# 5X tags: #reference ![[Five Parsecs From Home (cover).jpg|600]] ![[Five Leagues From the Borderlands (cover).jpg|600]] **5X** is the name Ivan Sorensen gave to a single, quietly clever idea, then spread across a shelf of games: one procedural adventure-wargame skeleton, re-skinned genre by genre. The label started as the "Five … From/From the …" titling of the sci-fi original and its fantasy sister, and it has grown into the shorthand for the whole family — the solo- and co-op-friendly campaign wargames that hand you a warband and a table-full of story hooks instead of a referee. It's an engine first and a brand second; play one and you can feel your way through the others. ## A family, not a setting Unlike a line that shares a world, 5X is a set of games that share a *method*. Each member plants the same skeleton in a different soil — a tramp starship's crew on the Fringe, a fantasy warband fighting to win a country back, a colony clinging to a hostile rock, a squad of modern Rangers stranded among orcs, a stack of five clones in Alpha Complex — so there's no single 5X setting to describe. What unites them is procedural generation and a story-first campaign loop, not geography. ## Mechanics The 5X engine is built for a person who wants to run a warband *and* be surprised by what happens next. At its core it's a skirmish wargame — initiative, movement, shooting, cover — with most things resolved on a **d6** against a target number set by skill, range, and gear. Wrapped around that is a **no-GM campaign machine**: the enemy runs on simple behavioral stances (aggressive, cautious, defensive, and so on) rather than a referee, and random tables generate the jobs, encounters, enemies, injuries, and story beats as your campaign loops through its phases. The signature promise is that the game hands you a narrative beat instead of a stat block — you're not so much playing against it as discovering what the campaign decides to do to the band you've started to care about. ### The lines Each game carries the engine into its own genre, book, and ruleset, so read them by their own pages: - **[[Five Parsecs From Home]]** (2020–) — the sci-fi flagship: a tramp starship crew out on the Fringe, keeping the lights on one contract at a time. *3rd edition in the library.* - **[[Five Leagues From the Borderlands]]** (2021–) — the fantasy sibling: a warband carving out a foothold against a dark frontier. *3rd edition in the library.* - **[[Five Parsecs From Home - Planetfall|Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall]]** (2025) — stops running: park the ship and build a colony on one hostile rock. *In the library.* - **[[Five Parsecs From Home - Tactics|Five Parsecs From Home: Tactics]]** (2024) — scales the skirmish up to full planetary operations and bigger battles. *In the library.* - **[[Paranoia - Five Clones From Alpha Complex|Paranoia: Five Clones From Alpha Complex]]** (2026) — the Five Leagues engine re-skinned onto Alpha Complex's "uncooperative" clone satire. *In the library.* - **[[Forgotten Ruin - The Adventure Wargame|Forgotten Ruin: the Adventure Wargame]]** (2025) — the same engine pointed at military fantasy, modern Rangers versus orcs and sorcerers. *In the library.* - **Five Klicks From the Zone** — the sci-fi forbidden-zone take. - **Five Fathoms Deep** — the nautical / swashbuckling take. ## Notes - **5X is a family, not the whole category.** It's the best-known member of **[[Adventure Wargaming]]**, but adventure wargaming is a rubric that *collects* — it also gathers the THW games (Warrior Heroes, 5150 New Beginnings, NUTS!, FNG on down), Twilight 2000, and others. Every 5X game carries its own family tag (`five-x`, or its own line's family) plus the `adventure-wargame` category, and its individual note. ## References - [Five Parsecs From Home collection — Modiphius (US)](https://modiphius.us/collections/five-parsecs-from-home) - [Five Leagues From the Borderlands — Modiphius](https://modiphius.net/en-us/pages/five-leagues-from-the-borderlands) - ["Make it fun to lose the battle" — welcome to the age of adventure wargames (Wargamer)](https://www.wargamer.com/adventure-wargames)