# Ashen Stars *Created:* 2026-09-13, *Modified:* 2026-10-19 ![[Ashen Stars (cover).jpg|600]] Somewhere out along the abandoned fringe called the **Bleed**, you're the closest thing to a federal authority there is — which is, frankly, not saying much. **Ashen Stars** puts you on a hard-bitten starship crew of **Lasers** (formally Licensed Autonomous Zone Effectuators, informally scrubbers or shinestars), freelance problem-solvers who get paid to handle the crises too tough, too baffling, or simply too weird for the local law. Robin D. Laws's space-opera cut of the **[[Gumshoe|GUMSHOE]]** engine, it's *Firefly* in tone and *Law & Order* in structure: take a contract, drop into a broken world, unravel the mystery, move on — and keep the bills paid. Its setting is the aftermath of the **Mohilar War**, an alien apocalypse that gutted the interstellar Combine and left a frontier of autonomous, wounded worlds to fend for themselves. And you, apparently, are the law. Congratulations. ## Setting The Bleed wasn't always a lawless fringe. Less than a generation ago it was the glamorous frontier of the **Combine**, an amalgam of interstellar empires at its apex, patrol vessels keeping the peace across the dense belt of systems called the Wave. Then came the **Mohilar War**: a mysterious alien race rose suddenly on worlds thought uninhabitable, mastered a strange material technology, and rampaged through Combine space — poisoning the atmospheres of the core planets, Earth included, killing billions, smashing the fleets. Seven years ago, after a surprise defeat at Myndaro Station, the Mohilar abruptly vanished. The Combine, barely able to administer its surviving core, abandoned its frontiers to themselves, and the Bleed's planets became essentially autonomous — with the old patrol duties handed to private contractors like you. Those contractors are a **Laser crew**, drawn from seven spacefaring peoples — the emotion-fearing **balla**, cybernetic **cybes**, dimension-phasing **durugh**, adaptable **humans**, body-switching **kch-thk**, serene warrior **tavak**, and the **vas mal** (near-omniscient energy beings devolved into misshapen flesh). You take **contracts** routed through Combine outposts, solve the mysteries local leaders can't, and tend the one asset that keeps the next job coming: your **reputation**. It's a satisfyingly mercenary frame — you're not saving the galaxy from heroic impulse, you're keeping yourself in the black while doing vaguely heroic work on the side, and the game has the honesty to say so. ## Mechanics ### The GUMSHOE Loop The engine underneath is the same **GUMSHOE** trunk as the horror games, and its one stubborn bet holds up fine in vacuum: **investigative abilities** find clues automatically — no roll, so the plot cannot dead-end on a bad die — and **spends** buy the bonus detail that makes a case rich. **General abilities** resolve the genuinely uncertain with a single d6 against a **Difficulty Number** of 2–8 (4 the baseline), point-spends nudging the roll up before the die falls, and the GM never lets on what the number even is. The real tell is what's missing: Ashen Stars is an action-adventure, not a horror game, so it keeps **Health** as the survivability pool and quietly drops the Stability/Sanity meters her siblings lug around. It's a game that would rather you get a good story out of the firefight than a nervous breakdown. ### Character Creation Crew-building is a collaborative nine-step ritual: pick your **species** from the Seven Peoples, hand out **crew packages** — one job warpside (Communications, Pilot, Strategic Coordinator, Systems, Weapons) and one groundside (Cultural, Operations, Survey, Security, Technical), with Medical pulling double duty — then fill in your leftover **investigative** and **general** abilities, choose a **Drive**, buy a **ship**, spec your **tech and enhancements**, sketch the personal detail, and tally your **Reputation**. The math is generous: Investigative build points step from 36 for two players down through 28 for three and 24 for four to 21 for five or more. Species grant **boosts** to certain abilities, so it pays to lean into your race's strengths; and since you're a crew, the table is expected to keep every investigative ability covered by somebody — no lone-wolf dead zones if you want the cases to keep coming. ### Drives The **Drive** is the game's shield against the player instinct to turtle up and play it safe. Every Laser picks a motivation from a gloriously long list — Altruism, Atonement, Revenge, Derring-Do, Justice-Seeker, Scientific Inquiry, Tech Hound, plus species-flavored cuts like the vas mal's Re-evolution — a reason to swagger into danger the way a heroic protagonist is supposed to. A GM who spots you stalling just reminds you of your Drive; dig in and refuse and a **stress penalty** lands — every Investigative spend costs +1 and every general test gets harder. It's a lighter leash than a horror game's sanity spiral: this engine nudges you forward for the story's sake rather than punishing cowardice with madness. ### Tests, Contests, and Combat A **simple test** is your d6 against the Difficulty, spends declared before the roller commits, and failure means no retry without a genuinely new angle. **Contests** — up to and including the mandatory **chase** — trade tests until somebody flubs, first to fail loses, usually against Difficulty 4. Combat runs on **Scuffling**, **Shooting**, or **Weaponry** contests that, as ever, don't pitch you out on a single failed roll — you're forced out only when your Health gives. Clear a target's **Hit Threshold** of 3 (or 4 if your Athletics is 8+) and you roll damage, modified by weapon, scraped off the target's **Health**. Health slips below zero into hurt and seriously-wounded bands, with a **Consciousness roll** and a hospital stay in the offing before you hit −12 and shuffle off. The book keeps gunplay blessedly lean — no ammo-crunching, because GUMSHOE would rather you felt the drama than did the bookkeeping. ### The Ship and the Contract The ship is a character in its own right — the **Runner** fast, the **Hauler** capacious, the **Sherlock** built for poking around — each with specs, cargo, condition, upkeep, repairs, and upgrades, and the cold arithmetic of what happens when the bills stop getting paid. Around it turns the **contract** economy that drives the whole series: open-ended "appropriate action" jobs, **pickups** (a crisis you find and then find an authority willing to pay you to fix), **side deals**, **dividend deals**, and loans — all of it guarded by your **Reputation**, the coin that decides how juicy the next offer is. There's even a full **judicial procedure** engine — whose law applies, trial, sentencing, prison — for the rare sessions where the Lasers actually hand a culprit to the courts instead of settling things personally with a disruptor pistol. ### Ship Combat A Laser ship is also a warship when the job calls for it, and its battles are a goal-driven race rather than a death spiral. Each side secretly picks a **skirmish goal** — Escape, Datascrape, Rake, Disable Weapons or Engines, Cripple, Slash, board-and-take, or Destroy — each tagged with a price in **skirmish points**, and the crew that banks its goal's worth first gets what it came for. Initiative comes from **surprise** (spot the ambush with Sense Trouble, or spring one of your own via a Helm Control ambush) and, when both sides are wise, a **Wide-Eye dogfight** hands first move to the ship with the higher Maneuver. Then the bridge crew mans the stations — the gunner on **Battle Console**, the pilot on **Helm Control**, the hailer on **Communications Intercept**, the **Stratco** on **Naval Tactics** — and attacks through four modes, each a GUMSHOE showdown against the enemy's matching station: **Fire**, **Maneuver**, **Override**, and **Trickbag**. Lean on the same mode and the other ship wises up and starts countering, so winning crews cycle through all four and stay unpredictable. ## Editions - **Ashen Stars** (2011) — the single core book by Robin D. Laws, Pelgrane Press's space-opera GUMSHOE game. *In the library.* ## Supplements The line grew a set of supplements and campaigns; those in the collection are marked: - **Dead Rock Seven** (2012) — Gareth Hanrahan's collection of four Ashen Stars investigations (story design by Robin D. Laws) — contracts that haul the Lasers from a pleasure planet's blackmail web to a crashed colony, with psionic Lunhgren slavers looming as a red herring; it was nominated for Best Adventure in the 2012 ENnies. *In the library.* - **The Justice Trade** (2013) — the three-adventure anthology (The Justice Trade, Terra Nova, and Tartarus) by Leonard Balsera, Robin D. Laws, and Bill White — including the story of the dead Combine luxury liner *Terra Nova* drifting between worlds with a secret it has kept for decades — plus a bonus twenty-minute demo by Kevin Kulp. Terra Nova and Tartarus are also sold as standalone PDFs. - **Accretion Disk** (2015) — the line's expansion book by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Kevin Kulp, and Kieran Turley: six new playable species, ship deckplans and bolt-on options for every class, a trove of new weapons, equipment, cyberware, and viroware, and a "Hot Contracts" roster of jobs for any crew to pick up. - **Station Duty** (2023) — Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's season-long campaign frame, in which the Lasers are permanently assigned to one troubled system. Everything — every character, faction, and location — is built in layers, surface and hidden depths, to be uncovered case by case. - **State of Preservation** (2022) — Robin D. Laws's scenario hook: the Lasers take a Combine Xenoarchaeological Foundation contract to protect the CIVA-3 ruins on the near-empty world of Delaney. ## References - [Ashen Stars — Pelgrane Press](https://pelgranepress.com/category/products/ashen-stars-products/) - [Ashen Stars — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashen_Stars) - [GUMSHOE System — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumshoe_System)