# Five Parsecs From Home *Created:* 2026-10-09, *Modified:* 2026-10-09 ![[Five Parsecs From Home (cover).jpg]] The loneliest shape in tabletop gaming is a crew of spacefarers and the one chair at the table that's actually filled. **Five Parsecs From Home** is Ivan Sorensen's answer to that chair — an "adventure wargame," meaning it pried the storytelling and campaign bones out of a miniatures game and turned them into the point. You command a tramp starship and its hard-luck crew out on the Fringe, taking whatever jobs keep the lights on while the galaxy gets on with being indifferent to your survival. It isn't a game about winning a battle; it's a game about a crew that starts with a stolen ship, a pile of debts, and a whole lot of open space in every direction — some of it reachable only if you survive the closer bits. ## Setting The galaxy of Five Parsecs is a two-tone snapshot, and you live in the grimmer half. At the heart of things sits **Unity**, the vast galactic body that keeps the **Core Worlds** comfortable — your health guaranteed by genetic updating, your safety by the star fleet, and your retirement by submitting the right forms in the right order. Out here, where you actually are, is the **Fringe**: a scattered sprawl of worlds that refuse generalization, anarchic colony settlements, crime-ridden concrete towns, corporate extraction bases, and the contested turf of warlords and pirates. The Fringe is where the credits are, if you're willing to work for them badly enough — mercenary contracts, dirty corporate errands, and the occasional colony that just wants its monster problem (or its tax problem, or its Krorg-petting incident) solved. You are, in the game's own warm words, on the run from "the taxman and the laser-fire of various rival factions." The campaign is the slow climb from that position: find allies while you can, because the enemies you make will remember your face. Somewhere out there are the factions that might pay you, the worlds that might let you land, and the very long odds of actually getting old. ## Mechanics Five Parsecs runs on the cheerful chaos of dice — mostly D6 and D10 — and a set of habits borrowed from wargaming rather than roleplaying. It is not shy about being a game of numbers and tables, but the numbers are in service of a story arc. **Characters** are rated in five **ability scores — Reactions, Speed, Combat Skill, Toughness, and Savvy** — which govern turn order, movement, attack rolls, what damage you can shrug off, and how you cope with the bits that aren't a firefight. You put together a **crew** (the ragtag band of freelancers, each with a background, motivation, and class), scrounge equipment, and roll up your ship — which is its own character with its own temperament, from the engines that don't always start to the debts that never sleep. The heart of the game is the **campaign turn**, a looping dance of phases: prepare, travel the starmap, arrive somewhere new, do the business of that world, and occasionally get dragged into a **battle** when the local math turns against you. Battles are the skirmish-combat core — initiative, movement, shooting, cover — resolved against enemies controlled by simple behavioral "AI" (Aggressive, Cautious, Tactical) rather than a GM, because there is no GM. **Story Points** and the luck economy give you a hand on the wheel when the tables get cruel, and the post-battle phase is where the fiction lives: you roll for injuries, for loot, for who on the crew finally snapped. The genius of the system is that every part is procedural but none of it feels hollow — the encounters, the jobs, the enemies, the injuries, the ship's complaints, all generated by tables that hand you a story beat instead of a stat block. You're not defeating the game; you're discovering what the campaign decides to do to that crew you've started to care about. ## The Line The **[[5X]]** family shares one engine and spreads it across genres. **Five Parsecs From Home** (2020–) is the sci-fi flagship; the fantasy sibling is **[[Five Leagues From the Borderlands]]** (2021–). Within the Parsecs line, **[[Five Parsecs From Home: Tactics]]** (2024) scales skirmishes up to multi-unit battles, and **[[Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall]]** (2025) stops running and tries to build a colony on one hostile rock. The wider 5X family also runs **[[Paranoia: Five Clones From Alpha Complex]]** (2026, the doomed-cooperation satire) and **[[Forgotten Ruin: the Adventure Wargame]]** (2025, modern Rangers versus orcs). The **Compendium** collects the earlier PDF expansions — Trailblazer's Toolkit, Freelancer's Handbook, Fixer's Guidebook — and integrates **Bug Hunt**, a military variant. ## Editions - **First Edition** (2020) — the original self-published solo adventure wargame from Sorensen's Nordic Weasel line, the little game that spawned a publishing program. Not held. - **Second Edition** (2020) — a swift, lightly-revised follow-up before the game went big. Not held. - **Third Edition** (2021) — the current Modiphius edition, redesigned and expanded: streamlined rules, new crew options, story points, and the full Fringe setting as a proper book. *In the library.* *(Established via Modiphius's 3rd-edition programme.)* ## References - [Five Parsecs From Home collection — Modiphius (US)](https://modiphius.us/collections/five-parsecs-from-home) - [Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall — Modiphius](https://modiphius.net/en-us/products/five-parsecs-from-home-planetfall) - [Five Parsecs From Home: Tactics — Modiphius](https://modiphius.net/en-us/products/five-parsecs-from-home-tactics) - [Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall — designer's blog, Nordic Weasel Games](https://nordicweasel.posthaven.com/so-what-all-will-be-in-five-parsecs-planetfall) - [Five Parsecs From Home: Tactics in big battles — Wargame SITREP review, Rocky Mountain Navy](https://rockymountainnavy.com/2024/08/04/wargame-sitrep-24-44-ttrpg-roll-24-30-almost-rpg-fighting-five-parsecs-from-home-in-big-tactics-modiphius-2024/)