# Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall *Created:* 2026-10-09, *Modified:* 2026-10-09 ![[Five Parsecs from Home - Planetfall (cover).jpg]] There comes a point in every runaway's life when running stops being the plan. **Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall** is that point for the Five Parsecs line: instead of hopping between starports and dodging the taxman, you park the ship and try to make one hostile rock home. A standalone ruleset comfortably compatible with **[[Five Parsecs From Home]]**, it shifts the job from "keep the crew flying" to "keep a colony breathing" — research, construction, exploration, and the constant, hungry attention of the planet's own evolving wildlife, which has not read your incorporation papers. ## Setting Planetfall swaps the open Fringe for a single planet with teeth. You've planted a fledgling colony on a rock that would rather you hadn't, and the game's world is the patch of ground around that settlement: sectors to map, resources to find, and a biosphere that treats you as something between a pest and a meal. Where the base game was about a ship and its debts, this one is about walls, generators, and the nervous math of whether the colony grows faster than the threats that circle it. The premise invites the comfortable genre fantasy of *SimCity with consequences* — the zoning is enforced by random tables, and the enforcement is frequently violent. ## Mechanics The engine stays recognizably Five Parsecs — D6-based resolution, target numbers modified by skill and gear, procedural enemy AI on Aggressive/Defensive behavior — but the loop is re-geared to planetary scale. The beating heart is the **Campaign Turn**, built around a **mapping system** that divides your surroundings into sectors. Each turn runs a series of phases: **Colony Events**, **Research** (rolling to unlock buildings from a list of dozens, along a tech tree), and **Exploration** (venturing out onto custom-generated encounter tables). The colony itself becomes the campaign's protagonist — you're tracking its population, its tech, its steadily-more-elaborate wall, and the growing list of things outside that wall that would like in. Combat is still there and still skirmish-sized: **Reaction** states order who acts when the shooting starts, and damage runs against a character's **Toughness**, with persistent injuries for survivors. But the framing has tilted from "clear a job" to "defend, expand, and not die," and that tilt is the whole game. ## Compatibility Planetfall is designed to talk to the rest of the line. You can crash a crew from **Five Parsecs From Home**, **[[Five Parsecs From Home: Tactics]]**, or **Bug Hunt** onto the planet and run the colony rules under them — turning scoundrels into (reluctant, heavily-armed) farmers. The 13 scientific theories and the building tech tree add a layer of planning that the freelancer lifestyle of the base game never needed. ## References - [Five Parsecs From Home: Planetfall — Modiphius](https://modiphius.net/en-us/products/five-parsecs-from-home-planetfall) - [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 collection — Modiphius (US)](https://modiphius.us/collections/five-parsecs-from-home)