# Orbital Decay *Created:* 2026-11-05, *Modified:* 2026-11-05 ![[Orbital Decay (cover).jpg|600]] ## Setting The solar system, some centuries out, and it is not a nice place to work. Humanity has gone off Earth into orbital stations and colonies — the cramped tunnels of Vesta, the domes of Mars Colony Charlie, the research hubs of Orbital Station Alpha, the slums of Titan City, Umbra Station and the ice of Europa — and everything is old, jury-rigged and one failure away from killing everyone inside it. **Orbital Decay** began life as an expansion for **Wretched New Flesh** and was rebuilt as a standalone game; the setting keeps the connection but does not need it, and the book is written so a GM can drop it into any science-fiction universe. What it supplies is the texture: biomechanical augments that are a lifeline and a liability in the same breath, corporations that own the air, rogue AIs, alien artefacts nobody should have picked up, and colonies whose inhabitants are one supply run from desperation. The filmography is Alien, Outland, Stalker, Event Horizon and 2001, and the tone is raw and industrial rather than noir. The timeline is what makes the decay concrete: the game's present is 102 years after the New Flesh setting, and the intervening century is a corporate future history — Takeda Tech's war with Kobayashi, Hagashira Aerospace building space-capable craft on alien technology from the Machinatores, the Filhos de Prometeu declaring war on every corporation, population peaking at eleven billion, the resource wars that followed, and then Hagashira's kinetic propulsion system, which funded the largest industrial effort in history and put humanity in orbit for good. By the end of it the last electronic computers are off the market, replaced by biocomputers, the Chalciope organic AIs are in business with the Bergen family, and the people living in the stations inherited all of it. The back half of the book is the setting proper — a timeline, From Flesh to Void, A Bleak New Frontier, the corporations of note, the colonies and orbitals, and plot hooks — so the game can be run out of the box. The corporations are named and given teeth: **Annexia**, the Frankfurt conglomerate whose biotech augmentations and biocomputers keep half the stations breathing; the **Bergen Group**, which moved to Interzone and built the arch-propulsion system with Nakajima before pouring everything into space infrastructure and bio-spatial research; **BurroughsTech**, Takeda's AI and VR arm, whose proto-AIs run life support; and **Future Genetix**, cloning organs and growing the food. The plot hooks are worked scenarios rather than prompts — one, *The Rift's Embrace*, has a healthcare corporation hiring the crew to board a ship that came back years late, coated in something that is not from here. The colonies chapter is the domestic counterpart. Mars City One and the Titan Observatory have grown into autonomous towns, Interzone in the Sky sells itself as a cruise liner for the elite with failing systems and a corporate underbelly behind the polish, and the book bothers to describe an ordinary day — the artificial sunrise brightening in stages, the communal breakfast of hydroponic greens and protein steaks, the work rotations, the movie nights — because the horror only lands if the shift work feels real. ## Mechanics ### Characters on the MicroRed system Attributes are the familiar six — Strength, Intelligence, Wits, Agility, Toughness, Charisma — rolled on 3d6 and assigned in order or distributed, with up to three trades of two points from one score for one in another. The modifier ladder runs from −3 at 1–3 to +3 at 18–19, then climbs in bands (+5 at 20–39 and onward), which is how the game handles things stronger than a person. Origin and lifepath are rolled (1d20 events), archetypes give the mechanical hook, and skills are rated 1 to 5. ### Resolution, combat and hardware Every task is 1d20 + skill level + attribute modifier against a Target Number; untrained attempts use 1d20 + the attribute modifier alone and are barred from complex work. Attacks roll against a Defense of 10 + Agility, a natural 20 doubles damage, and a natural 18–20 on the attack roll stuns. Below zero hit points the character rolls Toughness against a base TN of 10 or dies in 1d6 × 10 minutes. Acquisition is its own roll — 1d20 plus the acquisition bonus against the item's TN — and the wear-and-tear rules are there to make gear as fragile as the stations. ### Hacking, psionics and the void Hacking is 1d20 + Intelligence modifier + Technical skill + any specialization and hardware or software bonuses, against a base TN of 10 adjusted for the system. Psionics work off a PSI rating (Psychic/Psionic skill level + Wits modifier, +2 with the natural perk) and roll 1d20 + PSI × 2 against the talent's TN, with a natural 1 triggering a trauma roll. Fear and panic get their own chapter, because in a hull at minus two hundred the monsters are mostly internal. ### Generators The GM section is a toolkit: NPC, spaceship, orbital station, colony and corporate-faction generators, random scavenging, an adventure generator and plot hooks. Half the book is usable at the table without a session of preparation. The GM chapter opens on texture rather than plot — creaking stations, humming life support, shadows thrown by failing lights, silence broken by radio static — and hands over a 1d20 table of sounds for the moment the corridor goes quiet, from a hull twisting under pressure to a child humming a nursery rhyme. From there it is generators all the way down: NPCs, spaceships, orbital stations, colonies, scavenging, adventures and corporate factions. ## Editions - **Orbital Decay** (192 pp, 2025) — the standalone MicroRed edition, grown out of the **Wretched New Flesh** supplement of the same name. *In the library.* ## References - [Orbital Decay (MicroRed version) at The Red Room](https://moordereht.com/product/orbital-decay-microred-version/) - [The Red Room's store and blog](https://moordereht.com/) - [The Red Room on itch.io](https://moordereht.itch.io/)