# Starsmith tags: #game/rpg/starsmith #game/rpg/starforged ![[Starsmith (cover).jpg|600]] **Starsmith** is Eric Bright's "Play Every Role" line of fan-made — emphatically unofficial — supplements for **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]**, released free as pay-what-you-want PDFs under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that Tomkin's open engine exists precisely to feed. Like its Ironsworn sibling **Ironsmith**, the line runs at the fan-supplement economy's one speed, which is "more," and only ever "more": it expands the oracles until they've run out of room to grow, then hands you a framework for building entire cultures you previously couldn't be bothered to. It's the rare hobby where the answer to "what does this add?" is always "everything, and here's a table for it." This note covers the line's two non-setting books; its setting-defining mech supplement, **[[Starsmith - Mecha Mercs]]**, gets its own page as befits an actual setting definer. ## Starsmith: Expanded Oracles The most utilitarian book Bright makes, and honestly the one you'll use first. It takes nearly every oracle table from the **Starforged** Reference Guide and **triples** the outcomes: where normally you roll your 2d10 challenge dice for an oracle result, you now also roll the **action die (1d6)** to pick which table you read — a **1–2** means the original Starforged table, **3–4** the first new table, **5–6** the second. The categories run the full game — Campaign Starters, Core Action/Theme/Descriptor/Focus, Characters, Creatures, Derelicts, Districts, Factions, Planets, Settlements, Space Encounters, Starships, and Vaults — and it ports a few of Bright's best tables over from Ironsmith (Random NPC Conversation, what plot Knowledge an NPC or datastream can give, and Items of Narrative Significance). The only tables it doesn't triple, it remakes: **Derelict Zones** get matching Mega-City Districts so the mega-city gets its own flavor, and **Location Themes** get doubled new options rather than extended ones. Roughly three hundred pages of oracle, most of it usable for any sci-fi solo game, not just Starforged. ## Starsmith: Cultures The more ambitious book, and the one that shows off Bright's design brain. **Cultures** hands Starforged a real way to build the societies your worlds contain instead of leaving "the people" as a decorative shrug. It walks through forging a culture from scratch, the characteristics that define one, how **cultural misunderstandings** spin out of everyday play — and grounds the whole apparatus in **Geert Hofstede's six dimensions of culture**: **Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance, Competitive drive, Long-Term Orientation, and Restraint**. Each dimension becomes a lever you set for your fictional society, and **get-a-response** style tables turn those settings into concrete in-game behavior, so a culture comes out coherent rather than painted-on. Bright credits Caroline Hobbs' *Downfall* — a game about watching a doomed civilization come apart — as part of the spark, and the interest in cultures that feel internally consistent shows it. ## Editions - **Starsmith: Expanded Oracles** (2022) — ~300-page oracle expansion, CC BY 4.0, pay-as-you-want. *In the library.* - **Starsmith: Cultures** (2023) — culture-building supplement for the Forge, CC BY 4.0. *In the library.* ## References - [Starsmith — Play Every Role (official)](https://www.playeveryrole.com/creations/starsmith) - [Starsmith: Expanded Oracles — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/417619/starsmith-expanded-oracles) - [Starsmith: Cultures — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/436860/starsmith-cultures)