# Thousand Suns tags: #game/rpg/thousand-suns ![[Thousand Suns (cover).jpg|600]] **Thousand Suns** is James Maliszewski's love letter to the space opera he grew up on — the "imperial science fiction" of Asimov, Anderson, Bester, Piper, and Pournelle — and to **[[Traveller]]**, the game he'd been playing and writing for since the early '80s before he decided he could do it better (or at least more to his own taste). The result, from Grognardia Games, is a complete, classless, levelless science-fiction toolbox with a Golden Age literary ambition that most of the Traveller clone crowd never bothers with. ## Setting The galaxy of the Thousand Suns teeters half a millennium past the **Concord**, the treaty that ended the Age of Warring States and established the Great Peace, and a generation past the bloody **Civil War** that nearly tore it apart. It's a deliberately flexible "meta-setting": the referee decides whether the interstellar state is a federation or an empire, fills in the shape of the thing, and leaves the lights going out again on benighted worlds at the edges of explored space. The default is a recognizably imperial science fiction backdrop. The **Old Federation** looms as a cautionary Roman Empire of the far past — the source of humanity's clades and just about any technological terror the referee cares to invent. The **Navy** rules the jumplines, merchant princes and free traders hawk their wares, surveyors stumble upon lost colonies, and the Concordium (a two-chamber legislature) debates and enacts laws with varying degrees of real power depending on how the referee frames the setting. Humanity is on top, whether as baseline Terrans or as the genetically-engineered sub-species — the fastidious **Myrmidon** soldiers, the red-haired **Delphic** thinkers, the **Czanik** — that the Old Federation tinkered into being. Psionics are part of the furniture for when you want your space knights to have The Force. ## Mechanics Everything runs on the **12° system**, a unified roll-under mechanic. ### Core Resolution Roll 2D12 and succeed if the result is equal to or under the **target number**, which is your skill rank plus the associated ability score, plus or minus modifiers. There are three test types — ability, skill, and opposed — and the amount you roll under your TN is your **degree of success**, which decides opposed tests and, in combat, multiplies your weapon's base damage. A roll of 2 is a dramatic success; a roll of 24 is a dramatic failure. ### Character Creation A point-buy lifepath affair: divide points among five abilities, pick a species, a homeworld package, career packages, hooks, and benefit points. It's classless and levelless — you build the character you want rather than filling a class-shaped hole. ### Psionics Esper powers are baked into the core system, from telekinesis and mind reading to precognition and telempathy, with the degree of success scaling how much power you can bring to bear (and how costly it is in Vitality). ## References - [Thousand Suns: Rulebook - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/97661/thousand-suns-rulebook) - [Thousand Suns - Grognardia](http://grognardia.blogspot.com/)