# 3:16 - Carnage Among the Stars tags: #game/rpg/three-sixteen ![[Three-Sixteen (cover).png|600]] **3:16 - Carnage Among the Stars** is Gregor Hutton's satirical space-opera RPG about the universe's most enthusiastic solution to the Fermi paradox, published by BoxNinja in 2008 and distinguished with a high Ronny award for game design on the way out. You play a trooper of the elite 3:16th Expeditionary Force — the 16th Brigade of the 3rd Army — sent out to neutralize every alien life form in the cosmos so the blissed-out citizens of a sterile, workless paradise back on Terra never have to worry about a thing. It's Starship Troopers-grade machismo played at full bore: light, fast, and gleefully lethal, and built to be discovered in play rather than assembled at the table. ## Setting Terra is a utopia with a body count. Nobody works, nobody gets sick, and nobody feels hate or crime; people are sterile, life lasts as long as you care to make it, and a suicide booth is always there for the terminally bored. The recruiting poster says it all — *"Tired Of Life? Join The Expeditionary Force And See The Cosmos."* The players are the soldiers who joined up for a life of excitement and adventure and instead found themselves doing the galaxy's extermination: the entire mission is to find and wipe out every alien civilization they can, on GM-built planets encountered one mission at a time. The theme is war — a war far from home, and one you might not end up agreeing with. It's a game about choices, and about the consequences of those choices. ## Mechanics ### Two Abilities and a Test Characters are outrageously simple to make: a **Name**, a pointed **Reputation** ("Hot Headed," "Loyal To A Fault," "A Pig"), and ten points split between two stats — **FA (Fighting Ability)** and **NFA (Non-Fighting Ability)**, each needing at least two. Everything in the game is a **d10 test**: roll one d10 and you succeed on a result equal to or under your ability score (1 to 10). When the answer involves killing, FA decides who's still standing; when it doesn't, NFA handles everything from deciphering alien glyphs to digging a trench. ### Encounters and Threat An encounter opens with a **Dominance** test (NFA) to see who sets the initial **range — Close, Near, or Far** — and whether either side catches an ambush. In each combat round everyone rolls a d10 against their ability, and successes resolve from the highest roll down. An FA success strips a **Threat Token** and scores kills; an NFA success changes the range or completes a task; an **AA (Alien Ability)** success lets the aliens carve up every PC who didn't beat them. You can even cancel your own success so that everyone still to act fails instead — the sly tactical heart of the whole thing. **Threat Tokens** are the GM's pool (5 × the number of players, per planet), the measure of how much alien life is left to kill. Weapons deal their kills at specific ranges — from a single point up to d100 — the body count is invented after the fact by the kill rolls rather than fixed in advance, and the aliens' special abilities are bought by spending tokens. ### Flashbacks Killing your way through the swarm is only half the game. **Flashbacks** let you invent a piece of the character's past and use it — once per planet — to take the story over on your own terms. A **Strength** ends the encounter outright and strips every remaining Threat Token; a **Weakness** removes a single token and drops your character out of the fight, but lets the scene continue for everyone else. ### The Kill Counter Advancement is counted in corpses. Every kill adds to "Kills This Mission" and "Total Kills," ranks run from Trooper up toward the lofty reaches of command, and the better you are at making the universe emptier, the further you climb. There are one-use-per-planet items and play sheets to round it out, and the game is tuned to hum best with three or four players at the table. ## Editions - **First edition (2008)** — *3:16: Carnage Amongst the Stars*, written, designed, and art-directed by Gregor Hutton and published by BoxNinja, Edinburgh; first printing July 2008, ISBN 978-0-9559945-0-0. Winner of a high Ronny award for game design. *(In the library: the 2008 core book plus the standalone "3:16 Stuff" play sheet.)* ## References - [3:16 - Carnage Among the Stars on DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/56768/Three-Sixteen) > [!note] Editor's Note > > If you're one of those crazy people really enjoying spreading democracy for Super Earth in **[Helldivers II](https://store.steampowered.com/app/553850/HELLDIVERS_2/)** then you are in luck because this is exactly the tabletop RPG for you. > > Extremely fast, extremely lightweight, and with a similar sense of offhanded awesomeness and a kill count in the triple or quadruple digits, the fun never stops. It's one of my favorite games to run that any convention.