Stars
without Number
&
Warhammer
40k
HACK
EXPLOSION!
Skip the text and get the Hack HERE
I Love Warhammer 40k, the setting
is rich and grim and gritty and dark and exciting and ridiculous and
surprisingly funny.
I don’t love the RPG rule sets
produced for the Warhammer 40k universe however. They are large and dense and
convoluted and in many respects poorly designed. I rather enjoy
complicated games and systems but the 40k RPG’s lean away from complicated and
into the confused. The many issues of the systems have not stopped me from
buying and playing them out of pure respect for the setting of 40k itself of
course. For all the many failings of the systems built for warhammer 40k, I have enjoyed many hours
of enjoyment thanks to them.
I love simple intuitive systems
just as much as I like complex, well-crafted ones. I like OSR systems for their clear and focused game-play loop: go into dungeon, find loot, and go to
town, repeat. I love dungeon world and other apocalypse world
systems for their intuitive simplicity and reactive worlds. I like
burning wheel for its ridiculous complexity that somehow plays easily once you
know how it woks.
I was recently reading through an
RPG ruleset called “Stars without number”. “Stars without number” is an open world sci-fi RPG based on, or rather inspired by
some old school RPG thinking. The game does some interesting things.
Character creation is fairly quick and simple with three very flexible classes.
Advancement is slow and balanced in such a way that characters become very
powerful over time but only in narrow fields. Much of the progression is
focused, on gear. There is a healthy dose of
character development baked into the mechanics. And most interesting to me, as
a gm, the system includes rules for the microscopic world of the player
characters shooting and running and murder hobo-ing things, but there are also
rules for the wildly zoomed out world of galactic scale political clashes,
planetary invasions and grinding wars of attrition. All this in a fairly simple
package. I was highlighting sections that I was thinking could work well
in a current Rogue Trader campaign . Then it struck me.
The very first line on the
very first page of "stars withot number" reads:
“The year is 32000. Humanity is
scattered like
Dust among the stars. The broken
relics of a
Former day litter the sky and men
and women
Struggle to rebuild the glory of
humanity’s lost
Golden age.”
“Strain it but a little and this
will bend to me”. I was highlighting so much stuff because “stars without
number” is almost, Warhammer 40k, after all it is just 8000 years off the
mark. So I decided to attempt some messy surgery and give the system a
quick 40k paint job. One thing lead to another, however; and soon
my paint-job became an overhaul and then a total re-write and now it
has become its own rule book of questionable legality and even more
questionable value. The deformed experiment that stumbles out at the end
may be hideous but I have made her. I have welded the greatest aspects of the
40k RPG’s into the skeleton of the mechanically superior “stars without number
“and injected my favorite mechanics from a host of systems. Hopefully this
frankensteinian thing has turned out a decent game in the end. I have
spent more time then I care to admit calculating average die
rolls and doing my best to balance things but I am after all only one
person. Luckily i have based most of the systems off of well tested
ones in other systems so in theory it should all work out. There
are probably things i have missed. sections i have thought of
but haven't written but i am at the point where this cannot be made
better until i play it a bunch and other people play it a bunch. I know if I dont post it now it will just rott on my hard-rive as i endlessly update it so...
MISSION STATEMENT:
1: Twist the "stars without
number" system to suit the warhammer 40k setting which means.
A: increased lethality
B: more random tables
C: a healthy dose of grim darkness
2: create a game that
supports play as inquisitors, rogue traders, imperial gaurd and space marines interchangeably
and without separating rules or systems.
3: create reward and
mechanical systems that promote character development and campaign advancement
4: avoid writing fluff. there are books that do fluff very well and
this hack is about systems.
So here it is version
0.1 of what i have decided to
call Warhammers Without Number. In all
of it's half formed goodness for all 6 of my readers.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vesrnzubs7faw6c/Battle%20mallets%20without%20number.pdf?dl=0
(Disclaimer. I don't own or possess the rights to warhammer or any of its products. I am not producing this hack for monetary gain nor do I intend to use it as a source of add revenue. While I have taken inspiration and borrowed the idea for some systems, tables and concepts from the available Warhammer 40k RPG’s I have not directly copied intellectual property. Likewise I do not own Stars without Number. I have borrowed or modified many systems from this product, however Stars without Number is freely available and is itself heavily based off of old school DnD systems so I imagine that borrowing systems from it is not an issue. Should anyone have any issues of legality regarding this hack feel free to contact me and don't sue me please)
Credit and thanks to for inspiration:
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