The Athabasca Fold Network

Memorize this, but for god's sake don't act like you know it. Play dumb and ask for directions like everyone else or you'll get flagged and dumped out an airlock.

In the post-planet setting of Coming Apart, the few remaining human communities survive through secrecy. When any nickel-hulled pirate can fold in with a world-ending asteroid, the only defences are to be too small to extort, or to jealously guard your true location.

The Athabasca Fold Network is one one of the largest civilian fold networks, home to three space stations: Serengeti, Pitcairn, and Athabasca itself (a true class V).

Few visitors stay long, as berths on the stations are eye-wateringly expensive, but thousands make the trek every month to buy services from the many skilled specialists in Athabasca and Pitcairn.

The network is rich in primary resources like water, atmo, nickel and fission elements drawn from Bussard, Octavia and Youssef. Pitcairn station is known for its high quality ship modules, and exports them in large quantities. The network is not self sufficient, however, and imports huge quantities of food and biologicals from its trading partners. Relics of planetary life also fetch a premium here, in great demand among the wealthiest tier of network citizens.

Trade occurs through the public interchange, the lowest-security set of fold coordinates in the network. Here, most any ship is free to dock with the hub ships (commonly Wakatobi class), slow-folding trading posts that make a lazy loop through low-security space. Visitors swap news, sex, and services, or book passage deeper into higher-security parts of the network to broker larger trades on the stations.

While the topology of the network is not considered sensitive, the specific locations in space of the clearance fold points are highly classified. While visitors are welcome to travel through the loops between the stations and the public interchange as passengers, the only ships permitted to fold there known and trusted by the network. Gaining enough trust and goodwill to obtain a navigational security clearance can take years, and the number of high-security clearances is strictly limited by the civil administration.

Athabasca authorities waver between welcoming and wary. Trade visitors are essential, but spies or saboteurs are always probing for information or weaknesses. Agents of pirate gangs or rival networks have standing bounties for information that could compromise locations.

Exterior viewports are rare, as taking astronomical measurements that could be used to locate a high security fold is punishable by death. The larger stations are located in inky black, intergalactic space to make triangulation especially difficult. Visitors are carefully searched for instruments of sabotage, and only specifically licensed citizens may carry anything resembling maintenance tools.

Despite the caution, the network is a vibrant and joyful place, home to a great diversity of people.

Coming Apart v0.4

Without further ado, here's version 0.4 of Coming Apart. This is very much a design in motion, but some major changes are most of the way through.

Coming Apart v0.4 Rules

Coming Apart v0.4 Playbooks

Here's a partial change log of the v0.3 to v0.4 changes

• Basic moves completely reworked
• Weapon accuracy/damage table removed
• Hazard damage revised
• Mission clock ticks are coarser scale, O2/radiation every 3
• Ship combat rewritten
• Revised how ship quirks cause trouble
• Added section on threats
• Restructured the flow of the initial sections, started a GM section
• Clarified unusual fold types
• Catching a break is now on a 10+ not 12+

Basic Moves Reworked

The biggie is that this is no longer quite so obviously Powered by the Apocalypse. I find it quite challenging to not have an explicit measure of how difficult a task is in action genres, and that kept coming up for me.

What I do love is the move notation (if not the name), so that stays; there's now a core resolution mechanic that's very much like Blades in the Dark's three levels of difficulty (controlled, risky, desperate), and other specialized moves elaborate this.

(This relationship between the core move and the specialized moves is still in the pimply teen phase, but it will be clearer in the next revision.)

There is still an intermediate terminology problem at the seam - rolling 2d6 6-/7-9/10+ is a miss/hit/break, but then there are special names for the things that happen based on the degree of difficulty (succeed, fail, a cost, a disaster). In this design, 'hit/miss/break' is intermediate terminology that should be removed, and the specialized moves should be rewritten in terms of success, failure, costs, disasters, and so on.

Weapon Accuracy Removed

At the same time, I've pruned off one of the signature elements of The Regiment, the 'accuracy of fire' table. This makes sense in a battlefield context, but it was feeling more and more like complexity that wasn't paying for itself here.

Hazard Damage Revised

In its place is simplified weapon and hazard damage, all weapon dice just have a 50/50 chance of causing harm.

Ship Combat Rewritten

Ship weapons now use a different mechanic than the rest of the game, but I think it's simpler than fiddling with AOC. I'm going with the AD&D philosophy here that subsystems can be their own thing mechanically, and this is definitely not primarily a game about ship-to-ship combat (certainly not in the alpha/beta danger levels).

Mission Clock Ticks are Coarser

I like the mission clock, but I'm experimenting with making it coarser. Rather than tracking every few minutes, now the GM just tracks things that take a long time. This makes the bookkeeping chunkier, but I'm curious if this will lead to more GM cognitive load during play, having to decide what is or isn't worth a tick.

Section on Threats

There's now a short section that describes some of the shipboard threats. I think most people probably know what an anaconda is, but I was overdue for fuller descriptions of glass, dut-e-ful zombies, and SKULs.

What to Do With This?

Like v0.3 this is nominally playable, if you're okay with papering over a few cracks in realtime. If you do, or if you feel up for giving it a read, any comments in the PDFs in Google Drive are very welcome!

Coming Apart v0.3

For a little while now I've been working on Coming Apart, a sci-fi PbtA game about scrappers in rust-bucket starships working their way to something better by doing high-stakes salvage missions nobody else will touch.

Mechanically, it's heavily inspired by The Regiment, which was John Harper's ashcan WWII game. Lots of lead flying at you (or in this case, shrapnel and fire) as you try to get your mission accomplished.

It's set in a 'post planet' era a few centuries after "Too Good to be True". Planet killing weapons have wrecked humanity's few good homes, but instantaneous interstellar travel has opened the universe. Now, a scattered humanity stretches across incredible distances, linked by delicate webs of trust.

Play wise, I was heavily inspired by the smash 'n' grab style of the Void Bastards video game, but with a base-building component: all the ships are modular (like the modern day ISS), so one of your options is to saw something off and weld it onto your own ship.

Before long, you get a shot at targets from higher danger classes, which opens up more modules, threats, but also new advancements.

Right now the game is at a very early stage; despite its length it's still very much in the middle of refinement. (When I design I seem to go through bloating/contracting phases as I explore a bit and then distill to the core of what I want.)

If any of this sounds like your thing, have a look at the v0.3 rules and playbooks.

• Coming Apart v.0.3
• Coming Apart Playbooks & Reference Sheet

There's only been a tiny bit of playtesting; there are marked holes but also undiscovered ones. If you squint a bit, it's playable, but not necessarily fun yet! All the numbers are uncalibrated, so death spirals, unwinnable missions and boring cake-walks are just as likely as thrilling action.

Still, happy to have feedback if you have any!