Ashes Between The Stars

GM (Referee) Ryan R

Homebrewed Traveller Campaign

Player Campaign Primer

Out on the frontier, a starship is freedom—provided you can afford the fuel, repairs, docking fees, and next mortgage payment.

You are the crew of the Cinderwake, a small Scout-derived vessel making its way through the Ashen Reach. Freight, passengers, survey work, courier jobs, salvage, and questionable contracts can all keep the ship flying. Out here, information is valuable, help may be weeks away, and an ordinary job can become very complicated very quickly.

The Reach contains old places, neglected routes, dead infrastructure, and things that do not always behave as the charts say they should.

The Cinderwake is good at finding trouble.

Lately, it may also be finding roads that aren’t supposed to exist.

Character Creation

We will create our characters during session zero using the Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition Core Rule Book. You are welcome to use other published supplements to create a different race if you have that specific book. If you plan on using a different species for your character please let the GM (Referee) know via Discord prior to session one.

Please have an idea of what planet you will be from using Traveller Map prior to Session Zero. Specifically we will need the UWP or the World Code which will look something like this: Avalar A77559C-C. This will define your characters childhood up to the age of 18.

Pre-Game Information

Below is a download link to information about the Traveller Galaxy known as Charted Space and some useful items that will assist you as the player in recognizing and understanding the setting. Please note that Mongoose Traveller 2e does not include some of this information but can be useful.

The Ashen Reach

Player Briefing

Beyond the familiar trade lanes of the Imperium lies the Ashen Reach, a thinly settled region of the Foreven Sector where civilization survives by stubbornness, necessity, and the occasional miracle of working machinery.

The Reach is a place of scattered colonies, struggling industrial worlds, aging starports, and long stretches of empty space. Most settlements depend upon irregular trade and supply runs to survive. A delayed freighter can mean medicine shortages, idle factories, or empty fuel reserves. Imperial authority is distant, and local governments often rely upon corporations, independent ship crews, and Scout Service personnel to keep their worlds connected.

Much of the region’s infrastructure was built during earlier waves of expansion. Some of it has been abandoned. Some of it still operates—barely. Old navigation beacons, forgotten survey stations, sealed research facilities, and silent relay platforms remain scattered throughout the Reach. Travellers sometimes find valuable salvage among these ruins, but old technology has a habit of carrying old problems with it.

Power in the Reach belongs to whoever can provide what its isolated worlds need. Industrial combines such as Karsk-Havel control equipment, shipping contracts, and extraction rights. Financial institutions such as the Reach Development Credit Trust fund colonies that may spend generations repaying their debts. Independent merchants, prospectors, mercenaries, and smugglers survive in the spaces between them. Reputation matters here, but credits, fuel, and leverage often matter more.

Travel through the Reach is uncertain. Star charts contain outdated information, established routes sometimes disappear from navigation records, and vessels occasionally fail to arrive at their destinations. Most incidents have ordinary explanations: equipment failure, piracy, bad calculations, or captains taking risks they should not have taken. Still, spacers throughout the Reach trade stories of signals heard where no transmitter should exist, ships found far from their registered courses, and routes that appear on one navigation display only to vanish from the next.

You are Travellers aboard the Cinderwake, an unusual extended scout ship carrying experimental navigation equipment and more history than its records admit. Whether you are explorers, veterans, scientists, merchants, drifters, or professionals looking for a fresh beginning, the Reach offers the same promise:

There is work for anyone willing to fly beyond the safe routes.

There are fortunes waiting in the dark.

And there are places among the stars that were forgotten for a reason.