You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked. It’s both an eye-catching title and a quick summary of the new gore-drenched sci-fi tabletop RPG by Nevyn Holmes. The game, inspired by video games like System Shock and Dead Space, is designed for a GM and one to four players. After a successful Kickstarter in April, You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked has been released digitally with a physical release coming later this year. While space horror is a well-trodden subgenre in the tabletop world, with notable titles like Alien RPG and Mothership, this new game has plenty of unique features to help it stand out from the crowd.
There are two books that come with You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked, one for the game master, or Station, and one for the players, or Strugglers. While there is duplicate information presented in both books, they manage to keep each clean and concise, making for a quick and breezy read. There’s a scratchy, rough look to the art style that makes it feel grimy and attractively threatening. The red/black/white color palette makes the layouts pop, giving both books a distinct visual identity that matches its aggressive tone.
The game is designed for you to get up and running super quickly, so character creation is incredibly simple and streamlined. You only have two stats: TECH and FLESH, representing your proficiency with using technology and your physical prowess respectively. In addition, you’ll also have a background that can come into play mechanically and a unique tool that can give you a leg up in tense situations. When making an action roll, you’ll create a pool of D6s, starting with one, then adding additional dice for your relevant stat, any fictional advantages you may have from your background or items, then subtracting dice for disadvantages or wounds. Once you roll that pool, you count up the number of 5s and 6s, or hits, to see what happened. Zero hits is a failure, one to two hits is a success at a cost, while three or more is a full success. Before you roll you can also declare you’re spending either Luck or Will, a pair of resources that will give you an automatic success on an action. Overall, it’s an easy system that really encourages you to describe your actions fully in order to negotiate for advantages.
In order to make the station you’re exploring feel as threatening as possible, the player characters are fragile. On failures and mixed successes, you will take Wounds. Your first Wound is something that can be quickly patched up, like a dislocated shoulder. Your second Wound is something more gruesome, like a severed hand. Your third Wound is your painful, gory death. While this may seem punishing, You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked borrows an important mechanic from video games: the Save Point. As you explore you’ll either find save rooms on the map or create them by spending Will or Luck. Upon your death, you’ll respawn there with one item and some amount of character progression, while the rest of your items will be left on your corpse where you died, ready for you to pick up at your leisure. But be warned, the world will change upon your revival. There’s no canonical explanation given in-fiction for the Save Point, but players are encouraged to make up one that fits the type of story they’re trying to tell, whether it’s a cloning pod or some sort of automated occult ritual machine. This video game mechanic perfectly translates to the table, as it allows you to still feel the tension of being weak without permanently punishing you for failure.
Similar to character creation, You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked streamlines the process of GMing the game, encouraging you to prep as little as possible and generate the adventure during play. The game lists a few questions you should answer before starting to make sure you have a clear vision of your version of the Station, but once you have that it’s off to the races. As you play, you’ll be creating the map that the characters are exploring and filling it with various threats. There’s a table to roll on every time a character enters a new room, which will help determine the type and contents of the room they’ll enter. Maybe it will be a large, gore-filled med bay with a monster, or maybe they’ll run into a new ‘friend’ in a pristine meeting room, it’s all up to the dice. To keep driving exploration, the GM will always provide the player with an objective for them to pursue, which will often have sub objectives to complete along the way.
Just like generating rooms, there’s also a table to generate the horrific monsters that populate the station. You’ll roll to determine their HP, size, number of limbs, body type and other extra features to make them particularly dangerous and disgusting. Each will have a weak point that can be exploited by the player, if they are able to figure it out during the fight. The station guide has a section with pre-generated monsters to either use in your game or take inspiration from for your own creations. The premade monsters do a good job of conveying the wide range of tones that the game can encompass, from tiny exploding space scorpions to a being just called the “Cosmic Hell-Thing.”
While the game supports one to four players along with the GM, it really was designed for just one player, and that’s where it feels like the sweet spot is. Playing at that player count helps drive forward the desperate lonely tone of the video games it’s trying to emulate, making for a wholly unique feeling among tabletop RPGs. The video game-like rhythm of searching rooms and facing down horrors is a fun one to fall into, and the random tables keep everyone on their toes. If you want to play with more, there’s a couple pages of advice that help you with methods for adjusting to a higher player count without losing the tension and dread at the table.
The back of the book is full of additional random tables, ranging from items to strange occurrences, but I still wish there were just a few more concrete examples of how to play. Sometimes there are terms mentioned in the rules where it’s not clear if they are just fictional or have some mechanical ramifications as well. For a rules light game, it’s fine to leave that up to the GM, but sometimes a little more clarification can help people from getting tripped up on things like that. Another thing I would have loved to see is a completed map, both to help me wrap my head around the recommended scope of the station and to see the best way to represent it visually. The successful Kickstarter was able to fund a zine called Found Transmissions, which will include some prewritten missions, so maybe future content will have the examples I’m looking for. Despite my small wishlist for additional content, there’s definitely enough here to help facilitate the game.
You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked is a game definitely worthy of its title. It’s fast and easy to pick up, providing a compelling and surprising experience for the players and GM alike. I’m always excited to see what video games and tabletop RPGs can learn from each other, and this game takes all the right lessons from survival horror and creates an experience that accurately translates the genre to the tabletop RPG space. Usually character death is something that’s meant to be avoided in tabletop RPGs, but You’re in Space and Everything’s Fucked makes it a joyous part of the experience.
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