One drawback of trying to design a tight, compendious game is that there just isn’t room for an elaborate story. A summarily intriguing or suggestive one, yes, but on mobile screen estate and with expected game sessions of a few minutes, most of the attention goes to servicing the core gameplay (unless narrative itself is somehow the core). Fortunately for Rogueship, sci-fi has a venerable tradition of ornamenting shallow stories with a soaring host of operatic tropes and clichés.

I think the popular consensus is that our future will be a dystopia. That as good as humans are at improving technology, we’re not so good at improving ourselves, and so we can expect that by the time we’ve colonized space most of our old problems still remain, only exaggerated perhaps in scale. Commercial enterprise will galvanize entrenched powers while upstart pilots and privateers will find ways to appear on the front lines, all while criminal industry rushes to fill the gaps.

Rogueship is set after humanity’s realization of space colonization, but while interstellar travel still remains a hazardous and unregulated enterprise. Planetary merchant cartels have achieved an uneasy but functional balance that keeps humanity’s collective resources flowing through the galaxy. Wealth and influence have consolidated in the hands of private agents, and in return for services rendered the merchant lords are able to exert tremendous internal power in the preservation of their empire. Starfaring technology is not in abundant supply, however, and, beyond the reach of gravity, space remains a lawless realm.

The player takes the seat of a starship captain who has just enlisted in the service of the Hansa Star Guild, the largest merchant interest in the galaxy. The guild offers its contract pilots a proposal of insidious terms. The guild leases the pilot a small starship and a trade license, and authorizes them to do business in guild-sanctioned ports. In exchange, the pilots must complete a total of four payments to guild, after which they will own the ship and the guild will grant them an official rogue trader charter. Those who fail to pay have violated their contract, and are summarily endentured to the service of the guild where they shall suffer their remaining years in hard labor on an offworld debtors prison.

This gets the player running from creditors, trying to turn a profit from the stormy trade markets, battling space pirates, and a number of other unsavory tasks on the road to glory. It also rationalizes the turn limit, and conveniently divides the game into 4 rounds of payments.

So the world of Rogueship is basically a sci-fi adventure story about a starship captain beating a powerful organization at their own game and winning a ship and a trade charter. Or, well, dying with that ambition anyway.

I’m hoping that the ideas behind that setting are familiar enough to anyone passingly acquainted with sci-fi that they should be able to instinctively pick up on the mood, and anonymous enough that anyone could fill the roll. I mean, we all have our own reasons for becoming merchant starfarers, right?

Read Part 1: Design Foundation
Read Part 2: Gameplay Foundation
Read Part 4: Commodities
Read Part 5: Combat
Read Part 6: Events