10 Indie Sci-Fi TTRPGs Worth Running in 2026

One GM I was speaking to last week is six sessions into a Mothership derelict run, watching her crew burn through Stress faster than oxygen. A ScriptoriumGM user dropped me a message about his Friday-night Lancer crew, same four pilots, sixteen months in. Another GM in our community runs a Stars Without Number sandbox she preps in 20-minute pockets between meetings. Five conversations in the last month, five completely different sci-fi systems on the table, and not one of them was published by a company you've heard of unless you live on TTRPG social feeds.

D&D's space-fantasy hack works fine if you want hit points in space. If you want what sci-fi actually does (the dread of an empty corridor, the moral weight of stomping into a rebellion in a 30-foot war machine, the long quiet of a journal entry before a long jump), you want a system built for it. The good news: 2026's indie sci-fi shelf is embarrassingly good. The better news: most of these have free entry points, so you can find out if a game fits your table before you pay for the printed object.

Here are ten that keep coming up in those conversations, what they actually do at the table, and who they're for.

Sci-Fi Horror

Mothership 1e: The Benchmark

Publisher: Tuesday Knight Games. Designer: Sean McCoy. Best for: GMs who want horror mechanics, not just spooky descriptions. Players: 3–5.

If you've heard of one game on this list, it's Mothership. Sean McCoy and Alan Gerding's blue-collar sci-fi horror system swept the 2025 ENNIEs with three Gold awards (Best Aid/Accessory, Best Production Values, Best Supplement) and Kickstarted its 1e boxed set to $1.67 million from 17,719 backers. The Player's Survival Guide is still free as a PDF, and the full boxed set runs $59.

The pitch: blue-collar spacers (Teamsters, Scientists, Marines, Androids) drop into the uncaring void aboard derelict ships, mining rigs, and corporate stations, and watch which breaks first, their bodies or their minds. Resolution is bare-bones d100 roll-under with stats around 30–40, which means even basic checks fail often. That's where the horror lives.

The signature mechanic is Stress and Panic. Every failed roll adds 1 Stress. Critical failures trigger a Panic Check: roll 1d20 against your current Stress, and if the d20 is equal or lower, you panic and roll on a table that ranges from "+10 to your next roll" (the 20 result, paradoxically) all the way down to "Heart Attack" and "Full Collapse." With 10 Stress, you have a 50% chance of panicking. Players always know their odds, which is the cruelty of it. Stress only reduces in safe locations, and never below 2. Baseline anxiety is permanent.

The dice are doing some of the work, but the real reason Mothership earns its reputation is the Warden's Operations Manual, basically a how-to-run-horror masterclass disguised as a GM screen supplement. Encounter design as Transgression → Omens → Entity. When not to roll. How to draw a gameable map. Cannibal Halfling Gaming called it "one of if not the best GM's guides I have ever read". Read this before running anything beyond a pre-written one-shot.

McCoy is also unusually clear-eyed about what the setting is doing. From a 2024 Win Conditions Substack post on why he killed an entire trade subsystem in development:

"The kinds of people you're playing in Mothership won't have access to the kinds of capital that allow them to trade or build ships. It's just entirely out of their reach... Mothership [is] more of a neoliberal hellscape."

You play the people the captain shouts at, and that class politics is baked into character creation.

Pick this if your group loves Alien, The Thing, Event Horizon, or Dead Space and wants the system to do the heavy lifting. Skip it if you need your character to survive long enough to have an arc. Average character lifespan is around 4 sessions, and that's by design.

Coriolis: The Great Dark — Pulp Archaeology With Cosmic Horror

Publisher: Free League. Designers: Nils Karlen & Kosta Kostulas. Best for: Campaigns of focused exploration with built-in dread. Players: 1–5.

Coriolis: The Great Dark launched at Gen Con 2025 and landed on TTRPG Fanatics' 10 Best New TTRPGs of 2025 at #8. It's a standalone sequel to the 2017 Third Horizon (same universe, 200 years later, very different game). PDF is $24.99 on DriveThruRPG.

The setup: humanity fled a portal collapse and got stranded in a dead-end star system. Their entire civilization fits inside Ship City, an asteroid metropolis assembled from the hulls of the fleet that brought them there. The only way out is aboard one of eleven Greatships. Every system the Greatships reach is unpopulated except for ruins, the crumbling work of the Builders, a vanished civilization whose tombs leak a plague called the Blight. You play Explorers, the guild-paid weirdos who go down into those ruins and bring things back.

Mechanically it's Year Zero Engine (Free League's house dice pool) but with three damage tracks instead of one. Health for body, Hope for mind, Heart for Blight exposure. The Heart track is what makes this game distinct from anything else on this list. It escalates from bioluminescence to crystal vines on your skin to hallucinations of the Pale Halls (yes, the Twin Peaks Black Lodge reference is intentional), then trapping inside the Pale Halls, and finally, at terminal exposure, your character blinks out of existence so completely that their crewmates cannot remember them. They're erased from the fiction at the table.

The other distinctive piece is the Delve, a vertical exploration mini-game with five named roles (Delver, Scout, Burrower, Guard, Archaeologist), Supply consumption per Marker crossed, and Blight Protection rolls every round. Every player has a job, so nobody sits out.

Karlen and Kostulas were direct about the design intent in a Between 2 GMs interview. They deliberately narrowed the scope from the original Coriolis's 36-system sandbox: "It's no clear-cut focus of the game so it's very difficult to write material for it... we wanted to kind of make this game a bit more focused on what we think is the Sci-Fi and the Mystery Parts."

Pick this if you want a campaign-ready sci-fi mystery with cosmic horror, pulp archaeology aesthetics, and a built-in reason every mission exists. Skip it if you loved Third Horizon for its size. This is a deliberate narrowing.

Mech Sci-Fi: Two Answers to the Same Question

The mech RPG question is really two questions. Do you want a tactical wargame with deep loadout customization, or do you want the mech fantasy without the homework? The two best indie answers in 2026 sit at opposite ends of that spectrum.

Lancer: The Crunchy One

Publisher: Massif Press. Designers: Tom Parkinson-Morgan & Miguel Lopez. Best for: Tactical players who want politically engaged sci-fi. Players: 3–5.

Lancer is what BattleTech wishes it could be. It's an indie tabletop RPG that runs two completely different modes at the same table: a thin narrative layer for everything pilots do on foot (talking, scheming, downtime), and a dense tactical grid-combat layer for mech engagements with its own action economy, heat tracking, and license-based customization. The free SRD has the entire player-facing game; the $25 PDF adds NPC rules and setting depth. The 2024 Dark Horse hardcover printing brought it into proper retail.

The setting is the year 5016u. Humanity survived ecological collapse on Earth, spread across the galaxy under Union, and the Third Committee declared three Utopian Pillars: all material needs met, no barriers between worlds, no bondage via force or labor or debt. Union's core worlds are genuinely post-scarcity. No money, omninet jump gates, body-printing, AIs called NHPs as shackled partners. Lancers are the specialists Union sends to the frontier to do the work soft power can't do cleanly.

Parkinson-Morgan has been public about the politics: Lancer is intentionally an anti-capitalist, utopian work, and the megacorp factions are framed as antagonists. Harrison Armory, the most morally compromised manufacturer, is described in the lore as "a remnant of capitalism" tolerated only because eradicating it isn't worth the cost. The setting has an ideological position, and it's wired into every page of the lore.

Combat is where the system earns its reputation. Every mech has a Heat Cap. Powerful weapons generate heat. At half cap you're in the Danger Zone, where some of your best abilities unlock. Hit your cap and you take Stress damage and roll on the Overheating Table, which can range from a manageable Emergency Shunt to a full Reactor Meltdown that vaporizes your mech at the end of your next turn. Sitreps, pre-built encounter templates with objectives, keep combat from being a pure attrition slog. Instead of "kill everything," you're holding a control point, extracting under fire, or blowing a structure on a clock.

The five manufacturers (GMS, IPS-Northstar, Smith-Shimano Corpro, HORUS, Harrison Armory) each play differently and signal what kind of pilot you are. HORUS is the chaos faction: an anonymous hacker collective whose mechs may not fully obey physical law, including frames described as "deathless blinkspace entities."

COMP/CON, the free official builder, is basically mandatory for play. Mech-building from the book alone is technically possible but painful. Realistic time investment for new groups: 4–5 hour sessions, with a single combat consuming 2–3 hours. That number drops sharply with experience, but it doesn't drop to zero.

TTRPG Factory's review summarized it neatly: "Lancer is everything that BattleTech/Mechwarrior wishes it could be."

Pick this if you want tactical depth, mech-building that rewards planning, and a setting with an ideological position. Skip it if your sessions cap at 3 hours, or if you want narrative play with equal weight to the combat. Lancer's narrative layer is intentionally thin.

Salvage Union: The Lean One

Publisher: Leyline Press. Designers: Aled Lawlor & Panayiotis Lines. Best for: New players who want mechs without modifier math. Players: 3–6.

Salvage Union is the answer for everyone who looked at Lancer's COMP/CON, the LARS reference sheet, and the 4-hour combat windows and quietly closed the tab. PDF is £22.50 from Leyline; print+digital is £45. The free Quickstart is pay-what-you-want, includes 6 pre-made pilot/mechs, and ships with a starter adventure. It was a 2024 ENNIE finalist in three categories: Product of the Year, Best Game, and Best Rules.

The pitch: post-apocalyptic Earth, several centuries after a corporate-driven collapse. About 1% of survivors live in sealed corporate megacities called Arcos. Everyone else scrapes by in the wastes. Your crew of "Wastelander" pilots operates out of a Union Crawler, a literal walking city of around 100 people, and ranges into the wastes to strip ruins for parts, upgrade ramshackle mechs, and keep your fragile community alive.

The system is built on TC Sottek's Quest RPG, which uses a flat d20 with no modifiers, no stats, no bonuses. You roll, you read the table:

That's the whole resolution mechanic. Lines confirmed in a GMshoe Q&A that the 75% baseline success rate is intentional: "Pretty much anything you want to do in a game has a 75% chance of succeeding to encourage player agency."

The depth lives elsewhere. Mechs are nuclear-powered with a Heat track. Push a roll, you take 2 Heat and roll a Reactor Overload Check. Failure can shut you down, knock systems offline, or make you explode. Scrap is the campaign-level economy: XP, currency, building material, and Crawler upkeep all rolled into one resource. Lawlor and Lines explicitly modeled it on old-school D&D's Gold-for-XP loop. Upgrade your Crawler to a higher Tech Level and the upkeep cost rises faster than you can salvage, which is a trap on purpose.

Lines is also unembarrassed about the politics: "Yeah loosely speaking they're a trade union or at least inspired by that concept... banding together so effectively they can use all of their skills to work collectively for their greater good of the community rather than being forced to be individually exploited for their labour by the Corpos. (Yes the game is not subtle)"

The Crawler is more than a setting element; it's a third "character" that can fail. Jeff's Game Box described it well: "You have the pilots... You have the mech salvage and sometimes combat component... Last there's the Crawler, Union, or community portion of the game. If one of those three components goes down, the entire game effectively grinds to a halt."

Pick this if you want the mech-pilot fantasy with a community survival layer and zero modifier math. Skip it if you want competence to mechanically separate veterans from rookies. Everyone rolls the same d20 forever, and progression shows up in abilities and salvaged systems, not in better odds.

Solo, Sandbox, and the Long Sci-Fi Campaign

Ironsworn: Starforged — The Solo One

Publisher: Tomkin Press. Designer: Shawn Tomkin. Best for: Solo or co-op players. Players: 1–3 (no GM required).

If you've ever wanted to run a sci-fi campaign but couldn't get four humans into the same Discord call on the same night, Ironsworn: Starforged is built for you. PDF is $20 on itch.io. The original fantasy Ironsworn is free, mechanically 90% identical, and the cheapest way to learn the engine before paying for the spaceships.

You play a sworn spacer in the Forge, a small globular satellite galaxy where humanity fled after a cataclysm. Three modes are equally supported: solo (you and the oracles), co-op (2–3 players, no GM), and Guided (1 GM, 1–3 players). The action roll is 1d6 + stat (Edge, Heart, Iron, Shadow, or Wits) versus 2d10 challenge dice. Beat both d10s for a strong hit; beat one for a weak hit; beat neither for a miss and Pay the Price. Iron Vows are the campaign engine: your character literally swears a quest, opens a progress track, and works to fulfill it.

Two things make Starforged work as a solo game. First, the moves, which give you narrative scaffolding when you don't have a GM to set scenes ("Undertake an Expedition" tells you what happens if you fail, before you fail). Second, the oracles: over 100 random tables that generate planets, characters, derelicts, and complications when you don't know what happens next. Roll five oracles in a row and you've built a planet, a dungeon, a tone, and a reason to be there. The oracle doesn't write the story; it hands you material to interpret.

Tomkin in a Lone Toad interview explained the design intent:

"Procedural play is the secret sauce of solo RPGs, I think! A game needs its own inertia, driving the story and introducing new challenges and opportunities for your character. Otherwise, without a GM taking the reigns, things can feel a bit aimless... Ironsworn is designed so that, once you start interacting with the system and rolling dice, the game engine and your own creativity carry you forward."

The community has built a small empire of digital tools. The Iron Vault Obsidian plugin embeds dice rolls directly into your written journal, putting narrative and mechanics in the same document. Iron Link and Stargazer are PWAs you can install on a phone. Every move, oracle, and asset is published as open JSON via the Datasworn project, which is why the tooling ecosystem exists at all.

Pick this if you're a solo player, a couple, or a group with chronic scheduling collapse. Skip it if you need group energy or a living human GM to keep momentum, or if narrative ambiguity ("what do you think happens?") frustrates you.

Stars Without Number Revised: The Sandbox One

Publisher: Sine Nomine. Designer: Kevin Crawford. Best for: GMs who want to build a sector and let players loose in it. Players: 3–6.

The full version of Stars Without Number Revised is free. Not a starter set, not a quickstart. The entire 325-page game, including faction rules, sector generation, psionics, starship combat, and 100 adventure seeds. Kevin Crawford gives it away on principle and sells the deluxe edition (~100 extra pages of optional content like Transhuman Tech, True AIs, and Mechs) for $19.99 PDF / $80 hardcover.

If you've heard the phrase "GM toolkit" and rolled your eyes, SWN is what people actually mean when they use it well. The chassis is a hybrid: B/X D&D for combat (familiar to D&D players, OSR-lethal at low levels), Traveller-inspired 2d6 for skills. Three core classes (Warrior, Expert, Psychic) plus the Adventurer hybrid. Skills are verbs (Shoot, Sneak, Talk, Fix, Program, Trade) so a single skill covers a wide range of contextually plausible actions. The system mostly stays out of the way.

What you're paying for, even at $0, is the prep machinery. World Tags are two-word descriptors you assign during sector creation: Tomb World, Forbidden Tech, Theocracy, Tyranny, Trade Hub, Unbraked AI. Each one comes with five sub-tables (Enemies, Friends, Complications, Things, Places). You roll or pick two tags per planet, make selections from each table, and you have a planet with its own factions, hooks, locations, and emergent narrative logic. Ocean World + Theocracy: a wave-cult worshipping a drowned god, a caste of underwater-adapted priests, and an incoming merchant fleet that refuses to observe tidal restrictions. You did not plan any of that. It fell out of two tags.

The Faction Turn is the between-session worldbuilding engine. Every significant faction (governments, corporations, cults, mercs) has Force/Wealth/Cunning ratings, FacCreds, Goals, and Assets. Between sessions, you run a Faction Turn where each faction takes one action: attack a rival's asset, buy a new asset, expand influence, repair, use a special ability. The output is rumors. "The Hammer's Slammers crushed the Free Miners' intelligence network on Karaxis. Job boards are lighting up for freelance work retrieving the Miners' now-exposed contact list before Slammer agents find it first." There's next session's hook, generated automatically.

Crawford has been clear in interviews about who he writes for: "The GM is the one I care about most when I write my games because if I do not have a GM I do not have a game right... designer's obligation to the GM is to just make life as simple as possible for them." He runs Sine Nomine as a one-person operation that's done around $500,000 in gross sales over two years on the give-it-away-free-and-sell-the-print model.

Stu Horvath, in Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground (MIT Press 2023), put it shortest: "It remains unmatched in both its depth and its potential application."

Pick this if you're the GM who'd rather build a living sector than run a published adventure path. Skip it if your group hates OSR lethality at low levels, or if you wanted a tightly authored narrative arc instead of a sandbox.

Cyberpunk and Heists

Scum and Villainy: The Firefly RPG You Actually Want

Publisher: Evil Hat / Off Guard Games. Designers: Stras Acimovic & John LeBoeuf-Little. Best for: Crews who quote Firefly during session zero. Players: 3–6.

If your group has ever said the words "let's just play Firefly," Scum and Villainy is the answer. Hardcover + PDF is $35; PDF alone is $20. It's a Forged in the Dark game (Blades in the Dark's engine) where the whole crew runs a single spaceship through the Procyon Sector: four star systems too far from the Hegemony's core to matter, which is exactly the kind of place a smuggling crew can survive.

The Firefly mapping is explicit. The seven playbooks each correspond to a Firefly character: Mechanic (Kaylee), Muscle (Jayne), Mystic (River), Pilot (Wash), Scoundrel (Mal), Speaker (Inara), Stitch (Simon). The three ship choices set your campaign's tone. Stardancer is the Serenity option (smuggling, cargo, generalist crime). Cerberus is the bounty hunter. Firedrake is the Star Wars Rebels option (rebels striking the Hegemony directly). The ship is a second character sheet with its own stat block and upgrade tree.

The mechanical core is Blades': d6 dice pool, take the highest, 6 = success, 4–5 = success with cost, 1–3 = failure. Position and Effect replace HP and difficulty numbers. Stress funds pushing yourself, resisting consequences, or helping a crewmate. Flashbacks mean you skip planning the heist before play and instead narrate the prep mid-job, costing 0–4 stress depending on how audacious it is.

S&V's specific changes from Blades matter. Gambits are a shared crew pool of luck dice anyone can spend on any roll, which is what gives the game its scoundrel-pulling-off-the-impossible-shot feel that Blades doesn't have. CRED merges money and reputation into one resource (in open space, those are the same thing). Heat tracks per star system, not per city; when one system gets hot, you jump to another to cool down. There's a built-in campaign endgame at +3 status with any faction: one final mission that changes the sector permanently, then the crew retires. Designed for 12–20 sessions.

Mikhail Aristov's comparative review puts the tone difference cleanly: "While Blades was extremely dark and oppressive, with a huge thematic focus on death, trauma, and building a criminal empire... S&V is much more interested in mystery and adventure, while still remaining as violent and cynical as its predecessor."

Stras Acimovic himself, on the Off Guard Games blog, articulated the FitD philosophy that runs underneath: "The commonality of Forged in the Dark games to me is fictional positioning. If you say 'X is risky' it's hard to understand why it's risky if the world isn't established. Working back from an answer is much harder."

Pick this if you want pulpy space-crew adventure with a designed ending. Skip it if position/effect math felt counterintuitive in Blades. Same engine, same friction.

CBR+PNK: Augmented — Cyberpunk in 3 Hours

Publisher: Mythworks. Designer: Emanoel Melo. Best for: Convention play, after-work pickups, FitD samplers. Players: 3–5.

CBR+PNK is a one-shot machine. The boxed Augmented edition is $29.99: a sleeve of 15 laminated 8.5"×4" pamphlets with UV spot finish and dry-erase compatibility, no actual book. The original digital edition is $9.90 pay-what-you-want on itch.io (the free community copies are all claimed), three pamphlets, fully playable, and was the engine for the 2024 ENNIE Silver win for Best Layout and Design (Gold went to Shadowdark). The premise is brutally clear: this is your runners' last job, and every game is played as if it might be the last game anyone at this table ever plays together.

It's a stripped-down Forged in the Dark, the same dice math as S&V, with most of the campaign apparatus surgically removed. No crew sheet, no coin/rep economy, no faction tree, no XP advancement (your runners are already veterans). Twelve Blades actions are compressed into four broad Approaches (Aggressive, Elegant, Smart, Subtle). The Flashback mechanic is intact and load-bearing.

Melo described the design process on his own blog:

"This game took me more effort than I've ever planned, due to the nature of the Forged in the Dark engine and my (unadvised) goal to strip it down to a bare minimum. I learned so much reverse-engineering the mechanisms to figure out what really NEEDED to stay. In the end (and in my opinion), FitD is as simple as a conversation, and its core is not in numbers or boxes, but in the interaction with the fiction."

The signature contribution is the Angle Roll, the closing ritual. During character creation each runner writes their Angle (why they got into the life and what they're chasing). At the end of the session, each player rolls a d6 pool modified by what happened during the run. A 6 means the Angle is achieved and the runner rides off into the sunset; 4–5 is mixed; 1–3 sends them back to the grind, or worse. Wyatt Krause at Sprites and Dice called it "the coup de grace... it is magic": a public, emotional closing statement that collapses three hours of session into a single line of lasting character mythology.

The pamphlet format is the argument. Character creation runs in 15 minutes. A GM can hand one Runner File to each player, keep the GM Sheet, and run the entire game off two pieces of laminated paper. No prep beyond sketching a mission objective.

Pick this if you have three hours, four people, and want a complete cyberpunk story with closure. Skip it if you want campaign continuity or your group struggles with Flashbacks (D&D-trained players often underuse them in their first session).

FIST: Ultra Edition — Paranormal Cold War Mercs

Publisher: CLAYMORE. Designer: B. Everett Dutton. Best for: Low-prep gonzo black-ops sessions. Players: 3–5.

FIST: Ultra Edition is $20 PDF / $35 softcover and was one of 20 winners of The Awards 2022–2023, a juried indie TTRPG prize. The free RATIONS Collection on itch.io is six pamphlet-format missions and supplements that show off the tone, the enemy and gear templates, and the Intelligence Matrix in action — you need Ultra to actually run them, but it's the cleanest way to see whether the game's register is for you before you buy. The pitch: you're soldiers of fortune hired by a rogue paramilitary unit to handle the Cold War's paranormal dirty work, the assignments neither superpower can acknowledge. From the rulebook: "You are a disposable gun for hire, caught up in the death and destruction of pointless proxy wars and oppressive establishments. You may also be someone who can turn into a ghost or control bees with your mind."

Resolution is 2d6 + attribute, the PbtA spine without the elaborate move libraries. Four attributes: FORCEFUL, TACTICAL, CREATIVE, REFLEXIVE. 6 or less is failure, 7–9 is partial, 10+ is full success. Characters start with 6 HP. Damage is d6-based, and a natural 6 on damage is triple damage and ignores armor, for both sides. Fair fights are not the play.

The thing FIST does better than almost any game on this list is character creation. Each character picks two Traits from an index of 116+, numbered 111 through 666 (so you can roll random pairs with three d6). Examples: HAPPY (+1 on rolls to make a person or situation happier; starts with a Bundle of Lollipops); MORBID (defines a relationship with death; starts with a Gifted Scythe doing 2d6 damage; can call Death to your side when someone dies); WIZARD (rolls a random spell; starts with a Magic Missile Launcher that "always hits someone"). Plus 36 Roles. Seamus Conneely at Cannibal Halfling put it bluntly: "I could roll up characters for this game forever, quite possibly literally, it's practically a game in and of itself."

The other thing FIST does well is Intelligence Matrix prep. The GM tables generate mission types, locations, enemy factions, primary threats, NPC complications, and gear drops. Roll for 10–15 minutes and you have a self-consistent mission brief: a CYCLOPS Recon Operations team holding a Soviet nuclear silo where a child accidentally activated the CHERNOBOG warmech, and one of your contacts is a double agent. Run it as written.

Ben Milton (Questing Beast) reviewed it in May 2024 and pitched it as "the best RPG for playing a paranormal death commando": "if you like Powered by the Apocalypse games but want something a little bit lighter, without lots of complex moves to keep track of, [if] you want something faster, more deadly, more in the OSR style, I think this could be a really good option."

Pick this if you want a low-prep one-shot or pickup game where weird character builds doing impossible things is the whole point. Skip it if you want serious Lovecraftian horror; that's Delta Green's job, and FIST's gonzo undercuts dread on purpose.

Dimensional / Weird

Slugblaster: Game of the Year Edition — The Heart-Punch

Publisher: Mythworks (originally Wilkie's Candy Lab). Designer: Mikey Hamm. Best for: Groups who want bittersweet coming-of-age with hoverboards. Players: 3–5.

Slugblaster is the sleeper on this list, and you can't talk about indie sci-fi in 2026 without including it. The 2024 GotY box is $84.99: a 9"×9" hardcover, custom dice, a pizza-box GM screen, two poster maps, an enamel pin, a QR card linking to an original soundtrack, and a digital PDF. The original PDF is pay-what-you-want from $0 and the Turbo X quickstart is a free one-shot. It won the IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Game of the Year 2023 and was an ENNIE Best Game nominee that same year.

The pitch from the official site is what sells the game: "In the small town of Hillview, teenage hoverboarders sneak into other dimensions to explore, film tricks, go viral, and get away from the problems at home. It is dangerous. It is stupid. It has got parent groups in a panic. And it is the coolest thing ever."

It's a deeply heterodox Forged in the Dark game. Resistance rolls are gone. Position negotiation as a default is gone. Clocks driving every action are gone. Slugblaster keeps the d6 pool, adds Boost (spend for an extra die) and Kick (spend for more impact, even on failure), and centers the campaign on a doom/legacy/epilogue arc. Around session ten, your characters become adults and the game ends. The ending isn't optional; the ending is the point.

The rulebook itself contains the line "Hey, we don't really think it's appropriate to kill other sentient beings in this game", a tonal commitment that's mechanical, not squeamish. The real stakes are doom and legacy clocks, and they cash out in the shape of who your character becomes when they grow up. John Harper, designer of Blades in the Dark, is on record: "Just read through Slugblaster, and wow it is fantastic! Highly, highly recommended."

Quintin Smith's 47-minute Quinns Quest review drove a second wave of attention to the game in late 2024. His take, paraphrased: a campaign of Slugblaster ends in a way that hits you like a truck. He described his own group's final scene, a hospital corridor conversation about whether everything would still be okay, as "maybe the single most bittersweet scene I've ever had in a TTRPG."

Or, as Tabletop Gaming magazine's Chris Lowry put it: "It made me feel 20 years younger and a thousand years old at the same time."

Pick this if your group wants earnest emotion alongside gonzo action and you're tired of games where the only stakes are death. Skip it if you default to gritty darkness or want open-ended characters without a built-in arc.

So Which One Should You Run?

You're not going to run all ten of these. So here's the short version for your next campaign.

You want sci-fi horror. Mothership for one-shots and short arcs. Coriolis: The Great Dark for a campaign with cosmic mystery and crew politics.

You want mechs. Lancer if your group has 4-hour sessions and patience for COMP/CON. Salvage Union if they don't.

You play solo or your group can't schedule. Starforged. It's not even close.

You want to build a sci-fi sandbox and run a long campaign. Stars Without Number Revised. Free. Run a Faction Turn between sessions and watch the world grow itself.

You want Firefly. Scum and Villainy. The crew sheet maps to the show one-to-one.

You want a cyberpunk one-shot tonight. CBR+PNK. Fifteen-minute character creation, three hours start to finish, Angle Roll closes the night.

You want gonzo paranormal action with weird characters. FIST: Ultra Edition. Roll two traits, pick a role, drop in.

You want to feel something. Slugblaster. Don't read it on a plane, you'll embarrass yourself.

If you do try one of these, the Campaign Library inside ScriptoriumGM was built for exactly this situation, where the system doesn't have a published adventure path. Upload the rulebook, teach it to the Campaign Assistant, and you can ask "what does Stress recovery look like in Mothership?" or "remind me what HORUS frames specialize in" without leaving your prep notes. Every game on this list works inside it; bring-your-own-rulebook is one of the shipped features, not a future promise.

The thing all ten of these games share, that D&D's space-fantasy hack will never give you, is that their mechanics know what genre they're for. Mothership's Stress track makes you feel the dread. Lancer's Heat curve makes you feel the risk. Starforged's progress tracks make you feel the long arc of a sworn quest across an entire galaxy. You set the table; the dice know what kind of story they're rolling for.

What sci-fi system has been on your shelf the longest, and which one are you finally going to run? Drop into our Discord and tell me — and if I missed one that should have made the cut, that's the conversation I most want to have.