Mint Reviews: ChangedStars
“Only from the darkness may we see the stars.”
ChangedStars is a Hard Sci-Fi TTRPG about a future in which humanity has been well and truly humbled by a coalition of alien life to prevent a galactic genocide.
I received a copy of the game in exchange for a review, which is what I'm going to talk about today.
The Premise
ChangedStars takes place after a great conflict, in which the Human Empire tried (and failed) to achieve space superiority. Humans have joined a trio of pan-galactic species in a government called the Trinity. These three societies are not the only forms of alien life, however; there also exist a number of aliens and societies outside of the Trinity, interacting with it on various levels even though its members are not represented on a governance scale.
This future is hopeful, but imperfect: the universe is home to various forms of social organization, from the hyper-capitalist Rast, to the hive-minded Murai, to the poly-amorous, community-centered Thren. There exists crime, inequality, distrust, and armed conflict. In this way ChangedStars does not aim to present itself as a utopia, although it does expect that most players will be playing as part of Trinity in some way.
The inspirations for this game include The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, Steven Universe by Rebecca Sugar, Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, the Alien francise, The Expanse by Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck, and "Trava u Doma" by Zemlyane (a soviet song). I'm only lightly familiar with a lot of these works, so when I was reading the game, I found myself referencing personal touchstones like Star Wars FFG, Lancer, and Ender's Game.
A personal highlight for me was the Rast; otter-like aliens that thrive on trade and live on various Homeships with unregulated markets. I found the contrast of their cute appearance with their cutthroat business practices intriguing.
The Mechanics
Character Creation in ChangedStars is rather granular, with pieces that feel familiar and reminiscent of what I'd call trad games. You choose a species and an archetype, and the pieces of your character are defined by Attributes and Skills. You also choose equipment packages to represent the kinds of tools and gear your character would have on their person. Tools include weapons, armor, drugs, tools, and cybernetics. This means that fighting, coercion, repair, and hacking all seem to be the kinds of things your characters will expect to be challenged by.
This is also a game with a lot to consider whenever you enter a combat: the book recommends grid maps so you can track your movement accurately, and everything has hit points, meaning that a) there are moments in which you could be expected to kill things, and b) when exactly you die is something you play to find out. Combat makes use of initiative rolls and an action economy, with familiar enough rules for cover, hazards, stealth and hacking. With so many parts of the book focused on calculating hit points, special conditions, wounds tables, and specific environments, combat certainly feels like a focus for this game.
Character advancement looks to be somewhat corralled: talents are organized into trees, meaning that you typically have to meet prerequisites in order to advance in a specific direction. For a game that seems to prioritize a bit of crunch/strategy, this makes sense: having a path to follow minimizes choice paralysis and also teaches you about directions that likely feel rewarding.
To do something in ChangedStars, you roll a d6 dice pool formed from taking a Skill and an Attribute, which feels familiar from a number of games I've played before: it's elegant, simple, and allows for flexibility, which I appreciate.
Your character additionally has a resource called Edge, which can be spent to invoke a powerful ability, and also push you closer to taking a penalty called Shock. If you accumulate 7 Edge, you can do something called an Edge Break, which allows you to push your limits and do something truly exceptional. At 10 Edge, you must take an Edge Break. Taking an Edge Break does risk incurring Shock, which could traumatize your character if you take too much. I appreciate this tool, as it both gives you a cool moment of heightened competency, but also accumulates a cost that will allow your character to hit some tragic beats. Edge moves ChangedStars away from power-fantasy, and towards something that feels a little bit more grounded.
Things To Play With
ChangedStars boasts an extensive list of weapons, gear, ships, and creatures for your characters to go up against. Players have a rather diverse library of equipment - the pieces that make up their characters is their toy-box, and for the right group, I could see a this working as a buffet. For other groups, this might be overwhelming: someone with choice paralysis might not know where to go next. The character advancement probably helps the longer you play, but when you sit down for the first time, there's a lot to look at!
On the GM side, the toy-box exists in the bestiary and the lore, including information about the galaxy's diversity of social lives, political events, and various locations. I'm a big fan of how the locations are laid out, with visual reference to get a quick understanding of each solar system, and details about each planet that both give it flavor and provide a few relevant plot seeds to give you ideas. I skimmed the creatures in the bestiary, and while I appreciated that not everything in the bestiary needed to be a physical threat, I also noticed that every entry includes stats for combat: for example,a grazing, low-level herds-beast has rules about how to use them in a stampede.
Vehicles and gear in particular have a lot of rules about how to use them, especially regarding combat, piloting, and hacking. These are sub-systems of the game that require a lot of time to learn, and this learning curve typically is one that falls on the GM's shoulders. For myself, this is a piece I don't care for that much, and I definitely don't recommend trying to include a space fight, a hacking sequence, and an interaction with a synth character all in one session.
The starting adventure is a great help to a GM who's figuring out how to run ChangedStars, but at the same time, I feel like it's also a bit intimidating. The beginning adventure is laid out in such detail, with recommendations for specific checks to make depending on the choices the players make, that to replicate it for an adventure of my own feels like a monumental task.
Who This Game Is For
ChangedStars feels like a great game for folks who like adventures games, with suggested modes of free merchants, marines, scientists, spies, and survivalists. The game hints at telling stories about a mundane life in the Trinity, but I think this means that you can play someone who is an ordinary person in terms of job, but not ordinary in terms of life circumstances. Your 'ordinary' people will find themselves in extraordinary situations, and likely survive. This is not a slice of life game. I also don't think it would do politics very well, mostly because none of the rules that I saw appeared to give politics that much thought. (This isn't to say that you can't try to do politics, but much of the heavy lifting would likely be done through roleplay.)
This isn't a game that seems to put much mechanical weight into relationships either. What your PCs feel about each-other is up to interpretation, but based on the amount by which this book focuses on combat and surviva-bility, I'd recommend playing this game as a team of people who more or less have each-other's backs. This is not a game about getting into pretend fights with your friends; instead it's about overcoming adversity and doing something extraordinary together.
ChangedStars cares deeply about being faithful to the rules of the world that its' built. It is important to the game's authors that you track how many modifications a ship can reasonably take, or how long it takes for your crew to travel from one planet to another. It's important to consider what protects you from the cold vacuum of space, and how various weather or terrain may provide a hazard in a fight. This is a game that prioritizes consistency, rather than drama.
ChangedStars also cares about your failure being interesting. Every time you roll, you risk consequences, even if you fail. This means that actions in which you roll should mean something, even if the only thing that is at stake is increased personal stress.
In a world that is aspirational and yet flawed, there are pieces of this world that feel true to the sci-fi genre: asking what-ifs about living in a society unlike our own, alongside species that don't see the world in the same way that we do in our present. At the same time, it gives us things that we can understand: conflicts between peoples that disagree, violence, crime, debt, and bureaucracy.
My Thoughts
It was hard for me not to compare this to Star Wars FFG or Lancer, but in truth I don't think ChangedStars is necessarily reaching for the same group in either camp. D6 dice pools are more accessible to most groups than Star Wars FFG, and a new lore makes it less intimidating to non-Star Wars fans, although the amount of established lore does mean that to some extent, the GM might be considered to be the knowledge-keeper in regards to social customs and historical events. Compared to Lancer, ChangedStars has more options outside of combat, admits to a flawed world whose conflicts are justified, and provides more advice to game masters that helps build a plot.
That being said, the advice to game-masters section felt very similar to what I'd seen in many other trad games, like Numenera or Dungeons & Dragons. This includes advice on providing challenges to your players outside of combat, like puzzles, or taking time to make sure that every person around the table is getting a chance to contribute. I appreciate the different ways ChangedStars defines conflict in this section, looking at how societal conflict and internal conflict could inform the problems that put your PCs in danger. I still feel like getting into a physical fight is the easiest and most likely form of problem-solving in a game of ChangedStars.
I don't think this is a one-shot game. Theoretically, it could be played as a one-shot, but the recommended four-hour game with one hour devoted to combat feels aspirational to me; sure, combat might take an hour, but if you include one hour of setup/cool-down, that leaves only two hours for everything else, and at that point, I'd rather split the game up into two slightly shorter sessions. It would be easier if you're playing in a campaign, because the table can learn the rules gradually, and achieve a sense of system mastery.
If you love learning and mastering a new set of rules, and you like engaging with ideas about different ways to organize society, or playing through adventures in a logically consistent world, you'll probably like ChangedStars. If you are looking for a game with an emphasis on relationships, intrigue, or good dramatic beats, you'll probably want to look somewhere else.
You can find ChangedStars on Itch.io, and you can follow one of the main authors, Lee, on Bluesky. You can also watch this game be played on Youtube!
