Celestial Bodies, Orbital Mechanics

Celestial Bodies, Orbital Mechanics is a GMless tabletop roleplaying game for three players. It tackles themes of diaspora and homecoming; about receiving and committing violence; and a game about struggling to shape events far larger than the individual. It poses questions about colonialism, culture, and bodies.

This game provides a textual framework that will be populated by what you bring to it. It tells a larger story inside which you will have the opportunity to situate your smaller and more personal tale. The plot will proceed through a number of predetermined steps and stages, but what those look like and what outcomes arise from them are largely your responsibility to flesh out.

You as the players will always have the power to contextualize how your own characters are impacted by larger events. You get to choose how you react to the grand sweep of history in the making; how you cope with your own struggles; how you help those close to you; and how you change the world.

Your characters are members of a persecuted cause fleeing the solar system in a ragtag fleet of spaceships. After you escape and find a reprieve, you must decide what your return to earth looks like. Your story follows an elliptical path, soaring out from Earth but eventually—inexorably—being drawn back by the gravitational pull of all that you left behind. 

This game draws thematic inspiration from the podcast Friends at the Table; Heaven Will Be Mine, by Worst Girl Games; and the works of C. J. Cherryh. It takes mechanical inspiration from Downfall, by Caroline Hobbs; Fall of Magic, by Ross Cowman; Follow, by Ben Robbins, and Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker.

Written by Tomas Herbertson. Art by Sasha Reneau. Editing by Basin Herbertson and Emily Anzalone.