A year ago I wrote a small ruleset for fighting in the vacuum of space. The aim was to portray Necromundan lunar colonies and space stations, as well as underwater and toxic environments where pressurised space-suits were necessary.
I’ve revisited those rules, expanded, improved format and generally made something better of them.
The new version strips away a lot of the turn-by-turn micro-management and less sensible stuff in favour of a quick and streamlined system.
The core of the rules is Suit Damage and Air-tokens.
Essentially each fighter is equipped with a personal air-supply and a sealed spacesuit of some description. Whenever that fighter takes an Injury roll, they additionally roll on a Suit Damage table. This uses an injury dice as well, but affects the suit independently of the fighter.
The three options are that the suit is punctured but able to immediately self-repair, it’s damaged and must be manually repaired with a repair-kit, or it’s been torn wide open and can’t be repaired at all.
These results can happen completely independently of the normal injuries. So for example a knife-slash that merely caused a flesh-wound on the fighter might tear the suit badly enough that it can’t be repaired. Requiring that fighter to sprint for safety.
Or perhaps the life-threatening Serious Injury caused minimal damage to the suit and the material has sealed over the hole..
The second part of this feature is the Air Tokens. Whenever the suit is damaged, the fighter loses precious air, normally recycled around and around, the suits only contain a very small volume of air and have little margin for loss. Typically a suit can take damage no more than 6 times before the suit runs out of air entirely.
These can be replenished at certain locations, you can buy expanded air-tanks and similar equipment and there are plenty of options to make the suits themselves more robust.
If a fighter finds themselves without any air and is in hard-vacuum, they go out of action at the end of the turn.
I’ve written full rules for handling airlocks and hull-breaches, unique territories and scatter-terrain for scenarios, new Trading Post items and equipment to suit the new setting and I’ve also written two new factions since using existing ones made very little sense.
The new factions are:
Clan Coronus, specialists in bio-technology and life-support equipment. They inhabit the agri-domes and live a techno-tribal lifestyle. I’ve been converting models to represent them using Escher and Idoneth Deepkin parts.
House Sirius – Mining and industrial faction, based on the Genestealer cult line of models. They are in fact intended to be infected by a Genestealer Cult, however the House at large is not, and the cult is meant as background flavour rather than providing any unique units or rules. (Really it’s just an excuse if I forget to remove a Cult sigil on any models I make for them)
Together the two houses form a duality of nature vs technology, a common theme but a strong one I think.
I’m planning to build some custom scenery specially for void-war, specifically an agri-dome (jungle scenery inside a circular building with part of a transparent dome over it) and a couple surface-outposts consisting of a few rooms and an airlock each.
Those plus some scatter terrain and I should be able to play some cool scenarios!
Please play with them and tell me how you find them!
This Cave 