Your ship is fueled. Your crew is ready.
Someone is going to take that job.
Five major powers hold settled space in an uneasy balance. Between them sit disputed borders, failing relay chains, clan-held ports, salvage fields, and independent colonies that change flags when it becomes convenient.
Into all of that you send a small crew with a battered ship and a list of contacts. The crew takes jobs. The jobs are rarely simple. A cargo run turns into an extraction when the manifest is a person.
The relay at Vanta has been down for eleven days.
The Irnan customs tender that works this corridor has not come through in three weeks.
The port authority at Calder's World is offering double rates to run a cargo to Red Vale without asking about the manifest.
Several empires hold dense cores and compete through diplomacy, proxy wars, trade pressure, spies, sanctions, and deniable crews. Removing any one of them would not fix the others. You will work for people worth protecting and people worth opposing.
The Irnan Directorate controls teleportation. The Funtari Confederacy controls anti-gravity. The Shoiyan Concord controls continuity stacks, the Jaziri Caliphate true AI, the Antaean League cloaking. States protect, sell, license, and weaponize those edges.
Manufacturing, scarcity, cargo, repairs, trade routes, supply chains, and stolen parts all matter. A job pays because it is difficult, illegal, dangerous, or all three.
Fighter, shuttle, scout, cutter, corvette, frigate. Classes are familiar roles. Models belong to builders, each with a design language, strengths, and flaws. What carries across sessions is the ship, the crew, the debts, and the reputation.
Smugglers, scouts, traders, bounty hunters, troubleshooters, couriers, privateers, medics, engineers, diplomats, spies, and displaced veterans. They share a ship. They take jobs. They survive the complications.
You start in the Meridian Verge, a neutral zone where three powers meet and none could hold it without giving the others a reason to burn it down. It has everything a crew needs and nothing a crew can count on.
Character creation, five species, backgrounds and careers, 25 skills, talents, starting gear, common technology, ships and crews, and how to fight.
Open the Player's Guide First sessionQuickstart rules, a ready-made crew of five with their ship, and a first job that runs from an offer at Port Meridian to getting out of Harrowspan.
Take the first job ShipsStarship classes, builders, drives, sensors, weapons and shields, crew stations, ship combat and chases, designing a hull, and three catalogs of craft.
Open the Vehicles Manual GearCredits and legality, weapons, armor, field gear, sensors and computers, shipboard cargo, restricted tech, services and bribes, black markets, and salvage.
Open the Equipment Guide Known spaceThe power cores, disputed borders, unclaimed systems, freeports and smuggler havens, the relay network, habitable worlds, hazards, trade routes, and a full gazetteer.
Open the Atlas For the game masterThe state of the universe, the powers and their borders, routes and communication, technology secrets, factions and clocks, jobs and consequences, and a first campaign.
Open the GM GuideVoid Drifters is free to read online, all six books. You need the Exodus NDS core rules, a crew, and the worse judgment to take the job.
Exodus NDS Core Rules Recommended · Compatible with all Exodus NDS Universes