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Introduction

Welcome to Astrabound, a tabletop roleplaying game setting powered by the Savage Worlds rules from Pinnacle Entertainment Group. This book focuses on a particular frontier of that setting: The Edge of the Galaxy, where the maps get thin, the laws get selective, and the past refuses to stay buried.

The year is 2375. The Commonwealth of Worlds, with Earth at its heart, is the closest thing the galaxy has to a utopian superpower. The Alliance carries Commonwealth ideals into the void: peaceful exploration, defense without conquest, and strict restraint in the affairs of less developed worlds. In the Core and Colonies, it works. Out here, it is complicated.

Because beyond the comfortable reach of Commonwealth bureaucracy lies the Outer Rim. And the Outer Rim does not care what you meant to do.

The Azaran Empire has fractured within living memory. Old Imperial chains snapped, and worlds were left adrift: some liberated, some burning, some ruled by warlords in borrowed uniforms. Refugees spill through half-charted routes. Corporate syndicates set up shop where fleets cannot patrol. Relics from the Celestar age surface in black markets and buried vaults. Astra itself has grown louder since the reawakening of the Star Stone at Freedom’s Gate.

That is where your stories begin.

Not as admirals. Not as senators. Not as perfect heroes.

As the people who go anyway.

What Is Astrabound: The Edge of the Galaxy?​

Astrabound is a science fiction setting of discovery, danger, and hard choices. It blends space opera action with frontier survival and ancient mysteries, where a single artifact can change a system’s fate and a single mistake can strand you beyond rescue range.

In The Edge of the Galaxy, you play the kind of crew the official histories leave in the margins:

  • Starstriders hired to chart unknown routes, salvage Celestar ruins, or carry a message no one else will touch

  • Independents trying to survive between Commonwealth law, corporate sovereignty, and Rim justice

  • Smugglers, bounty hunters, and free traders who know that “legal” is often just another word for “owned”

  • Deniable operators who do the work governments and corporations cannot admit they need done

You might be explorers. You might be criminals. Most crews are both, depending on who is asking.

I’m the Game Master. What Do I Do?​

As the Game Master (GM), you are the voice of the galaxy. You frame scenes, play everyone the crew meets, and keep the pace moving when the plan falls apart, because it will. You decide what the scanners see, what the customs inspector wants, and what that “dead” Celestar station is doing with its lights on.

Your job is not to defeat the players. Your job is to challenge them, surprise them, and make their choices matter.

In Astrabound, the best games come from pressure:

  • a contract that pays too well

  • a cargo that should not exist

  • a distress call that no one else answered

  • a lawman with a badge and a private agenda

  • a relic that offers miracles at a cost

Keep it fast, keep it pulpy, keep it human. Fun first, rules second.

I’m a Player. What Do I Do?​

As a player, you create a Player Character (PC) and join a crew. Your PC is one of the few people willing to cross the line between “charted” and “known.” You will make deals, take risks, break rules, and sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Adventures in The Edge of the Galaxy play like episodes of a prestige sci-fi series: each job is its own story, but the consequences stack. Your crew earns scars, allies, rivals, and reputations that follow you from port to port.

Player Characters in this setting are often from the hard side of space, but they don’t have to be. You can be:

  • a freed Android searching for personhood beyond a purchase contract

  • a Dendi survivor with a list of names and a reason to keep flying

  • a Resarian bounty hunter who takes targets dead or alive, but prefers paid

  • a Kriost-linked agent working quietly to prevent horrors the galaxy forgot

  • a Commonwealth exile branded a traitor, guilty or not

  • a Voidborn fixer who knows every port has two prices, and you never want the official one

For example, you might play a smuggler running illicit supplies into former Azaran territories while dodging customs frigates, local warlords, and corporate privateers who insist their invoices are law. Or you might play a crew hired to recover a Celestar relic only to discover it is not abandoned. It is waiting.

Out here, nobody survives on innocence. You survive on skill, nerve, and the people who watch your back when the airlock lights turn red.

Good luck, and may the dice be kind.

– CJ Schrum