Stellaris

Stellaris

Stellaris is one of the strangest and most tightly controlled organizations in the known galaxy: part recovery agency, part scientific authority, part paramilitary order, and part calling. It exists for one purpose above all others: to locate, contain, study, and recover awakened Celestar Crystals before they destabilize the worlds around them.

The organization’s formal name is Stellaris. Its field operatives are properly called Stellaris Agents, though across the Outer Rim and the Unknown Regions most people still use the older, more familiar title: Stellarions.

In practice, both terms are used interchangeably. Someone may say “Stellaris is here,” meaning the Agency, or “a Stellarion is in town,” meaning one of its agents.

Astra, Star Crystals, and Star Stones

To understand Stellaris, one must first understand the Astra.

Astra is not magic in the crude or superstitious sense. It is a fundamental force of existence, as real and universal as gravity, matter, radiation, or time. It is woven into the structure of reality itself. If one were to ask by what medium creation first expanded, by what current the earliest stars first moved, the Celestar answer would have been simple: through Astra.

Long before recorded galactic history, the Celestar learned not merely to sense Astra, but to harness it.

Their earliest Astra technologies were built around Star Crystals, refined crystalline matrices designed to focus, channel, and stabilize Astra. The Celestar typically paired this crystal technology with refined neutronium, using neutronium as an ultra-dense energy medium and structural substrate in many of their most advanced systems. Swappable crystalline modules handled data storage, power regulation, and specialized functionality, often embedded within neutronium assemblies tuned for particular tasks.

In time, these same crystals became extraordinarily efficient containment media, capable of storing and regulating immense quantities of energy. In later eras they served many of the functions that lesser civilizations might compare to zero-point systems: compact, stable, long-endurance power sources of almost mythic efficiency.

Yet Star Crystals were never merely batteries.

Over long periods of use, exposure, and experimentation, a crystal would absorb ambient Astra and begin to change. As resonance accumulated, it could produce side effects in the surrounding environment, often shaped by the manner in which it had been used. A crystal employed in biological research might affect living tissue. One used in transit systems might distort motion, distance, or direction. One used in warfare might become responsive to fear, aggression, or protective instinct.

The Celestar understood these risks. Before a crystal could become dangerously unstable, it was typically recycled and remade.

Eventually they achieved something far greater: the Star Stones. If a Star Crystal was a tool, a Star Stone was infrastructure. These vast crystalline engines operated on a galactic scale, focusing and regulating Astra across enormous regions of space.

Then came the war with the Illithari.

When the Celestar were forced to take their Star Stone network offline, they lost the vast focusing systems on which much of their civilization had once depended. Their lesser crystals went dormant. They continued to absorb Astra over time, but without active Star Stone amplification they remained mostly quiescent. By then the Celestar had learned enough to channel Astra through other means, and much of their civilization moved on from direct dependence on the Stones.

Earth did not fare so cleanly.

The shutdown and subsequent loss of the local Star Stone created what later ages would call the Dead Zone around Earth. The Illithari assault that followed destroyed or captured much of what remained. The Celestar never publicly confirmed whether that Star Stone was annihilated or merely lost, but the practical result was the same: its network collapsed, its influence vanished, and the surrounding region became silent, damaged, and incomplete.

Celestar Androids and Astracores

In the long shadow of those wars, the Celestar pursued another line of survival: transference into artificial bodies.

These Celestar Androids were built around a specialized thoracic core housing designed to accept a Celestar Astracore. An Astracore was not merely a raw crystal placed in a socket. It was a complete Celestar core assembly: a crystalline-neutronium module in which swappable crystal elements handled regulation, memory-state support, and specialized system behavior inside a refined neutronium framework.

With a properly calibrated Astracore installed, an android body could operate for hundreds of thousands of years on what was, for all practical purposes, a safe, near-limitless energy supply. In effect, the core functioned as a highly advanced zero-point system, creating a small trapped region of subspace to draw on vacuum energy under tightly regulated conditions. These were not generic machines. They were purpose-built Celestar vessels, designed to house continuity of mind, memory, and identity.

When the Synthar emerged and the Celestar turned away from many of their more dangerous artificial intelligence pursuits, this line of development dwindled. Production ceased. Existing units became relics of an age already passing into myth.

One such being, Alex, would later influence the rebirth of crystal doctrine in a way the ancient Celestar could never have predicted.

The Restoration of Freedom’s Gate

Everything changed when Astra Starstrider and her companions restored and reactivated the Star Stone at Freedom’s Gate.

The Star Stone there is colossal, less a relic than a crystalline engine on the scale of a reactor core, towering roughly fifty feet high and twenty feet wide. Once awakened, it did more than power Freedom’s Gate. It sent out a vast pulse through the galaxy, a wave of Astra resonance propagating outward at light speed.

Every year that expanding front reaches more systems.

And wherever it passes, dormant Celestar Crystals can awaken.

These crystals had been left untouched for millennia. They had continued absorbing Astra all that time, unrecycled, unregulated, and forgotten. By the time the Star Stone’s reactivation reached them, many were no longer merely dangerous tools. They had become singular phenomena: volatile, transformative, deeply contextual artifacts capable of warping environments, societies, biology, and perception around them.

Astrid, carrying Celestar blood and the burden of inherited memory, understood at once what this meant. This was not merely a frontier curiosity. It was an old Celestar problem returning to life in a younger, less prepared galaxy.

So she founded Stellaris.

The Founding of Stellaris

Stellaris was created as a dedicated agency to hunt down awakened Celestar Crystals, contain them, transport them to Freedom’s Gate, and store them in secure vaults before they could cause greater harm.

The solution that made the organization possible came from the old world and the new alike.

Inspired in part by Alex and the Astracore-equipped Celestar android design, Astrid worked with Drakneri engineers and the Kriost researcher Dr. Alias to create a surgical thoracic Astra-regulation implant capable of housing a stabilized Crystal inside a living body. This apparatus, called a Harness, anchors a Celestar Crystal within the chest and integrates it into the bearer’s cardiovascular, neural, and metabolic systems.

The procedure is dangerous. Not everyone survives.

Those who do become something more and something stranger than they were before. A Harness serves as a circulatory-energy regulator and resonance core, helping stabilize vital function while channeling Astra through a body redesigned to survive it. In crude structural terms, it is a living adaptation of one narrow Astracore principle, scaled down from Celestar machine architecture to something a biological body can survive. The result empowers the bearer, changes them, and binds them to the greater work of Stellaris.

These survivors become Stellaris Agents.

Most people call them Stellarions.

The Call

Not everyone can become an Agent, and not everyone who wishes to serve is accepted. Stellaris does not recruit in the ordinary sense. Its future agents tend to arrive the same way: drawn by something they can scarcely explain.

They speak of a pull, a pressure, a whisper at the edge of thought. Some describe it as a dream they cannot stop having. Others call it instinct, destiny, or terror mistaken for purpose. Stellaris teaches that they are being called by the Astra itself.

Those who answer undergo training before implantation. They are taught physical discipline, close combat, weapons use, survival, crystal theory, field procedure, and mental conditioning. By the end of that process, a Stellaris Agent is expected to be the foremost expert in the room on Crystals, their signs, their hazards, and their probable effects.

Over time, the formal term Celestar Crystal has been shortened in common speech to simply Crystal. In context, the meaning is usually obvious. Each recovered crystal is eventually given an individual name by the researchers who study it.

Crystals and Their Influence

Crystals are usually local in scope.

Most affect an area no larger than a ruin, a district, a valley, a settlement, or at most a city. Their effects may be subtle or dramatic, stable or wildly adaptive, but they are generally regional phenomena. A crystal might transform an abandoned laboratory into a biome of living circuitry, keep an undersea ruin impossibly dry, alter memory across a mining town, or twist wildlife into something half-mythic.

When an Astra phenomenon operates on a truly planetary or galactic scale, it is no longer the work of an ordinary Crystal. That is the domain of a Star Stone, and Star Stones lie far beyond the capacity of ordinary Agents to confront directly.

That distinction matters.

Stellaris exists to manage awakened Crystals. If a true Star Stone crisis emerges, the galaxy would require powers on the level of the ancient Celestar to address it.

Where Crystals Awaken

For reasons not yet fully understood, awakened Crystals are concentrated overwhelmingly in the Outer Rim and the Unknown Regions.

They are rare in the Core, Colonies, Inner Rim, and Mid Rim, though the Mid Rim has seen isolated incidents, often tied to megacorporate experimentation or illicit excavation. Most scholars within Stellaris believe this distribution is connected to the destruction of the original Earth-region Star Stone. When it was lost, crystals within a massive surrounding radius were not merely deactivated but shattered. Beyond that range, however, many survived in dormancy until the pulse from Freedom’s Gate reawakened them.

This means the more civilized rings are not immune. A single transported crystal can still create a crisis anywhere in the galaxy. That is why formal agreements with Stellaris exist even in places where its agents are rarely seen.

The Agency and Galactic Law

Most planetary governments, station authorities, and regional powers have signed some form of cooperation agreement with Stellaris, though the terms vary greatly.

In most jurisdictions, Crystals are treated as dangerous contraband. Their possession, sale, transport, or concealment is heavily restricted or outright illegal. Even powers that dislike Stellaris often accept that awakened Crystals are too hazardous to leave unmanaged.

There are, however, notable exceptions.

The Drakneri collect relics aggressively, but generally leave active Crystals to Stellaris jurisdiction. The Sovreki regard Crystals as a possible path toward restoring lost power and are therefore viewed with deep suspicion. The Azaranians find Crystals scientifically compelling and do experiment with them, but Stellaris maintains a standing agreement to remain outside Azaranian space.

For campaigns, this makes Crystals one of Astrabound’s most flexible engines for adventure. They are a reason to descend into a flooded ruin, investigate a mining collapse, explore an abandoned lab, survive a town gone uncanny, or deal with a city whose people have quietly adapted to something they do not fully understand.

Rights and Burdens of a Stellaris Agent

Once properly identified, usually by displaying the Harness, a Stellaris Agent is often afforded a mixture of legal privilege, practical deference, and wary respect.

Common privileges include:

• ceremonial respect, including invitation to important local functions as honored guests
• lodging and meals for up to a week each month
• limited authority to assist local law enforcement
• limited authority to use force against those obstructing active Stellaris operations

In many systems, Agents also benefit from a kind of unofficial diplomatic tolerance. Local powers may overlook rudeness, procedural violations, or aggressive investigative conduct if the alternative is a public dispute with Stellaris.

That tolerance has limits.

Agents remain subject to local law in principle, and more importantly, they are always subject to Stellaris itself. The Agency punishes misconduct harshly when it believes an Agent has endangered civilians, abused authority, or damaged the organization’s reputation without cause.

Safe Crystals

Though Stellaris generally claims authority over any awakened Crystal the moment it is identified, there are exceptions.

Some settlements have become dependent on conditions created by a Crystal. A local crop may only grow because of one. A breathable cavern system might collapse without it. A town’s water purification, weather pattern, or ecosystem may have quietly stabilized around its presence.

In cases where removal would cause catastrophic harm, Stellaris may designate the artifact a Safe Crystal and leave it in place under observation.

The Agent’s Codex

Every Agent trains under the Agent’s Codex, a dense procedural manual governing conduct, recovery doctrine, cooperation standards, and the ethical use of force. It is not merely a handbook but a binding code of service.

Its central principles are simple:

• Go where directed, but show initiative. Routes are built from rumors, fragmented reports, old Celestar traces, and incomplete intelligence. Agents are expected to adapt.
• Aid local authorities when called upon. Stellaris personnel are frequently better trained, better equipped, and more experienced than the officials they encounter.
• Avoid unnecessary violence. An Agent, a Harness, a Crystal, and the equipment issued to support them represent enormous investment and irreplaceable expertise.
• Do not build private fortunes. Stellaris supplies what its Agents need. Agents are not meant to become merchants, crime lords, or private warlords.
• Represent the Agency. An Agent’s conduct shapes how Stellaris is treated everywhere that follows. Diplomacy matters. So does discipline.

Mechanics: Agent’s Codex

All Stellaris Agents should take a version of the following Hindrance.

Agent’s Codex

REQUIREMENTS

STELLARIS AGENT

You are bound by the rules, procedures, and obligations of Stellaris.

Treat this as a Major Vow Hindrance.

If you ignore a direct duty, conceal recovered Crystals, abuse Stellaris authority, pursue private commercial interests, or bring disrepute upon the Agency, the Gamemaster may impose temporary penalties to Requisition rolls, loss of privileges, disciplinary scrutiny, reassignment, or other consequences appropriate to the mission.

Crystal Seekers

Most newly fielded Agents begin as Crystal Seekers.

Seekers operate in small teams, usually two to four Agents, and follow routes assembled by Stellaris intelligence based on sightings, rumors, archival fragments, black-market chatter, and pattern analysis. A typical route lasts five to six months and includes eight to ten major stops, though real conditions often stretch those plans. Travel delays, weather, hyperspace complications, local crises, docking queues, political requests, and the sheer unpredictability of Crystal activity can derail any schedule.

Stellaris recruits only a small number of new teams each year. At any given time, there are usually only a handful of active Seeker groups in the Outer Rim and Unknown Regions. Routes are generally assigned to avoid overlap, though multiple teams may be converged on a single location if the Agency expects resistance or an unusually dangerous retrieval.

Debriefing and Check-Ins

Teams are expected to check in with a Stellaris facility roughly every six weeks.

At these meetings, Agents:

• file mission reports
• surrender recovered Crystals and shards for evaluation
• requisition gear, Crystals, dossiers, or maps
• receive updated orders
• review bulletin board requests from local authorities

An Agent may temporarily socket a newly found Crystal into their Harness, but Agents are permitted to carry only one active Crystal in service at a time. If they keep the new one, the previous one must be surrendered.

Not every route succeeds. Many end with nothing more than a shard or a disproven rumor. Not every team survives long enough to complete its second circuit.

Bulletin Board Missions

Every Stellaris facility maintains some version of a bulletin board where local authorities, station officials, or trusted intermediaries can post requests for help.

Taking one of these missions is an accepted detour from an Agent’s assigned route.

At the Gamemaster’s discretion, completing one successfully may grant:

• +1 Requisition
• improved local standing
• a valuable contact
• intelligence related to another Crystal route
• temporary access to restricted facility services or gear

Advanced Duties

As Agents gain experience, Stellaris begins assigning them to more specialized roles.

Wanderer

Wanderers are free Agents, though not truly free, despite the name. They submit plans, operate with broad discretion, and are trusted to advance Stellaris interests through methods of their own choosing. A Wanderer might cultivate political ties, recover rare resources, investigate long-range leads, or work alongside organizations such as the Starstriders.

It is a mark of trust, not independence from the Agency.

Keeper Duty

Keepers are sent where a problem requires precise capability. They may support planetary governments, major alliances, scientific missions, or delicate Stellaris objectives. Some assignments are urgent and highly defined. Others are deliberately open-ended.

Warden Duty

Wardens are the subject of endless rumor among junior Agents. Officially, they are elite operatives assigned to internal Stellaris missions too sensitive for general disclosure. Whatever their true work entails, they often return injured, altered, or in need of prolonged medical care.

Few outside the highest ranks know more than that.

Stellaris Facilities

Stellaris maintains a network of facilities across the explored frontier. Most settled planets with sustained Crystal activity host two or three major offices, often in large cities or primary starports, as well as smaller way stations in remote regions.

These sites support Seekers on route, Keepers on assignment, Free Agents in transit, and local administrative staff. Stellaris also maintains mobile support vessels, and many teams are granted use of dedicated Seeker ships. Even toward the Core, some major starbases host modest Stellaris offices or liaison cells.

Each facility also maintains some version of a bulletin board where local authorities can post requests for aid.

Facility Services

A main facility offers two of the following services. A way station offers one.

Roll, choose, or assign services to fit the location.

d6	Service	Benefit
1	Formal Meeting Rooms	Agents meeting with non-Stellaris guests here gain +2 to Persuasion, Intimidation, or Performance rolls made as part of social interaction.
2	Local Library	The facility’s archives and databases grant +2 to Research rolls.
3	Crystal Examination Chamber	Controlled scanners and containment tools grant +2 to Academics rolls made to identify, analyze, or understand a Crystal’s properties.
4	Workshop and Garage	Technical bays grant +2 to Engineering rolls to create or repair devices and vehicles. At starports, this also applies to starships.
5	Clinic	The medical center grants +2 to Healing rolls and +2 to Vigor rolls for Natural Healing while treated there.
6	Training Room	After at least several days of training, an Agent gains 1 Benny that may be used during the current or following session.

Facility Quirks

Every Stellaris facility has its own local character, strengths, and dysfunctions. The first time the heroes visit a new facility or way station, roll or choose a quirk.

d6	Quirk	Effect
1	State of the Art	One service at this facility is among the best Stellaris can provide. Increase its bonus to +4. If it is a Training Room, it grants 2 Bennies instead of 1.
2	Lacking	The facility is understaffed, badly supplied, old, new, or poorly run. Staff are barely helpful and supplies are thin. The Gamemaster may reduce available ammo, fuel, spare parts, or support to a minimal level.
3	Reputation	The facility is well known for a major event. Roll or choose: a celebrated success, a notorious scandal, a disaster averted, or a failure everyone remembers. This may grant +2 or -2 on first impressions, depending on who is dealing with the Agents.
4	Secretive	The site is hidden, unofficial, or treated as a black-ops installation. Locating it may require contacts, clearance, or special circumstances.
5	Multi-Purpose	The facility also serves as something else: a fort, theater, observatory, mercenary post, dam, shrine, customs office, or similar secondary function.
6	Weird	The facility is built or staffed in an unusual way: underwater, robot-run, shard-powered, partially buried in ruins, or otherwise memorable.

The Citadel at Freedom’s Gate

The heart of the Agency is the Citadel, Stellaris central headquarters at Freedom’s Gate.

The Citadel serves as command center, academy, archive, vault, barracks, arsenal, medical complex, hangar, research core, and political nerve center. It can house hundreds of personnel at a time and supports vehicles, walkers, armored transports, and a standing reserve of ships not currently deployed.

A significant portion of the Citadel is restricted.

These secured zones include:

The Crystal Database

An isolated data system containing all classified research on recovered Crystals, shards, and crystal theory.

The Crystal Repository

Usually called the Vault by outsiders. This is where unrequisitioned Crystals are stored under tightly regulated stasis conditions designed to suppress side effects beyond containment barriers.

The Situation Room

The operational center where analysts, handlers, and senior Agents convert reports into actionable intelligence.

Main Servers

The administrative core of the Agency, where transport orders, requisitions, assignments, reports, logistics, and interfacility coordination are processed.

The Council Chamber

Seat of the five leaders of Stellaris. Rumor insists they rarely leave it, and some whisper that they do not truly live as ordinary beings any longer.

The Cells

A deep secure detention block for Agents who have committed severe violations. Some are temporarily imprisoned with deliberately weak Crystals installed. A handful are never released.

Mechanics: The Citadel

The Citadel offers all Facility Services, and all of them are treated as State of the Art.

Apply the following benefits while the heroes are using the Citadel:

• Formal Meeting Rooms: +4 to appropriate social interaction rolls
• Local Library: +4 to Research rolls
• Crystal Examination Chamber: +4 to Academics rolls involving Crystals
• Workshop and Garage: +4 to Engineering rolls to build or repair devices, vehicles, or starships
• Clinic: +4 to Healing rolls and Vigor rolls for Natural Healing
• Training Rooms: after several days of training, gain 2 Bennies instead of 1 for the current or following session

Structure and Rank

Not everyone in Stellaris is an Agent.

Administrative Personnel

Stellaris employs a large body of non-Agent staff across its facilities: diplomats, physicians, engineers, archivists, logistics officers, mechanics, trainers, legal advisors, security personnel, researchers, and administrators. They keep the organization functioning.

Agents in Training

Only a small number of recruits answer the call each year, and fewer still survive training and Harness implantation. Most train for about six months. The Harness is usually installed midway through the process. If implantation fails, the recruit cannot become an Agent.

Ordinary androids cannot use Crystals and therefore cannot serve as Agents. Celestar Androids are the sole known exception.

Field Agent Ranks

The five standard ranks of play map well to Stellaris field seniority.

Savage Worlds Rank	Stellaris Rank
Novice	Novice Agent
Seasoned	Seasoned Agent
Veteran	Veteran Agent
Heroic	Heroic Agent
Legendary	Council-tier / Legendary Agent

The Council of Stellaris

At the top sits the Council of Stellaris, five remote leaders who govern the Agency and alone are authorized to wield the only five known Legendary Crystals.

Whether they are simply leaders, transformed beings, or something stranger remains one of the great private mysteries of the Citadel.

Death, Replacement, and Memory

Agents rarely work alone for long.

Teams bond quickly because few outside Stellaris can understand what it means to live with a Crystal in one’s chest and the Agency’s weight on one’s back. When an Agent dies, disappears, is imprisoned, or is reassigned, Stellaris attempts to fill the gap. Replacement Agents are often drawn from other teams, reserve pools, or recent graduates.

Sometimes teams are dissolved for practical reasons. Sometimes for disciplinary ones. Sometimes because Stellaris believes a different combination of personalities will be more effective.

When possible, the dead are recovered. If enough remains of the body survive, and if research division has no overriding claim, the remains are returned to the family, often by the fallen Agent’s teammates.

The Agency can be cold. It is not always indifferent.

Requisition and Material Support

Stellaris provides nearly everything its Agents require.

Food, shelter, equipment, maintenance, training, medical care, transport, and ammunition are all generally supplied through Agency logistics. Local currency has limited value to many Agents, and Freedom’s Gate, supported by advanced synthesis systems and centralized provisioning, operates with minimal dependence on conventional wealth.

Two things remain exceptional:

• Starships
• Crystals

These are acquired through Requisition, the internal measure of an Agent’s standing, trust, and operational priority. A team with sufficient standing may request better ships, more specialized support, or access to rarer Crystals, though approval is never automatic.

This is one of the quiet tensions at the heart of Stellaris: in a life where wealth means little, access means everything.

Requisition Guidance

Requisition is a useful campaign-facing reward for Agents.

The Gamemaster may grant +1 Requisition for:

• successful Crystal recovery
• completion of a bulletin board mission
• excellent diplomacy that advances Stellaris interests
• recovery of important data, relics, or contacts
• protecting civilians while preserving Agency assets

The Gamemaster may impose penalties to Requisition for:

• failing to report recovered Crystals
• reckless misuse of Agency authority
• mission failure caused by negligence
• clear violation of the Agent’s Codex
• major diplomatic embarrassment

Using Stellaris in a Campaign

Stellaris works especially well when you want:

• frontier mystery
• ruin exploration
• dangerous relic recovery
• political disputes over ancient technology
• strange environmental anomalies
• teams with limited authority but real obligations
• an organization that can support the heroes and pressure them at the same time

A Stellaris campaign can center on assigned routes and Crystal retrieval. Just as easily, the Agency can be used as an allied organization, a patron, a rival power, or a source of complications for a more independent crew.

Stellaris Agents are not just relic-hunters. They are field investigators, containment specialists, sanctioned meddlers, and the thin line between a forgotten Celestar artifact and a spreading catastrophe.