TTRPG • Sunken Stars

Sunken Stars

Maritime exploration in a broken world of fallen constellations, hungry seas, and crews making desperate choices in the dark.

Weird voyages, bad weather, cosmic debts.

Downloads

I’m working toward a full set of books and a print run, but you can explore the dark sea right now. These PDFs are free to download and use at your table:

  • The Player’s Guide  — Everything you need to understand the world, the rules, and the cost of sailing.
  • Character Sheet  — Print, fill, and start building your desperate sailor.
  • Ship Sheet  — The ship is home, weapon, and liability. It deserves its own page.
  • The Chart  — A map of the Sea of Sunken Stars: ports, hazards, and whispers on the current.

Weird voyages

Sunken Stars is a roleplaying game about exploration, trepidation, cosmic dread, and the hard choices made by a desperate crew in a world broken by the heavens.

You are the crew of a small ship, picking your way across a sprawling sea littered with the bones of fallen constellations. Distant and dangerous Patrons, exiled fragments of the stars, trade favors for pieces of your life.

You play sailors, witches, deserters, and conscripts—anyone desperate enough to sign on. You owe money, blood, or promises. The ship is your home and your trap.

Every journey is a continuous string of painful decisions:

  • Which rumor to chase across the empty sea.
  • Which Patron to humor when the storm hits.
  • Which island to risk for water, work, or answers.
  • Which wound you pretend doesn’t hurt when you pay the crew’s wages.

What makes it different?

Plenty of games have ships and tentacles. Sunken Stars leans into the space where the cosmic and the intimate meet.

Islands as characters

Every island is written like an NPC: desires, secrets, weird economies, factions, and strong hooks. You’re meant to visit, get involved, and leave things changed.

Patrons & courts

The distant Sun and Moon Courts pretend they still run things. Patrons are their exiles, offspring, and mistakes. They offer power in exchange for slow, corrosive marks on the crew.

Navigation as tension

Travel is simple to run, but every leg pushes the crew toward mutiny, hunger, storms—or the sighting of something huge beneath the waves.

Tools for the GM

Sunken Stars comes with small, focused tools to keep prep light and sessions sharp: character generators, voyage events, and more.

What is Sunken Stars?

Genre
Maritime exploration with elements of cosmic horror and folk magic.
Tone
Bleak but intensely human. People trying to live between storms and cosmic debts, driven by the promise of something better.
Rules
A bespoke system that runs on 3d6, with DNA from several generations of D&D and OSR design.
Focus
Exploration, a huge weird ocean, politically rich factions, and a crew you care about.

Digital tools

SunkenGen

Character generator and crew manager for Sunken Stars. Get a full sheet in one click.

SunkenEvents

Voyage and encounter generator: storms, ports, trouble, and strange signals on the horizon.

Keep following the wake
  • Read development posts and play reports under the Sunken Stars category .
  • Open the tools from the menu or links above when you’re ready to throw a crew into the sea.