announcements

Celestial Bodies is crowdfunding now!

Harvest the bodies of dead gods in deep space in this GMless tactical mecha RPG.

Binary Star

Mar 4, 2025 — 3 min read

This is a community-submitted press release.

After the calamity, the infinite dark between the stars was cramped with refugees. During the second generation, the survivors cannibalized the metal skeletons of less fortunate home-ships. In the third generation, those survivors expanded their ships, their mecha, their operations, and their conflicts. The fourth generation discovered the Titans: dead gods whose frozen bodies spanned hundreds of miles across. You are the fifth generation.

In this GMless and solo-able tactical mecha game, you play as the residents of one of the home-ships that house the remnants of humanity. You are its Lamplighters: the unions of pilot and mech that each home-ship maintains to protect their interests.

Build your mech on a grid with parts gained both from your own home-ship’s research and from other factions. 8 Frames and more than 100 parts give you a lot to work with! When combat arrives, you'll find yourself using that same Grid as not only a record of what's contained on your mech, but a set of hit locations!
Engage in deep, tactical combat against other Lamplighters as you seek to carry out whatever mission your Home-Ship needs to survive.
Experience life between missions through downtime events.
Build up your home-ship and lead it to greatness.
Deal or fight with 24 factions on missions created with a hexflower-based mission generator.
Uncover the Titans: The dead gods at the edge of the stars, now ripe for harvest and plunder for humanity’s war against itself. What dark mecha and psychic secrets might they yet reveal?

For this campaign, we are also creating a series of supplement zines:

Allegiance: A zine written by Binary and Charlotte that details ways to play as the various factions in the book, including playing without a home-ship or with a fleet of home-ships.
Cosmic Powerstomp: A zine written by Kyle Tam that details the calamity as the result of a miraculous resource that ruined Earth and outlines the kinds of realities that result from that.
Keep the Lamp Lit: A zine written by Binary and Charlotte that details life on home-ships, including procedures to determine the things Lamplighters get up to in their free time.
Synodic//Sidereal: A zine written by Hipólita that details the calamity as an ongoing struggle between imperial Earth and an ever-expanding network of colonies and describes the kinds of realities that result from that.