The Slow Zone's news, and everything behind it — the timeline, the powers, the people, the ships, the Medina ring map, and your First Footing briefing. What's moving through the gates, on one channel.
Ground vehicles, rovers, and powered rigs — what you actually drive on a station, a moon, or a raw colony world. Stats use the AGE vehicle rules (Handling · Capacity · Velocity · Ram · Hull · Cost). Tap a card for details.
Standard gear from the TUE Core Rulebook — weapons, armour, suits, electronics, tools, and kit. Costs are Income-test TNs. Tap a card for details. Art is original line-work.
You're a contractor crew working out of Medina Station, the great hub at the heart of the Ring gates. Your employer is First Footing, a small Belter outfit in the pre-arrival trade. When settlers buy passage through the Ring to a new colony world, somebody has to make sure there's a there, there — before they arrive. That somebody is you. “We're there before you are.”
Medina Station — a two-kilometre former generation ship, spun for gravity, parked in the Slow Zone where 1,373 gates meet. Home base is the cramped First Footing office, off the souk near the docks.
Go ahead of a settler convoy, through the gates to their destination, and make the ground ready: scout hazards, find water and safe air, mark the approach, drop supply caches and beacons, pick landing and build sites — sometimes clear whatever (or whoever) got there first.
Settlers reach the Ring the cheap, safe way: one hard burn out of Sol, then cut the drive and coast dark — cold and near-invisible — for the better part of a year, slipping past pirates and bad luck. That long coast is your head start.
| Coast speed | Sol → Ring (~20 AU) |
|---|---|
| 50 km/s | ~1.9 years |
| 100 km/s | ~11.5 months |
| 150 km/s | ~7.5 months |
| 200 km/s | ~5.7 months |
A warship doing a full flip-and-burn makes the same trip in ~13 days — but loud, bright and broke. Settlers trade speed to stay alive; you get months to do your job.
An old Grendel-class light freighter with a pirate past — seized from her crew, repossessed, and signed over to First Footing cheap. 65 metres, crew of 2–8, hidden compartments, a pair of torpedo tubes nobody mentions, and a hull that's seen things. Fast and tough; thin on sensors, so you fly close. ▦ View deck plan
Sefa hires you and has your back; Hal runs contracts & paperwork; Mari runs gear & the supply cage; Téo runs the tide board and knows how long you've got. Your handlers, your home, your lifeline.
A standalone, fully offline character builder & sheet — abilities, origin, background, profession, drive, focuses, talents, and gear. It does the math for you (Defense, Toughness, Fortune, Income) and prints clean in landscape. Open it in Excel, LibreOffice, Google Sheets, or on a tablet.
The crew runs two cheap, dented UTVs — Ebb and Flow — and a standard issue of gear by role. Browse the rigs and the starting gear:
The clock is always running — the settlers are already on their way.
A gate-system scan is not a promise that a planet is safe. It is a work order: what can be breathed, drunk, built on, mined, quarantined, and argued over before the settler convoy arrives.
| Tier | Meaning | First Footing read |
|---|---|---|
| Open | Shirtsleeves or near-shirtsleeves. | Still verify pathogens, allergens, soil chemistry, and weather before settlers land. |
| Mask | Outside work is practical with respirators, filters, or light protection. | Good target if water and power are dependable. |
| Dome | Permanent settlement needs sealed buildings, greenhouses, and managed air. | Normal First Footing work: site the domes, water plant, beacon, pad, and caches. |
| Sealed | The surface is dangerous; caves, lava tubes, subsurface water, or heavy habs make it viable. | Possible, but the first town is infrastructure before community. |
| Orbital | The surface is not the prize; moons, belts, stations, or aerostats are. | Mark traffic lanes, fuel, anchorage, radiation shelters, and extraction sites. |
| Dead | No plausible foothold without imported infrastructure. | Not the primary target unless the system has another viable settlement niche. |
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Water | None, trace, seasonal, regional, abundant, or global. Abundant water can still be brine, ice, contaminated, or politically controlled. |
| Air | Breathable, thin, filterable, toxic, corrosive, or vacuum. "Filterable" means settlement-grade after scrubbers, not bare-face safe. |
| Pressure | Low, workable, high, or crushing. Pressure determines suit burden, airlock design, and vehicle limits. |
| Gravity | Human labor, pregnancy, bone loss, machinery, flight, and long-term health all change with local g. |
| Temperature | Average comfort matters less than swings, storms, night cycles, and whether water systems freeze or boil. |
| Biosphere | None, microbial, simple, complex, hostile, or incompatible. Local life is food only after lab proof. |
| Radiation | Background dose, flare exposure, magnetosphere gaps, gas-giant belts, and contaminated ruins. |
| Settlement mode | Open, masks, sealed town, domes, caves, floating, orbital, or subsurface. |
Features are why the site works: polar ice, black-soil basins, ore-veined cratons, geothermal vents, stable lava tubes, harbors, or terminator-band valleys.
Blockers are why the crew gets paid: caustic rain, crop incompatibility, toxic spore seasons, flare blackouts, seismic swarms, bad regolith, orbital debris, or a charter dispute.
Good scan data always explains both. A world with no blockers is probably undersurveyed.
| Category | Examples | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Life support | Water ice, nitrates, phosphates, organics, breathable gases | Air, food, fuel, and whether a colony can stop importing survival. |
| Industrial | Iron, nickel, copper, aluminum, silicon, carbonates | Construction, pressure vessels, tools, roads, pads, and repair. |
| Energy | Deuterium, hydrocarbons, uranium/thorium, geothermal | Power independence and who controls the lights. |
| Strategic | Lithium, cobalt, rare earths, platinum-group metals | Corporate claims, security contracts, smuggling, and war risk. |
| Biological | Useful compounds, hostile microbes, crop-compatible soils | Quarantine, medicine, agriculture, and contamination law. |
| Salvage | Ruins, dead survey craft, lost caches, abandoned stations | Adventure hooks, evidence, danger, and ownership fights. |
The mission is not to make a world safe. It is to know exactly how unsafe it is before families bet their lives on it.