🤖 Sci-Fi Special Issue 2025
Notorious and Arathi Sector Previews, 9 Reader Recommendations, and more!
Ship’s Log Stardate 79309.1: The Soloist returns to deep space to explore strange new solo and GM-less games. This mission previews Arathi Sector and Notorious: Tales of Hardscrabble Bounty Hunting, and reveals nine reader-recommended titles along with my favorite galaxy-building books.
Before departure, review the previous mission logs:
The 2023 Sci-Fi issue - Traveller, Starforged, Stoneburner and more.
The 2024 Sci-Fi issue - For Small Creatures Such as We, Across a Thousand Dead Worlds and more.
1. Arathi Sector: Spacefaring Sequel to Kal-Arath
Castle Grief, designer and artist behind the barbarian fantasy RPG Kal-Arath, is returning this month with the Kickstarter for Arathi Sector, a solo sci-fi evolution of the Kal-Arath design and style. I caught up with Castle Grief to talk about what Kal-Arath fans can expect from the shift from desert wastelands to orbital ruins.
What is Kal-Arath?
Kal-Arath is a 56-page solo and co-op fantasy RPG built around procedural systems and fast, deadly combat. It emphasizes exploration with a hex-crawling gameplay loop and dozens of tables for encounters, dungeons, NPCs, items, and more. The art, hand-drawn by Castle Grief, has the raw, pulpy vibe of early-80s sword-and-sorcery zines. Its mix of speed, setting, and solo-first design has helped it stand out in a crowded OSR scene.
✅ Lingo check: “OSR” stands for “Old School Renaissance” or “Revival" or "Rules," (no one agrees on the "R"). It usually refers to games inspired by RPGs of the 1970s and 1980s with simple rules and high-risk play that encourages player ingenuity.The Grief System
Kal-Arath runs on what Castle Grief calls the Grief Engine, a custom system that blends mechanics from Mörk Borg, Barbaric!, OD&D, and other RPGs.
2d6 vs 8+: Most actions use 2d6, aiming for an 8 or higher
Five stats: Adapted from Mörk Borg
Exploding damage: Roll the max on a damage die, roll again, and add it
Armor reduces damage: Instead of boosting defense
No classes: Characters advance through skills
Player-facing rolls only: No GM rolls.
High risk: Combat is unforgiving. Survival depends on smart choices.
Enter the Arathi Sector
The next evolution of the Kal-Arath design and the Grief Engine is Arathi Sector. Still solo-first, deadly, and pulpy, but now with jump gates, corporate enclaves, crashed dreadnoughts, and laser pikes.
When asked why he’s taking the Grief Engine to space, Castle Grief credits his regular play group:
“My table wanted a break from fantasy and asked me to run an old school sci-fi game. We tried Traveller, but it was a bit more than they were looking for. But reading those Traveller books was incredibly inspiring. My friend and I set out to make a game that still felt old school, retro and grimy, but was more set up for speed.”
What’s New
While it uses the Grief Engine, Arathi Sector brings new tools, settings, and tone:
A full sci-fi sandbox starter with factions, locations, and hooks
Procedural generators for spaceports, salvage missions, and tech ruins
New gear, enemies, and environments
“We wanted something that could be used to run John Carter, Aliens, or Total Recall vibe adventures with equal ease.”
And fans of Kal-Arath may discover some strange crossovers.
“Kal-Arath isn’t a time in this world. It’s a place. The timeframe is the same. If you wanted to, you could go there. As you’ll see — some already have. Others have already left.”
Illustrating a Sci-Fi World
Grief’s art is part of Kal-Arath’s draw. Moving from fantasy to sci-fi has brought new challenges:
“It’s damn hard! With fantasy, it’s a lot of organic shapes and natural objects. In sci-fi, so much is straight lines, machinery, architecture. This was another reason I wanted to do a sci-fi game — to broaden my artistic horizons and challenge myself.”
Arathi Sector Kickstarter
Grief says the game is close to done and ready to launch this month.
“I never treat Kickstarters as ‘what ifs.’ They’re always used to fund a product that is already 90% of the way there and just needs capital to pay the fine people involved and print it. More of a pre-order than a crowdfunding. It’s just that Kickstarter is easy to use and gets more eyes.”
Get notified when the Kickstarter campaign launches.
Go Deeper
Join the Castle Grief Discord
Subscribe to the Castle Grief Substack
Play Kal-Arath now
2. Notorious Returns as a Solo Card Game
Five years ago, Jason Price released Notorious, a compact, space opera RPG about bounty hunters. Its structured play, quick sessions, Star Warsy setting, and fun art made it one of my alltime favorite solo games. A tight game loop made it very easy to get into. It also limited its replayability.
“The original book was designed as a short game you could play a few times before feeling like you’d seen most of what it offered,” Jason told me. “But it’s always been my most popular game. I’ve thought a lot about what I’d do with more time, resources, and ambition.”
The result of that thinking has led to Notorious: Tales of Hardscrabble Bounty Hunting, an all-new standalone solo card game co-designed with Jack Harrison (Koriko).
The theme of the new game remains the same: you seek out targets as a Guild Nomad for competing factions. Each job sends you to a planet where you’ll extract intel from locals, face rivals, and deal with other challenges.
The scope, though, has expanded. The game uses 450+ cards, dice, and planet maps to generate each mission. A single bounty is one session; a full campaign chains three bounties into a personal trilogy.
“Fans of the books will recognize parts of the setting — a few of the classes and location names. But it’s a brand-new system focused on replayability and discovery. You’ll only see a thin slice of content with each trilogy you play.”
Jason describes the game as bridging solo RPGs and open-world adventure card games like Earthborne Rangers.
“There’s a table presence you don’t get with the books and it looks really appealing to have all these little decks set up around your player board and a planet map.”
Torben Bökemeyer’s illustrations have a colorful, lived-in sci-fi aesthetic that tie everything together. (I liked his art from the original book so much I asked him to create The Soloist’s banner.)
Kickstarting Now
“There’s so much I’m excited to talk about, like how each bounty is a self-contained story, and the in-universe cash cards. But I’ll save that for campaign updates!”
The Kickstarter campaign wraps up in a week and for Notorious fans, it feels like the long-awaited sequel to a favorite space opera.
3. Reader-Recommended Solo Sci-Fi Games
I asked readers for their favorite solo sci-fi games. Here are their picks.
Against Time and Death: A storytelling game where two players take turns portraying rival operatives in a multiversal time war. Scenes are exchanged asynchronously through written correspondence over eight turns.
Hostile Solo: A DriveThruRPG Platinum-selling solo RPG where you control a crew of deep-space workers. They interact, fall out, form bonds, and pursue careers in asteroid mining, exploration, freight and salvage, and more. Set in a near-future inspired by Alien and Outland.
Niv Lova: A post-apocalyptic RPG set in a frozen northern wasteland warped by an unexplained catastrophe. Play as a scavenger exploring forests, tundras, and ruined cities filled with mutants and anomalies. Built on Kal-Arath’s streamlined system, it’s written by Write Firster, who also publishes a great solo-focused Substack.
Reign of the Star Kings: A solo RPG about building dynasties and charting the rise and fall of galactic empires. Players record the triumphs and failures of successive rulers, tracing how their choices shape future generations. Inspired by Dune, Foundation, and the designer’s earlier game, Lineage.
Star Drifter: A print-and-play solo game where you pilot a fragile ship through a dangerous, event-driven galaxy. Simple rules, quick turns, and hundreds of branching encounters create a tense mix of risk and discovery that keeps you rolling for “just one more jump.”
Universe at Your Door: A journaling game where you play an explorer documenting worlds, relationships, and memories from their travels. This expanded edition features new art and optional group rules for collaborative play.
Voidlight: A 90+ page rules-light sci-fi horror RPG from Fari RPGs where you explore the innards of a spacefaring leviathan. While the game can be played with a GM, its 70 themed tables and dedicated single-player rules make it ideal for solo play.
What We Found Beyond the Stars: A GM-less co-op RPG about cooperation and discovery on alien worlds. Players form a small research crew exploring planets, conducting scientific missions, and uncovering hidden truths about each other. Every expedition concludes with a shared report on what the crew found among the stars.
1000 Empty Lights: A 40-page solo survival horror zine for Mothership by Alfred Valley. Written as an in-universe corporate manual, it casts you as a lamplighter tasked with restoring power to an abandoned underwater tunnel. Includes solo procedures, an adaptable oracle system, and a d50 table of safety signs inspired by Alien’s semiotic standard.
Thanks to everyone who contributed. Share your own solo sci-fi recommendations in the comments below.
4. Great Galaxy-Building Books
Not everything has to be built for solo play to spark solo inspiration. Here are two of my favorite recent sci-fi RPG supplements.
The Perilous Void by Jason Lutes: A system-neutral toolkit for creating science-fiction settings, from the galactic to the planetary level. It builds off of the collaborative worldbuilding systems from The Perilous Wilds, Jason’s classic guide for Dungeon World. It’s not just that it has 160 pages of generators for planets, lifeforms, societies, NPCs and way more; it’s the way they build on each other to make cohesive settings. I’ve used it in group play, but for solo players, the tables alone are pure joy. Sometimes I just roll up a sector of worlds for fun. The Perilous Void is an Encyclopedia Galactica for GMs and solo players alike.
An Infinity of Ships by STATIONS: A 150+ page toolkit for creating unique starships for sci-fi RPGs. Inside are tables for ship details, theme packs that collect tools around a specifc vibes, and encounter ideas for the ships you make. It’s equal parts art book and creative engine. It’s perfect for solo players looking for inspiration for that new unknown contact on their deep-space scanners.
🧑🚀🧞🧟 The creators of An Infinity of Ships are currently Kickstarting 100 Strangers, a collection of misfits, outcasts, weirdos, normies, and other folk for your sci-fi universe.
Great read as usual! Very interested in Arathi Sector!
Given that it's sci-fi and solo, I can imagine that the game I'm working on, Danger Close, might also be interesting! https://dicegoblingames.itch.io/danger-close-tactical-skirmish-ttrpg