I have a game of The Expanse currently in its final act and want to advance it a few years down the timeline, but am dissatisfied with AGE and thinking about a shift to a different rules set. After much reading and long deliberation, I have narrowed things down... just not as much as I would like. Here are the semi-finalists, at least the ones I recall after three hours' sleep:

1. Age Of Steel uses six-sided dice exclusively in a fairly simple and straightforward system. Characters have three attributes rated from 1 to 5 with skills rated at one of three levels: untrained, trained, and mastered. Checks are made by throwing dice equal to your attribute score against a difficulty based on your skill level and counting how many dice are successes. To succeed untrained, dice must come up 5 or 6; trained, 4, 5, or 6; and mastered, 3, 4, 5, or 6. Characters also have personal expertise called knacks, which provide two bonus dice to checks made with the related skill.
   
   
2. Airlock uses ten-sided and six-sided dice, with the ten-siders provided by a character's relevant tactic and the six-siders filling out your pool so the total number of dice rolled is five. Any dice that come up 6 or better are successes, while dice that come up 1 are botches that reduce your number of successes. There are sixteen tactics divided between four categories (combat, evasion, intrigue, and crew) and four approaches (reckless progress, cautious progress, protect yourself, and protect an ally). Based on the system used in Sigmata.
   
   
3. Alien Earth is pay-what-you-want, which sidesteps the cost issue, and the rules are certainly adaptable. It is a dice-pool system which, like Age Of Steel, exclusively uses six-sided dice. You roll a number of dice equal to attribute plus skill value, with each 5 or 6 counted as a success, quite similar to Age Of Steel but without the greater degrees of competence described in those rules.
   
   
4. High Colonies uses percentile dice for skill resolution, and six-sided dice to generate attributes and determine damage in combat. Given that this is a hard sci-fi game built off the HarnMaster engine, High Colonies is on the gritty side. Skills start at a value equal to the sum of three attribute scores, with adjustments for profession and player preference. Skill levels represent how well a character performs under pressure, in low-stress situations competence is assumed and dice are not rolled.
   
   
5. Other Worlds is also percentile-based but, rather than a roll-under mechanic like High Colonies or M-Space, you add an ability score to a roll of percentile dice, and compare that to your opponent's skill-plus-roll. Three other relevant abilities can contribute one-tenth of their value to your roll, in a manner similar to inspiration from Pendragon, and augmentation from RuneQuest and QuestWorlds. Whoever rolls highest wins and can place a temporary ability on the loser to reflect the contest's outcome. Character creation consists of selecting templates to reflect a character's upbringing, profession, and personal quirks, as well as unusual genre- or setting-related backgrounds.
   
   
6. Thousand Suns is the odd duck, in terms of dice mechanics. When making a test, you attempt to roll under a target number on 2d12. In the case of skill tests, the target number is derived from a character's skill rank and their score in that skill's associated ability. Degree of success or failure is the amount by which one rolled under or over the character's target number. Ability scores are allocated from an initial pool of points, with skill ranks gained from background and career packages. Solid and otherwise unremarkable as games go.

We'll probably focus on a single system rather than bouncing all over the place, but the main idea is to take the game beyond the Ring. The Bering Survey consisted of four probes mentioned... with others hinted at... in Cibola Burn as a United Nations project. There are nearly fourteen hundred gates in the Ring Network, however, and robotic probes are not cheap. The Martian Congressional Republic doubtless had a comparable program, albeit one probably suborned by those loyal to Duarte. Belters likely got survey information second-hand, prior to the formation of the Transport Union, if they got any at all before picking a gate and just going.

The Transport Union seems our best option for moving the campaign forward, as it holds a politically-neutral place similar to that of Aid Without Allegiance. Mind you, factions galore remain and no one would expect any of the old causes and agendas to vanish overnight. The Transport Union is founded about six years after the Ring opens, and that occurred about four years after the Eros Incident. That gives us twenty-five years before Laconia re-emerges to conquer the interstellar human community.
This message was last edited by the user at 20:37, Mon 05 Sept 2022.

Two things:

1 - I recommend picking a system you like best, you're the one who has to run it after all.


2 - I'd dump the plots of the books post-whatever time the PC's go through a gate to establish a colony (if that's where you were going).  Run your game not the game the book/series outlines.

But I agree, the AGE system is kinda terrible.  Good luck.

In reply to evileeyore (msg # 3):

Players can be notoriously picky about the game systems they want to play, so I prefer to stay flexible. Using the canonical gap of several decades between Babylon's Ashes and Persepolis Rising frees me of any and all need to fret about what happens in the final three novels.

And lest I was unclear about this, I will be recruiting new players. Started with eight, middled with six, ended with four. Real-life happens. Send me a character pitch via rMail if you're in a rush, but please do contribute here first.