Shades of Vengeance has launched a crowdfunding campaign for Era: Hydrogen, a sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game about frontier crews risking their lives to mine stellar fuel across the Taurus region. Set 500 years after human expansion into space, the game tasks opportunistic outcasts with keeping five dying suns burning by feeding them hydrogen through ancient alien injectors.
The London publisher has reached £511 of its £750 goal from 31 backers, with funding scheduled to end on Sunday, 15 November 2026 at 9:00 PM UTC. Operating under Kickstarter’s standard all-or-nothing model, the project marks the latest release from designer Ed Jowett, who confirms the complete core manuscript is already written, edited, and laid out ahead of a planned delivery in December 2026.
The Taurus Systems and space cowboy mining
Humanity survived its expansion across the Taurus systems by inheriting ancient precursor jump gates, stellar injectors, and an abandoned Dyson sphere. With five suns facing an unexplained collapse, civilisation relies entirely on desperate miners, traders, and salvagers willing to venture into lawless space to procure fresh hydrogen.
Crews haul volatile gas using extraction pods attached to industrial freighters, salvage derelicts drifting through the black, or take cargo by force. Seven key locations across six star systems provide work, leaving crews to choose between selling their haul directly to desperate planetary governments or trading on the open market at Market Station.
Era d10 Lite mechanics and character gear
The roleplaying game runs on streamlined Era d10 Lite rules, built to resolve tasks swiftly without table-lookup delays. Players construct a pool of ten-sided dice by combining two relevant character attributes against a difficulty threshold set by the game master. Every die meeting or beating the target counts as a success, and every natural 10 explodes to add another die to the roll.
Instead of traditional skill lists, characters are defined by an equipment triad:
- Hats: Determine public standing and self-perception, separating traders and military veterans from corporate aristocrats.
- Guns: Dictate tactical style, distinguishing the patience of a long rifle from the untested status of a decorated pistol or the deceit of a concealed derringer.
- Boots: Reveal a character’s true background, contrasting humble working-class origins with exotic leather meant to posture across frontier stations.
The interactive backer tale: Corporate drudgery meets space piracy
To support the campaign, Shades of Vengeance is running a collaborative choose-your-own-adventure story directly inside the project updates. Backers cast votes on choices that dictate the fate of an unnamed Junior Engineer, with the final collected logs slated to appear in an exclusive backer booklet.
The chronicle began with the protagonist signing on with mining megacorp Asset One aboard the Asset 74698, grimly nicknamed the Hindenburg by its crew:
I thought ‘Junior Engineer’ meant ‘less experienced’, not ‘gets a room only a child could fit into.’ I’m 90% sure it wasn’t intended to be sleeping quarters. When I’m lying down, the ceiling is about six inches from my face. I can’t stand up in here.”
After spending days mopping floors, the protagonist was dispatched on a dangerous mining run inside an extraction pod alongside a coworker named Kyle. Disaster struck when pirates severed their line and tapped their fuel supply. In an audacious twist revealed in the latest public update, the protagonist made contact through a hydrogen pipe and applied for a job with the raiders:
I waited until Captain Lavoisier had finished laughing and asked whether, since she found my current employment situation so amusing, she happened to have any jobs open. There was another long pause before she asked what experience I had, which was a surprisingly reasonable response considering I was applying for a job with the people currently stealing from us.”
The latest public vote leaves the protagonist torn between accepting Captain Lavoisier’s offer, using the negotiation as cover for a heroic rescue, or rejecting the pirate captain outright to pull off an escape. Geek Native readers can jump to the campaign page to check the updates and see whether the next story branch opens for public voting.
If future votes open up, table chatter could steer the story in several chaotic directions. The Junior Engineer could accidentally detonate the siphon line and vent the Hindenburg‘s hydrogen into the pirate ship’s engine intake, ignite a full corporate-versus-raider turf war inside an unstable asteroid hollow, or steal both ships simultaneously and register as an independent fuel syndicate at Market Station.
Reward tiers
The campaign offers digital delivery in November 2026, followed by physical distribution in December 2026:
- Pledge £2: Lend a Hand. Access to campaign story updates, backer voting, and community commentary.
- Pledge £10: Digital Cowboy. The complete Era: Hydrogen core rulebook delivered in PDF format.
- Pledge £15: Space Cowboy – Physical Version! The physical softcover print edition of Era: Hydrogen plus the digital PDF.
- Pledge £30: Signed Limited Edition. A signed, limited print edition of the book along with the core PDF.
- Pledge £50: Holiday Collection! (Digital+Paperback). The signed limited physical and digital edition of Era: Hydrogen, plus three companion standalone roleplaying games running on the same d10 rules: Era: Crueltide, Era: Kaiju, and Era: Silence.
The project operates under an all-or-nothing threshold, meaning pledges will only process if the £750 target is met by Sunday, 15 November 2026.
