The work
It is 2567. Humanity got off Earth and stayed off it: domes on Jupiter’s moons, extraction platforms buried in Io’s volcanic crust, transit rings where customs law changes between one docking arm and the next. Eight colony star systems lie beyond the solar system, connected by forty-eight interstellar ships. There is no faster-than-light travel or faster-than-light radio. A message between stars rides aboard a ship and arrives years late.
Twelve megacorporations replaced the nation-states that built the rockets, then replaced the governments those nations became. Their Corporate Assembly governs through agreements between institutions that can afford to enforce them. Subsidiaries, contractors, security firms, and clinics handle daily life. Obligation travels upward. Liability lands on whoever is standing nearest the failure.
You play an operator: a competent, compromised professional who takes work in the gap between corporate certification and survival. You investigate, negotiate, infiltrate, retrieve, repair, protect, and sometimes kill. A contact brings the job. The job turns out to concern something the brief left out.
Your crew has the skills to act. What you lack is a complete account of who benefits, who has already been paid, and what the client expects you to overlook. You find enough to make a decision. Its consequences follow you into the next assignment.
The two Substrates
The foundational Substrate is the computational layer physical reality runs on: matter, energy, spacetime, and causality are expressions of its computation. Nobody built it. Within a gravity well, its instantaneous communication makes the ansible possible. Between stars, it goes dark. Messages must travel with ships.
The Corporate Assembly named its human-classification system after that foundation. A Universal Substrate Interface at the base of your skull writes your record into the foundational medium. Corporate scanners read your genetic profile, work authorizations, citizenship classification, medical flags, credit, and legal personhood.
That corporate record is your Substrate profile. Its compressed measure is your Substrate Rating. The number helps determine where you go, what work you can take, and which institutional services recognize you. A high rating opens doors, extends credit, and makes you worth attention. A low rating closes certified routes and leaves you negotiating for alternatives. Off-Substrate means the system cannot confirm you exist.
The rating’s practical meaning depends on the region and the infrastructure there. A record scrutinized on Ganymede may pass with little attention on Callisto. Clearance Level is a separate authorization. Once established at creation, it changes through grants and sanctions independently of your rating.
The foundational layer reaches places the corporate scanner network does not. A corridor without coverage is a gap in deployed infrastructure. It is not a place where physical reality has stopped working. Operators need to know which kind of absence they are dealing with.
Your operator
Your operator has a history, a skill set, a network, hardware in the head, and three things they cannot stay neutral on. Their competence is established before the first job.
A Spec Sheet
Four starting keywords name the work an institution certified you to perform. You are competent at more than four things. Working beyond the sheet is Off-Spec. If a scanner, logged system, or witness with standing sees it, the record can become a problem.
The first visible Off-Spec action checks the job’s Visibility box. At job end, that checked box resolves once: the operator becomes Flagged, or the crew uses Institutional Pressure where containment is realistic. Avoiding observation, reaching an unsynced record, and knowing who can file a report all matter. A quiet act outside your certification does not produce an automatic rating loss merely because you attempted it.
Skills and Implants
Skills are competencies built through training, experience, or gray-market practice. They are rated on the scale of the die. Some fit your Spec Sheet. Many do not.
Nearly everyone has the mandatory interface. Operators begin with two operational Implants, chosen from a roster of sixteen. Penfield regulates neurochemistry. Scrambler masks identity to scanners. Precog reads patterns before they resolve. Mercer projects empathy. Simulacra changes how your body is perceived. Hayflick accelerates healing. Ghost Line reads residual data traces. Homeoplex tests whether your perceptions can be trusted.
Activation draws on Processing points. Overuse advances Coherence, the track of identity strain. The suite itself is part of what a scanner reads, so your equipment can reveal what work you are capable of doing before you begin.
Drives and Coherence
Three Drives name what your operator cannot leave alone. Two come from the archetype and connect to the two starting Implants. The third concerns a handler: the person or obligation that can still reach you when you would rather not answer.
Once per Drive per session, after a failed skill roll, invoke a relevant Drive and roll it. Success replaces the failure with success. Failure complicates the situation. A fumble advances Coherence.
Coherence has six states: Stable, Strained, Fractured, Forked, Splintered, and Hollowing. Implant overuse, neural attack, and prolonged time off-Substrate can strain it. Recovery needs rest, connection, and appropriate downtime. Hollowing does not recover.
Contacts and the crew
The crew shares a Contact Network. Each contact has particular access, a Reliability rating, and a balance of favors owed and owing. Contacts bring jobs, open routes, hide people, and remember how you treated them. An introduction can get you through a door that equipment cannot.
The other operators are the people at the table beside you. Trust is the default. The institutions, clients, and obligations outside the crew supply enough reasons to be careful.
Nine starting shapes
An archetype describes how you work. It gives you somewhere to begin; your operator’s history and decisions make the person.
- Broker: Knows what something is worth before anyone else does.
- Cutter: Works a black clinic for patients official medicine does not see.
- Drift: Keeps moving because stopping means somebody catches up.
- Fixer: Makes the job happen quietly.
- Ghost: Lives in the Substrate’s blind spots.
- Hound: Finds targets who are good at not being found.
- Mask: Is the face a corporation sends when it does not want to send a person.
- Scanner: Pulls threads and does not stop.
- Wrench: Knows what every machine was supposed to do before ownership let it fail.
Every archetype is open to four humanotypes: Standard, Adapted, Spacer, and Synthanoid. Adapted bodies suit orbital and low-gravity life. Spacers come from ships and long-haul communities. These origins shape your operator’s circumstances as well as their body.
A synthanoid is biologically human in every functional sense, manufactured by Vesalius BioSystems. The corporate profile marks them as property. Their sheet calls certifications Operational Parameters because the record refuses to call its subject a person. You can play one, with the same archetype choices and an institution that monitors its inventory closely.
At the table
Roll one twenty-sided die. At or under your rating, you succeed. Over it, you fail. At ordinary ratings, rolling the rating exactly is a critical. A natural 20 is always a fumble.
For example, Firearms 13 produces a critical on 13. Difficulty changes the dice you roll, not that critical number. A bonus die makes the task easier: roll an additional D20 and keep the lower. A penalty die makes it harder: keep the higher. More severe difficulty uses the same principle with additional dice.
The Pressure Framework uses this procedure across four Pressure Modes:
- Physical Pressure: Bodily danger, driving Durability from Unhurt toward Dying.
- Social Pressure: Leverage in a room, driving Composure from Composed toward Yielded.
- Information Pressure: The search, trace, and breach, driving Exposure from Unnoticed toward Burned.
- Institutional Pressure: Audits, holds, sanctions, and credentialed force, driving Standing from Clean toward Disputed.
Each mode has a six-state track. Successful actions advance pressure toward its stakes; criticals have stronger effects. The detailed procedure depends on the mode. Coherence is a fifth State Track outside the four modes, reflecting identity strain rather than a separate kind of contest.
The stakes are named before the dice come out. A social exchange might extract information, recruit an ally, or discredit an opponent. An institutional dispute might seek an acquittal, delay a sanction, or contest jurisdiction. A firefight resolves more immediately and lethally. Paperwork can ruin an operator more thoroughly.
You can lose a job without anyone taking a wound. A source burns, a route becomes visible, or your record acquires a Condition every checkpoint can read. Those changes are still present after the scene ends. Preparing a route, protecting a contact, or choosing a different approach matters because the consequences persist.
A job, from brief to fallout
A client wants cargo retrieved, a person verified, a document found, an introduction made, an investigation prevented, or leverage acquired. The surface problem is real. The client is withholding something, misunderstands their own situation, or wants a different outcome than the one described.
You talk to people. Check the manifest against the dock records. Find the discrepancy. Work out which faction benefits from things as they are and which will use a disruption for an unrelated purpose. You decide without complete information because waiting has a price.
The job escalates. A contact becomes involved in a way the brief did not mention. Someone applies pressure. You invoke a Drive when a failed roll touches something you cannot leave alone, and find out what it costs to insist.
By the end, you have leverage and an imperfect picture of the interests around you. You choose who gets the evidence, who gets the payment, which promises you keep, and what you are willing to owe. The consequences enter the next job with you.
The Jovian Region
Play begins among thirty-five million people across Jupiter’s four principal moons and the orbital layer. They share a nominal corporate charter. Their practical arrangements differ sharply.
Ganymede is the political and financial center of the outer system. Verification has full inner-system fidelity. Beneath the Galileo Regio Administrative Center, the Lower Tier houses transit workers, unlicensed clinics, and the gray-market operators the institutional economy employs while denying it needs them.
Callisto sits outside Jupiter’s radiation belts. At Valhalla Port, an eighty-year deadlock between Kuznetsov Transit, Titan Atmospherics, and Blackwell Associates makes unclear jurisdiction profitable. Docks, power, air, and enforcement belong to overlapping contracts. Verification is thinner than on Ganymede. The people who understand the arrangements can get things done.
Io is a corporate possession: fifteen thousand Solward Extraction workers on thirty-day rotations inside Jupiter’s worst radiation belt. Tight surveillance can spot labor organizing before it becomes visible to management on the shift floor. Departure schedules matter to anyone trying to get away.
Europa supports two hundred researchers studying the solar system’s only confirmed extraterrestrial life. Its surface is protected under a treaty every corporation honors. Independent vessels in the orbital layer have a useful reputation for discretion about cargo.
Orbital infrastructure connects the moons. Kuznetsov Transit corridors move people, freight, and information. On the Ganymede Primary Ring, docking-arm leases produce different customs arrangements within the same structure. The scheduling staff who know what moves legally often know what moves illegally as well.
There is enough ground here for sustained campaigns. The distant colonies establish the scale of human settlement; your next rent payment is much closer.
Is this your table?
Substrate suits players who want investigation to matter as much as the gunfight, who want a negotiation to have consequences, and who want institutional power to exert pressure through play. Your operator is capable from the beginning. Choosing how to use that capability creates the trouble.
You need an appetite for compromised professionals, incomplete information, and decisions that change relationships. A clean victory over the entire system is not the promise. You can get someone out, keep a contact safe, expose a lie, or decide that this particular employer will not get what it paid for.
Your crew needs a route out, the client wants the file, and a contact has asked you to keep one name out of it. You have enough to decide.
Know your worth. Then decide if you’re selling.
Substrate and \substrate — © Dan Zappone 2026 — version 1.2.37 — 2026.09.18-09:44:28 PM