Neon Odyssey - Stardust Rhapsody Playtest 1.1

Creating your character

Everything in all three playtest documents is open to you. Nothing is gated and nothing needs my approval first. Forty two species are available, twenty one in the Outrunner's Handbook and twenty one in the Overdrive Expansion. Aetheron carved from the stuff of space by Khorabos the Architect. Bitlings out of Arcadia who look like whatever their imagination settled on. Terminox built of fiendish metal. Oozoids, saurians, glowblins, motliens, zeticulans. Play a mushroom, a construct, a cactus, a cloud-marked horse, a worm in a person's shape. Thirteen classes. Twelve are class skins that rename and refit the 5.5e core: Cryptist for Warlock, Disciple for Monk, Enforcer for Paladin, Esper for Sorcerer, Gridrunner for Wizard, Icon for Bard, Juggernaut for Barbarian, Oracle for Cleric, Primalist for Druid, Scoundrel for Rogue, Soldier for Fighter, Tracer for Ranger. Several carry genuine mechanical changes, so read your class sidebar rather than assuming your 5.5e knowledge carries over. The thirteenth is the Machinist, entirely new. Fifty two subclasses sit across the two books. Neon Odyssey asks you to build your own background instead of picking one off a list. Two skill proficiencies, one tool, your choice of the new Computers or Technology skill, two vehicle proficiencies, Common plus two languages drawn from your homeworld, an Origin feat, and $2,500 in Galactic Notes to spend on gear. Fourteen Origin feats are keyed to the kind of world you grew up on, whether that is frigid, scorching, oceanic, technological, or one of the four tones of Cacophony. A Basic Rules background works if you would rather. I am importing all three documents into Foundry as drag and drop compendiums. Species, classes, subclasses, Origin feats, all ninety five spells, weapons, armour modules, outrunning equipment. You drag what you want onto the sheet and it assembles itself. Nobody at my table hunts for a page number or hand-enters a stat block. Session Zero is mandatory. There is no version of this campaign where we skip it. These are playtest documents, which means rules are in flux, wording is occasionally unclear, and some of it will turn out to be broken in ways nobody has found yet. We settle table expectations, run safety tools, connect your Outrunners to each other, and make sure the party spreads across enough of the playtest content that the feedback we send back is worth something. Bring a concept in plain language. I will find it in the books.

Preparing for the session

Once your seat is confirmed on StartPlaying, send me a message here on the platform and I will follow up with next steps. If you are joining us now, weaving you in is easily done as our crew has a ship! Alternatively, you may send a Discord friend request first if that is your preferred method. Discord is saithefae. When we have touched base I will send you a Discord server invite. Nothing to read and nothing to buy. I backed the game and hold all three playtest documents, and Avantris permits backers to share these files with the people they are playtesting with, so seated players receive the Outrunner's Handbook, the Cosmic Codex and the Overdrive Expansion from me directly. You will never be asked to pledge, pre-order, or buy anything to sit at this table. Though if you love the game I advise backing it to see them grow! We play in Foundry VTT and everything is already loaded there. I have imported the playtest material by hand into drag and drop compendiums, so all of it opens in your browser when you click the link. Your sheet is built for you, the dice roll themselves, and the rules you need sit right there on the character when you need them. I teach the system at the table and I keep teaching it for as long as you want the reminders. You do not need to have played 5.5e. You do not need to know the setting either. I will tell you what aether is the first time it starts killing you and what the Hypergrid is the first time somebody spikes into it. A note on what you are signing up for. This material is version 0.1.1 and everything in it is subject to change. Rules will be unclear in places, some things will be overtuned, and some will not work at all. That is the point of the exercise. When Avantris pushes an update we adopt it and I tell you exactly what moved. Starship combat is being rebuilt and sits outside this playtest, so it stays off the table until the real rules land. Feedback is my job. You say what felt wrong while we play, I write it up and submit it to Avantris myself, one survey per item the way they asked for it. One house rule comes straight out of the book. Neon Odyssey has no interest in real world physics, and neither do I. If a debate opens up at the table about how aether could possibly work or why a galaxy is shaped like a vinyl record, I will close it and we will get back to the space opera. Avantris asks Game Masters to do exactly that, and I agree with them. You need a Discord account and a browser. I pay for all hosting and provide every other material you will need. Come with a character you want to find out about. The Rhapsody will handle the rest.

What Yuthika 'Fey' brings to the table

I do not use generative AI anywhere in my creative pipeline. Thirty four years behind the screen. I have been playing D&D and its derivatives since TSR still had its name on the box, and I learned to run games inside Japanese TableTalk culture, where the referee's job sits closer to hosting than to just ruling on dice rolls. I bring a table that already has a working prototype drag and drop compendium for almost everything. Every species, class, subclass, feature, spell, origin feat and piece of equipment from all three playtest books is built into Foundry as drag and drop compendiums. The bestiary, the vehicles, the rules references and the setting material are all in there too. Along with a custom character sheet. Please note I have asked the Devs via Discord and was informed I am not allowed to share them, but am absolutely encouraged to use them here. Space is the genre I keep coming back to. Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy. Every Star Wars tabletop line ever published, from West End Games d6 through Saga Edition and Fantasy Flight and 5e. Star Trek. Spelljammer. Lancer. Firefly. Decades of running crews who live aboard a ship and answer to nobody they did not choose. Neon Odyssey is that same shape of game with a better colour palette. I am a game designer as well as a GM, co-creator of Visions of Suaykalpa. Reading a rule set for what it is trying to do rather than what it happens to say is the entire skill a playtest asks for, and it is work I already do. When something at this table plays wrong I will know why it plays wrong, and that is what goes into the survey. Years as a costume designer and VFX artist on NBC's Grimm, and teaching foam latex and prosthetic work on the convention circuit. It shows up in how I describe things. English, Japanese, Thai and French. Alien languages get spoken at my table rather than summarised. Voice acting for every NPC. I work professionally in anime and games. Space pirates, codeshaper technocrats and whatever the Deep sends at you come back with voices you will recognise from session to session. Teaching is my actual job. PhD in Psychology, professional educator. I teach the system in play, at your pace, for as long as you want the reminders. That matters more than usual here, because there is no published guide to lean on and nobody at the table gets to look up the answer. And I have sailed around the world. An actual circumnavigation, steering by stars that hold their position no matter where on the globe you happen to be standing. Neon Odyssey runs on that exact principle, with Agathos holding the stars fixed so the whole galaxy can navigate by them. I have made this crossing once already. This one has better guns.

Homebrew rules

I do not house rule playtest content. That is the whole arrangement. If a subclass is overtuned we play it overtuned and I write that down. If a species trait does nothing at level 1 we find out together and I write that down too. Patching a rule at the table destroys the data, and the data is what Avantris asked testers for. I bring a table that already has a working prototype. Every species, class, subclass, feature, spell, origin feat and piece of equipment from all three playtest books is built into Foundry as drag and drop compendiums, so building a character means dragging what you want onto the sheet and watching it assemble itself. The bestiary, the vehicles, the rules references and the setting material are all in there too alongside a custom character sheet for Foundry. There is exactly one hole in the material, and it is a known one. Starship combat is being rebuilt from the pre-launch results, the old version has been declared obsolete, and Avantris is not collecting feedback on any of it. So this campaign lives planetside and station-side until the real rules land. That gap gets covered rather than ignored. The playtest already gives me a great deal to build on. Aether currents and the slow FTL crawl between worlds. Liminal Rings opening into the Overtone for the fast crossings. Aether exposure rules for anyone who ends up outside a sealed suit. Planetary vehicle rules for the ground. Adaptation Traits for building the wildlife of any world we touch down on. Drift gaunts in wrecked stations, void mantas at altitude, and space pirates who board rather than duel at range. Ships in this campaign are places. Travel gets narrative weight, a working navigation problem, and consequences for a bad crossing. When something goes wrong out there it resolves at on-foot scale in corridors and cargo bays, which is precisely the scale this playtest is testing. You will get void combat. You will get it through a helmet and a mag boot rather than through a gunnery station. One more piece of the puzzle sits on the character side. The playtest hands you a background you build yourself rather than pick, so I will sit with you and build it, keyed to a real homeworld with real weather and a real reason you left it. That world then feeds your Origin feat, your languages, and the adaptation traits on everything that lives there. Anything I build sits under my name and gets labelled as mine in play, so nothing of mine ever gets submitted to Avantris as though the design team wrote it. When the official starship rules arrive, my stand-in comes down the same day and we test theirs instead. The setting primer says outright that it will not appear in the final books. Everything past its edges is mine as well. The worlds we visit, the crews we cross, and whatever the Deep is doing at the bottom of the Wyrmways. The framework belongs to Avantris. The galaxy we play in is ours.

How Yuthika 'Fey' creates a safe table

Your safety matters more than any scene. This is space opera at full saturation. A galaxy sung into existence, gods holding the stars still, an arcade dimension that runs on boss fights. In a setting where you can roll up a worm in a jumpsuit and go bounty hunting, nobody is in the grimdark. The default tone here is adventure, colour, and a crew that likes each other. That said, the material has teeth in places and I will not pretend otherwise. Cacophony is a genuine hell. The Deep does not hate you and will eat you anyway. Aether kills slowly and the books are clear about it. The table itself has one standard. If you are pro fascist, anti LGBT, hostile toward any group of people, or sincerely pro Cacophony, this is not your seat. Nobody here gets to make another player feel othered or unsafe. I will remove a player for it and I will not need a second conversation about it. How the table holds that. Lines and Veils before we begin. Whatever you name as off limits stays off, permanently, and you never have to explain why. X card always available. Say the word or type an X and the scene changes. No questions asked. Open door policy. Step away at any point, camera and mic off, return when you want. No judgement. Check-ins during play. If a scene runs heavier than expected I pause before we continue. Roses and Thorns at session close. Short debrief every session, and private follow-up afterward if you prefer. What this campaign contains. Adventure violence at blaster and blade weight. Corporate greed and the cheerful cruelty of a consumerist galaxy. Fiends who corrupt people through their worst coping habits. Body horror where the Deep is involved, including parasitic implantation, described with a light hand. Horror-comedy monsters that jump out. Aether exposure and death in vacuum. Loss of people your character cares about. Characters can die here, and I will always tell you when the danger is real before you commit to it. What this campaign does not contain. Sexual content of any kind. Harm to children onscreen. Torture as a scene rather than as something that happened. Graphic, dwelt-upon injury. Anything a player has named as a line. One extra note specific to a playtest. Rules will break. Something will land badly through no fault of yours or mine. Say so, out loud, mid session. That is a feature of this table. The galaxy is dangerous. The table is not.