Cepheus Engine / Hostile Supplement by Etges Press
NEW TOKYO — A HOSTILE Worldbook An Unofficial Supplement for HOSTILE and the Cepheus Engine
New Tokyo was supposed to be the off-world capital of Japanese culture, a second Tokyo five light years from Earth. That plan ended suddenly in 2195, when a typhoon and a catastrophic solar flare hit within weeks of each other, Japan’s bureaucracy stalled, and a colonial affairs official named Stan Yoshimura decided not to wait. The colonists knew who saved them, and when Japan sent a delegation to reinstate their power, the colony sent them home, declaring independence.
Thirty years later, the republic is functional, contested, and running out of room to manoeuvre. Japan funds the Kuro Shotai, a pro-Earth guerrilla faction dug into an alien root-lifeform millions of years old. Erebus Petrochem pumps oil from the river deltas under terms Yoshimura granted because he needed the investment, protected by a corporate army that answers to London shareholders. British soldiers arrived in 2217, formally invited to bring balance and counter the guerrilla, operationally uncertain whose interests they actually serve. None of this is declared war, and all of it is.
What this book contains
- A fully detailed world orbiting Barnard’s Star, tidally locked, permanently lit on one side and frozen on the other, with rules for flare events, atmospheric hazards, methane accumulation in the root-caves, and the psychological toll of life under constant light.
- Three major settlements written as working places with distinct characters: Minato-ku, the Japanese-built capital now running a Republic; Tokai, a river city shaped by the West and Central African diaspora and its Mtogo creole culture; and Hayashima, an Erebus Zaibatsu company town where the annual health checks describe workers’ lungs as acceptable, which is different from healthy.
- The Motsureta, a 36,000 square kilometre root-cave swamp that functions as the Kuro Shotai’s strategic base, detailed as both a navigable environment and a military problem, with encounter rules, genetically engineered bioluminescent fungi, shiroi – the killer albino scavengers, the amphibian movement-sensing midori and methane hazards the guerrillas manage carefully.
- The Akari-ishi, luminescent crystals universally unique to New Tokyo, non-synthesisable and worth a miner’s lifetime wages per item. At the centre of a black market connecting the Kuro Shotai, Erebus Petrochem, and an orbital broker that three separate intelligence agencies are investigating independently.
- Detailed NPC entries for all major factions and key personnel, including Governor Yoshimura, the Kuro Shotai’s unidentified field commander Shirogane, and the British commanding officers with plot hooks and the political architecture that makes their coexistence a daily exercise in managed hostility.
- Three short scenarios that cannot be resolved cleanly: a missing government inspector, a smuggling run with unforeseen complications, and a jungle cordon-and-search operation built on bad intelligence.
New Tokyo is available through DriveThruRPG in PDF.
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