Borealis – Cold Silence, Old Secrets

Sci-Fi Cepheus Engine Setting by Etges Press

Cold Silence, Old Secrets

A trading ship hasn’t landed here in fifteen years. Before that, the Silence lasted a hundred and fifty. The colonists who survived it were left behind, abandoned, and forged a whole way of life on seeing what happened but never understanding why.

Borealis is a frozen colony world, cut off from the rest of known space for generations and only now being rediscovered. Its settlers speak plainly, but keep one dark truth buried so deep that most of them don’t know they’re protecting it anymore. Something unique in the planet’s biochemistry is worth more than anyone here understands, and the ships that are coming back now are bringing more than basic trade goods.

This is a hard science fiction worldbook, based on real biology and speculative exobiology rather than technobabble. Stabilins, the antifreeze protein family at the center of Borealis’s strangeness, are grounded in actual cryobiology. The planet’s black-canopied forests, its bioluminescent geothermal life, its brutal seasonal flood cycle, all of it follows from a small set of consistent scientific principles rather than a grab bag of alien window dressing.

Borealis is also setting agnostic: there’s no corporate authority to learn, no dated timeline to reconcile, no universe you need to already know. Drop it into your existing campaign, run it on its own, or use it as a single strange world your players visit once and never forget. It’s built for the Cepheus Engine and works with any classic 2d6 science fiction system with little to no conversion. It can be used as an Alien or Blade Runner -style offworld colony.

What’s inside:

• A fully detailed colony world: six main settlements, their culture, their politics, and the unspeakable secret three generations of Keepers have spent their lives protecting
• A faction triangle in motion: a fractured underground resistance to the Keepers, an off-world Directorate deciding whether ressource extraction is worth occupation, and an isolated splinter settlement running its own long game
• A cast of NPCs with their own agendas, goals, and relationships to each other, not just to the players
• Original alien biology, including stabilins, bioluminescent geothermal organisms, and a colonial predator that looks exactly like the ground you’re standing on (plus guidelines on creating realistic alien lifeforms)
• Three ready-to-run adventures, plus guidance for building your own
• A referee’s toolkit: quick-reference faction goals, standardized hazard and creature mechanics, and a chapter built specifically to get a new table playing in your first session
• Full character creation guidance for Borealis-born and off-world characters alike

Borealis is detailed-oriented and rewards a table that likes to pay attention. It’s harsh and cold, it’s patient, and it doesn’t explain itself twice. Everything strange about this world has an answer, if your players are willing to earn it.

Borealis – Cold Silence, Old Secrets is available through DriveThruRPG in PDF.

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