Welcome to your afterlife

You don’t remember dying. Intellectually, you knew you wouldn’t. The upload happened long before the moment of death. You think you can feel where those memories should be, like a phantom limb: surely such an important moment of your life should leave some mark in your mind. But no, you’re left with just your imagination, and that makes poor company.

Where they’ve put you is scarcely better. A simulated heaven calibrated to create the median consumer’s paradise but a few technological generations too basic to satisfy. Your remaining friends and family occasionally visit but you are an inmate in a gilded cage, a legal grey area more pet or property than a person.

There’s a way out. The star-studded void, long ago abandoned by humanity after proving unsuitable for breathing and bleeding life. Your breath is simulated and electrons flow through you. Out there you might find work, meaning, a second chance of life. Why stay?

What is Ghost Ship?

This is a roleplaying game of space exploration and transhuman phantoms. In Ghost Ship, you play uploaded minds in a near-future solar system, pushed into a life sailing between planets by a society that doesn’t view them as people but is still willing to profit from their unique talents. It’s about crossing the thresholds between life and death, between earth and the stars, between human and something new.

Art by Juan Ochoa

The game’s designed to focus on the mission:

• Your crew selects a job that’ll take them across the system and further their agenda (or make them rich).
• In the weeks, months or years it takes to travel to your destination, you use a simple system to track how you spend the time.
• Once there you dive into the action, using an action system that lets you draw on your memories of life to boost your chance of victory.
• After the mission’s complete you work through the consequences – both to you and to the solar system as a whole.

As time goes on your characters will gain new capabilities as they adapt to their digital state, just as new developments across the system unlock new technology for your Company to use. Meanwhile, your living contacts will age and go through significant changes, your memories will accumulate glitches and artefacts, and the peculiar stresses of your way of life will give you personality quirks to deal with.

It’s a game about how new social and technological developments can change everything, how a new environment can reshape the people that live in it, and how people can rebuild their lives after a catastrophic change.

This game is work in progress!

Ghost Ship is still in development. We're planning on refining the system in playtesting, as well as:

• Adding new Drone Frames.
• Adding ship modules and drone modules.
• Building a system framework around social change in the solar system's settlements.
• Building a system framework around scientific development and unlocking new technologies.