About Last Week: Building Beyond the Black

About Last Week… I missed my first weekly post in a long time last week — I aim for every Wednesday around 9 am. Not many people read this site yet, but I hope to change that over time.

So, what was I working on?

Beyond the Black.

It's my own sci-fi setting, inspired by The Expanse and the TTRPG Mothership.

Mothership is a sci-fi horror game, and it's brutally lethal — players are encouraged to roll up multiple characters because death is nearly guaranteed. Beyond the Black grew out of Mothership's recent expansion, Wages of Sin, which casts you as a bounty hunter.

That got me thinking: in a game this lethal, how do you keep the story going?

That question ran into a problem every DM knows — what to do when players can't make it or don't show up. Wages of Sin pointed toward an answer: run it like the first season of The Mandalorian, an adventure of the week, with a larger plot for players to get swept into over time. But since characters die easily, I needed an in-universe way to explain how they get replaced so quickly. I didn't want to lean on cloning (though I explored that separately). Instead, the players are part of a High-Risk Fugitive Recovery team — a small unit inside a larger Private Military Corporation called Aegis.

Answering that question raised new ones. Anyone who's built their own setting knows how it goes — it starts to feel like stacking an ever-growing Jenga tower of your own design.

Jupiter has 115 known moons, and that gave me something to build on: a planetary body in my system with a huge number of moons, room to keep expanding the setting. Beyond that are the outer Fringe/Drift, and past that, the Black — uncivilized space. Just like that, I'd built in room to grow from day one.

I plan to publish the current Player's Guide here, along with a separate technical manual geared more toward the Mothership ruleset. I'm still deciding whether to release the setting as system-agnostic or Mothership-specific — I'd lean toward the latter, since that's what it was built for.

On the creative side: I did all the maps and faction logos myself in Procreate, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Express, and Photoshop. The trailer (embedded above) used those same tools plus Premiere, After Effects, and Firefly — it's probably my best work to date, and I'm genuinely proud of it. Keen-eyed viewers will notice the Mastiff pilot has the unit logo on his shoulder; I added that in Procreate and was glad to see it carry through into the animation. The only AI-generated art is in the trailer and on the Player's Guide cover, both of which I heavily reworked afterward in Procreate and Photoshop.

AI art and animation can be wonky and temperamental, but it's a solid pipeline for someone with more ambition than skill—and it's pushed me to get back into art, something I was decent at as a teenager and still need to work on. I'll likely do a Premium version down the line too, once I can commission artists.

I hope you and your table find this useful and inspiring.

Keep an eye out for the Player's Guide — I'll write a post when it's up.

Until then, Stay Frosty.