The Perilous Void has Landed in PDF

Mar 21, 2025

Lampblack & Brimstone has released the science fiction themed The Perilous Void. The book is packed with tons of material in which to generate universes, planets, communities, lifeforms, NPCs, and more. The 168 page PDF is available at DriveThruRPG for $20.00.

About the book:

A comprehensive set of content generation tools for the science fiction role-playing game of your choice, created by the same people that brought you The Perilous Wilds.

The Perilous Void is a 168-page, 5.5″ x 8.5″ fully-illustrated book packed with content generation tools to cover everything from the galactic level down to the personalities of individual NPCs. The tables provided rely entirely on d10 and d100 rolls.

The book is comprised of the following sections:

Overview: An explanation of the physical and social hierarchies used to organize the content generated using the procedures described in the book.
Setting Creation: Procedures for collaborative approaches to setting creation for a sci-fi campaign. Using the “Big Picture” method, players create a comprehensive summary of the overall setting, while the “Frontier Snapshot” method focuses on the star system where the PCs will start their adventures and builds out from there.
Sector Creation: Guidelines for generating a sector of space, including tables for star types, nebulae, and anomalies.
System Creation: Procedures and tables for generating the essential components of a star system: population centers, satellites, asteroids, gas giants, and other phenomena.
World Creation: Extensive procedures for determining the position, climate, size, type, gravity, atmosphere, resources, and environmental characteristics of planets and moons. The tables provided ensure that no two worlds will be alike. By my highly unscientific calculations, these tools are capable of producing 1,107,072,000 unique worlds.
Lifeform Creation: Guidelines for generating microbial, simple, and complex lifeforms, with tables to determine physical form, size, quantity, special features, and evolutionary adaptations by world type.
Society Creation: Rules for determining the social organization of sentient species—whether local to a given world or spanning multiple star systems—including technology level, current condition, and political system.
Faction Creation: Guidelines for generating groups within a society, organized around common interests, goals, and/or ideologies. Each faction is defined by its classification, base of operations, reach, goal, leader, assets, and some complicating factor.
Community Creation: Within a given society may be found multiple communities, which come in seven possible types: outpost, space station, colony, village, town, city, and megacity. This section includes tools to help every community feel unique, along with comprehensive listings of residents’ roles and locations that might be found in any given settlement.
Development Creation: In Perilous Void terms, “developments” encompass various emergent aspects of play, categorized into situations, incidents, encounters, events, offers, and discoveries. Along with tables for generating each of these, this section includes a procedure for creating a vast variety of jobs for the PCs to pursue.
NPC Creation: Finally, whenever the GM needs to create a non-player character, this section is ready to assist. I believe that interesting NPCs are the backbone of a compelling campaign, and the procedures and tables here are designed to supplement GM creativity by generating NPCs according to archetype (from “paragon of virtue” to “irredeemable sociopath”) and fleshed out via occupation, motivation, personality traits, and other details.
Additional Tables: The last section of the book is a collection of tools for generating a range of other features, from specific sensory details (smell, taste, texture, etc.) to technobabble, along with a host of tables for generating the names of star systems, planets, settlements, factions, and NPCs.
Record Sheets: Included with the book is a PDF of five different printable record sheets, for use in tracking various aspects of a sci-fi campaign: a setting overview, galactic sector chart, site profile, star system profile, and world profile.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...