Troubleshooting (Part II)

A New Frame for Thousand Suns

In Part I of this post, I mentioned a common (and, I think, fair) criticism of the 2011 edition of Thousand Suns: its open-ended nature makes it hard to immediately grasp what the game is about. That’s a real hurdle for both new players and Game Masters, who may rightly wonder what a typical adventure or campaign is supposed to look like.

That’s why one of my main goals with the second edition is to make this much clearer, both in presentation and in content. I don’t want anyone to finish reading Thousand Suns without a strong sense of what “imperial science fiction” means, not just in broad thematic terms, but in practical, gameable ones. The second edition is being built to make Thousand Suns easier to use in every respect. With that in mind, I’d like to focus this week on one particularly practical improvement.

I titled this series “Troubleshooting” deliberately. In the second edition, the default campaign frame assumes that the player characters are exactly that — individuals whose unique skills and training make them especially suited to tackling problems that would challenge or even defeat, anyone else. By presenting this frame, my aim is to make it simpler for players to create characters and for GMs to design adventures and full campaigns around them.

That said, troubleshooting isn’t the only campaign model Thousand Suns will support. Even in its new edition, the game remains committed to accommodating a wide range of styles, approaches, and even subgenres of science fiction. Still, I think it’s crucial to give the game a clearer structure, something that helps newcomers start playing “out of the box.” Immediate accessibility is one of the driving goals behind this new edition and I think this framework goes a long way toward achieving it.

As I envision them, troubleshooters are free agents who survive on the strength of their reputations as skilled and dependable operatives. In a setting like Thousand Suns, where instantaneous interstellar communication doesn’t exist, reputation is everything. News of success — or failure — travels slowly, carried by ships and word of mouth, which means a troubleshooter’s good name is both fragile and invaluable. To thrive, the characters must take on difficult jobs, complete them with professionalism, and leave behind satisfied patrons who’ll speak well of them long after they’ve moved on to the next world. In short, their livelihoods depend not just on what they do, but on how others remember it.

In this respect, troubleshooters have more than a little in common with the free companies of the Middle Ages, mercenary bands who sold their services to whoever could meet their price and whose fortunes rose and fell with their reputations. Like those historical counterparts, troubleshooters in Thousand Suns operate on the fringes of power, hired by planetary governments, corporations, or private patrons to handle the kinds of delicate, dangerous, or deniable missions that official agents can’t. They must balance loyalty and self-interest, taking enough risks to build their names without overreaching and ending their careers (or their lives) too soon.

In both cases, the work is as much about politics and perception as it is about skill. Success depends on knowing whom to trust, which jobs to accept, and when to walk away. A well-connected patron can open doors that would otherwise remain closed, while a single botched mission can destroy months or years of careful reputation-building. This dynamic not only gives the characters a tangible motivation — survival through success — but also provides a steady supply of adventure hooks. Each new contract carries the promise of reward, danger, and discovery, perfectly suited to the episodic structure of most campaigns.

This, in turn, ties directly into one of the key goals of the second edition, namely, providing a clear, intuitive framework for what characters do in the game. The concept of troubleshooting grounds the game in a specific, actionable premise. It gives the GM an easy way to generate adventures (“Who needs help this time?”) and gives players a reason for their characters to work together and travel across the stars. It’s a structure that’s both practical and flexible, capable of supporting everything from political intrigue and corporate espionage to exploration and first contact missions.

Patrons play an essential role in this approach. Whether they are planetary governors, merchant consortiums, secret societies, or ambitious nobles, they provide the connective tissue between the troubleshooters and the wider setting of Thousand Suns. Through their assignments, characters are naturally drawn into the setting’s politics, rivalries, and mysteries without the referee having to front-load exposition or invent elaborate contrivances to get them involved. A patron’s request for help with a frontier colony, for example, might introduce a new culture or alien species, while a corporate investigation could uncover deeper conspiracies within the Terran State. In this way, the characters’ careers become the lens through which the players learn about the setting.

At the same time, the troubleshooters’ independence ensures that they are never tied to one place or cause for long. Each completed job can lead to the next or to an entirely new direction. Their choices allow the campaign to grow naturally in scope and complexity. Over time, the troubleshooters might evolve from humble problem-solvers to major figures in the interstellar web of intrigue or fall from grace and struggle to rebuild their reputations in the Marches or Wildspace.

That, ultimately, is the purpose of introducing the troubleshooting framework in the second edition. Doing so gives Thousand Suns a clear sense of focus and direction without constraining its scope. It offers an immediate, gameable structure that supports both one-shots and long-term play, while still leaving room for the wide range of scenarios that “imperial science fiction” can encompass. By defining what the characters do and how they fit into the setting, the second edition aims to make Thousand Suns more approachable, more engaging, and, above all, easier to bring to life in play.

Next week, I’ll try to get even more specific by talking about patrons and how I see their use in a Thousand Suns troubleshooting campaign.