Omega Team

Version 0.12 · not yet playtested

Jon Mayo. PUBLIC DOMAIN (CC0-1.0)

Omega Team

A grim science-fiction game of blacklisted mercenaries doing retrieval work in a universe that does not reward competence. Players tell the referee what they do. The referee tells them what it costs.

You were the best at a job nobody admits exists. Then a contract went past a line one of you would not cross, and you all walked, and the corporation that owned you made sure every reputable outfit in the sector knew your names. Now you run retrieval out of a welded-together junkyard on Harshaw Junction: you find the thing, you get it out, you get paid what the client can afford. The lights are on and the shuttle is fueled, and nobody is doing that for you out of kindness.

The work is mostly people and machines and bad corporate weather. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes a survey team comes back with fewer names than it left with, or a sealed container is cold in a way that cold should not be, and the smart move is the one you cannot quite explain to the client. You do not have a word for that. You have instincts, rumors, and the good sense to walk away from a job that feels wrong, most of the time.

This is a starter page. It runs on the Wizards & Lizards engine; the reminders below are enough to play tonight, and the full rules are in the SRD.

1 The Dice, in Brief

When something is genuinely uncertain and going wrong would cost you, the referee names where you stand and you roll a pool of d6. You never add anything.

Where you stand | Pool
Desperate | 1d6
Poor | 2d6
Fair | 3d6
Good | 4d6
Commanding | 5d6

Take the two best dice (a lone die pairs with a 1). A 5 or 6 is gold. Two gold, you get it clean; a 1-2 and no gold, it goes wrong; anything else, you get it at a cost the referee names. Every die you talk your way into, with a real plan and the right gear, is one more chance at gold, and that is the strongest thing you can do.

Stress is five boxes. Mark one to push your body past what it should do, to buy a reroll (if you have the rank), or when the referee says the thing you just saw cost you something. At five marked, further strain wounds you. A safe rack and a real meal clears it.

Condition only worsens: Healthy, Wounded (roll a die fewer on everything), Incapacitated (two dice fewer, out of the fight), Dying (a four-segment clock, one segment an exchange), Dead. Every wound is one step, whatever dealt it. Worn armor, a vest or a hardsuit, turns the first wound of a fight aside; after that it lands. There is no soaking blows by burning through kit, so cover and a good angle are what keep the crew whole.

2 Making an Operator

Stats. Spread -1, 0, +1, +1 across Might (force, hauling, zero-G grip), Agility (shooting, piloting, breaching, EVA), Wits (tech, hacking, medicine, noticing), and Will (nerve, command, holding together when the weird shows up). A stat is a die you add or drop, not a number you add to the roll.

Role. Every member of Omega Team is ex-military and can fight; the role is what you do beyond being dangerous. Pick one. Your role is your standing permission: if a thing follows plainly from it, you attempt it at your normal odds without argument.

Command. Planning, negotiation, reading a room, the politics of a job. Add a die when a plan you laid is actually unfolding.

Operations (the Face). Organization, cover identities, cutting through bureaucracy, jack-of-all-trades. You fill whatever gap the crew has.

Sapper. Breaching, demolition, structural reads, getting into places built to keep people out.

Tech. Hacking, fabrication, systems. If it has circuits, you can make it do something it was not built for.

Pilot. Shuttle, ground vehicles, anything with a drive. Getting in, and more to the point, getting out.

Background. One line: who you were before the tribunal burned your careers. Roll the d66 below or pick. It grants permission the way your role does, and it says how you came to be broke, blacklisted, or hunted enough to take this work.

Why you are still here. Write your stake, the thing this crew is really for, as far as you are concerned:

Amends. You did things in the corporate years you cannot undo, and the pro bono jobs are the closest you get to setting them down.

Revenge. You are using the retrieval business as cover and funding for a plan to take down the people who owned you. It could compromise everyone if it surfaces wrong.

The paycheck. Your money goes somewhere that eats all of it: a sibling in an expensive ward, a debt, a name to buy back.

The work. These are the best operators you have ever run with and the jobs do not keep you up at night. The competence is the point.

Vice. Name what you take to get the shaking to stop. Combat stims (clears 2 stress; you crash after, roll a die fewer on your next physical thing). Synthahol or a soft-dose patch (clears 3 stress; the world goes far away, roll a die fewer on your next roll). A black-market neural smoother (clears all stress; roll Fair, and on a Failure something in your wiring does not switch back).

Rank. Everyone starts a Novice. You earn Expert the first time you pull the crew through a job that cost you something and moved you real distance on your stake. Expert lets you mark 1 stress to reroll one die after seeing it. You earn Master when your stake is in sight, one more good job away; Master also lets you spend 1 stress to reroll a die of another operator’s roll, with their say-so.

2.1 Kit

Take your role’s loadout, or build your own and let the referee price it. Gear does what it plainly does; there are no keywords.

Command. Sidearm, encrypted comm slate, a good coat that reads as authority, a favor or two owed by people who matter.

Operations. Sidearm, a case of clean IDs and credentials, a med-kit, a disguise wardrobe.

Sapper. Carbine, breaching charges and cutting gear, an armored jacket, a helmet.

Tech. Sidearm, a custom deck and repair tools, a fabricator, a recon drone.

Pilot. Sidearm, the crew’s shuttle (parked, not on you), a flight rig, a vehicle toolkit.

Body armor and a hard visor are worth their weight because they are things you can destroy to walk away from a hit. A drone or a loader can take one for you too, and then it is scrap, not cover, and the referee says whether it also bolted or died.

2.2 Who You Were (roll d66)

Roll two d6, first as tens. Answer the describe in your own words; that is your background.

d66 | Who, and what it left you
11 | PMC Operator. Describe the deniable job that finally curdled. You know how black-ops crews think, because you were one.
12 | Corporate Fixer. Describe the executive you cleaned up after until they hung you out. You know which lever a corporation pulls, and when.
13 | Ship’s Medic. Describe the ward you could not save when the funding was cut. You keep people breathing who should not be.
14 | Combat Engineer. Describe the structure you were ordered to bring down with people still inside. You read a building like a threat map.
15 | Station Cop. Describe the case they made you drop. You know how port authority actually works, and who it protects.
16 | Cargo Runner. Describe the manifest you signed knowing it was a lie. You know the docks, the routes, and what does not get scanned.
21 | Recon Sniper. Describe the shot you were told to take and didn’t, or did. Patience is a weapon you are comfortable with.
22 | Corporate Scientist. Describe the project whose sample logs you were not cleared to read. You have seen enough to be uneasy.
23 | Debt Enforcer. Describe the family you were sent to collect from. You know how a syndicate that calls itself a company behaves.
24 | Drop-Ship Pilot. Describe the extraction that left people on the ground. You can fly through things that should not be flown through.
25 | Signals Analyst. Describe the transmission you were ordered to bury. You hear the pattern in noise.
26 | Field Chaplain. Describe the unit whose last rites you gave. You are the one people talk to before a bad job.
31 | Salvage Diver. Describe the wreck you were the only one back from. You are calm in vacuum and dark, which most people are not.
32 | Black-Market Doc. Describe the implant you fitted that you should have refused. You work off the books and ask nothing.
33 | Deserter. Describe the order you refused and ran from. You know how a unit falls apart, because yours did.
34 | Habitat Mechanic. Describe the life-support failure they blamed on you. You keep old, failing machines alive by feel.
35 | Corporate Auditor. Describe the fraud you were told to certify clean. You can read a ledger and find the buried body.
36 | Prison-Barge Guard. Describe the prisoner you let walk, and why. You have seen what people do with nothing left to lose.
41 | Colonial Ranger. Describe the settlement you could not reach in time. You survive off a hostile world without complaint.
42 | Corporate Spy. Describe the cover you lived under so long it stopped being one. You lie for a living and it costs you.
43 | Wetware Hacker. Describe the network you crashed that killed more than servers. You despise the lie, and you will not tell one.
44 | Orbital Marksman. Describe the competition tab in a drawer you never mention. The fitness and the shooting remain.
45 | Foundling of the Fleet. Describe the ship that raised you and the day it dropped you. You have no home port and it shows.
46 | Bonded Laborer. Describe the contract you bought your way out of, and who still holds paper on you. You know work nobody chooses.
51 | Blockade Runner. Describe the cargo you swore you would never carry, and the fortnight you did. You get through cordons.
52 | Combat Nurse. Describe the triage call you still second-guess. You decide fast who can be saved.
53 | Xeno-Surveyor. Describe what your team logged before the roster came back short. You have been near the weird and did not have a name for it.
54 | Union Organizer. Describe the strike that got you blacklisted the first time. You know how to move a frightened room.
55 | Drone Wrangler. Describe the swarm you lost control of, and who paid. You think in machines and angles.
56 | Ex-Convict. Describe what they put you away for, and whether they were right. You have contacts nobody respectable admits to.
61 | Corporate Heir. Describe the family firm you were disowned from. You know how the powerful talk when they think no one records it.
62 | Frontier Marshal. Describe the town that ran you off for doing the job right. You hold a line by yourself when you have to.
63 | EVA Rigger. Describe the tether that failed and who was on the end of it. Nothing outside a hull frightens you any more.
64 | Interrogator. Describe the session you walked out of and never went back. You read people, and you wish you could stop.
65 | War Correspondent. Describe the story that got your access pulled and your sources killed. You know where the bodies are filed.
66 | The Only One Back. Describe the op that killed the rest of your team and the call you made at the worst moment. You carry their share, and their families’ addresses.

3 The Weird

Omega Team are mundane people. They do not know about the things certain corporations keep pulling out of deep space, and they have no framework for it. Your operators cannot cast anything, learn anything, or fight the weird on its own terms. This starter does not use the engine’s magic rules at all, and that is the point: the horror is something that happens to the crew, never a tool in their hands.

At the table, the weird enters as atmosphere and threat, never as a mechanic the players operate. A container is cold through the gloves and wrong in a way nobody can name. A survey team’s helmet log has a gap. A friend who took a classified posting answers the comm in a voice that is almost right. Standing too near a thing that has crossed over costs stress, not hit points, and it does not stop when you leave the room. The Colonel’s whole reputation as the crew’s compass is really just this: he steers you off jobs that feel wrong, and he is right more often than luck explains. Believe him, or find out why the fee was that high.

4 Threats

No stat blocks. A threat is a tier and one true sentence. A blow is a Success or a Partial against it; a Partial fells it too, but you pay for it.

Tier | Blows to finish | Facing it
Lesser | 1 | Fair
Common | 3 (and 1 stress) | Fair
Greater | 6 | Poor
Dire | 8 (a clock fills) | Poor

A blow lands often, so the crew drops a lone target fast; that is why the counts run high. Outnumbered is how a security detail wins: face more guns at once than the crew can meet and you drop a die, badly outnumbered you drop two, until you cut them down or break line of sight.

This setting runs lethal. The crew are mortal people in over their heads; armor and cover are the only cushion, and a job that turns into a stand-up firefight is a job already gone wrong. Rank comes as an operator closes on their stake. Referee: do not be shy about Partials that wound.

Corporate security detail. Common. Professional and well-drilled, and the moment it is pressed it calls for backup you have to beat before it arrives.

Station enforcers. Common. There are a lot of them and the law here is theirs, so a fight you win is a fight you then have to leave a station over.

Rival merc crew. Greater. As good as you are, and they have done their homework on how you work.

Automated defense grid. Common. Tireless and precise inside its arcs, and blind outside them; the whole problem is the approach, not the fight.

A hollowed survivor. Greater. It was a person, it does not register pain or reason, and it only wants you to stop moving. Puzzle: it is still wearing a lanyard, a wedding band, a name, and someone who knew them can reach the last of it.

A cleanup asset. Dire. Sent to bury the job and everyone who touched it; it is not on any manifest, it does not negotiate, and it does not stop.

Shroud-cold cargo. Dire, and not a fight at all. Being near it drains stress each push; opening it, or carrying it too long, is how a person comes back hollow. It must be moved sealed, delivered or dumped, and never, ever opened. Telegraph the cold, the frost that forms wrong, the way animals will not go near it.

Jobs are won before the shooting, with a bribed manifest, a cut camera feed, a route through the maintenance levels, or a client talked into a smaller ask. Walking into a corporate site and trading fire until someone falls over is how crews end.

5 Finding Work

Roll a d6 when the crew goes looking, or when a fixer sends word. Spend a favor to reroll.

d6 | The word on a job
1-2 | Nothing clean. You owe somebody to get in on a job at all.
3-4 | A job, but something about it is off, and the fee is high enough to say so.
5-6 | A choice between two jobs, and you can only take one.

The job itself. Roll four d6 and read across.

d6 | The client | Wants you to | From | But
1 | A frightened mid-level exec | retrieve a sealed container | a quarantined research dome | it is cold, and the client won’t say why
2 | A rival corporation | extract a person who wants out | a corporate arcology under lockdown | the person is not who the file says
3 | A family who cannot pay much | recover a body, or proof of one | a derelict hab on a decaying orbit | another crew is already inside
4 | An information broker | copy and wipe a data core | a black site off every registry | the site went dark two days ago
5 | A fixer you trust | move a package, no questions | a station you are banned from | the manifest is a lie and you signed it
6 | A voice through three cut-outs | destroy something in place | a survey ship back early and quiet | the crew that hired you plans to bury you with it

Why it goes sideways. Roll a d6 on a Failure.

d6 | What happens
1 | The client lied about the opposition, and it is already inside with you.
2 | Something you were carrying is gone: the deck, the charges, the map, the key.
3 | The way out you planned is shut, and the backup route costs a friend or a favor.
4 | Corporate cleanup arrives faster than anyone should have known to send it.
5 | The thing you came for is not what the brief said, and now you have a choice.
6 | Someone got there first, and left it arranged in a way that makes your skin crawl.

6 The Back Page

Harshaw Junction, and who you deal with. Roll four d6.

d6 | The contact | Runs | Wants from you | The catch
1 | A dockside fixer, all smiles | the only clean berth in the Old Berths | loyalty, and first refusal | owes money to worse people than you
2 | A syndicate quartermaster | the weapons and the wet-work board | a job done off the books | keeps a ledger of everyone’s debts
3 | A retired operator, out of the life | a noodle shop by the yard | to be left out of it | sees everything on the approach
4 | A corporate recruiter, too friendly | a “consulting” front | your crew, quietly, one at a time | already knows your real names
5 | A station medic who asks nothing | a back-room clinic in the Warrens | supplies, and no attention | patches the people hunting you too
6 | A journalist who should know better | a feed nobody watches yet | the story you are sitting on | is going to get killed, with or without you

The place, when a job needs one. Roll four d6.

d6 | The site | The state it’s in | What’s here now | Getting in costs
1 | A research dome on a contested world | evacuated in an orderly hurry | sealed sample crates, all wrong | your cover. Someone recognizes the crew.
2 | A derelict hauler on a decaying orbit | powered down, drifting | one survivor, or something wearing the memory of one | time. A clock fills.
3 | A corporate arcology | fully staffed, fully surveilled | the person you came for, watched | a bribe, a favor, or a body
4 | A mining rig gone silent | still running, nobody aboard | machines doing yesterday’s work | your light and your comms, both cut
5 | A black site off the registry | scrubbed, recently | the data core, and why the site went dark | a wound, unless you go slow
6 | A station’s maintenance underlevel | flooded with coolant fog | the route everyone forgot | noise. Everything down here hears.

What the job pays out. Roll 2d6.

2d6 | The payoff
2 | A favor from someone who can call off a hunt. Worth more than money, once.
3 | Clean papers for one crew member. A new name that survives a scan.
4 | A vehicle or drone, salvaged and yours, until it takes a hit for you.
5 | A data cache that is leverage over someone dangerous, if you dare use it.
6 | Standard fee, tarnished credits, somebody’s operating budget.
7 | Standard fee, and a lead on the people who blacklisted you.
8 | Corporate-grade gear that works better than yours and is very traceable.
9 | Medical credit at the good facility, the kind that saves a sibling.
10 | A specialist tool that makes one kind of job start a die higher from now on.
11 | Something the client did not mean to hand over, and will want back.
12 | Enough, for one operator’s stake, if they choose to walk. The rarest result.

7 The Founding Crew (ready to play)

For a one-shot, hand these out. All are ex-military and can fight; the roles are what each does beyond that.

Colonel Elias Adeyemi (“the Colonel”). Command. Pragmatic, persuaded into his conscience rather than born to it. Knows more about the weird than he lets on.

Major Sigrid Mehta (“the Major”). Operations, the Face. The crew’s moral center and its best liar, both at once. Will refuse a job that crosses her line, or go along in protest and carry it.

Correia (“the Sapper”). Sapper. The quietest operator with the longest name. Expresses his ethics by action, not argument. Superstitious to a fault.

Luo Kai (“the Tech”). Tech. Amoral, brilliant, delights in elegant chaos, and despises deception, which puts him at odds with the Major he respects.

Phoebe Voss (“the Pilot”). Pilot. Cold on the stick, always broke, always angry in a way that makes her precise. Running something on the side, for reasons of her own.