Player's handbook
Use normal fifth edition mechanics. Stellar Dawn changes the description, tools, technology, and setting language around those mechanics unless a specific rule says otherwise.
Skills
These examples show what familiar skill proficiencies usually mean in Stellar Dawn scenes.
| 5e Proficiency | Stellar Dawn Use | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Arcana | Impossible systems, anomalous forces, magic, psionics, hard-light constructs, precursor science, and phenomena that do not obey ordinary technical rules. | Identify a relic's operating logic, understand a reality fracture, interpret symbolic machine behavior, recognize magical or quasi-magical effects. |
| Survival | Staying alive when infrastructure stops helping you. | Navigate hostile terrain, manage exposure and oxygen, track movement across alien ground, find safe shelter, read weather or radiation hazards. |
| Nature | Xenobiology, planetary science, ecosystems, alien organisms, and natural hazards. | Identify a creature's instincts, judge whether local food is safe, understand a colony world's ecology, predict animal behavior. |
| Religion | Cosmology, faith, cults, metaphysics, sacred traditions, mythic history, and doctrines concerning the Quiet Ones or similar powers. | Recognize a rite, understand a sect's taboo, interpret sacred star charts, recall myths attached to an ancient signal. |
| History | Galactic history, faction records, lost colonies, wars, migrations, archives, and famous crews or vessels. | Recall who built a station, identify an old fleet insignia, place a ruin in its era, know why two factions hate each other. |
| Investigation | Clue analysis, data forensics, research, pattern recognition, and reconstructing events from evidence. | Search logs for inconsistencies, determine how a breach occurred, analyze a crime scene, find the useful file in a corrupted archive. |
| Perception | Awareness through senses, sensors, cameras, scopes, and other immediate detection systems. | Spot an ambush, notice a pressure leak, catch movement on a sensor sweep, hear something in the ductwork. |
| Animal Handling | Alien beasts, trained creatures, mounts, companion animals, and living things governed by instinct, fear, trust, or pain. | Calm a panicked mount, handle a xenofauna specimen, train a pack creature, bond with a living companion. |
| Performance | Music, speech, ritual presentation, broadcast presence, morale work, holo-stage craft, propaganda, ceremonial diplomacy, and public-facing spectacle. | Move an audience through presentation, keep a crew steady, perform a rite, or control the tone of a public broadcast. |
Tools
Tool proficiencies describe specialized gear, software, instruments, and procedures. The check still uses the ability score that best matches the approach.
Intrusion Tools replace Thieves' Tools. They include lock bypass devices, intrusion software, codebreakers, signal taps, spoof chips, microtools, and physical access probes.
Use them to open secured doors, bypass locks, disable alarms, breach terminals, spoof credentials, recover protected data, or manipulate connected systems.
Engineer's Tools replace Tinker's Tools. They cover repair, modification, diagnostics, fabrication, salvage, jury-rigging, and controlled demolition of technological systems.
Use them for ship systems, drones, weapons, life support, damaged vehicles, power conduits, and improvised field repairs.
Medical tools cover trauma care, field stabilization, surgery, cybernetic complications, alien pathogens, radiation exposure, cryo sickness, and biotech incidents.
Use Wisdom (Medicine) for diagnosis or stabilization; use Intelligence with medical tools when treatment depends on technical procedure.
A Forgery Kit covers false credentials, transit permits, cargo manifests, station passes, guild papers, faction marks, transponder records, and official-looking digital or physical documents.
Use it when the challenge is making a record look legitimate rather than hacking the system that verifies it.
A Disguise Kit covers cosmetic alteration, biosculpt masks, pressure suit markings, uniforms, insignia swaps, false station IDs, and other visible changes that help someone pass as a different person, role, or affiliation.
Alchemist's Supplies may represent a chem kit, field lab, or pharmaceutical kit. Use them for toxins, solvents, fuel additives, explosives, alien reagents, medical compounds, and strange samples that need controlled handling.
Smith's Tools, Leatherworker's Tools, Weaver's Tools, and similar proficiencies may be reframed as fabrication, armor repair, suit work, textile engineering, field machining, or specialty crafting as appropriate.
If the campaign does not need fine distinctions, Engineer's Tools may cover general technological crafting and repairs.
Languages may include alien languages, trade cant, machine code, precursor script, faction ciphers, military signals, station pidgins, or ritual languages tied to faith and myth.
Knowing the right language can grant understanding without a roll, or allow a check that would otherwise be impossible.
Vehicles
Vehicles are tool proficiencies in fifth edition. In Stellar Dawn, Vehicles (Spacecraft) is especially useful because the ship is central to travel, combat, and survival.
Starships, shuttles, fighters, cutters, boarding craft, and other spaceflight vessels use this proficiency.
At least one party member will probably benefit from it. Piloting, evasive maneuvers, tight approaches, tactical positioning, and ship weapon attacks may all call for Vehicles (Spacecraft).
Rovers, crawlers, trucks, grav-bikes, skimmers, industrial haulers, and other surface vehicles use this proficiency.
Walkers, powered frames, industrial loaders, combat mechs, and machines piloted through body-scale movement use this proficiency.
| Situation | Likely Check | Use This When |
|---|---|---|
| Evasive flying | Dexterity (Vehicles: Spacecraft) | The pilot is making tight maneuvers, dodging fire, or threading a dangerous approach. |
| Ship weapon attack | Attack roll using Vehicles: Spacecraft | A character is aiming and firing a ship-mounted weapon through the vessel's systems. |
| Calculated maneuver | Intelligence (Vehicles: Spacecraft) | The pilot is using timing, vectors, ship limits, or tactical positioning. |
| Read traffic or hazards | Wisdom (Vehicles: Spacecraft) | The pilot is relying on field judgment, pattern recognition, or instinctive hazard sense. |
A Drone Rig is used to pilot, coordinate, recover, and operate mechanical drones. Use Dexterity for tight manual piloting, Wisdom for scouting and overwatch, and Intelligence for programming, diagnostics, or coordination.
Use Intelligence (Intrusion Tools) when a character is seizing unauthorized control, spoofing ownership, corrupting a command link, or disabling hostile drone behavior.
Equipment
Choose normal fifth edition equipment for rules purposes. The table can rename or redescribe that equipment to fit Stellar Dawn, but the item keeps its listed mechanics unless a specific rule changes them.
Light armor might be an armored flight suit, medium armor might be a tactical vacsuit, and heavy armor might be reinforced combat plate or powered-looking exo-plate. If the original armor does not require a power source, the Stellar Dawn version does not require one for rules purposes.
A longsword might be a mono-blade or boarding saber. A quarterstaff might be a shock baton. A longbow might be a coilbow or flechette caster. The name changes; the damage die, properties, range, and proficiency stay readable.
Many personal weapons are designed for ships and stations. They can threaten armored people, drones, creatures, and light cover, but they are limited to reduce hull breaches, ricochets, decompression, reactor damage, and collateral system failure.
A charging gauss rifle using longbow statistics is not a bad rifle. Its fifth edition range, damage, and properties represent stable charge release, limited penetration, low sensor bloom, and reduced risk to nearby systems.
Weapon names can use words like shock, stun, volt, pulse, or charged without changing mechanics. A shock staff using quarterstaff statistics still deals the quarterstaff's normal damage type. A stun mace does not stun unless a rule, feature, spell, or item property says it does.
Ranged weapon reskins keep their listed ranges. In fiction, range represents the distance where the weapon remains reliable for adventuring-scale combat: projectile stability, charge timing, recoil profile, safety regulators, smart-targeting limits, ammunition design, or battlefield role.
Military firearms, heavy lasers, antimatter weapons, breaching charges, and other high-output arms may appear as restricted gear, enemy equipment, black-market purchases, or special loot. If used aboard ships or stations, they can create serious environmental consequences.
Use the normal fifth edition damage types. Lightning can be electrical discharge, thunder can be sonic pressure, force can be hard-light impact or gravitic pressure, and radiant or necrotic can reflect the campaign's metaphysics without changing damage type.
Use listed fifth edition prices and exchange rates for bookkeeping. Copper, silver, gold, and platinum values can be renamed later as credits, scrip, trade chits, or another campaign currency once the table chooses the language.
Weapon examples
Choose the normal fifth edition weapon first, then describe how it appears in Stellar Dawn.
| 5e Weapon | Possible Stellar Dawn Flavor |
|---|---|
| Club | Baton, pipe, weighted tool |
| Dagger | Mono-knife, ceramic blade, survival knife |
| Greatclub | Shock maul, heavy impact tool |
| Handaxe | Boarding hatchet, utility axe |
| Javelin | Collapsible shock spear, thrown charge spike |
| Light hammer | Weighted repair hammer, compact impact tool |
| Mace | Stun mace, grav baton |
| Quarterstaff | Shock staff, sensor staff, collapsible staff |
| Spear | Boarding spear, shock lance |
| Shortbow | Compact gauss carbine |
| Longbow | Charging gauss rifle |
| Light crossbow | Mag-launcher |
| Heavy crossbow | Heavy rail caster |
| Hand crossbow | Holdout dart pistol, wrist launcher |
| Longsword | Mono-blade, boarding saber |
| Rapier | Vibro-rapier, dueling spike |
| Scimitar | Curved mono-saber |
| Shortsword | Tactical shortblade |
| Warhammer | Grav-hammer, powered impact hammer |