During the (infamous) lockdown, Tim wrote a set of squad-level rules set in the universe of Antares using the Antares D10/dice draw system. As it’s purely a personal project, he kept the rules fairly stark and straight from his initial draft. These may be updated one day to fully comply with the latest V2 stats, but they work on their own as they stand.
Overview
Antares: Incision Shard is a small-scale tabletop wargame in which a highly specialised special operations team – an Incision Shard – takes on a number of critical and often secretive missions on the many worlds of Antares. Whilst a game can be played on its own, Incision Shard is primarily a campaign game: opposing Incision Shards are sent on a mission consisting of a series of linked scenarios – games – during which the shard’s operatives attempt to achieve an objective but may become injured or fall casualty.
Typically, three to seven combatants are involved on each side, normally five a side plus drones and equipment. The most common sized playing area is 3’ ×3’ – small enough to fit on a dining room table – and terrain can range from woodland to sci-fi cities and blasted, volcanic moonscapes.
Each scenario they survive earns a shard member experience points (commonly termed XP) and at the end of a mission the surviving members can spend XP to gain new skills. Alternatively, if shard members are killed, retired or do not match the required skill sets, a player can spend XP to bring in completely new team members to their shard!
Key to success in the long term is increasing the right skills to maintain an effective, multi-disciplinary roster from which specialists can be chosen for each scenario. Will a demolitions expert be more important than a marksman? Will a medic be of more use than an infiltration expert? Will a counter-shard operations specialist be more useful than a drone controller?
Only you can decide…
Rules/Downloads
- The Rules PDF are here: Antares Incision Shard (which contains a roster and squad-level sheet).
- The quick reference sheet, here: Incision Shard Quick Ref.
- There is also a Incision Shard Weapon Ref.
- Tim’s also collated a few example squad sheets from those in the book – which may not be totally accurate (beware) – ato give an idea as to how to fill in the squad sheets for a game: Example Incision Shard Squad Sheets.
Jon Harrington also created some .stl files for the main state tokens: Prone (a duck!), Wound 1, Wound 2, and Broken.
Antares Nexus 