Stargrave – Bold Endeavour

Four supplements in, and Joseph A. McCullough takes Stargrave again somewhere it has never gone before. Bold Endeavour, released in October 2023, started life as a large sprawling campaign and ended up as something considerably more interesting. While working on the ship rules he had originally planned as a side feature, McCullough found himself enjoying them so much that they became the centrepiece of the book. The result is the first Stargrave supplement that fills the space between scenarios rather than just adding to what happens on the table.

What is it about?

Every independent crew in the Ravaged Galaxy lives and dies by their ship. It is their home, their strategic headquarters, and in many of the genre's defining stories, practically a character in its own right. The Millennium Falcon limping out of Mos Eisley. Serenity held together by improvisation and stubbornness. The drive to keep your ship flying - whatever it takes, wherever you have to go to find the parts - is one of science fiction's most reliable narrative engines.

Bold Endeavour makes that part of the game. Between scenarios, crews now roll for space encounters: pirate ambushes, black holes, space krakens, derelict ships, first contact events, wormholes, wounded space whales. Each encounter draws on the new ship crew assignment rolls and can damage Structural Integrity, injure crewmembers, or deliver unexpected loot. Managing the ship – repairing it, upgrading it, deciding which systems to prioritise – becomes a campaign layer running parallel to everything else.

The five scenarios in the book are standalone and unconnected, designed to drop into any existing campaign rather than form their own narrative. For groups who want a complete campaign, this is a supplement about the infrastructure of play rather than a specific story.

Stargrave – Hope Eternal

We already gave you the reviews on Quarantine 37 and The Last Prospector. Now we move on to thethird supplement for Stargrave: Hope Eternal, released in 2022. Where the previous supplements expanded the competitive game with new campaign structures, Hope Eternal takes a different direction entirely: it is a dedicated solo and cooperative supplement, and the most narratively ambitious entry in the Stargrave line to date.

What is it about?

It starts with a routine data grab. An anonymous client wants access codes to a prisoner database on a backwater planet. Standard work for an independent crew. What follows is anything but routine.

The freed prisoners carry intelligence on a secret meeting between two of the major pirate fleets, the same fleets that have been keeping the Ravaged Galaxy in a state of permanent darkness since the Last War. Somewhere in an abandoned system, there is a space station designed to trigger supernova-level events. If the right crew can board it, arm it, and get out alive, both fleets could be destroyed in a single moment.

Hope Eternal is a ten-scenario linear campaign structured in three acts. Part One covers the initial job, a pair of daring prisoner rescues, and a desperate escape. Part Two tasks the crew with tracking down the last surviving operator of the space station, obtaining a keycode from one of the harshest planets in the subsector, and sourcing a rare mineral that can turn the station into a weapon. Part Three is the infiltration itself – boarding a station that turns out to be less abandoned than expected, restarting the computer, overriding the safety protocols, and triggering the experiment before the pirates work out what is happening. The final question is whether the crew can outrun the blast radius.

Joseph A. McCullough is upfront about his inspirations: the original Star Wars trilogy, Terminator, The Lord of the Rings, and Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet novels. He is equally clear that this is the first time he has written Stargrave with the crews in an explicitly heroic role. Whether that framing sits comfortably with you depends on how you read it. A more pragmatic interpretation is that the moral framing serves a structural purpose – it gives the solo campaign a defined direction that prevents it from becoming an open-ended exercise without stakes. The crews may be rough around the edges and not above pocketing a few credits along the way, but the campaign needs a reason to keep pushing forward, and "destroy the pirate fleets" is a more compelling one than most.