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.

Stargrave – The Last Prospector

With Quarantine 37 covered, we move on to the second full supplement for Stargrave: The Last Prospector, released in 2022. Where Quarantine 37 leaned into science-fiction horror, The Last Prospector takes the game somewhere different entirely – the space western.

What is it about?

The setup arrives as an intercepted message. An old contact, known only as the Prospector, has found something big in the Honereb System – a run-down cluster of asteroid mining operations near the edge of a forgotten galactic arm. He wants to cut you in. By the time your crew arrives, the Prospector is nowhere to be found.

What follows is a ten-scenario campaign built around tracking down your missing contact while navigating the politics of a system that nobody with options would choose to visit. The Honereb System is populated by five factions, each with their own agenda: Pa, the mysterious authority running the decaying Penthalia Station – nobody is sure if Pa is a person, a council, or a computer; the Honera Collective, a semi-socialist operation on a jungle planet with strict border controls; The Gliders, a pirate gang operating out of a scuttled ore hauler called Saint Mollia; United Minerals Incorporated, a pre-war corporation that is now functionally a dictatorship; the Freeholders League, independent asteroid miners who pool resources for mutual survival; and the Darksiders, a secretive, robe-clad group in the third asteroid belt that nobody quite understands but most people leave alone.

Joseph A. McCullough is upfront about his inspirations. The space western as a genre has a long history. George Lucas built the Mos Eisley cantina on it, Joss Whedon ran with it for a single glorious television season, and the British film Outland put Sean Connery in a mining colony and filmed a remake of High Noon. For tabletop hobbyists, the reference points extend further: Marshal BraveStarr, The Mandalorian, the whole visual grammar of the frontier in space. The Honereb System is built from these materials, and the supplement wears its influences without apology.

Stargrave – Quarantine 37

We covered Stargrave extensively over the years on this blog, starting with the core rulebook and the several plastic kits for Crew, Troopers, Mercenaries, Scavengers and Automatons. The last supplement we took a look at was Dead or Alive, the solo supplement that started as a free PDF and received a major overhaul in 2024. Now it is time to work through the remaining supplements – and that means going back to where it all started: Quarantine 37, the first full supplement for Stargrave, released back in 2021.

What is it about?

Imperial Research Station 37 once housed nearly ten thousand scientists working on biological and chemical research. Six months before the Last War, it went dark – no distress signals, no escape pods, just a single repeating broadcast: This station is under quarantine. Do not approach. Now, with the war over and independent crews picking through the ruins of the galaxy, the station has been rediscovered. Whatever happened there, the technology inside is worth a fortune.

That is the setup for Quarantine 37, and it is a good one. Joseph A. McCullough freely admits in the introduction that he could not decide between two classic sci-fi horror archetypes for this supplement, zombies or alien bugs, and in the end simply chose both. The station is big enough for both threats, depending on which airlock you enter through.

The result is two separate mini-campaigns of four scenarios each. The first, The Shuffling Dead, sends the crews deep into the zombie-infested sections of the station before they are surrounded and have to fight their way back to the ship. The second, Strike from the Shadows, pits the crews against a swarm of alien bugs that herd them steadily deeper into the hive, culminating in a face-to-face encounter with the alien queen. Beyond the scenarios, the book adds two new captain backgrounds (Aristocrat and Hunter), eight new powers, six new soldier types, a table of advanced technology to loot from the station, and a bestiary covering zombies, bugs, and everything in between.