Welcome back, Spacers!
We're back at ITU HQ after our little weekend team retreat, where we spent some much needed time away from our screens, ate far too much, played a perfectly reasonable number of board games (there is no such thing as too many), went on a really long walk, and generally enjoyed having almost all of the crew together outside the office for a change.
We had a great time and you'll get to see a bit more of what we got up to in tomorrow's From the Unknown newsletter. If you're not subscribed yet, you can still join HERE.
Now, back to the Shepherd. We have quite a few things to show you today!
Complete rules are almost here
Marcin: Still putting the finishing touches on the Rules document. It’s the most challenging one yet! Not because of rules complexity, but because it encompasses two very distinct ways you will play the game – the dungeon crawlery scavenges, and the boss battles, an ITU staple. If you add scenario’s on top of that, and the Safe House (of which you will learn today), as well as the Custom Campaigns… Enormity has shaped into the quintessential flagship ITU game.
It also requires a lot of cross-referencing, hyperlinking, diagrams, and double-checking.
Now, for the document’s specifics. I should finalize the Rulebook text by the weekend, at which point we’ll push it out as a separate, unscheduled Update. The document will contain all the basic game rules, for the entirety of the campaign. It will not contain: the Learn to Play (that’s a separate book, and, if you’re asking, it’s already written), the Enabled Rules section (these will be also protected in the final paper Rulebook – because discovering new things is half the fun), and the ‘More Ways to Play’ section. This last section deals with One-off Missions (so you can showcase the game to your friends), Custom Spacers (there’s infinite customizability) and the Custom Campaign rules (Because they are spoilery and…).
What I can tell you about the Custom Campaigns is that it is the most free-form sandbox game mode we’ve done in any of our games. Imagine taking an ATO campaign, sans the main narrative (but keeping in the side stories), that can go through all five Cycles continuously without a break, on a single expanding map, that incorporates Enormity’s equivalent of post-game/Mnestis Theatre. It’s… it’s beautiful. People have been badgering us for ages to make an endlessly replayable, sandbox, roguelike mode. Like that other game, about kingdoms and death.
Well. I think this is it. And I think nobody expects it. I know you were all miffed about the delay, but sometimes delays are very good for a game. You will be extremely happy with what we came up with. And it starts with this Update’s Safe House spotlight, which introduces our biggest, most robust and satisfying ‘civilization phases’ yet.
Enjoy, and see you soon.
Community review and feedback
Maria: Before we move on to the Safe House, a few more things from me! Once the Rulebook goes live, we'll open dedicated channels on our Discord server, specifically for the community review. This will be the place to discuss the rules, ask questions, flag anything that seems unclear or inconsistent and bring up those wonderfully specific edge cases that only reveal themselves once hundreds of people start digging through the same document. Our team will be keeping an eye on those channels and collecting your feedback throughout the review period.
We absolutely want to hear from you but we also want to set some expectations for how we'll approach that feedback. At this stage, factual inconsistencies, unclear wording, missing explanations, and ambiguous rules interactions are especially valuable. We'll read and investigate what you report, but naturally, not every suggestion will result in a change. The purpose of this review is to make sure the rules explaining those systems are as clear as possible before they go to print.
So yes, the complete rules are coming soon :).
See You at SPIEL Essen!
And speaking of things coming up soon: we're going to SPIEL Essen 2026!
This year, you'll find us at booth 4E200, and we're bringing quite a bit of stuff with us, and keen eyes might have spotted something very special in Marcin's photo in the last TSoH update;). We'll be running demos of Enormity, Kingdoms Forlorn, and Aeon Trespass: Twelve Sins of Herakles throughout the event, so if you've been waiting for a chance to try any of them at the table, we'd love to have you. Of course, Enormity will be there in full force, meaning you'll be able to sit down with our team and get a proper taste of the game before it lands in your hands. Demo slots can be booked ahead of the event, so if you already know you want to play, you can book your slot HERE.
And just like we did for UKGE, we're also looking for a little help from our community!
If you're coming to Essen and know our games well enough to help us present them to other people, we'd be incredibly grateful to have you join us at the booth for a while. And we really do mean for a while. We're not asking anyone to sacrifice their entire convention to work at our booth. Even if you'd be happy to help us run demos for an hour or two, that would already mean a lot to us, and give our team a chance to catch their breath during what tends to be a very, very busy few days.
If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, you can sign up to help us and let us know when you might be available HERE.
And if you're not planning to play a demo or volunteer, please come by anyway! Again, we're at 4E200. Stop by to see what we've brought with us, chat about the games, ask us questions, or just say hello and give us a high five. One of the best parts of these conventions is finally getting to meet some of the people we've spent the rest of the year talking to online through Kickstarter, or Discord, or BGG, etc.
See you in Essen!
Welcome to the Safe House
Now that we have both the Rulebook and Essen business out of the way, we'd like to move on to something we've been working on recently, and something you've been asking us about A LOT ;).
We've already shown you quite a bit of what happens during runs by now, but as of yet we’ve shared much less of what happens after you make it back. So, today we're finally going to take a closer look at the Safe House and explain how this part of the game works.
The Safe House is your headquarters aboard the Shepherd, hidden away in one of its null spaces and connected to the rest of the ship through the STYX network. Before you arrived, this particular space was used as an old shipbuilding unit which makes it surprisingly well suited to being modified as your needs grow.
This is where your Spacers spend their time between runs. You'll follow ongoing stories, work on new technologies, develop your Spacers, deal with whatever you've managed to drag back from your latest excursion, and eventually prepare the team to head out again. As the campaign progresses, more possibilities open up and your little corner of the Shepherd becomes more and more tailored to your needs.
Every Safe House Phase begins with another light-year passing. You'll mark it on the Timeline on your Campaign Sheet and resolve any stories waiting for you there. Some threads play out during runs, while others happen between them, including personal stories connected to your Spacers. Things you've done several light-years earlier can come back to haunt you here. Moreover, whatever is happening elsewhere aboard the Shepherd doesn't politely stop while you're working on your equipment.
Once those stories are resolved, you move into Development, which makes up the largest part of your time here. Development is free-form, so there isn't a prescribed sequence in which you need to do everything. You can work on your Safe House, improve your Spacers, deal with your equipment, and prepare for the next run, in whatever order makes sense.
And quite a lot of what happens here ends up recorded in one place.
Your Campaign Sheet
At the beginning of a campaign, large parts of the Campaign Sheet will be rather empty. That changes as you progress. Your resources and Suits accumulate in Storage, new technologies appear in the Facilities section, and the Xenodex gradually fills as you encounter and study boss Intruders. You'll record Stratagems and Allies as you gain access to them, while your campaign-wide Axioms and stats can shift depending on what happens throughout the story.
So while the Safe House itself is represented on the table by its spread and cards, the Campaign Sheet gives you a broader picture of what your crew has actually built up over the course of the campaign.
The Timeline is particularly important here. As I said before, every new Safe House Phase moves you another light-year forward. Light-years are grouped into Parsecs, which represent the distance, physical and metaphysical, between you and the normalcy of everyday life on Earth. In gameplay terms, they represent growing levels of difficulty.
When the light-year you’re marking crosses a Parsec threshold, that;s where Parsec Clearance comes in. It represents the various permissions, access codes, keys, and technological clearances you’ve accumulated aboard the Shepherd as your journey progresses. Some are granted by the factions you meet. Others may have been obtained through somewhat less official means.
Higher Clearance gradually gives you access to more advanced technology. It determines which Gear and Suits you're able to use, which Facilities can be developed, and which locked areas of the ship you can access. It can also reveal new boss Intruders and their Domains, giving you new targets to pursue later.
Which brings us to the part of the Safe House that will probably occupy quite a bit of your attention.
Developing Facilities
When you first establish the Safe House, your operation is fairly modest. At its center is the CHARON Facility card that represents the entirety of your Safe House, and is thus the cornerstone of your Safe House Phase. It is the only Facility card that doesn’t have any requirements, which means you always have access to it. It determines many of your starting limits and provides your initial Power generation, giving you enough to keep the essentials working. From there you'll start expanding.
Facilities represent the technologies and infrastructure your crew manages to bring online throughout the campaign. Some give you the means to work on equipment, others improve your existing capabilities or provide abilities you can use later. Some Facilities have a much larger impact and introduce new mechanics that weren't previously available to you.
Before any of that happens, however, a Facility starts life as a Project.
Every Facility card is double-sided. Its Project side represents a field of study or a technology your crew knows enough about to pursue. Here you'll find its prerequisites and, importantly, the other technologies this research may eventually lead to. Once you've successfully developed the Project, the card becomes a Facility and its actual benefits become available.
This creates a branching network of research rather than a single predetermined list of upgrades.
Developing one Facility can reveal several new Projects. Developing one of those may open up another part of the network. You can freely look through the Projects you've currently discovered, see where they might lead and decide which direction seems most useful.
You won't see everything from the beginning, either. Technologies you haven't discovered remain in the Reserves, safely hidden away until something you've developed leads to them. So you'll gradually uncover the possibilities of the Safe House as you play rather than starting the campaign by studying the entire development tree.
Having a Project available doesn't automatically mean you can develop it. Some Facilities require other technologies to already be operational, while other prerequisites are tied to what has actually happened during your campaign. You may need to encounter something specific aboard the Shepherd, acquire a particular resource or gain access to a new source of technology. Your Parsec Clearance also needs to be high enough for the Facility you're trying to develop.
This makes exploration feed directly back into Safe House development. Something you discover during a run may suddenly fulfill the missing requirement for a Project that's been sitting there for several light-years. Completing it might then reveal another Facility you didn't even know existed.
The actual development is driven by Scientific Breakthroughs, usually earned by completing non-Firefight runs. When you gain one, you'll use it to develop an available Project whose requirements you've fulfilled. When a Project becomes an operational Facility, anything it leads to is added to your available Projects, and your research continues from there.
As your Facilities grow, you'll record them on the Campaign Sheet as well. What begins as a rather sad collection of empty lines will gradually become a record of the infrastructure you've managed to establish aboard the Shepherd.
And, naturally, all this wonderful machinery needs electricity.
Keeping the Safe House running
CHARON has an autonomous power source capable of handling the basics. Oxygen, lights and crucial systems such as the Bioprinter are covered. Some, more demanding Facilities need to leech additional energy directly from the Shepherd, requiring Power to activate.
You'll have a limited Power supply for the current light-year and a pool of Power Dice used to operate those systems. Activating a powered Facility means rolling one of your available dice, with the result potentially draining some of the Power you have left.
The same Facility can be used more than once, but doing so becomes increasingly demanding. After an activation, the rolled Power die remains on that Facility. The next Spacer who wants to use it adds another die and rolls them together, so repeatedly pushing the same system increases the risk of draining more of your available energy.
Some Facilities can be power-cycled by spending resources, clearing the accumulated dice and freeing them for another use. You can't do this indefinitely, though, and running your Safe House too aggressively can leave you without enough Power to activate anything else during that light-year.
All of this matters because Facilities eventually give you access to a substantial part of what you'll be doing between runs.
Gear, suits and whatever you dragged home
Most of the useful things aboard the Shepherd have to be found first. When you’re out on a run you’ll be able to collect resources you'll use back at the Safe House, as well as much of the Gear you'll actually carry. With the appropriate Facilities developed, scavenged equipment can be modified into more advanced versions. Truly special Gear can sometimes be fabricated from Blueprints, but those are considerably harder to come by.
Suits have their own development path. The Standard EVA Suits you brought aboard were perfectly adequate for the peaceful scientific mission everyone thought you were going on. Current circumstances require something a little more substantial. You'll eventually gain access to Earthtype Suits, built primarily around human technology, as well as Xenotype Suits derived from the Intruders themselves. The latter are closely connected to another part of your Campaign Sheet.
The Xenodex records the boss Intruders you've identified and how many times you've encountered them. Facing the same boss repeatedly advances your research, eventually unlocking its Autopsy, and later its Study. Those discoveries can give you access to the corresponding Xenotype Suit and its modified form, alongside some other rewards hidden further along individual Xenodex tracks.
There’s one more little box next to Xenodex track, though: Vengeance. Defeat a boss, and you’ll mark it. Apparently, some Intruders don’t take losing particularly well, so they’ll effectively put a bounty on your heads. And as long as Vengeance is marked, the Adversary corresponding to that boss becomes more dangerous… ;)
So deciding to hunt something you've already encountered can have a very practical purpose. Every new encounter gives you another opportunity to understand what exactly you've been fighting and, eventually, figure out how to make use of it.
Developing your spacers
The Spacers themselves aren't standing still while all of this happens.
They gain experience throughout the campaign, which can eventually, once you've built the necessary Facility, be spent on their individual development paths. These paths let you improve their capabilities and unlock new options, including Specs and Masteries, while some developments require additional Safe House technology before they become available.
Even Spacers sharing the same Class don't follow identical paths, so they can gradually develop in different directions depending on how you choose to spend their Experience.
Preparing to go back
Eventually, you've finished your research, worked on the equipment and done everything else you wanted to accomplish during Development. Now you need to decide what happens next.
Sometimes, there isn't much of a decision to make. Major story Scenarios appear on your Timeline and come with their own Briefings, objectives and information about what awaits you.
Outside those moments you'll have more freedom to decide where you want to go. The Intel you've accumulated during previous expeditions tells you which parts of the Shepherd are available for Scavenge runs and which boss Intruders you've identified well enough to deliberately hunt. The STYX network, meanwhile, gives you access to more insertion points as you successfully explore new parts of the ship.
Before committing to a freeform Scavenge run, you'll also perform a Risk Assessment. By rolling three Telemetry dice on your chosen Intel card, you'll find out exactly which baseline Intruders and Adversary you'll be facing, as well as what kind of Crisis may be waiting for you at the end of the run. Crises are closely tied to your campaign stats and can dynamically change your situation after each run - for better, for worse, or for much worse. ;) Once you've seen what you're getting yourselves into and lock the run in, however, you're committed.
And that's the general rhythm of life in the Safe House. You return from a run, deal with what has happened in the meantime, use what you've brought back to push your operation further, and prepare as well as you can for whatever comes next.
Then, you leave the relative safety of your little shipbuilding unit behind and step into STYX again. Hopefully, all that research was worth it.
And that's it for today, Spacers! See you very soon for some collective Rulebook reading!
P.S. 😉
P.P.S. And yes, even after this rather sizable Safe House section, there's still plenty I haven't covered. I haven't gone into the different Suit types, Spacer development in detail, Stratagems, Allies, Antinomies, all the different resources you'll be bringing home, or exactly how Crises work - to name just a few. But we're going to leave some things for you to discover yourselves. Luckily you won't have to wait long: the complete rules will be in your hands very soon, and you'll be able to dig into all of it properly then. ;)
