Spacer's Home is meant to be used as a setting for FTL Nomad (previously SWN). Some lore or specific setting may be present in the manual, but for the purposes of the game, please ignore most of it. Sci-fi RPGs may be unforgiving and difficult, and as such, some systems may be toned down or improved for easier play, such as less taxing ship combat and ship mechanics, more HP, less stark death conditions, etc. In general, the campaign is geared towards the players, as the heroes and main characters of the story.
IMPORTANT: text highlighted in red is homebrew rules and edits. The rest of it is recaps and summaries taken from the manual itself and placed here for ease of access.
Additionally, FTL Nomad is separated in Technological Ages, which indicate the technological era associated with an item, vehicle or civilization. Sol 2400, the United Nations, and the playable areas are all associated with the Late Galactic age (you can buy items from any earlier age still).
FTL Nomad uses a d6 dice system. All skill rolls are a basic 2d6, and are heavily based on Advantage. Advantage is negative or positive (disadvantage) and affects the amount of dice you roll, and which numbers you pick. Advantage dice are called +D (+1D, +2D). For example:
Oliviere is evading a torpedo on a shuttle. He has a level 2 Vehicles skill, and between his other bonuses, another +2. The torpedo is faster, and he is trying to evade it in an asteroid field, so he has an additional -3 difficulty. In total, Oliviere will roll 3d6 (4-3) and choose the two highest dice since, in total, he still has advantage. If the situation was dire, and the difficulty was -5, he would still roll 3d6 (4-5, without the negative) but choose the two lowest dice since this time he's at a disadvantage.
Character creation in FTL Nomad is quite easy, and does not involve rolling dice, meaning that your character is left up to you, not to chance. For information on bonuses on alien species, see the next section. The process of character creation is as follows; one interesting note is the lack of Classes you'd see in D&D or even SWN
Develop a character concept.
Distribute skill points. FTL Nomad offers seven skills, and you can distribute points as you wish. Alien characters have 4 points to distribute, but depending on the species, they may start with a point in a skill determined by their aptitude. Humans and Automata, being respectively a neutral and highly adaptable species and a robotic race made for certain specific tasks, have 5 points but start with all skills at 0. At most, you can assign 3 points to a single skill.
Combat: aptitude to hand-to-hand or weapon combat. Kosidians start with level 1 Combat or level 1 Physical.
Knowledge: willpower, intellect and intelligence, applied to medicine, history and, importantly, psionics. Skrell start with level 1 Knowledge; if your Skrell isn't psionic, choose another skill.
Physical: exertion, resilience, endurance and toughness, also used to resist diseases and toxins. Kosidians start with level 1 Combat or level 1 Physical.
Social: interacting with others, lying, negotiating, convincing.
Stealth: sneaking, lock-picking, hiding and ambushing. Also used to detect such activities.
Vehicles: driving cars and piloting ships. Also covers basic repairs and maintenance.
Technology: repairing, fixing, engineering. Used to operate machines and sensors, hacking and building.
Pick an Archetype. Archetypes are the general life that a character has taken, and give additional advantage dice in specific situations. For example, the Outlaw archetype has +1 advantage dice to sneaking, lock-picking, pickpocketing and dealing with criminals.
Pick a Talent. Talents are special abilities or training that your character learned or picked up on. These are more specific than Archetypes, and you can earn more by leveling up. Aliens CAN choose a Talent.
Calculate Stamina. Stamina is FTL Nomad's health system. Stamina is your ability to take damage and keep fighting, and once it runs out, you are generally out of the fight. If a combat ends and you still have Stamina, you can simply take a breather and be fine. If not, you will roll on the Wound Triage Table (page 42). Due to the advanced medical tools available in Sol 2400, the weeks indicated by the table may be days or even minutes, depending on the situation.
Calculate Encumbrance. This is disabled for ease of play.
Purchase Equipment. Your characters start with 2d6x1000 Credits plus 1500 from your UN Navy Academy bonus, and you can purchase the items you'd like from the list in the Equipment chapter. If you instead choose to take an Equipment Package that fits your character's role in the game, as seen below, you start with 1d3x1000 (1d6 halved) Credits as your starting money.
Play!
These are standard kits provided by the UN Navy to new recruits for free upon boarding their first ship, and depend on which department they are in. If you choose to take one of these, your starting money (primarily used for trinkets, bartering with shady merchants, gambling to your captain's disappointment) will be 1d3x1000 (1d6 halved) Credits.
Aside from humans, there are three alien species to play and robots with High Artificial Intelligence, for which the character creation process is different. Alien species receive significant bonuses to their respective fields of expertise, counter-balanced by the need to oblige with each species' specific weaknesses, lore implications and traits unless decided otherwise. Non-psychic Skrell are possible but rare, and they are often considered as inferior: they might face discrimination or be outright rejected or even attacked by other Skrell.
This section will give you some setting-accurate technobabble for each department or field. This is not an exhaustive list.
Inertial Confinement Fusion Reactor: a simple (real) engine that fuses atoms together and absorbs the energy produced to power a ship. Shaped like a ball and usually suspended and encased for safety. Deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, is used for fuel, together with tritium or helium. These gases are produced or harvested on the ship itself by gas collectors on the hull, and then compressed into small fuel pellets the size of ping-pong balls. A set of lasers run through laser amplifiers before being fired at the pellet chamber, heating it to 3 million degrees Celsius and starting the reaction. The reaction typically lasts for a few days before needing refueling, but can be "overcharged" by refueling manually and amplifying the reaction.
Dimensional Displacement Drive: also known as the Triple-D Engine or the Hyperspace Catapult, this is the main FTL drive type. By shifting the ship's atoms into another dimension, where the rules of physics are less stringent, it allows ships to almost instantaneously travel between two points. To the outside viewer, a ship with a Triple-D engine simply appears to suddenly shoot forward and disappear. This engine is typically shaped like a cylinder with a smaller tube inside, which vibrates when the jump begins to kickstart the quantum shift of the ship. Small confinement beacons are present on the hull to restrict the process to the ship itself - if damaged or missing, the ship could also drag with itself anything nearby (or part of it).