Celestial Bodies Press Kit

Celestial Bodies Press Kit #

Cover mockup

Fact Sheet #

  • Developer/Authors: Binary Star and Charlotte Laskowski
  • Digital Release Date: November 6th, 2023
  • Crowdfund Dates: March 4th, 2025 through April 3rd, 2025
  • Platform: Tabletop Role-Playing Game
  • Price:
    • Just the book: $25 digital, $40 softback and $70 hardback
    • Bundles with zines: $30 for just the digital zines without the book, $50 for the digital zines and digital book, $125 for physical zines and a hardcover.
    • Addons: $30 to add digital zines, $60 to add physical zines, can add an extra softcover or hardcover.
  • Available At: https://binary-star-games.itch.io/apocalypse-frame

Game Description #

Celestial Bodies is a game about humanity’s long struggle to colonize the universe, and what will become of them. It’s about those who will continue to the next generation — and those who will not. It’s about endless destruction and death in the name of continuation, and those who wage it. It’s about the great titan corpses that lie where the stars end, and what lies beyond them.

You are lamplighters: a once-reverent name for the union of pilot and mech, flesh and steel, serving a home-ship. In the name of your home-ship, you will do things that are alternatively necessary, magnanimous, and possibly unspeakable. Your mechs will engage in combat with other hulking metal war machines and uncanny monstrous threats. Your ships and mechs will change as humanity begins to extract everything from the Titans.

Celestial Bodies has been in development since late 2023, when it

  • Build your mech with parts gained both from your own home-ship’s research and from other factions. 8 Frames and more than 100 parts give you a lot to work with!
  • Engage in deep, tactical combat against other Lamplighters as you seek to carry out whatever mission your Home-Ship needs to survive.
  • Experience life between missions through downtime events.
  • Build up your home-ship and lead it to greatness.
  • Deal or fight with 24 factions, including:
    • INFINITY: A wealthy, absolutely ruthless home-ship that has been accumulating secondary ships and colonies since the second generation.
    • Neon Witch Network: A tiny coven of operatives procuring worrying amounts of Titan materiel for inscrutable purposes under the noses of other Factions.
    • The Virtuous Collective: A set of 4 home-ships who have split into a series of quarreling houses with a noble veneer over a vicious mecha-dueling culture.
    • Reverie: Uncannily-happy, psychically-linked missionaries who rent themselves out as mercenaries in exchange for proselytization rights.
  • Uncover the Titans: The dead gods at the edge of the stars, now ripe for harvest and plunder for humanity’s war against itself. What dark mecha and psychic secrets might they yet reveal?

For this campaign, we are also making and commissioning 4 supplemental zines, comprised of material that will not be in the main book:

  • Allegiance: A zine written by Binary and Charlotte that details ways to play as the various factions in the book, including playing without a home-ship or with a fleet of home-ships.
  • Cosmic Powerstomp: A zine written by Kyle Tam that details the calamity as the result of a miraculous resource that ruined Earth and outlines the kinds of realities that result from that.
  • Keep the Lamp Lit: A zine written by Binary and Charlotte that details life on home-ships, including procedures to determine the things Lamplighters get up to in their free time.
  • Synodic//Sidereal: A zine written by Hipólita that details the calamity as an ongoing struggle between imperial Earth and an ever-expanding network of colonies and describes the kinds of realities that result from that.

The Team #

  • Binary Star and Charlotte Laskowski: Writing, Design, Layout, Illustration
  • Roz Leahy: Editing
  • Kyle Tam, Hipólita: Supplement Writing

Advance Praise for Celestial Bodies #

The loadout system is the logical evolution of Mausritter’s inventory, leading to a satisfying tetris mini-game to juice up your character and elegantly handling tradeoffs by giving powerful tools shapes that require - literally- being built around.

- Aisling Jensen

This game is, narratively, about balancing the ruthless calculus of survival: resources harvested vs resources deployed. Instead of presenting this from an impersonal, macro perspective, it zooms right in and magnifies the importance of the individual Lamplighter player-characters.

Celestial Bodies perfectly emulates the dopamine-and-adrenaline rush combo of being a squishy human making extremely reckless choices because you are wrapped in several tonnes of steel and titan-bone.

- Justin Vandermeer

Clear writing and beautiful illustration bring this tactical game of space-mecha to vibrant life. The unique combat system allows for mechanical and flavorful tracking of damage to different mech systems. Celestial Bodies is an absolute blast!

- Allen Hall

Assets #

High-resolution assets can be found here. You can also browse through/get them on google drive here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GudYW1frNbWGljAvR-6O4Hw0rTgLQ2mq?usp=drive_link

Contact Information #

If you have additional questions or are looking to schedule an interview, please reach out!