Violence Without* Combat

May 15, 2026

Hi there! Did you know that not only is NULL_SPACE out, not only is it out in physical form, and not only does it have a printed job packet…it has its first official supplement, called Supplement #1: Violence?

What’s that, you maybe didn’t know that because I suck at promoting it? Well let’s fix that and talk about it then.

We’re gonna need a good, overly oppositional, trendy header to start this one. Not an accurate one, per se, but a good one.

Against Combat #

There we go.

From the start, back when the overarching plan was still for Liminal Void, I wanted to have a combat-focused supplement. Later on when I wrote Combat Without Combat, I mentioned that I probably wanted to reintroduce that at some point.¹ It makes perfect sense, really; I don’t really make any bones about Total//Effect starting life as a combat-heavy thing because that’s what I’d created up to that point, and Liminal Void had had something to that effect from the word go. I considered this some more, and I decided that combat as such was too narrow as a concept.

What do I mean by narrow? Well, I don’t think it’s gonna blow anyone’s mind if I say that the typical “combat focused RPG” concept of combat is a little artificial. Even putting aside the turn-based nature of things, even if you’re ignoring balance, you’re still kind of thinking on wargame-ish terms. Now: I think this is great a lot of the time! LUMEN games have like, video game health/power drops and that’s fun. It feels way weirder in something like NULL_SPACE though. This is a very grounded game, so having modal combat as such feels off in the vast majority of cases. But from the start, this also wasn’t going to be a purely pacifistic game. So I got to thinking about what I could add on that front.

Beyond just being artificial, I think the idea of “combat”, and especially a dedicated combat system as such, often sucks up all the energy in the room if you let it. In this case I don’t want to make a game that exists as a thin shell around a skirmish game or even a theoretical game that isn’t that but it’s extremely assumed you’re doing combat so effectively it is; I want whatever we’re doing here to be something that exists to serve the game as a whole. So I tried to think of a better description of what most independent contractor-types in the vein of the average NULL_SPACE crew, or in real life, get hired to do. It’s generally either security work from people who can’t hire security or dirty work from people or organizations who don’t want to risk their own. It’s frequently more one-sided, sometimes lethal and sometimes not, and often not actually executed: the implication is sometimes enough. So at the end of the day, it’s not combat, really. It’s just violence.

Violence Without Combat #

So with this in mind, I decided to start with the basic question: what does incorporating a system of violence into a game look like without just slapping a combat system in there?

Well, first, I made a point of thinking out the basics.

1. Who are you? #

My assumption is that most blue-collar-ish crews (which Basic Rules expects you to be, more or less) don’t usually decide to become dedicated or even frequent mercenaries. I mean I’m sure some of them do, but they don’t need the help. So I wrote up a group of starter Professions more suited to that: former security, soldiers etc. Some of them require you to use your Background trait for Combat Training and some give some Restricted toys in exchange for extra Trouble up front. They typically start with weapons and not tools. (I also threw in a few more toys because it’s fun to have new toys. There’s a 5-bulk LMG in a game where you typically have 6-9 effective capacity and that’s very funny to me.)

2. What are you getting hired to do? #

I determined that you can break violence-adjacent jobs into a few things: Security (preventing someone from doing something), Intimidation (getting someone else to do anything because of the implication of violence), Retrieval (getting something by any means necessary), and Wetwork (someone wants someone dead, not as a means to an end, but as the end itself). So from there, I tried to nail down a little more the more intangible bits of a Challenge in this space, and some of my intent as such.

• If someone is in a position to be designated a Challenge, what does that look like and what do their complications translate to?
• If you wanted to shake someone down or de-escalate a fight, what’s that look like?
• If you choose flight instead of fight, freeze, or fawn (or if your target does), what’s a good procedure for that?

Trying to cover basically all my bases as far as approaches within the rules as written.

3. To whom are they inflicting the violence? #

To start, I describe some people, generally, who end up being targets of violence. The list starts with “civilians” and then works up to cops, soldiers, and such, with the note that it’s often just civilians. I do describe a few groups you can easily use too: insurgent cells, pirate groups, mercenaries, and security corps ranging from rent-a-cop services to serious business PMC types.

At the back, there’s a section on combatants, which is effectively the real “bestiary” of sorts. In Liminal Void this is exactly what you think it is: entries for “corpsec” and “pirate” and such with combat stats. In an early draft, I planned to have just that and also a list of NPCs. Thinking about it more, though, I wanted to pick at one of my favorite hobby-horses about Combat Systems: by necessity, it more or less has to presuppose a bunch of generic mooks who come from offscreen and feel like they have no context in the world other than getting ventilated by your cool PCs. So instead of that, I combined the two: it’s a list of 30 NPCs statted out as Challenges, each unique. There isn’t “generic pirate”, there’s Razor, a pirate who finally joined the primary boarding party and wants to prove his worth. He has the Eager and Shotgun complications; he’s also a Minion with a little extra Endurance who can fire with Low Die Ballistic to Melee/Near range and steps up Harm at Melee and/or on a 13+.

Wait, what’s that last bit? Does that seem like a combat statblock to you? Well…

Violence WITH Combat #

Ok, enough stalling. You saw that asterisk in the title, I hope. There IS also proper, modal combat in this supplement too, should you be in a position where there’s an actual honest to god firefight going on and you want to make it something more measured and less of a shitshow. (As per this lack of emphasis, it’s less than half of the supplement, so about 12 of 48 pages.) What does this look like?

When it does exist, I want combat to be something PCs have to prepare for specifically. Weapons and armor are intentional choices that take the place of other, more utility-based choices: you’ll have less room for tools, consumables, etc if you bring more weapons, and combat-ready outfits typically have drawbacks like low inventory space or poor handling of any threat that’s not bullets. If you don’t have them, you’re not going to have a good time in combat, and that’s intentional; from the start, I emphasize that this isn’t for every situation, this is if you have an Honest To God Actual Fight Between Semi-Equals on your hands. Even stuff like an ambush is just handled best by the normal Challenge/Risky Action setup as usual. This ain’t D&D, combat isn’t as written the default activity or method of interaction and that’s not changing.

My starting point was the standard Total//Effect Skirmish. As noted there, immediately there’s a pretty big change from Valiant Horizon: turns alternate instead of being side-based, and while weapons can be very powerful and take out just about anything quick (more on this later), it’s unlikely any one person is going to take everything out in one turn (and also that cuts both ways anyway). Due to the auto-hit nature of Total//Effect Skirmish rolls means someone’s gonna get hit, probably. So there’s no offense that can strictly be better than a good defense, if combat proper has started. If you’re not outfitted for it, you’re going to know very quickly.

Environment #

Combat is assumed to use a zone-map, much like Valiant Horizon. Unlike VH, though, there are two bits of the environment really I wanted to nail down.

First, cover exists. It’s a rating between 1 and whatever. Any ranged attack that would deal Harm less than or equal to cover does nothing and the cover value degrades by 1. This is your best protection against a lot of things and it’s not very good if there’s a lot of attackers.

Second, zero-G. This is something that’s gonna come up a lot so I had to nip that one in the bud early. You don’t just move normally; you either clamber around slowly with magnetic boots attached to the bulkhead OR you make risky action rolls to try to jump from location to location. It’ll make fights in zero-G way more interesting as a result.

Attacking #

Melee weapons are basically just modifiers on the default Do Melee Attack action, Struggle, which does Low Die Harm (i.e. not much). They’re not the star of the show, this isn’t lightsabers-style sci-fi. Ranged weapons, on the other hand, don’t generally play. Flying in the face of the advice I give in the Skirmish section of the SRD², a lot of them have a band of 2 ranges (like Melee/Near or Near/Far). The ones that do often favor one, like giving a bonus to one range or a penalty to another. This flexibility compared to something like Valiant Horizon or APOCALYPSE FRAME is intentional to make having a dedicated weapon, even the most basic “shitty pistol” kind, important and useful given it’s deliberate choice to take one.

Weapons also have traits or extra abilities based on their general class and the features they had as standard. All of them have a default Fire which is basically “attack normally”. Some of these abilities require you to spend an attribute:

• Pistols let you move and fire as a single action by spending 1 Reflexes.
• Shotguns let you distract enemies with a loud reload by spending 1 Toughness.
• Precision rifles let you reach out and touch someone basically anywhere by spending 1 Focus and taking Disadvantage based on how far.
• Full auto weapons let you step down Harm to spray an area instead of attacking one person by depleting with Low Die instead of Mid (which puts the odds of draining ammo way up).
  • Some full auto weapons let you attack twice in a round, something that’s normally not allowed, with the second attack either auto-depleting or depleting with Low Die instead of Mid depending on the kind of weapon.
• Energy weapons (just the one nonlethal sonic one for now, don’t get too excited) let you use more diffuse or powerful shots by depleting with Low Die instead of Mid. They also don’t use Ballistic.

And finally, weapons that aren’t meant for “indoor” fighting typically ignore Resist/Invulnerable but have a 25-75% chance of poking a hole in the side of a ship or station if they roll low. This is a very clear risk with a high reward if you’re fighting things that expect to resist Ballistic. This way everything feels a little distinct.

One key thing here is that ranged weapon damage is decently high. Most of them that aren’t the weakest pistol you can get do Mid Die-ish, thereabouts. This is great for you if you’re the one firing and very bad for you if you’re the one being fired at, because enemies use the same weapons you do. This is where that dedicated outfit comes in: Resist Ballistic drastically cuts Harm (5 -> 3.5 -> 2 for high/mid/low average, so a little less than halved on average) and as such makes it more likely that Harm is going to ping off cover, reducing it further.

Speaking of…

Enemies #

Enemies (which is to say, entities you Do Combat against) are given player-like Health and Endurance. How much Health/Endurance is informed by how many Complications they have: 0-2 is Minion, 3-4 is Elite, 5+ is Prime. I provide some ideas for how to translate various blocking and consequential complications into combat bonuses; most of them translate like various Traits or are counted as equipment, but some of them (especially ones on Primes) are a little more nasty.³ So the more complications in a challenge, the more it translates to a nasty enemy.

• Minions have 4 Health, 0 Endurance.⁴
• Elites have 4 Health, 2 Endurance. This way they can get taken out by one good roll unless they pointedly have some kind of protection that grants Endurance/Health.
• In this case, “Prime” is closer to Elite than the Valiant Horizon (or even default Total//Effect) idea of it, as these aren’t like “bosses”, they’re just nastier fuckers than usual. They have Player Character durability (which is to say, 6 Health/4 Endurance) and take two turns per round. Generally that number of complications also means they have the good shit.

Remember that list of combatants I mentioned above? All of them get statblocks for this combat module as well as being kitted out as challenges, translated as per the guide provided into Minion, Elite, and Prime. So if you throw some of those NPCs in and decide retroactively that you want shit to hit the fan properly, you’re covered.

What next? #

Well, it’s out., but it does say “jam version” there. This is to say, it’s largely complete, but not entirely. So what makes it complete?

• First, obviously I want to finish layout. It’s serviceable enough but compare it to the basic rules and you can see the difference. I want it to look like that, if not better.
• I want to write at least two Jobs for it, one that expects the combat system to show up and one that doesn’t necessarily.
• A little more stuff. Non-human threats (i.e. security systems, animals, weird shit) are a big one: I mention them up top in the book and don’t really stat ’em out as such. I also want to add some considerations for the fact that if you’re getting in fights all the time, the game’s economics get tough fast; which is fine under base assumptions but it’d be good if a dedicated merc crew had options to mitigate that, like a medical contract that always takes a little off the top but always accounts for X Health restored per Job or something. I’m aiming for an eventual pagecount of the same as basic rules or a little lower (60-68 pages) so I’ve got the room, I think. We’ll see.

What else? #

Long-term, some places I want to take this:

• At some point I want to make a larger combat-Job or series-of-Jobs, like a corporate war that you get dropped into the middle of and can do mercenary work in and around. If you wanna commit to being mercs, this one’s for you, and so on.
• I came into this thinking I wanted full separability between supplements, and I think I do; but it’d also be cool to release little things that cross over supplements, like an Implants one that lets you add sick cybernetics to do both work or combat stuff (or both). I’d probably just make those digital-only and let anyone who has either supplement take a crack.

If any of this sounds like it appeals to you, get it here for $10 (for now, this number will go up when I finish it for real). NULL_SPACE physical copies are here.

Comments