I. The situation
The army was built to help us
Humanity met them by accident, and it became a friendship. They had no military, no doctrine, and no experience of anyone meaning them harm. When our war started on the other side of human space, they wanted to help.
So they built an army. Nobody on our side asked who it answered to, because nobody on theirs knew that was a question. It works perfectly. It is simply not doing what anybody intended.
You are the commander of an Earth destroyer, arriving in orbit above their desert homeworld months after all of that stopped being recoverable.
II. Your orders
Nobody sent you to save anyone
A ship was sent, once, when the first reports came in. One corvette — a gesture, because the front mattered more and there was nothing else to spare. It stopped answering.
You are here about the corvette. That is the whole of your mission, it is what your orders say, and it is what your executive officer will keep reminding you of. Everything else you do above this planet is a decision you made on your own authority.
You are not the first ship to try. The wreck of the last attempt is still down there, there are people alive in it, and you are not the only thing picking through it.
III. The Tesh
The surface is their basement
They live underneath. Their cities pierce the desert floor and rise out of it, and what you can see from orbit is the crown of something enormously larger below. Roads dive underground and surface somewhere else entirely. The road network is not a map, it is a knot.
They are low and wide and many-limbed, built for tunnels — which is the honest reason they have no soldiers. It was never timidity. They do not have the bodies for a war fought in the open, in their own streets, and they never needed them until now.
They liked learning from us, and they did. Every Tesh voice you will ever hear is somebody speaking a second language under pressure: effortful, over-formal, occasionally beautiful, occasionally wrong. Nobody ever learned theirs. The game never once points that out.
TESH · SECTOR LIAISONWe are still here. We are still here. Please continue to be coming.
IV. Voices, no faces
Silence is the loudest thing on the channel
You never leave the cockpit and you never leave the map, so you never see anybody. The whole story arrives as radio — your own crew, the survivors you pull out, the liaisons in each district who tell you what they can see from where they are.
Which means the story can be taken away from you. A liaison who stops answering has stopped answering for a reason, and there are a great many reasons. They have been overrun. They have been evacuated. They have been jammed. They are dead. They have decided they are finished with you and your apologies. The only way to find out which is to fly there and look.
TESH · DISTRICT 4The lights below the west crown are being off since two days. We are not knowing if this is people leaving or people hiding.
TESH · DISTRICT 9— no carrier —
The machines are the only thing on the planet with no channel at all. Every voice you hear is a person. They are a silence that shoots, and nothing in the game ever has to say so out loud.
V. A different opponent, every time
You are never told what it wants
The machine army is generated fresh for every campaign. What it is trying to achieve, the way that intention went wrong, how quickly it makes up its mind, how much it is willing to lose — all of it is rolled before you arrive, and none of it is ever stated.
So the campaign is a diagnosis. You are reading an opponent from what it does, and everything it does has more than one honest explanation. A sector that goes quiet is getting stronger, or has nothing left, or has decided you are not worth the ammunition. A machine army that pulls back and starts building orbital defences might be finished with the planet, or might be making sure Earth cannot interfere again. Both are good reasons. Neither tells you what it intends.
Some rolls are far harder than others, and nothing scales down to meet you. Recognising early that you cannot win this one, taking who you can carry and going home, is playing well.
VI. Two dice, one history
What happened to the ship, and what happened to its crew, are separate questions
The corvette's fate is rolled. So is the circumstance of the people who were aboard it. They are rolled independently, and the mismatch between the two answers is the story you have arrived into — a history nobody sat down and wrote.
- The ship is intact and the crew are not aboardSomething took them and left the hull. Why the hull?
- The ship is gone and the crew are scattered and aliveThey got out. Months ago. They have been down there ever since.
- The ship is down and the crew never left itThey have been holding a wreck since the winter.
You will learn those two things at different times, and possibly a very long way apart.
VII. The name
Exonerare
Ex-, off. Onus, burden. Literally, to unload. It is the root of exonerate, and the title means both at once: the thing you spend the game physically doing, and the thing the people who understand what happened here think humanity is owed a chance to do.
There is a ledger of what we owe this species. It is longer than anybody aboard your ship would like, and no line of it is your fault.