This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 20, November 2025

Vesta Mandate is the sci-fi political thriller tabletop roleplaying game for one shots or long-term play with a group of 2-4 players. On Vesta Station, you play the conniving mastermind with a secret agenda that will either bring the station to its knees or uplift it to a new era.

Vesta Mandate is inspired by Powered by the Apocalypse games with mechanics and procedures added to turn the game into a competitive, political drama.

The game gives players everything they need to immerse themselves in the political realities of the station. Create a councilor in a hidden role game of secrets, hidden agendas, and complex political ideologies, and get right to the table with a comprehensive GM section and eight ready-to-play Crisis modules!

During a Crisis players make moves, improve their reputation, and investigate the problem plaguing the station.

Vesta Station stands between corporate oligarchy and total revolution. Corporate has smashed Earth into its own image: an authoritarian nightmare of endless subsidiary companies and ruined, flooded cities of failed nation states.

Vesta stands alone as a revolutionary project, an asteroid amid the inky black. In the canyon of Rheasilvia, the Council plots and backstabs, dreaming of the power to forge the unfinished nation into polished steel. Yet Corporate looms, ready to shatter the dream into molten slag.

YOU are the Council. The POWER is all yours. What will YOU do with it?

Reputation & Triggers

Video game RPGs were a major influence for how we thought about reputation in our game. From the first pitch documents that we wrote more than a year ago, bonds and reputation were a core element of play that we wanted to explore.

How can actions influence relationships over a session or campaign? How can we frame how they might affect a broader group of people? How can power and influence affect relationships and reputation?

Eventually this evolved from our initial ideas about reputation and relationships to merge with our shared love of political stories.

Both Ryan and I are big fans of political drama, especially in science fiction. Shows like “Babylon Five,” “Andor,” and “The Expanse” are big touchstones for us, and game series like Mass Effect and books like “A Memory Called Empire” have shaped our vision of Vesta Station.

These inspirations have also had a huge impact on how characters interact mechanically. Both in the ways players can meddle in each others business and how they engage with non-player characters.

You’ll find many of the Moves – bite-sized mechanical pieces that interconnect with the overarching narrative – structured around scheming, making deals and playing the political game.

One of the most impactful mechanics when it comes to NPCs is Reputation Triggers.

Let’s look at an example of a Reputation Trigger from the grumpy police chief Mr. Draper:

Mr. Draper, Head of Station Security.

Moustache, bald, grumbles frequently

[+1] Gifts or titles.

[-1] Question Draper’s competence.

The mechanic is simple as that. Give him a gift or title, gain Reputation. Question his competence, lose Reputation.

This event can only happen once and functions as a mini puzzle along with all the other mechanics. You can see a 1 to 1 connection with this system and the way that some CRPGs mechanize choices in games.

Secrets

In their first game of Vesta Mandate, players sit down with each other and create their characters. After everyone shares who their characters are, the players at the table create Secrets for each other.

The Secrets are like the missing piece of each politician’s backstory. What messes did they get involved with before? How did they climb the ladder and become so powerful?

Secrets aren’t just backstory, though. They’re mechanical as well. Vesta Mandate is a game that uses dice for resolution. At any time, a player can increase the success of their dice roll by invoking a Secret. It could be their own Secret or another Councilor’s blackmail.

We really wanted to emulate the tense, push-and-pull feeling of competitive, hidden role board games. When Secrets are revealed at the table, players collectively make the same “oh shit” face. Not only does it increase the success mechanically, it also pushes the story forward.

Now that everyone knows your once shiny, affable politician actually mulched a political rival in the space farm, how are they going to turn the story around?

Secrets can also be really subtle. Even without saying a Secret out loud, a player can hint at it in conversation with the air of “I know what you did.” It makes the game tense; every scene is a moment where everything can be revealed and go catastrophic.

Hidden Agendas & Faction Agendas

Just like Secrets, Hidden Agendas help flesh out characters, their motivations, and their backstory. While you and all the politicians around you might have aligned overarching goals, you’ll often still quibble over the specifics of how those goals should be achieved.

Hidden Agendas are a three-stage track of escalating goals that mark competition between players. These agendas will give each player diverging incentives that push them to quibble, scheme, compromise and work in the background to achieve their larger political machinations.

When players create characters, they work with the game master to decide on the first step of their Hidden Agendas. This is a written goal that drives play.

Sometimes it’s aligned with a character’s ideology, but other times it’s something driven by their identity or some other facet of their character.

Each player’s Agenda drives the actions they take from the background and helps motivate the ways in which they struggle for control of the station.

Players have multiple steps to their Hidden Agendas and as they complete the early steps, they get more extreme. What may start as a goal to consolidate power in their party or pass a major resolution can quickly become a power grab, shifting the very existence of the Station, or massively change their own position.

Vesta Mandate is available for purchase on itch.io, just in time for your next game night: https://storygameschicago.itch.io/vesta-mandate