The Freeporters
The freelancers' own guild and hiring hall. Shared charts, mutual aid, and a bar that doubles as a contract board. In the game, the Freeporter board is where contracts are taken and packs are earned.
The universe
Tau Averni
Tau Averni is a sealed galaxy, and the corporations that build its ships run most of it. The Freeporters fly those ships for hire. Each pilot owns one ship and takes whatever contract pays.
Who flies
Rogues and hired guns
A Freeporter owns one ship and takes whatever work the board is paying for.
Most of that work comes from the corporations. A hired pilot costs less than a navy and asks fewer questions, so the board fills up with salvage runs, escorts, bounties and repossessions, plus cargo with no paperwork.
Plenty of those contracts send two pilots after the same wreck, or hire one pilot to stop another. Out past the Freeport, that gets settled ship to ship.
You can read a pilot by their ship. Two screens and one patient gun is a different pilot from three guns running hot, and everyone at the Freeport bar can tell them apart.
Hotwire
Light Ship — Interceptor—
Called Shot
Tactic
Attack with a ready light or medium weapon you control. That attack gets +1. Its Critical chance + this round.
AC-TAC-047 · U
ALPHA CARINAE · EN
© 2026 Hollowstar
ALPHA CARINAE · EN
© 2026 Hollowstar
Set 01
Alpha Carinae
A forgotten system on nobody's route, until a field of wreckage the size of a moon drifted into reach. Nobody can say what moved it. Every crew in range came to claim a piece, and there is not enough to go around.
The Syndicate
Unlicensed salvage, off-book parts, and the contracts the Authority will not stamp. Same trade, opposite side of a line everyone maintains and nobody respects.
Carina Salvage Authority
The corporate-backed skin over the boom. Issues salvage rights, takes its cut, and pretends it is in control. Under-resourced, over-stretched, bribable.
Most crews end up working for all three, and few will admit it. Every contract still goes up at the Freeport, a station bolted together from salvage, and the whole system hears who came back.
The makers
Manufacturers
Every frame and every system comes from a manufacturer, and each one builds to its own idea of what a ship is for.
Salvage frames
Driftworks
Salvage frames under stolen parts. Hazard stripes, mismatched plating, guns bolted wherever they fit.
Driftworks frames are light, quick and cheap to keep flying. The hardware is built to be pushed past what the label says, and it pays off for pilots who push it. Most of the hot rods parked at the Freeport started out in a Driftworks yard.
BuildsInterceptors and Lancers
LeansAssault and Maneuver
Names its shipsA hand-painted callsign. Hotwire, Hornet, Sundown.
Hotwire
Light Ship — Interceptor—
Thumper
Light Weapon System · Blaster
2
:Attack. You may add 1 heat counter to this weapon. If you do, its Critical chance + until the next Refresh.
Critical : +2
Torch Battery
Light Weapon System · Plasma
1
:Attack.
This weapon does not exhaust. Each attack after the first each round adds a heat counter to it.
Pilot records
People you may meet
Some of the pilots you will run into while taking on contracts. Their voices run through the cards, and a few of them post work of their own.
- Pilot record · 001
Orin Vask
- Ship
- Magpie
- Trade
- Salvager
- Board
- Posts contracts · flies contracts
Old hand, gallows humor, and the pilot every other pilot measures against. The voice in most of the logs.
- Pilot record · 002
"Sundown" Doss
- Ship
- Sundown
- Trade
- Courier
- Board
- No contracts on record
Cocky hotshot in the fastest Driftworks frame in the sector. Has never lost a race and says so.
- Pilot record · 003
Severin Cole
- Ship
- Long Account
- Trade
- Bounty hunter
- Board
- Posts contracts · flies contracts
Cold, patient, and in Carina for a person, not a payday. Takes Sable's exclusion-zone work when the money is right.
- Pilot record · 004
Mara Okonkwo
- Ship
- Understar
- Trade
- Smuggler
- Board
- Posts contracts · flies contracts
Charming, slippery, knows where everything is, and owes the Syndicate more than she says.
- Pilot record · 005
Aleksei Vor
- Ship
- No ship of record
- Trade
- Surveyor
- Board
- No contracts on record
Flew a Sable probe out to the exclusion zone and came back fine. Sleeps with his eyes open now.
Null Signature
Program
The host has Cloak.
"Sable sells the coating. Nobody sells the paperwork that says you can fly it."
AC-UPG-013 · U
ALPHA CARINAE · EN
© 2026 Hollowstar
ALPHA CARINAE · EN
© 2026 Hollowstar
Please Stand By
Tactic
Add a suppression counter to target enemy system.
Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold.
AC-TAC-032 · R
ALPHA CARINAE · EN
© 2026 Hollowstar
ALPHA CARINAE · EN
© 2026 Hollowstar
The name
The hollow star
The object the game is named for, and the biggest open question in Tau Averni.
For three centuries it sat in the charts as an ordinary black hole, cataloged as NRC-9. Then a close survey found a physical shell where physics allows only a singularity: a star-sized object with nothing inside it, returning "null" on every probe reading. Spacers call it the "hollow star."
It sits behind an exclusion marking. Ships that fly too close find their instruments lying and their crews losing time. It may contain new energies this galaxy has never seen, and that is why it cannot be ignored, and why Sable pays so well for contracts to gather more information about it.
Take a contract
The board is open
Choose a frame, fit the loadout, and take a contract.