A new science fiction setting book for Savage Worlds
From Star Trek to Star Wars and everything in between, I’ve been a fan at one point or another (and still am in many cases). I started playing tabletop RPGs as a teenager, and most of them were sci-fi: Star Frontiers, Star Wars, Shatterzone, Star*Drive, and Babylon 5. Over the years, I ran games through high school, college, and beyond, and along the way I began creating my own material – aliens, space dragons, strange worlds, and half-formed ideas that sometimes found their way into rough sketches. I don’t claim to be an artist, but I’ve always enjoyed dabbling.
Now I find myself in my 50s with decades of notes, drawings, and concepts sitting on a website I’ve been maintaining since the mid-1990s. I kept it alive simply because I didn’t want all that creative effort to disappear. Maybe it isn’t perfect. Maybe it isn’t polished. But it mattered to me – and maybe someday it might inspire someone else. Even after personal websites fell out of fashion, this remained a quiet passion project.
Then came AI.
Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot gave me a way to revisit all that old material with fresh eyes. I started cleaning up the text. Then converting sketches. The results surprised me. Suddenly, ideas that had lived in notebooks for decades were becoming vivid again. That’s when something clicked – what if I brought everything together into a single, cohesive setting? With AI acting as a creative partner, I began refining lore, connecting factions, rebuilding races, and shaping a consistent universe. Most of the artwork comes directly from my original sketches or written descriptions – about ninety percent of the time, the AI nailed the look. The rest took iteration, tweaking, and sometimes a bit of Photoshop.
What you’re holding now is the result of that process.
Shattered Expanse is a compilation of decades of imagination, blending inspirations from Star Frontiers, Star Wars, Shatterzone, and Star*Drive, mixed with my own ideas and finally forged into something I can call uniquely mine.
Welcome to the Shattered Expanse.
