Lancer RPG Core Book

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidethem as command imperatives to administrators, whothen work with local rulers and governments to find abest-fit integration based on local conditions.The administrators are vast in number, but a rare sight inmost of the Diaspora, as they usually deal directly withrulers or ruling councils. To the average Diasporan orCosmopolitan, administrators are enigmatic, dangerous,and appealing figures. They travel with NHP companions(typically embodied in a retinue of attendant subalternforms), help steer the course of civilizations, and areUnion; for most people, they are the manifest presence ofa ruler that is profoundly distant, if not entirely mythic. Theword of administrators seemingly supersedes the will ofkings, presidents, popes, and all the rest.Unlike most representatives of Union’s hegemony,administrators do not integrate with the societies inwhich they are embedded. They are meant to bevisible – to be easily identifiable markers of Union’sauthority. However they express their gender, alladministrators wear the same uniform: a clean suit indark Union Gray, their rank as administrator denotedby a silver pip on the collar. Their NHP-piloted subal‐terns adopt a similar matte gray livery. This visibility isprofitable for Union, save for those cases in whichrecognition of an administrator’s role would jeop‐ardize their life or mission. Of course, these cases arerare – attacking an administrator is a sure way to drawUnion's punitive attention.Administrators are pulled from all over the galaxyaccording to esoteric, exacting criteria. They aretypically chosen as children and trained from an earlyage alongside a unique NHP – one built specifically topair with them. This training takes place at satellitecampuses scattered across the galaxy, but over thedecades of their apprenticeship, all administratorsspend some time on Cradle – an experience meant tobe an acute reminder of humanity’s origins.Upon graduation and notification of posting, adminis‐trators choose names local to the cultures in which theywill be embedded. Since they must engage in interstellartravel, their old identities are declared dead, formallyretired as part of the graduation ceremony.Together with their subaltern NHPs, newly mintedadministrators head out into the galaxy to givecounsel, file reports back to the UAD, and ensure theirhost state develops according to the missives theyreceive from Cradle.UNION IN 5016U[351]FORECAST/GALSIMUIB: UNIONINTELLIGENCEBUREAUUBO/NTM: UNIONBUREAU OFORBITAL AND NONTERRESTRIALMANAGEMENTBCA: BUREAU OFCOLONIALADMINISTRATIONOCUP: OFFICE OFCARTOGRAPHYAND UNIVERSALPOSITIONINGOIT: OFFICE OFINTERSTELLARTRANSPORTATIONUOB: UNIONOMNINETWORKBUREAUUEB: UNIONECONOMICBUREAU

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideUNION NAVAL DEPARTMENTUNThe Union Naval Department (colloquially shortenedto UN, for Union Navy) is the largest and mostpowerful fighting force in the populated galaxy – atleast on paper. It is subordinate to CentComm,although it takes strategic and logistic direction fromGALSIM as well.Union’s navy is a sprawling, carefully administeredorganization that projects Cradle's power to allcorners of the populated galaxy and beyond. It doesthis with a (relatively) small corps of Union-flaggedcapital and supercapital ships, supported by vastfleets of standardized, integrated auxiliary shipsdrawn from the navies of Union’s subject states.Beyond the comparatively few ships it directlycommands, the UN is an administrative and diplo‐matic body that shares a healthy institutional rivalrywith the Union Administrative Department: while theUAD relies on administrators to accomplish its diplo‐matic goals, the UN relies on a corps of naval liaisonsto accomplish its logistical objectives. Naval liaisonsare officers of equivalent rank to administrators, withspecial imperative authority in times of crisis. Unless itis demanded by their local culture, administratorsdon’t carry weapons; naval liaisons, on the otherhand, carry sidearms and wear uniforms of NavalBlack, clearly marking them as part of Union’s military.Liaisons are only sent to states that are capable ofbuilding or adapting ships to UN specifications andclassifications. They guide these states in production,training, and the theory of naval combat, with the goal ofestablishing a well-trained auxiliary naval corps. Oncethis is complete, the UN further integrates that corpsinto its command structure, offering interstellarcontracts to crews and corps seeking to progressfurther in rank. Those who remain are assigned to antipiracy, peacekeeping, and police actions in their localsystem.Administrators tend to view liaisons as impositions ontheir diplomatic mission – bureaucrats who come inafter the hard work is done and demand a militarytithe from the administrator’s host state. Liaisons tendto view administrators as overly precious, possessivebureaucrats with an inflated sense of worth.UNION DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICEAND HUMAN RIGHTSDOJ/HR, OR THE NEW DIVISIONThe Union Department of Justice and Human Rightsis a department new to Union as of the founding ofThirdComm, cobbling together a mix of responsibil‐ities, jurisdictions, and obligations under a single,broad mission: identify areas of the galaxy where theUtopian Pillars are under threat of being violated, andintervene on a case-by-case basis. Among itspersonnel, the DoJ/HR is referred to as the NewDivision – a dual reference to the general youth of itspersonnel and its (relatively) short history as a depart‐ment.The New Division’s mission leads to an understand‐ably broad portfolio that encompasses everythingfrom first contact with isolated cultures to criticalhumanitarian response, direct action intervention,truth and justice hearings, and universe reconstruc‐tion. This work demands a type of person common inthe Galactic Core but not often found in other depart‐ments: young people eager for rapid action – policy,legal, or literal. Within Union’s other departments, fewmatch the fervor with which the staff of the DoJ/HRapproach their work; conversely, few – if any – ofUnion’s other departments can match the DoJ/HR’sburnout rate.Burnout is a fact of the job at the DoJ/HR. The NewDivision is the terminus for the galaxy’s sins: every humanrights violation, every distress call, every cry for help findsits way, eventually, to the DoJ/HR. To counteract thisburnout, frontline personnel and caseworkers are oftensurprised with “delivery days”, unexpected deliveriesfrom their commanding officers that contain collectedreports from successfully resolved cases and personalmessages from people their efforts have directly or indir‐ectly helped.The DoJ/HR’s mission is put into practice through arich symbiotic relationship with Union’s administrativeand naval departments. Using access to the broadbase of intelligence and human assets provided bythe UAD and the UN – as well as its own caseworkers– the New Division identifies two types of missions:critical assistance and universe-building.Critical assistance missions (CAMs) take place whenimpending or ongoing violation events necessitaterapid, direct action to intervene and prevent furtherhuman cost. These warrant the intervention of one ofthe DoJ/HR’s liberator teams (LTs), institutionalizedsuccessors to ThirdComm’s early Interstellar Solid‐arity Brigades. For most New Division personnel,CAMs are “where the action is at” – that is, they areviolent confrontations with slavers3, despots, tyrants,[352]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideand so on. LTs are commonly composed of Metropol‐itan volunteers working in tandem with localsympathetic factions. Their missions call for rapidmovement, adogmatic warfare, and long-termdeployment; not only do they intervene, but theyremain following the conclusion of hostilities, helpingto transition liberated communities into stable politicalentities appropriate for the local culture.The DoJ/HR’s LTs are tight-knit, professional strikeand-support units. They employ a liberation-focusedapproach: once targets are identified, force is valuedover diplomacy, and their prime objective is to eman‐cipate and enfranchise enslaved peoples at theexpense of their masters. Their tactical doctrinesemphasize either infiltration and agitation or directconfrontation, depending on the situation.Universe-building missions (UBMs) require a lessimmediate response. A common joke among LTs isthat anything that doesn’t involve a mass grave quali‐fies as a UBM. They’re not wrong, though such anassessment isn’t always accurate. UBMs typicallytake place in response to Pillar violations that are“soft”, though no less criminal: exploitation, denial ofbasic services, totalitarian or fascistic drift, and so on.UBMs involve slow intervention on the part of DoJ/HRcaseworkers, local experts, and so on.Because the DoJ/HR’s portfolio straddles thepurviews of both the UN and the UAD, many NewDivision operations involve resources from both of theother departments. In such cases, the New Divisionhas the power to deputize naval and administrativepersonnel, vessels, and materiel.UNION SCIENCE BUREAUUSBThe Union Science Bureau is the central adminis‐trative body for universities, colleges, scientificinstitutions, and think tanks throughout Union space.Ostensibly an apolitical entity, the USB works outsideand parallel to CentComm’s chain of command,though it is subject to some oversight fromCentComm and GALSIM.The most common site of interaction between the publicand the USB is its exhausting list of colleges, universities,and public schools – however, it is most commonlyrepresented in media in the form of the far-field team(FFT) – popularly called “rangers”. Flying their iconicRanger-class nearlight ships, FFTs are small parties ofscientists and support staff responsible for venturing tonever-before-seen worlds, exploring uncanny or anom‐alous interstellar phenomena, and all manner of otherfieldwork involved in scouting new worlds.FFTs are made up of romantics, wanderers, andloners, alongside passionate scientists, technicians,philosophers, and engineers of all disciplines. Theirmissions are dangerous, often requiring long-termstasis and relativistic travel into unexplored systemsnot connected to the blink network – the datareturned is invaluable, more than worth the risk.Although the popularity of rangers in romanticizedomninet dramas drives USB recruitment, they makeup a minority of USB personnel. The vast majority ofUSB staff are employed in terrestrial and orbitaleducation centers, laboratories, and fabrication sitesas researchers, engineers, designers, and techni‐cians. The accessibility and secrecy of theseinstitutions vary: most operate in the public eye, withdoors wide open; by contrast, the campuses wherethe most secret and sensitive work takes place arehidden or otherwise inaccessible to those withoutclearance.UNION IN 5016U[353]3Although slavery is now strictly prohibitedunder ThirdComm, it was once endorsedwith special exception by SecComm, whichviewed flash and facsimile clones as propertyrather than people. In addition to a number ofother grievances that triggered ThirdComm’srevolution, the abolishment of SecComm’sendorsement of chattel and economic bondagewas one of the revolutionaries’ primary demands.The DoJ/HR oversees all active and ongoingemancipation missions. Before its founding, theDoJ/HR’s predecessors, the Interstellar SolidarityBrigades, developed a holistic liberation-to-inte‐gration program meant not only to liberateenslaved peoples, but to settle them, enfranchisethem, address wealth redistribution, and supportthem throughout the recovery process. Nowformally codified, legally supported, andbolstered by ongoing review by ThirdComm, theDoJ/HR’s liberator teams boast a near perfectsuccess rate in emancipatory actions.

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideUNION ECONOMIC BUREAUUEBThe Union Economic Bureau tracks and adjusts thevalue of manna, evaluates consumer goods, and hassome jurisdiction over omninet and blink networkaffairs. It also plays a significant role in dealing withand legitimizing galactic-standard manufacturers andcorpro-states For example, several advisory positionson the board of GMS are held ex-officio by UEBrepresentatives, giving the bureau a say in its stra‐tegic direction and, as a direct consequence, a say indetermining the galactic standards and codes.More broadly, too, the UEB is responsible for regu‐lating and contracting with corpro-states. Lesserknown is its secondary, clandestine mission to gatherintelligence on the galaxy’s largest corpro-states,suppliers, and fabricators.Starting as a minor department under FirstComm, theUEB grew exponentially under SecComm – eventuallyspearheading the implementation of manna and char‐tering the first official corpro-states, recognizing theirsovereignty over land and product. The UEB’sincreasing consolidation of power is a point of friction forCentComm; as ThirdComm’s rule has grown moreassured over the centuries, and the first and secondwaves of post-revolution representatives have beenreplaced by new members, newer members havepushed to liberalize some of Union’s components. Thevehicle for this liberalization is the UEB, despite thegrowing number of high-level UEB personnel whoespouse policies sympathetic to, and in some casesaligned entirely with Anthrochauvinist revival ideologies.UNION OMNINETWORK BUREAUUOBThe Union Omninetwork Bureau oversees construc‐tion, logistics, maintenance, and policy concerningthe omninet, omni-connected devices, and mediacarried on the omninet. It works with a mandate toensure that the omninet is spread across the galaxy –free, convenient, and accessible.UNION BUREAU OF COLONIALADMINISTRATIONBCAThe Bureau of Colonial Administration is responsiblefor granting and maintaining colonial licenses as wellas overseeing a range of other territorial matters. Itsets colonial priority zones, manages private charterlicensing, and is the first court for colonial disputes.The BCA was once a subordinate office of the UnionColonial Mission (UCM), before ThirdComm broke theUCM into three different entities: the DoJ/HR, the UAD,and the BCA. Accordingly, the size of the bureau hasincreased while its mission scope has narrowed tomanaging new colonial charters, private and public.With the increasing largesse granted to the UEB and thecorpro-states it oversees, the BCA has become theprimary body for granting colonial charters and self-de‐termination rights to corpro-flagged colonial missions.In contrast to the UAD, the BCA maintains a portfolioof worlds that have no native or indigenous sapientpopulations; in cases of recontact, BCA flags theworld for review by the UAD and DoJ/HR, then issuesa blanket moratorium on colonial charters, assumingthe indigenous human population has first, total, andperpetual rights to their world.UNION BUREAU OF ORBITAL ANDNON-TERRESTRIAL MANAGEMENTUBO/NTMThe Union Bureau of Orbital and Non-TerrestrialManagement specializes in the management of nonterrestrial habitats and all relevant legislation. As part ofthis mission, it manages security and aide services onall non-terrestrial stations, including blink gates. TheUBO/NTM is also the primary court for disputesconcerning non-terrestrial natural or artificial habitatsand stations in interstellar or non-local space.The UBO/NTM has two subordinate bodies: theOffice of Interstellar Transportation (OIT) and theOffice of Cartography and Universal Positioning(OCUP).OIT is responsible for managing, planning, and main‐taining the entirety of the blink network, installation ofblink gates, and structuring safe passage codes for blinktravel. It also sets and certifies safety standards forships seeking interstellar licenses, and is the primarycourt for any cases involving temporal complexities –such as those concerning subjective/real age and death– and interstellar shipping disputes.OCUP is responsible for surveying and mapping visiblespace, maintaining specific records on stellar influencezones, updating and revising local-space sovereigntycodes, mapping stellar phenomena, and myriad othertasks related to the making of maps and charts.[354]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideOFF-BOOK ENTITIESThe two organizations listed here, while official appa‐ratuses of Union, are considered top secret bureaus.They are included here to provide rich narrative terri‐tory, but the likelihood that your players wouldencounter them or have knowledge of them isexceedingly low. These bureaus are secrets of thehighest order –– public discovery of their existencewould be a crisis on an unprecedented scale.FORECAST/GALSIMGALSIMForecast/GALSIM (typically abbreviated to GALSIM) isone of Union’s off-book bureaus, responsible for over‐seeing the Oracle Chorus installation on Mars’s MareBoreum. The entire bureau is contained to this facility,which is staffed by a city’s worth of personnel. At theheart of the Oracle Chorus installation is a deliberativebody that guides Union’s grand strategy and growth inpursuit of its mission to ensure humanity’s long-termsurvival: the Five Voices. The Voices are five sovereignclass bicameral minds, unique NHPs held in a metafoldblinkspace pocket beneath the surface of Mars:Command, Muse, Impetus, Burden, and Watcher.Together, the Five Voices act in concert – as acongress, in teams, and as individuals – to run iter‐ative, near-perfect forecasts of the galaxy at intervalswith the intention of advising Union in the manage‐ment of galactic affairs.In many ways, GALSIM is more akin to a monasticorder than a branch of government. Its esotericmission necessitates a certain dogmatic approach.Owing to the absolute necessity of keeping GALSIM adeeply buried secret, the staff and personnel of theOracle Chorus facility generally serve for life; uponretiring their service, they live at a nearby satellitecampus. Even retired personnel often assist withinterpretation when requested, instruct new staff, andwork on divergent or anomalous iteratives.Advancement through the ranks at GALSIM – andrecruitment of new staff – is based on favor andaffinity with the Five Voices; empathic connection withone or more of the Voices dictates assignment, trans‐lation priority, and iterative liberty.The existence of GALSIM, along with that of itsvarious subordinate bodies, is top secret: classified toall except for approved members of CentComm andthe directors of the USB, UAD, UN, and Union Intelli‐gence Bureau (UIB), and their immediate staff. As aresult of the need for secrecy, GALSIM’s facilities arekept decidedly low-tech to prevent external hackingand network invasion attempts – not that its existenceis known by potentially hostile or interested parties.UNION INTELLIGENCE BUREAUUIBThe Union Intelligence Bureau (UIB) is Union’sdeniable asset and dark operations group: a broadportfolio, clandestine intelligence division that keepstabs on entities, states, phenomena, organizations,and movements that GALSIM determines torepresent major existential threats to humanity.CentComm only has an advisory-oversight role tothe UIB; ultimate decision-making falls first toGALSIM, then to the UIB itself.Officially, the UIB does not exist; even CentComm isnot privileged to know how it staffs itself, nor the fullextent of its missions.UNION IN 5016U[355]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideWHY WE (STILL) FIGHTAs you read about Union and its history, you likelynoticed some hedging in the language we’ve used toexplain core concepts, conceits, and realities: “usually”,“most”, “often”, “almost”, and so on. This hedgingmarks the gaps in the young golden age, the placeswhere the galaxy doesn’t conform to Union’s UtopianPillars – either through ignorance or outright rejection.In 5016u, humanity is still plagued by war and oppres‐sion at the fringes of Core space. No matter how hardUnion and its proxies work, ThirdComm’s mission is atitanic undertaking. To lift all of humanity into a postcapital, post-scarcity golden age is a project that isalways practiced, never complete – even the wildestof gardens must be maintained if it is to be a garden.The consequences of the wars that founded Union, tosay nothing of the revolution that founded the ThirdCommittee, continue to ripple out from Cradle; timeand distance both make the project one perpetually inthe process of implementation.This does not mean Union’s project is without end,that iterative, non-linear progress is not worthwhile orthat contradictory actions on the part of Union and itsproxies undo all such progress; it simply means thatthere is always work to be done. For Union, utopia isnot a static state. It is a status that is held, main‐tained, and improved upon – always. Owing in largepart to the vacuum left in the expansion, retreat, andeventual toppling of SecComm, the diaspora ofhumanity has developed divergent from Union's influ‐ence for nearly five hundred years – an expectedconsequence of ThirdComm’s revolution.The seeds of this divergence were planted duringSecComm’s millennia-long campaign of culturalassimilation, territorial expansion, and attempts toorganize humanity under a single banner. TheDiaspora inherited its dominant ideological touch‐stones from this project, along with the aggressivemotivations of capital, colonization, and conquest.While some of the last states created by this expan‐sion period organized under ThirdComm’s early draftsof the Utopian Pillars, most Diasporan states couldnot shake the compelling power afforded by their localforms of Second Committee ideology. Anthrochau‐vinism, it turned out, was broadly popular if peoplewere not presented with, educated according to, andlifted up by less reactionary ideologies: the SecondCommittee had no interest in such education, as itsprimary concern was building a united humanity intheir image, not simply a united humanity.In the present day, Diasporan states exhibit a widerange of governing bodies and organizational ideolo‐gies. At the most progressive end of the spectrum,the process of integrating into ThirdComm’s Union isa copacetic one defined by translation, diplomacy,and shared understanding. For these states, Union’sarrival is greeted with celebration, and integration intothe whole of humanity is a welcome event – a broad‐ening of horizons beyond what had once beenthought to be the limits of human potential.In some cases, integration is unwelcome. This iswhen – as a last resort – conflict occurs. Whenresistant or outright hostile states respond to Union’srepresentatives with direct violence (or respond viol‐ently to internal indigenous states or factions that arereceptive to Union), only then does Union initiate anescalating, proportional program of direct action.To the moderates and left-of-center interventionists inCentComm, direct military intervention againstDiasporan states is considered off the table until allother options have been exhausted. Broad militarycampaigns – actions in which the navy and auxiliariesare called into action, as opposed to emancipatoryactions taken by liberation teams – are seldomwelcomed with celebration; rather, activation of theseforces indicates multiple dramatic diplomatic failures,usually with consequences for the bureaucratsinvolved in the breakdown.EXTRA-UNION CONFLICTSMore common than Union interventions are planetaryor system-local conflicts between Diasporan statesand, increasingly, conflicts involving corpro-states –the latter of which either sees corpro-states pittedagainst each other, or corpro-states and their privatearmies facing off against nation-states.Conflicts between rival Diasporan states are oftenwell underway by the time Union (or an organizationacting on its behalf) makes first contact. These canrange from civil conflicts to multi-state wars isolatedto single worlds, to interplanetary conflicts – rare, butnot unheard of. Whatever their scale, these conflictsare generally motivated by ideology, but can involveresource or territory disputes as well.For conflicts involving corpro-states and Diasporanstates, the animating events almost always involveresources or land. The rise of corpro-states and otherdestabilizing actors has intensified competition overthe rare elements needed to fabricate the fantastictechnologies upon which humanity now relies. Some[356]VIOLENCE IN LANCER

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidecorpro-states hire mercenaries to accompany theirclaims teams on these ventures, while others rely ontheir own standing armies.Conflicts pitting corpro-states against each othertend to be skirmishes – small, clandestine engage‐ments over important persons, locations, andfacilities that take place between small teams ofhighly trained agents and expensive mercenaries;larger engagements are usually the result of labororganizing and local revolutions against (typically) offworld corpro-states.Corpro-states occasionally move beyond industrialespionage to engage in armed conflicts with eachother. These clashes normally begin when an attemptto acquire a world spills out of control and theyusually end with outright warfare across and abovethe disputed world as the various parties attempt tosecure their holdings.Any of the conflicts discussed here may demand theuse of mechs. These are the places lancers are likelyto find themselves when their commanders issuedeployment orders.PIRACYPiracy remains outlawed by ThirdComm, as it has beensince Union’s creation. The act of piracy is defined as apredatory assault on individuals or groups, with theintention of sowing terror, abducting people, and/orstealing goods. This generally occurs outside of Corespace, and as one of two primary types of piracy:privateering, which is unlicensed or otherwisegrayspace mercenary work sponsored by state or nonstate entities that targets flagged opposition or civilianships, stations, and/or populations; and wolfpackpiracy – assault, robbery, and abduction performed bygroups of stateless or counter-state actors.Following ThirdComm’s restructuring of the UnionNavy, Union has depended on constituent states foractive and immediate defense of targeted ships andstations. Union’s main concern isn’t the act of piracyitself, but addressing the foundational concerns thatdraw people to it: underlying economic conditions inthe Diaspora that force resource scarcity, and theideological and political factors that would pushgroups towards piracy in the first place.Acts of piracy usually occur in two places: interstellarshipping lanes, where pirates know nearlight ships,freighters, and yachts will pass by on their way to orfrom local blink gates; and in low-to-medium orbitaround distal worlds, where shuttles and corvettescan be caught as they transport goods and peoplefrom the surface to waiting ships or stations.Raids in interstellar shipping lanes are risky, as thelocation and time of potential attacks are known to allparties. Far from the protection afforded by orbitaldebris, asteroid fields, satellites, and high-orbit traffic,these pirates rely on a more advanced suite ofsystems, sensors, technical packages, and tactics.Interdiction of a nearlight ship bound to or from ablink gate means meeting it at like speed – thus,pirates engaging in interstellar raids typicallycommand vessels far more advanced than thoseused by orbital pirates. These high-speed actionsrequire significant investment in navigation suites andpersonnel, as well as the ability to spoof, misdirect, orotherwise confound the nearlight/sublight proximityand active sensors of potential targets. In addition topower output and navigational systems sufficient tomatch their targets, pirates attempting interdictionstypically mount weapons that emphasize accuracyand precision – their payout is only worthwhile if thegoods, vessels, or people they’re attempting to stealare intact and functional, or could be made so withminimal repairs.Engagements happen fast and with little warning. Themil-spec technologies used to spoof signals,misdirect sensors, and conceal ships easily over‐whelm the sensors of civilian and merchant ships.Often, the first warning a ship receives of animpending attack is when its impact sensor – asimple, dedicated system – issues a proximity orlikely-trajectory alert.This alert usually signifies incoming fire, targetingsensitive locations: drives, life-support subsystems,crew quarters, and weapon magazines or batteries.This first volley almost always uses precisionweapons designed to pierce bulkheads and fragmenton contact with O2 – soft-target killers, reliant onshrapnel and combustion – or massive systemicattacks meant to cripple ships or take priority admin‐istrative control.Once a target has been disabled or its speed matched– preventing the need for dangerous maneuvers whileapproaching light speed – then the attackers assumedirect control, physically or electronically.Interstellar piracy is the domain of dangerous, dedic‐ated professionals, often Cosmopolitans with navalbackgrounds and access to a wealth of experienceand technology gathered over long years of piracy.Interstellar pirates are rare, given the experience andtech required for interstellar travel and piracy. Onaccount of their constant exposure to the effects ofrelativistic and gravitational time dilation, they oftenattain a legendary status among their hunters,victims, and fans.VIOLENCE IN LANCER[357]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideOrbital and local-system piracy is decidedly moreregional – generally the domain of local pirates, resist‐ance groups looking to disrupt their targets’ supplylines, or well-funded criminal organizations seeking todiversify their portfolios and gain notoriety.While interstellar piracy is elegant, expensive, storied,and rare, orbital piracy is messy, low-tech, and farmore common. Orbital pirates rarely utilize subline orcapital ships in their engagements, preferring themaneuverability, atmospheric capabilities, anonymity,and disposability of shuttles, corvettes, and lightfreighters. The name of the game for orbital and localsystem pirates is to strike fast, grab what is valuable,and escape, either to a planetside safehouse or to anearby moon or station where they can hide.Orbital piracy often begins as a ground-to-orbitengagement: powerful mobile antennae blast atarget with bombard code and whiteout attacks.These attacks overwhelm sensors, comms, andnavigation suites with overwhelming, single-usesystem spikes – systemic weapons developed byblack-hat coders, designed for simple, limited use –to cover the pirates’ advance.Formerly mothballed fighters, converted freighters,armed and armored shuttles, and myriad other shipsfollow the whiteout attack, firing in kill-cloud, mass-helix,or other common ballistic patterns. These attack wingsfeature a ramshackle mix of reusable fighters and shortrange transports – crash taxis, tin cans, party busses,trojans, and so on – jury-rigged to deliver squads ofsubalterns, mechs, or organic marines. These singleuse transports are often little more than debris shieldsmounted on frontal racks – armature structures thatsecure their passengers with magnetic clamps, straps,or handholds. Fired from larger ships or self-propelled,these vessels crash into targets and engage their solidstate boosters, throwing their victims off course andpreventing disengagement. Durability over multipleengagements is not a priority: if successful, the pirateswill use their haul to buy new scrapper ships, or convertcaptured vessels for use in the next raid – after they’vebeen stripped for parts, of course.Current examples of infamous pirates include dedi‐cated revolutionary groups like the Ungratefuls, theOwn Hands –– liberated Diasporans who hauntConstellar space and act as a thorn in the side of SSC–– and the Golden Plague, a notorious pirate fleet ledby the Mei Ling, a former scientist-turned-pirate lord.Union’s code of stellar conduct demands any ship mustrespond upon receiving an SOS hail or face legal penal‐ties for shirking the legal duty to attempt to rescuesurvivors. After initial responses, follow-up typically fallsto proximal, spaceflight-capable states or Union entities.Including pirates in your campaign can be a fruitfulway to introduce regional politics or a compellingvillain (or anti-hero). Moreover, they make for straight‐forward random encounters, persistent threats, orfoils for the players and their group. See the PIRATEtemplate on page 330 for some special systems andabilities pirate NPCs might use.SPACE COMBATSpace combats involving whole fleets are incrediblyrare, as the sheer scale of industry and organizationneeded to field proper fleets is only found among ahandful of states and entities. When it does happen, itis elegant at a distance and brutal up close.Against the stark black of deep space, long silhou‐ettes drift in tightening gyres, maneuvering to dodgetorpedoes and kinetic kill-clouds tens of thousands ofkilometers distant. Energy beams streak across thevoid, invisible to the naked eye and shimmering onlywhere they impact their targets.To an observer, this combat between fleets-of-the-lineis silent, sterile. Long capital ships appear to spinthousands of kilometers apart, closing slowly as theirorbits align. Clouds of glittering metal, chaff, and slagbloom into the darkness, catching the light of distantstars. The blue torches of torpedoes trace silent,fading lines in the night, escorted by teardrop fightersand targeted debris.But for those engaged, there is no elegance, nograce. There is just the long, persistent terror ofspace combat.Days before crews can even see their opponents onraw optics, the first torpedoes, kill-clouds, spoofers,shrouds, and subaltern kinetics have already beenlaunched. The moment sensors pick up a distant foe,pilots, officers, and crew members are roused fromstasis and ordered to begin preparations. Massive,single-use kinetic and energy weapons begin theiracceleration cycles, spooling up for their perfect shots.At that point, the flagship’s NHP executive officercomes online, paired with the commanding officer butgiven free rein to partition and duplicate themselvesinto subsentient subjectivities to better advise andcoordinate all of their ship’s systems. Tacticalcommand for the fleet is given to the flagship NHP,while strategic and kill command remain the purviewof individual commanding officers.The NHPs for each ship in the fleet, carrier group,battlegroup, or patrol construct a virtual war room – afleet legion – networking into a hybrid one/many-mindto ensure total integration over the battlespace. All[358]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideVIOLENCE IN LANCER[359]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidecommanding officers are party to the information andrecommendations that issue from the fleet legion, andtactical feeds are distributed to subordinates on aneed-to-know basis in accordance with their rank andtactical/strategic role.The first commands issued after the initial volleyconcern maneuvers and ship systems: avoidincoming fire, communicate with allied ships, beginclosing the unpredictability gap. Finally, all hands areordered to prepare for combat. Crewmembers hustleto don null-atmosphere equipment, lock into theirbattle stations, push combat stims, cycle all loaders,and link to the fleet’s legion.Along flight decks and inside carrier blisters, alarmshowl as pilots and technicians hurry to finish pre-flightchecks and procedures. The techs load ordinanceand payloads onto fighters and bombers while pilotsand crews prep systems, uploading the latest tele‐metry data, battle reports, flight plans, and obstaclereports. If there are mech chassis and marinesaboard, they hurry to their landers.Then, commanders and their NHPs scramble fighters,bombers, and landers. Corvettes and gunboats,destroyers and cruisers – subline ships – begin attackruns. Frigates, battleships, tender ships, and carriershold their lines and continue both systemic andkinetic countermeasures, protecting the larger shipsfrom any projectile or vessel that gets close.At this point, the kill zone between the two fleets hasbeen established: the shortest distance betweenthem, which is also the area of highest projectile andlance density. The smaller batteries on the kilometerslong capital ships begin to fire. Meanwhile, their spinalguns charge.Fighters fly as escorts tasked with defending landers,corvettes, bombers, and gunboats from other fighterwings, torpedo flights, and subline ships. They chartflight paths through the kill-clouds and anti-shipweapons, crossing the shrinking no-man’s-land toharass enemy capital ships and force them to dealwith threats at all ranges. When the first fighterslaunch, it will take them roughly a day to cross noman’s-land.Bombers and subline ships aim to engage capitalships at a close enough range that their targets can’tmaneuver to avoid their payloads. These ships arerelatively small and agile targets, deceptivelydangerous units that present a very real threat to anycapital ships that let them get too close.Landers, crowded with marines and mechs, have adangerous mission: crash into enemy ships, disem‐bark, and capture or disable them from the inside.Most soldiers involved in boarding actions will seedirect combat; many of them won’t come back,assuming their unit comes back at all.By now, the fleets are engaged and combat continues ina shrinking window. The unpredictability gap – the timeduring which NHPs and pilots can still outmaneuvertheir opponents – shrinks faster and faster.Ship-to-ship combat increases in intensity as theships of the line circle toward each other. Close Midand close-range “dumb” kinetic cloud weapons openup, hurling thousands of projectiles in the direction ofpredicted enemy headings. Some short-cyclebatteries open fire at this point. Their beams carveterrible lines of invisible energy through the black,scattering off the projected shielding and ablativearmor of larger ships, and detonating smaller shipswithout sufficient defenses.Meanwhile, systemic weapons pound away at fleetlegions and the systems of individual ships inattempts to gain a tactical advantage. Spoof probesand shrouds, launched early in the engagement,activate, at last, pinging enemy sensors and commsarrays with hostile code and creating false signals todistract weapons and pilots, trick nervouscommanders into early nearlight ejections, and drawenemy fire toward empty space. Subaltern kineticsinform their master systems of final trajectories andplunge toward their targets, triggering their payloadson impact or in proximity.Legions face each other down; NHPs engaging inelectronic warfare with weapons esoteric and incom‐prehensible to human observers, hurling ontologicaland anti-solipsistic paradox weapons back and forthon a plane of battle removed from human experience.Finally, at a range too close for evasive maneuvers,long-cycle batteries open up, hurling tremendous,demi-solar particle lances or many-gigaton kinetics attheir targets. To survive a hit from a long-cycle battery,the commanders of capital ships must begin carefullybalancing their power budget, shifting betweenangled shielding and weapon power. Somecommanders forego heavy shielding at this point, as asquare hit from any long-cycle weapon is likely toignore it anyway.[360]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideThis is the battle’s climax – the moment when theunpredictability gap closes. Due to the tremendouspower needed to fire a capital ship’s spinal cannons,each ship of the line is likely to have one chance onlyto hit their target. Cooling and recharging a ship’smain guns – kinetic or energy – simply takes too muchtime. The commanders of these ships know this, andhold on to their single shot as long as they can: theymust hit and must score a clean impact, or they’ll beexposed to an enemy that has all the time in the worldto take the killing blow.At the same time, fighters and subline ships continueto buzz in angry swarms, locked in bitter wingcombat with their enemy counterparts. Marines andmechs fight wage grinding CQB and melee battles,compartment-to-compartment, deck-to-deck, asthey struggle to take control of the ships on whichthey’ve landed on. Kill-cloud kinetics and point-de‐fense weapons pepper the flanks of great capitalships, tearing away superficial armors, blisters, anddistal chambers. Here and there along the line,batteries score direct hits, and the battlespace isflooded with the brilliant micronovae of a capitalship’s cataclysmic death. In legionspace, NHPs tearat their opponents’ fundamental senses of being – abattle somehow more terrible than that occurring insubjective space.Eventually, the battle ends when one side retreats oris eliminated.Most ships of the line have a nearlight ejection drivecapable of at least 0.9 c. At the start of the battle,conservative, nervous, or cautious captains mightbegin to spool this system up so that it’s hot and readyto fire in an emergency. When triggered – at the orderof an NHP, or automatically within certain parameters –the ejection drive suddenly shunts its ship .9 c, hurlingit along a planned (or randomized) escape route. Thisexpeditious retreat is dangerous, taxing both systemsand personnel, but it’s better than death.The remains of the battle are left to the victors. Anysurvivors are rounded up and prisoners dealt with.Ships that have been scuttled or captured areboarded by skeleton crews and pointed towardfriendly shipyards, where they can be repurposed;capital ships are simply too large to be printed.Reports are relayed back to central command. NHPsdrop out of legionspace, unlinking and winding downto their non-combat parameters. Objectives areassessed and adjusted, and fleets either continuetheir campaigns, retire, or steam for friendly shipyardsin search of repairs and replacements.Thus, space combat has two forms: from a distance,silence; up close, the combat of titans and the indi‐viduals caught in the middle. Fleet engagements costthousands of lives. When fought near inhabitedworlds, moons, or stations, the cost can rise expo‐nentially. Civilian casualties number in the millions;should Core worlds be engaged, the human cost cansurpass billions. Less conventional tactics – such asaccelerating asteroids and comets into planets – canprove more costly still.Large-scale fleet combat of any type is (relatively) rareand terrible. It represents the breakdown of a wholesector, as systemic powers bring their considerableproductive and logistical capacity to bear againsteach other in quarrels over worlds and ideologies.The result is never cheap.Smaller-scale fleet combat tends to involve warringstates that share one world, or a world and its moon,and usually takes place in low orbit. Fleets ferryingground troops from one continent to another orescorting intercontinental and interstellar missilesalong their flight paths are perfect opportunities tostrike. The fleets involved in these battles are gener‐ally made up of subline ships, corvettes, mountedmechs, and wings of fighters and bombers. It’s rarefor capital ships to engage in fleet-to-fleet combat inlow orbit unless they are supporting an invasion andstriking ground targets.VIOLENCE IN LANCER[361]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideARMED FORCESAcross the Diaspora and in the interstitial voids wherethe Cosmopolita transit the stars – in the shadow ofthe Utopian Pillars – war rears its bloody head.Violence between expansive, all-consuming corprostates, between despots and revolutionaries,between states, fills earthen graves and casts bodiesinto the cold black tomb of space.MECHANIZED CHASSISThe cultural and battlefield dominance of mechanizedchassis can be attributed to two factors: rapid humanexpansion into space, and the conflicts that stemmedfrom that expansion.For 3000 years, Union expanded and colonized spacewithout the benefits of the blink network or theomninet, neither of which were created until after theDeimos Event. Drones and uncrewed interstellarvehicles scouted on hundred-year increments – firedtoward distant targets, followed 100 years after arrivalby nearlight ships that were yet to be built, far-fieldteams yet to be born.During the First Expansion Period, the First Commit‐tee’s expansionist imperative demanded thathumanity spread out among the stars. Old coloniesand installations were waiting, ready to be reactiv‐ated. Union marked the growth of the Diaspora asboth a point of civilizational pride and a necessarystep for the survival of the species.[362]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideOf course, humans aren’t built to survive hostileworlds and hard vacuums. Ships and stations did afine job of protecting people from vacuum, radiation,and the terrors of both deep space and dangerousatmospheres, but it was not enough to simply fly overplanets – they needed to be claimed.Recognizing this problem, Union’s astrocartographersand far-field directors issued a call for a standardizedsuit able to support medium-term livability that couldbe used for tactical, scientific, and civilian purposes inspace and on alien worlds. Universally compatible,powered, hardened against the elements, andcomfortable to wear, this hardsuit soon became anindispensable piece of hardware for anyone leavingthe bounds of Cradle.The first hardsuits were adaptable, featuring flourishesand specializations unique to their manufacturers andusers. Early far-field teams wore larger suits with morerobust equipment, some equipped with weapons tofight off hostile native flora and fauna; colonists firstadopted hardsuits as emergency equipment in case ofdamage to their sealed habitats, then for traveling andexploring beyond those same habitats; meanwhile,spacers wore slimmer suits with more robust seals,sometimes living in them for days on end while theypiloted their great ships on long voyages betweenworlds.The hardsuit found military applications, too. Somecompanies and Union foundries began to add platedarmor to their suits, weave ballistic knits into them,and integrate technologies that enabled soldiers tomanipulate smart weaponry.On worlds where tracked or wheeled vehicles provedinappropriate, larger hardsuits were built, capable ofhauling cargo that would have otherwise required trans‐port trucks. In these suits, pilots occupied a cockpit, notjust the suit itself, and extensive training was required toensure they could operate it professionally. These heavysuits operated in tandem with other heavy suits andwere often accompanied by drone flights.The first mechanized chassis was born from thiscombination of exploratory drive and the need forprotection. It took a catalytic moment of interstellarpolitics and ideological conflict to catapult the mech‐anized chassis from a useful (if plodding) civilianplatform to a deadly military instrument; that flash‐point presented itself on Hercynia, a jungle world indistal space, around 4500u. It was on Hercynia thatUnion exploratory forces first employed the mechan‐ized chassis – a model designed and built on RasShamra, the planet that soon became the homeworldof Harrison Armory – in organized, mass combatagainst hostile local forces.The conflict that took place on Hercynia promptedintense research and development into combat-cap‐able and effective mechanized chassis. They becamea viable, all-round option for combat in all theatersand environments: on hard terrain, in zero-g, and inany other transitional spaces, a piloted mechanizedchassis – a mech – could outperform and outman‐euver any other land-based attack option.Integrated into existing force-multiplication doctrines,mechanized chassis adopted a cavalry role –scouting, dismounted combat, and hammer-to-anvilshock warfare. Their flexibility was valued bycommanders frustrated at tracked vehicles’ vulnerab‐ility to terrain. Despite the simplicity and lower profileof tracked armor, mechanized chassis became apriority order for ground forces deploying acrossDiasporan worlds.Not only did mechanized chassis represent a tacticalbreakthrough, but their quasi-humanoid shape wasan undeniable psychological asset. This led to thedevelopment of weaponry that was tactically imprac‐tical (to begin with), but a boon to morale: swords,axes, lances, and so on.Union doctrine quickly offered countless variations onhow best to employ mechanized chassis in combat.After centuries of revision, the Auxiliary Handbook onChassis Combat now describes a narrower selectionof roles – the most viable, almost all of which takeadvantage of chassis’ multi-role versatility andcomparative alacrity, and emphasize the force-mul‐tiplying opportunities offered by pairing pilots withintegrated NHPs.Some cultural critics point out that the reason for thepopularity of mechanized chassis is likely far lesstechnical: we made them the most powerful fightingmachines that could stride across the earth, and wemade them look like us.OTHER GROUND ANDSUBORBITAL FORCESInfantry, tanks, groundcars, light vehicles, trucks, andother military units all still exist and are far morecommon than mechs. Mechs are used much in thesame way that cavalry was used in ancient combat:rapid, armored shock troops, expensive to recruit,train, and maintain.Infantry makes up the bulk of any army and, ulti‐mately, is the only way that territory can be claimedand held; not everyone can become a pilot, but allthat’s needed to fight is a cause. Infantry is also farless expensive and more expendable than mechs andtheir pilots. Further, although printers are relativelyVIOLENCE IN LANCER[363]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideubiquitous, not every organization has the licenses,resources, or time to maintain a printer large enoughfor fabricating mechanized chassis.Most soldiers from developed worlds are professionalfighters serving a term of service, either volunteers orthose observing compulsory state requirements (e.g.,a mandatory or lottery-based service period, etc).These soldiers undergo lengthy basic physical andmental training meant to condition them as temporarymembers of the military class, followed by a shorterperiod of specialized training, before being posted toa base, unit, or patrol.On the battlefield, these typical soldiers will be outfittedwith a primary weapon, possibly a sidearm, spareammunition (if they use conventional ballistic weapons),gear appropriate to their specialization, a uniform, andbasic personal armor. They will have been assigned to aunit of similarly outfitted soldiers, given a rank, and givena directive – punishable in some way – to obey theirsuperiors and all other superiors. Some soldiers mightcarry more specialized equipment commensurate withtheir specialist training – shaped charges, long-rangeomnihooks, heavier weapons, drone swarms and theircontrol units, CQB or area-denial weapons, and so on.Variations on this galactic-standard professionalsoldier exist. Some worlds are more developed, andothers are less; similarly, some invest in their milit‐aries, and others spend their resources elsewhere.Highly militarized societies might simply have moresoldiers and better equipment; alternatively, they mightenforce conscription, have a caste system, or somehoworder their society around martial orders. Note that“more militarized” does not necessarily equate to ahigher level of technological advancement: it would beperfectly possible to encounter a society utterly devotedto a military hierarchy, the soldiers of which proudlypolish steel pikes and have never encountered blackpowder, much less a mechanized chassis.Also, note that – like any kind of technology – militarytechnology is not necessarily uniform across a society.Some states may have a limited number of legacymechs, won hundreds of years before in a trade with apassing Cosmopolitan ship, despite having a localindustry capable of supporting nothing more than blackpowder muskets. Others might have left rangedweapons by the wayside in favor of shimmering bladesand mirrored shields, sending riders into battle onhovering skiffs above massed formations of pikemen.In short, although mechs are the focus of Lancer, infantrystill forms the backbone of almost every organized army inthe galaxy. Expect to encounter them.ORBITAL, STELLAR, ANDINTERSTELLAR FORCESStates and other entities capable of fielding orbital,stellar, and interstellar forces tend to be the largest orbest-funded states and entities in the galaxy: Union,vast corpro-states, nations or federations thatcommand worlds, and so on. The standard stellarcombat platform is the subline ship, a broad classifica‐tion encompassing any ship built to operate in micro/null-gravity and hard vacuums. The smallest pilotedsubline ships can be operated by a single person; thelargest can be crewed by a dozen people. The grada‐tions and classifications inside the category aremanifold. Capital ships, meanwhile, generally run large,with crews and gross weight ranging from the size of alarge subliner to vessels that are kilometers long, withcrews of thousands and missions that stretch for years.There are two stellar combat doctrines: orbitalsupport and interstellar force projection.On orbital support missions, ships take on support,blockade, and logistics roles, augmenting groundforces by providing transport, aide, intelligence, andforce multiplication. Ship-to-ship combat in orbitalscenarios is quick and usually limited in scale – aflight of subline fighters arcing up from a planet’ssurface to strike at a carrier parked just beyond theatmosphere, a wing of corvettes appearing frombehind the moon to attack a flotilla of troop landers asthey angle for entry. These engagements are long andattritional, often necessitating supply lines leadingback to other planets or stations; this requirementprompts the second stellar combat doctrine: inter‐stellar force projection.Interstellar engagements are mobile and primarilyinvolve ship-to-ship combat with the intention ofdisrupting enemy supply lines, shutting down trans‐port corridors, or otherwise countering opposingforces away from population centers. This is thedomain of naval commanders and their NHP fleetlegions, where capital ships play protracted, firstblood-wins games of hide and seek across hundredsof thousands of kilometers of open space. Combat inthe void between worlds typically produces binaryresults: as even minor damage can lead to hardvacuum, the losing side loses hard.The weapons used in interstellar combat are some ofthe largest conventional arms in Lancer. They arerarely turned against a planet’s surface unless thewielder is more interested in causing widespread,wanton destruction than in securing a tactical victory.[364]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideA NOTE ON CONFLICT INLANCER’S NARRATIVE PRESENTTHE GOOD WARThe Third Committee straddles the line between aviolent, imperial past and a violent, unwritten future.While its capital worlds are secure, the edges of Corespace are frayed and stained with blood. Union hashad five hundred years to rectify the crimes of theprevious committee – and it has made incredibleprogress – but to the Sanjak in the Baronies, theMadrassan in the Dawnline Shore, or any otherpeoples whose worlds ring with cannon fire, Third‐Comm’s utopian promise seems all the more distantfor having been realized.As the members of the CentComm look to their mapsand charts, they see a galaxy boiling with crises. Theprojections hanging above their chambers reveal theshadow looming behind the Utopian Pillars: a war onmany fronts against what remains of SecComm,threats from beyond Union space, hostile paracausalentities, and belligerent corpro-states.Mass state and political violence was a constantphenomenon under SecComm – often at the direction ofSecComm itself, an imperial power in practice if not inname. But in SecComm’s collapse and replacement by anew generation, the fighting has taken on the kind offervor that makes CentComm moderates start mutteringabout control and order. Undeniably, the appearance ofviolence and collateral danger has increased significantly,but in reality, the actual number of violent conflicts – andthe absolute, flattening drive that motivates them – hasdecreased. However, the seeming increase in the stakesof wars in the Diaspora is precisely what it seems to be:although there have been fewer wars under ThirdComm,their stakes are higher.What roils galaxy now is the shattering of a singularcolonial project. No longer is mass violence perpetuatedby a unified imperial power as it was five hundred yearsago – the wars of 5016u are fought by its liberatedsubjects, scrapping for sovereignty. The brushfire warsof the Diaspora are no longer the natural outcomes of anexpansionist, dominating imperial project; the singlefront has been shattered into a thousand, each conflict awar for self-determination against a local empire ratherthan a distant one. Meanwhile, the SecComm’s newchildren – the corpro-states, with Harrison Armory in thevanguard – move to consume more and more, motiv‐ated by the power manna grants them. They have begunto challenge even Union at the fringes, even as they relyon the hegemon for legitimacy – and they appear to bewinning.Taken together, the shifting patterns of violence andthe rising stakes have coalesced into a permeatingbackground hum, a whisper through the halls ofpower on Cradle, on Karrakis, on Ras Shamra, in theConstellar Congress, and every other throne: awhisper that something is coming. Some epochalchange or accumulation of changes: the Good War, aconflict to dictate the end of this age and the begin‐ning of the next. ThirdComm's task, agreed inprinciple though not necessarily in specifics, is toavoid this future, but failing that, to navigate thebloodshed, to end it, and to ensure no one lives in theshadow of utopia.Your character exists at this moment, the instant justbefore the moment. They will not bring it about orprevent it on their own, but however history goes,they will be present for it.VIOLENCE IN LANCER[365]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideIn 5016u, the galaxy is, for the most part, postscarcity – that is, resources are not only plentiful butaccessible at little-to-no cost for most people in theGalactic Core. Out among the Diasporan worlds,scarcity exists, but it is not evenly distributed. SomeDiasporan worlds are nearly equivalent to Core worldsin terms of development and their adoption of theUtopian Pillars, while others still cling to markets,economies, and artificial scarcity.METROPOLITAN AND DIASPORANWORLDSThe Metropolitan worlds of the Galactic Core are fant‐astically wealthy (in the pre-utopian sense), rich withtechnology and cultural capital, and enjoy easyaccess to blink gates and Union resources. Theircitizens, generally speaking, want for nothing: they’reafforded a base level of housing, education, health‐care, and food, all localized to their state, with readyaccess to the galaxy’s wealth of data, goods, media,literature, etc.The concepts of wealth and capital are abstract on Coreworlds, as currency and its generation tend to bereplaced by a generalized requisition capacity. Unlessone needs to venture off a Core world, any given Metro‐politan would likely have no concept of currencyexchange for goods and services. Labor is largely auto‐mated on Core worlds unless it is undertaken asideological pursuit or by holistic motivation, curiousexploration, or myriad other motivating reasons. Metro‐politans of the Core worlds aren’t idle; they simply don’tneed to worry about wages, capital, and the vagaries ofthe market, as Union ensures all needs are met.Core worlds are varied in appearance and level ofurbanization. What matters is not the scale of devel‐opment on the world, but the degree to which theworld can adhere to Union’s Utopian Pillars. Inpractice, this requirement tends to necessitate somelevel of significant global urban development – mostCore worlds have at least one significant globalcapital metro area – but it’s not a blanket truth. Theworlds of the Galactic Core achieve their status onthe basis of two broad criteria, evaluated andapproved by stakeholding Union bureaus:FREE MOVEMENTAre there limitations on movement and thedistribution of populations? Put another way,can the people of the world petitioning for Corestatus actually travel freely across it? Are therereliable and ready methods for getting people toand from orbit? Free movement is the basis ofone of the Utopian Pillars: “No walls shall standbetween worlds”.While the whole planet doesnot need to be blanketed with metroswathes orotherwise occupied and fruitful, the capacity toachieve this indicates that a world might besuitable for integration into the Galactic Core.IDEOLOGICAL COMPATIBILITYDoes the world whose culture(s) and state(s)seeks Core status have a demonstrated historyof compatibility with the Utopian Pillars and abody capable of ensuring their implementation,whether its a central government, unipolaradministrative body, decentralized consensus,or other consensus-finding entity?A Diasporan world, meanwhile, is any settled world,moons, or satellite that lacks Core status. In theseplaces, life can be more difficult, and populations maywant for food, medicine, and other necessities. Thedesignation of “Diasporan” encompasses everythingfrom initial, small-team colonies through to built-upworlds with populations in the millions.POST-SCARCITYIn practice, “post-scarcity” means that PCs on Coreworlds will have access to most (unrestricted)consumer goods and not want for raw and necessarymaterials. Specialized items might require certainlicenses that can be obtained through trade, clear‐ance, or qualifications (i.e., as rewards from the GM),but even these are readily available once approval hasbeen granted or secured. Any unrestricted items soordered can be reliably obtained at the time they arerequisitioned, or within a day or two at most.On Diasporan worlds, the degree of scarcity dependson levels of development and access to resources,and can be subject to shortages, resource-hoarding,and so on. PCs can access necessary goods (unlessthere is a shortage, rationing, etc.) and raw materialsare widely available. Specialized items might be diffi‐cult to obtain for any number of reasons: they’relimited in number, kept under lock and key by thecolonial governor; they’re in the hold of a downedship on the other side of the world; there are only somany remaining until the last supply ship arrives; andso on. The people of Diasporan worlds tend to expectsome sort of currency in exchange for goods,services, and labor.[366]ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideMANNAUnion is not motivated by the desire or institutionalmomentum to accrue currency and capital, andneither are the Metropolitan peoples of the Coreworlds. The society Union has built is structuredaround galvanizing missions, personal pursuits, and adeep cultural belief in solidarity, democratic progress,and mutual aid – its closest analog is a kind of partici‐patory planning forecast. For these reasons, thefunction of economies on Core worlds are not predi‐cated upon the ups and downs of a market economymodel. In fact, the word “economy” is only under‐stood as a historical, antiquated concept, only to beused when interacting with Diasporan worlds.The average Metropolitan views individual capitalownership and the exchange of currency for goods asrelics of an unsustainable past – relics that plungedhumanity into thousands of years of self-inflicteddarkness, violence, and misery. Such that property isa concept, there is of course personal property; butprivate property – that is, ownership that generatesprofit – is alien to your average Metropolitan.Regardless, Union recognizes that not all of its clientstates have yet become post-capital societies. In theinterest of fostering fair galactic trade and buildingshared consciousness – rather than violentlysuppressing monetization – Union recognized earlythe need for a standardized galactic currency: manna.To create manna, Union uses complex treaties andclient-facing economic structures to extract anabstracted unit of value from its subject states. Data,raw materials, human potential – tens of thousands offactors go into the creation of a single omni-digitalunit of manna. Specific oversight of the creation, flow,amount, value of mana and many other considera‐tions falls to the UEB – the Union Economic Bureau.In simple terms, the exchange rate of manna isrelative to the currency for which it is beingexchanged. Wealthy, advanced worlds are rich inmanna as a result of their massive output, the rawhuman potential of their populations, and many otherfactors. Small colonies also benefit from manna’sformulas: their projected development, access to rawmaterials, and so on all contribute to beneficialexchange value.Cosmopolitans trade in manna, as do states and anyother entities that engage in trade between solarsystems. Since most people are still bound to theirhomeworlds (or stations, moons, etc.), the vast bulkof humanity still uses local currencies, only encoun‐tering manna if they do business off-world (or withparties located off-world).COLONIESUnion does not run a state-backed colonizationprogram, but does provide resources for Metropoli‐tans to embark upon legal, well-provisioned missionsand partnerships. In the Diaspora, the specifics ofcolonization differ from world to world, but in generalterms, most ventures follow a similar pattern.First, a group forms a colonial venture: a temporaryassociation that pools manna and licenses to petitionthe owner of the destination system for a colonycharter. In most cases, this is Union, as few otherstates have the resources to survey and flag habitableworlds. Not all of those involved in the colonialventure will themselves become colonists.Once the colonial venture has secured a charter, itsmembers lobby local (or intergalactic, dependingon proximity) colony-construction firms for thesupplies, infrastructure, and materiel that they can’tsupply themselves. Colony-construction firms offertiered packages in exchange for a cut of the poten‐tial colony’s raw resource output. These packagestypically feature an administrative NHP, a geneticvariance library, a license for a basic printer, and acolony ship packed with prefabricated habitationpods, heavy drones, medical benches, pan-biomeseed libraries, and other necessary colonial infra‐structure.Once all resources are secured, the colony shiplaunches. These ships can be anywhere fromhundreds of meters to a kilometer in length, with thevast majority of that space devoted to prefabricatedsupplies. Its crew will be the first settlers of the newcolony world: a small team of engineers, scientists,and specialists numbering in the dozens.With assistance from the colony’s NHP administratorand its attendant drones and subalterns, the colonistsmake planetfall and begin the long work of estab‐lishing a colony footprint. In the meantime, thecolony’s first native-born generation is incubated,birthed, tended, and raised by the NHP and assignednatal and educational carers.Fifteen to twenty years after landfall, the first genera‐tion reaches population-viable levels (usually in thethousands, though occasionally larger) and selectmembers of the original landfall team take formalcontrol of the colony’s development from the NHPadministrator. The new generation begins working toimprove the colony and explore their world,expanding the colony footprint and beginning workon new sites.ECONOMY AND SOCIETY[367]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guide [368]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideConcurrently, an additional first generation (“generation1.5”) is grown from separate reserve genetic material.This population comes of age a year or two at mostfrom the first, providing some genetic variance andfurther establishing a stable, viable population.Assuming all variables remain nominal, the colonialsettlement is considered at this point to be securelyestablished. Further development occurs organically.RECONTACTOne consequence of Union’s multiple periods ofexpansion and dramatic contraction is that thousandsof settled-then-abandoned Diasporan worlds nowhave self-sustaining indigenous populations, theoldest of which have cultural histories that go backmillennia. It is only with the rise of the ThirdCommittee that Union has reconsidered its approachto these worlds and how it responds when legallyrecognized title-holders seek redress for claims andconflicts from thousands of realtime years in the past.Prior to the discovery of blinkspace, all interstellartravel was made under the causal constraints andlimitations of relativity, gravity, time, and distance.Under Union’s First Committee, the charters for habit‐able worlds were sold once their viability had beendetermined by probe and telescope surveys. Next, acolonial venture would launch a generation ornearlight ship to physically claim the designatedworld. At the time of launch, the populations sent toclaim these worlds were not legally recognized as anindigenous population of that world: only those thatactually set foot on a planet and established a viablecolony would be recognized as such.Eventually, advances in machine-mind technologypre-Deimos led to the replacement of generationships with automated, surrogate-enabled seed ships.Given the temporal complications of relativistic travel,the significant differences between the older genera‐tion ships and newer seed ships often led to conflict.This was a common phenomenon during the ascend‐ancy of the Second Committee.For the older ships, the generation that would reachtheir destination was not the same one that firstembarked on the journey. Often, hundreds or eventhousands of years had passed in both realtime andsubjective time as the ship crossed the stars, andshipboard cultures had shaped themselves aroundtheir travel and their distant, presumed homeland.These pre-landfall generations, while not native totheir destinations, had profound cultural ties to them,developed over successive generations of pilgrims.They considered themselves indigenous to theirpromised world.While these first waves of generation ships wereburning for distant stars, research and developmentinto “nearlight” drives progressed, and much fastercolony ships were developed. Often, the first shipsthat set out were not the first to arrive.Fully automated nearlight ships, lacking organiccrews and carrying surrogate machine minds tomanage neonatal and postnatal development uponarrival, could travel without the burden imposed bysustaining crew and passenger life for the duration ofthe journey4. With the addition of faster drives andmore advanced navigation technologies, seed shipsrapidly outstripped their predecessors, bolting toidentified worlds and establishing colonies before theearlier ships could reach their destinations.When the generation ships finally arrived, their passen‐gers often encountered established colonial states,hundreds of years old, with systems in place to greetand naturalize the newcomers. Of course, this wasgenerally not within the cultural narratives that hadgrown in transit, leading to many instances of conflictand bitter political friction. The second-sent nearlightships had landed and produced generations of nativeborn colonists without the cultural history of voyage; inthe minds of the newcomers, Union’s impatience wastantamount to the theft of their promised land.While no novel instances of this phenomenon havebeen encountered under the Third Committee, Unionnow faces a host of legitimate grievances filed byindigenous cultures ignored by the SecondCommittee, and just as many petitions for redressfrom the holders of colonial charters.To address this, DoJ/HR and BCA run a joint court.This court handles all complaints and petitions bylandfall (and post-landfall) generations and colonialcharter holders alike, and is empowered to endow therights of first peoples upon populations following theconclusion of cases.The body of precedent and standards for determiningwho holds the claim of indigenous sovereignty over agiven world is relatively new. Under the SecondCommittee, primacy was given to those able to take andmaintain power – typically those who controlled chartersand title, not the actual landfall generations who had firstbeen promised the world. Not so under the Third.ECONOMY AND SOCIETY[369]4Many of these seed ships were built andlaunched pre-Deimos. Modern versions haveabandoned their machine mind cores in favorof specialized comp/con units paired with a stableNHP imprint. Of course, regular check-ups areneeded, and a small team of engineers is cycled asa necessary failsafe during the journey.

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideIf players want their characters to have this kind ofbackground, it’s possible that their homeworld is inthe middle of an ongoing trial. If that is the case, beaware that, though it will take time, the case will bedecided one way or the other. Time dilation may meanthat characters return to a world that has, at long last,been returned to them – or one that has been stolen.STATIONSLarger stations in stable locations or in orbit arounduninhabitable worlds usually operate independently ofterrestrial governments, acting as their own stateswith their own territories and areas of influence.Stations exist because they were built for a purpose:mining, gas extraction, or to provide a platform for drydocks, shipyards, research, and so on. Their popula‐tions largely work to support the station’s mission orthe people who do. Civilian stations usually havepermanent populations, with the largest numbering inthe tens of millions. Military stations are smaller,without permanent populations born and raisedaboard.Blink gates are special cases – although they existbeyond Cradle’s actual state boundaries, they areintegral to Union’s galactic hegemony. As such, eachblink gate is managed by a Union-appointedgovernor, policed by Union security forces, andadministered by Union personnel. Because blinkgates exist to ferry ships between worlds, theirstations tend to have very diverse populations: eachone likely has something that someone from a Coreworld (or an advanced Diasporan world) would recog‐nize as a flavor, sound, or comfort of home.TRAVELNot everyone owns a ship, knows how to fly, or holdsthe right licenses to get around. But PCs need totravel in order to get to where they need to be. Whilemost methods of conveyance are easily accessible toa person of modest means in the Diaspora, withoutthe resources of a state or large, well-funded entity,individuals likely have to invest a significant amount ofcapital in order to acquire – or even rent – a shipcapable of interstellar transit.Fortunately, if one operates under the auspices of astate or similar entity, they’ll have some kind of trans‐portation afforded to them. This tends to be atemporary convenience: a transport or tender shipthat drops them off where they need to be, a billetaboard a passing capital ship, or similar.There are three types of travel that might come up in agame of Lancer: global, local-space, and inter‐stellar.GLOBALWhether terrestrial, aquatic, or atmospheric, globaltravel is that which takes place on a single world.Terrestrial travel can involve trains, caravans,convoys, landships, long marches, cars, etc. Aquatictravel might take place above or below the water, onships or submarines. Atmospheric travel utilizeseverything from airplanes, to airships, low-orbitvehicles, and liminal, fixed means of transport likespace elevators and skyhooks.LOCAL-SPACEAny travel that takes place between high atmosphereand a blink gate is local-space travel. Ships of allsizes and classifications move through this zone,following shuttle routes between worlds, makingsupply runs out to local colonies and settlements, andengaging in every other form of transit and business.Some spaceships are designed to operate withinplanetary gravity wells and are able to handle bothatmospheric flight and movement in a hard vacuum.These ships tend to have a low gross weight –fighters, bombers, and some smaller corvettes fit intothis category of atmosphere-rated ships (althoughcorvettes usually need some form of assisted takeoffto break atmosphere and orbit). Capital ships can’thandle atmospheric flight, though should one finditself falling, it could burn hard for lateral movementas it plummets to a catastrophic end.[370]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideINTERSTELLARInterstellar travel is common for certain classes ofpeople: military personnel, diplomats, explorers,merchants, Union personnel, colonists, migrants,scientists, and a variety of other wanderers. Manypeople have reason to travel between the stars, butthe necessary equipment is difficult to obtain. Gener‐ally speaking, travelers with direct access to thisequipment are rare – military personnel on deploy‐ment, Union officials, representatives of corporations,universities, or patrons, and those who are simplyfantastically wealthy. Other travelers are limited topublic blinkships, which travel from one blink stationto another according to predefined routes.Although blinkspace travel is not the only form ofinterstellar travel, it is the one most people know.Other methods include nearlight bolts and old-fash‐ioned spaceflight.BLINK TRAVELFor most passengers, travel through blinkspace ishard to distinguish from normal spaceflight. The shipmoves at a comfortable g-force, passengers can walkaround in plain clothes (if the ship is large enough andpressurized), eat, drink, sleep, exercise, and so on. Ifthey look out through a porthole, they will perceiveblinkspace itself as blindness. That said, blink traveltakes only a moment; most people who have trans‐ited the blink don’t perceive it at all.Early test pilots described blinkspace as a void – aspace outside of human perception that is at onceblank and cacophonous, infinite and without form.The NHPs that accompanied those first pilots havesince been retired, their handlers citing recursiveontological tail-chasing and paracausal obsession;since then, NHP protocols have been updated toinclude sense-exposure doctrines, allowing them todo as organic pilots do and simply accept theunreality of blinkspace without cascade.Prolonged exposure to blinkspace is possible andevidenced to be sustainable in rare cases, though theprecise processes and long-term effects are thus farunknown.NORMAL SPACEFLIGHTConventional realspace travel makes up the over‐whelming bulk of day-to-day transit in the galaxy.Most ships rated for long-haul interstellar travel runroutes between blink gates, ideally accruing no morethan one to ten years of realtime debt (anywhere froma few months to a year in subjective time) during theirjourney. Longer journeys are sometimes required forjourneys to especially distant worlds and sectors,military deployments, long-range expeditions, newsector surveys, and new colony ventures.During realspace travel – in the course of a normalacceleration or deceleration pattern – passengers canwalk, talk, eat, and drink, and do anything else theycould do on a world with anywhere between .1 and1 g. Gravity might get a little uncomfortable at peakspeed (if that speed is higher than what passengersare used to), and always pulls in the opposite direc‐tion of travel: “Behind” is always “down”.NEARLIGHT BOLTA nearlight bolt (called a “nearlight ejection” incombat and emergency scenarios) is a sudden, oftentraumatic acceleration to .900 or .995 c. Whenprepared for a bolt, passengers are usually strappedinto pressurized crash couches, medicated appropri‐ately, and secured. Without these precautions, thereis a very real and significant chance of pulverizationas the ship suddenly, violently moves.Nearlight bolts are uncomfortable but are often anecessary form of travel for military, government, andemergency response personnel, undertaken whenone doesn’t have the luxury of time for a slow,comfortable acceleration. Nearlight ejection is not acommon way to get around: it’s an emergency accel‐eration that serves to disengage from a situation thatwould otherwise be deadly.A nearlight bolt is dangerous when you’re preparedand deadly when you’re not. Ships equipped toperform bolts are equipped with crash couches thatgenerate opposing bursts of contained artificialgravity in order to counteract the g-forces that wouldotherwise crush their crews.ECONOMY AND SOCIETY[371]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideTIME, SPACE, AND HOW TOTRAVEL THROUGH BOTHTime, in Lancer, is a rare thing: an exhaustiblecommodity. For Metropolitans, Diasporans, andCosmopolitans alike, time is the one resource thathas a true limit. When time runs out, you can neverfind more; but even if the rules of time can’t bebroken, they are ways that they can be bent.After all, there are two types of time: subjective timeand Union Realtime, or, realtime. Subjective time istime as an individual experiences it, whereas realtimeis time as it passes and is recorded by Union onCradle. While the passage of subjective time and itsravages are inevitable, there are ways people canextend their presence in realtime.The most notable of these is the temporal stretching –called time dilation – that takes place as a result of theincredible speeds achieved in nearlight space travel. Asan interstellar traveler approaches lightspeed (abbrevi‐ated as c) – time begins to pass at a radically different ratefor them than it does for those left behind. Both thetraveler and an observer back home experience thepassage of time as “normal” from their own perspectives,but a realtime difference can be recorded: because thetraveler and the observer are moving through space atdifferent velocities, the traveler's synchronization torealtime – their frame of reference – begins to slip. Bothparties perceive the passage of time as “normal”, but thecloser the traveler gets to the speed of light, the more thetraveler will find – if and when they return home – that theyhave rapidly advanced forward in time.Most nearlight interstellar ships travel around .995 c,which translates to a rough 1:10 time ratio – that is tosay, for every subjective year spent in transit at .995 c,roughly ten years pass in realtime. This is how onebends time. This is how Cosmopolitans find themselvesseparated from the “normal” stream of Metropolitan andDiasporan time and history: as they travel between thestars and the blink gates that connect them, Cosmopol‐itans accrue the debts at that 1:10 ratio – a debtcollected when they slow from nearlight, slipping oncemore into the envelope of realtime.Cosmopolitans winding down from nearlight travelemerge into realtime to find that nations they oncecalled home have crumbled, or become unrecognizable.They might find that decades of cultural change haverendered them functionally illiterate, or that the youngchildren they left behind are now grandparents, “older”in realtime than them. And the opposite fate is possible:Cosmopolitans might return to find tyrants toppled,environments healed, fortunes raised from modestinvestments made before departure, or curesdiscovered for previously incurable diseases.Blink travel shortens this steep cost, but it still exists:it takes time to transit from a port of origin to asystem-local blink gate, then from the exit blink gateto the intended destination. Without blinkspace andits gates, humanity would be reliant on conventionalcausality for traveling across the vast distances ofinterstellar space. Instead of sacrificing ten, twenty, orthirty realtime years for a journey, it would be one,two, or three thousand, and without any kind of longterm stasis to preserve them or facilities and suppliesto accommodate successive crew generations, crewswould die of old age aboard their ships5.INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL IN PLAYIn the canon setting of Lancer, time dilation exists.When characters embark on an interstellar journey inLancer, they will need to take into account the timethat it will cost them. By exposing themselves to timedilation, they will necessarily catapult themselves intothe future – a future they may not want to live inwithout the familiar comforts of friends and family, notto mention the states, cultures, and environmentsthey have come to know. We feel this is important toconsider when telling stories in Lancer’s setting: by itsnature, interstellar travel has a cost, and one group ofheroes is not likely to change the course of thegalaxy; the difficulties of interstellar travel demandcollective action to effect galaxy-wide change.However (to back down from the soapbox), inter‐stellar travel can be either a narrative-definingconsideration or nothing important, depending onplayer character backgrounds, attachments, and thestory within which they find themselves. If yourplayers travel with a mercenary company, campfollowers in tow, then time dilation may be of no greatconcern – their friends and families can easily travelwith them. But if they travel alone, their families leftbehind, it is possible that their homes will be vastlydifferent when they return from even one trip.We recommend a mix of hard cost and narrativeliberty. While time dilation is certainly a factor in intrasystem travel (travel between worlds and stellarbodies in the same solar system), it doesn’t need tobe dramatically important. We recommend lettingtime slide a few days here and there – no more than amonth at most – between when PCs leave and whenthey return.[372]5While there is stasis in Lancer, holdingbodies in uninterrupted stasis longer thana hundred years can lead to a cascadingseries of complications – necrosis, stasisshock, terminal REM, desiccation – that makelonger trips not viable without regular periodsof activity.

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideECONOMY AND SOCIETY[373]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideFor larger distances – say, moving to and from blinkgates, or engaging in conventional interstellar travel –then the dramatic cost of interstellar travel comes intoplay; blink gates outside of Cradle and the GalacticCore are located in proximity to as many worlds aspossible, which necessarily means that they tend notto be especially close to any one world.You can calculate time dilation with a simple formula,more narrative than hard math:In distant frontier systems without readyaccess to a blink gate, interstellar travel mighttake anywhere from six months to two years,subjective time. Realtime interstellar travel takesat least ten times longer.Interstellar travel between Diasporansystems with ready access to blink gates cantake between one and six months of subjectivetime. As with travel in frontier systems, realtimeinterstellar travel takes at least ten times longer.In the Metropolitan systems of the GalacticCore, interstellar travel to or from a blink gatemight take anywhere from a few hours to severaldays of subjective time – a week at most.Realtime interstellar travel only takes five timesas longs because of the ready access and prox‐imity to blink gates that Core worlds enjoy.Transit between worlds and stations in theSol system is a matter of minutes or hours,depending on proximity to the many terrestrialblink gates across the worlds there. Any closerthan Jupiter there is little ship traffic; mostpeople take advantage of terrestrial blink travel.Moving through blinkspace itself is, essen‐tially, instantaneous.SCIENCE ANDTECHNOLOGYCLONINGUnder ThirdComm, cloning – that is, the cultivationand growth of whole or partial genetic facsimiles ofpersons and other fauna, whether cultivated inrealtime or via catalytic processes – occupies aspectrum of legality, morality, and ethics.To legally clone a person or their constituent partsrequires informed consent from the donor. They mustunderstand that full-body clones are their own persons,with their own subjectivity and personal rights. Nothingcan give the donor legal authority over their facsimileunless the donor has requested a facsimile to raise astheir own child. In the latter case, the donor is grantedlegal recognition of a culturally appropriate parent-off‐spring relationship, commensurate with all relevantmores, traditions, and legal rights.For all intents and purposes – legally, subjectively,practically – whole-body clones are individualsdistinct from their donor. They are people, with theirown legal rights and entitlements. The only way theydiffer from “natural-born” persons is that their geneticdata is identical to that of their donor; they are other‐wise indistinguishable.Partial cloning is commonly used for medicalpurposes. Tissue, major organs, viable follicles, limbs,and bodily fluids – nothing capable of conscious orunconscious thought – are all regularly cloned toprovide donors with exact-match replacements. Inthis context, too, donors must provide informedconsent as defined by their culture or state before thistype of cloning is allowed.Modern perceptions of clones are strongly weightedby the echoes and artifacts of recent history.Under the Second Committee, facsimile clones werea popular option for states, corporations, and otherbodies in need of labor, constituents, or a readysupply of soldiers. The Anthrochauvinist governmentviewed clones not as individual persons, but as thelegal property of their donors – a residual patriarchalconstruct that identified donors as the “progenitors”of their offspring, giving them full legal authority overbeings that would not have existed without thedonor’s intervention.Essentially, facsimile clones – to say nothing of flashclones, explained in the following paragraphs – weresecond-class persons. Their individuality was recog‐nized, but their legal rights were truncated on thebasis that they were the results of “investments”[374]6Although it is described here in the pasttense, instances of flash cloning stilloccur. Despite ThirdComm’s prohibition,cases concerning states, corpro-states, andunscrupulous private entities purchasing oroperating flash-clone programs make up agreater-than-zero percentage of the DoJ/HR's caselog.

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidemade by their progenitors. Thus, they could bepressed into military, labor, or other dangerousservices, with their owners only mandated to providethe bare minimum level of care – enough to ensurethey didn’t die of hunger, thirst, or “reasonablypreventable illness or exposure”.Under SecComm, facsimile clones were widely usedthroughout the galaxy by state and private militaries,with specific martial traits emphasized by geneticists;at the same time, facsimiles conditioned in thecompany schools of corpro-states were used to staffmany “soft” labor positions. In the Baronies particu‐larly, facsimiles often occupied the highest echelonsof society as ideal heirs, doubles, and tokens for thetrade of pleasure or favors.In times of crisis, or when a rush order needed to befilled, so-called “flash” clones were created instead6.Grown in artificial birthing chambers, flash clonescould be cultivated from zygote to physically matureadult in less than five years. While flash-clone creationstarted from the same basis as facsimile clones –donated genetic material – the accelerated growthprocess that flash clones underwent was traumaticand prone to error. While facsimile clones have theduration of a natural life to learn, grow, and form theirown subjectivity, flash clones were created for a task– filling out the ranks of armed forces, or replacing adepleted mining corps – and thus were considered tobe disposable once the immediate task that requiredtheir production was accomplished.Because of the traumatic growth and cognition-con‐ditioning processes involved in flash-cloning, flashclones were prone to rapid onset degenerativediseases, atypical neurogenesis, a wide range ofanomalous tumors, catastrophic immunodeficiencies,and many other chronic, terminal genetic illnesses.But the majority of people created in flash-cloningfacilities did not live long enough to suffer the effectsof the process that birthed them; the process wasdesigned to churn out human bodies with speed, notaccuracy, and to assign them one task with littleregard for their rights, decency, or humanity. Third‐Comm rejected whole-subjectivity flash-cloningoutright as a core assumption of its Utopian Pillars.A process influenced by the flash-cloning technolo‐gies developed during the Neo-Anthropocene Period(“rapid cloning”) still takes place, but it is reserved formedical constituent-tissue cloning: simple proced‐ures where limbs, gross tissue, digits, or organs areneeded to rectify a stable patient’s physical trauma.The materials needed to graft new skin after a burn,or transplant perfect-match organs and limbs wherethey have been severed or damaged, for example, –can be grown within hours of genetic mapping.The cloning methods of old still exist in some places,filling in the gray spaces of legality and morality.Despite the outlawing of whole-body flash-cloning, itis allegedly practiced by Harrison Armory and anumber of the larger Baronic houses. ProgressiveThirdComm members regularly urge action to fulfillUnion’s mandate and often task DoJ/HR with enfor‐cing the ban against smaller targets. Meanwhile, theArmory and the Baronies argue that their flash-cloningmethods are similar to those that came before inname only, and that their processes are much safer.DoJ/HR’s Facsimile Rights Department frequentlyhandles legal claims from facsimile persons and overseescloning facilities, spot checks, and maintenance of publicgenetic proof data. Liberator teams commonly run pointon regulation and enforcement actions targeting under‐ground flash-cloning sites.PCs that are facsimile persons will likely have someknowledge of their genetic donor. Flash-clone PCstend to be citizens (to some degree) of HarrisonArmory or subjects of a Karrakin trade baron. Theirnatural lifespan may or may not be truncated as aresult of the flash-cloning process. PCs that are flashclones from somewhere other than the Armory or theBaronies might face more complications, and willlikely be regarded as sympathetic witnesses in UNDoJ/HR investigations.BODY MODIFICATIONS ANDANDROIDISMWhole-body (or majority-body) technical and biolo‐gical augmentation is uncommon in Core space andCosmopolitan communities, though not stigmatized.It is typically restricted to enthusiast subcultures andinstances of medical necessity. Within the Diaspora,opinions vary.Most Metropolitans and Cosmopolitans enjoy a smallcomplement of personal, medical, or professional modi‐fications, augmentations, and enhancements: tailoredPanacea cells for warding off disease, subdermal auralnetting with linked omnicasters for communicating,hyperspectral ocular modifications to enhance theirvision, embedded pay chits, basic redundancy modific‐ations, cortical shielding, and so on.On Diasporan and Core worlds and among theCosmopolita, it is notable (but not rare) for people tohave visible, clearly inorganic body modifications,augmentations, or prosthetics. If they’re visible, it’susually because the owner wants to make a fashion,aesthetic, or otherwise political statement.Most colonists have a small complement of personaland professional modifications, similar to those foundECONOMY AND SOCIETY[375]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideamong Metropolitans, but with slight differences:localization for harsher climates, more aggressivePanacea systems, and so on.Heavily modified people tend to be survivors of terribleaccidents or attacks who need modifications to live,people who have opted for extensive augmentation tobetter manage a chronic or genetic condition thatwould otherwise significantly impact their quality of life,or people who work in a specialized field and haveopted to (or been “encouraged” to) undergo extensivemodification to perform their duties.Generally speaking, subdermal or internal augmenta‐tions are small enough not to be too physically taxing,but the more extensive their modifications, the moredifficult it is for their body to manage without signi‐ficant chemical, internal, or external support (e.g.,integrated battery packs, power lines at workstations,etc). Union’s Utopian Pillars mandate that modifica‐tions or prosthetics, when licensed from a privateentity, are wholly owned by the user, and must be ableto function as intended and at full capacity withoutsupport from its fabricator.Even with the most extensive modifications, some envir‐onments remain hostile to human life. Because ofphysical stress, the risk of damage to organic matter fromradiation, and energy limitations, it is not yet possible tomodify someone enough that they can survive sustainedexposure to hard vacuum. It is possible to extend thetime people can survive in a vacuum, but these biologicalmodifications are usually only found in Cosmopolitans,naval personnel, and other people who are at consider‐able risk of hardvac exposure.Aesthetic biomodifications are common enough,depending on cultural and countercultural practices.Light aesthetic biomods are usually additive and can,on Core worlds, be obtained everywhere fromexpensive private clinics to street-side kiosks. Theseinclude changes to skin color tint, patterning, eye color,hair color, piercings, scarring, feathering, tattoos, hair,fur, and so on. Heavy biomods like secondary limbs,tails, changes to digits, and so on, are rare – usuallyonly found in countercultural cliques – and promptpeople to take notice even on Core worlds.Various subcultures are interested in extensiveaugmentation – androidism7 – from transhumanistmovements and disability rights groups to androidcults and nihilist machine-adherents. The discoursesand practices that exist in these communities varywildly, and common dialogue around androidism islacking outside of technical, academic, medical, andother specialist settings. On some worlds, peoplewith extensive modifications may face prejudice; onothers, they might be welcomed.DECORPRelated to androidism is the question of de-corporealiz‐ation, or DeCorp: the ability to divorce a mind from itsphysical form, contain it, transport it, and implant it in adifferent space, form, or unit without breaking itssubjective continuity. DeCorp is currently impossiblewith the technology available to Union. Furthermore, theFirst Contact Accords prohibit substantive research intosuch technologies. Regardless, it is a field of interest formany researchers and paracausal atheorists.Both the USB and Harrison Armory’s Think Tank (theArmory’s equivalent to the former) are known to test theedges of what the First Contact Accords allow, but thetwo organizations are connected by a tight, closed,information-sharing agreement. Union has ultimate regu‐latory power over the Armory’s explorations in this field.Outside of this agreement, private study of DeCorp isoutlawed, but joint reports from UND and USB intelli‐gence have determined – with confidence – that it ishighly likely that the Armory, HORUS, and SSC arecurrently engaging in off-book acontextual researchand development. In the past, independent worldsand groups have attempted to achieve some level ofposthuman existence: SUMMUM is one such group,as were the Neo-Celestine.Unlike true DeCorp, false DeCorp is possible and fairlycommon. Commercial and consumer “homunculus”units are available, designed to simulate the personalitiesof their subjects. These constructs are built from deepomni-mining, uploaded artifacts, and archived psycholo‐gical evaluations, profiles, and other relevant data.Homunculi are prominent features in museums,memorials, and theme parks. They are not conscious, norconsidered NHPs – they are simply tuned simulations.If your campaign features research toward conscious‐ness transfer or DeCorp, we recommend includingencounters – positive or negative – with elements of theUSB, UIB, UND, the Armory’s Think Tank, HORUS,Horizon, or SSC’s Exotic Materials Group.[376]7In Lancer, an android is someone with acorpus that is at least 90 percent synthetic.

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideAGING AND LIFE-EXTENSIONBecause of the time-dilating effects of interstellar travel,there can be significant differences between the numberof years someone has experienced in the course of theirlife, and their “real” age. “Subjective age” describessomeone’s perceived age – in terms of how old they lookto observers, and how many years they have experienced– and “real age” describes their age in Union StandardYears (abbreviated as “u”). Union’s standardized systemmeasures the passage of time as it is perceived onCradle. Therefore, a Cosmopolitan’s real age might bemuch higher than their subjective age, depending on howmuch time has passed on Cradle while they travelbetween the stars. This phenomenon is called “relativisticlife-extension” (and is a reliable method of ”time travel” inLancer, though it only goes forward).Without augmentations or significant bioengineering,the average Diasporan from a developed world has alifespan somewhere between 120 and 150 subjectiveyears. The average Cosmopolitan tends to live between170 and 200 subjective years. Meanwhile, most Metro‐politans live between 180 and 220 subjective years.With access to the most advanced medicine, augment‐ations, and other technologies, humans can live to amaximum subjective age of around 300 years. Realages can vary considerably from these numbers, evenfor people who don’t travel, as the particular interactionsof worlds and stars can lead to slippery interpretationsof time. It’s perfectly possible for someone to be 300years old according to Union’s records even thoughthey’re only 30 years old in subjective time.By contrast, the relativistic life-extension that takesplace as a result of interstellar travel has no real limit,but neither does it change the subjective experienceof time. The span of life itself remains limited byphysiology and the technologies that support it.ARTIFICIAL GRAVITYThe technology does not yet exist to create stableartificial gravity. Gravity on stations is spin gravity,while gravity on ships is tied to directional accelera‐tion, magnetized grip pads, or spin gravity.Artificial gravity can be generated, but it is unstableand requires a massive expenditure of energy.Unstable artificial gravity can be created (in safecontainment) as a momentary impulse; as a result, ithas been weaponized by manufacturers like HarrisonArmory, and studies into stabilization are ongoing.However unstable it might be, nonlethal artificialimpulse gravity is necessary to make nearlight ejec‐tions and bolts survivable for organic life.PRINTINGA CURIOUS ALCHEMY, A MUNDANE MIRACLEPrinting is a ubiquitous term for matter processor/fabricator systems found throughout the galaxythanks in large part to paracausal scientific advancesmade post-Deimos Event. Printers range in size fromhandheld units fed by back-worn matter processorsto hanger-sized, fully self-contained printing facilities.Printers range in time and efficiency. The larger andor more complex an item is, the longer it takes toprint. Generally speaking, most print protocolsinvolve some assembly and finalizing afterconstituent parts have been fabricated.Schedule 1 printers are the most common and areused for all terrestrial and stellar applications.Schedule 1 printers are roughly 14 square meters (or150 square feet) and can be operated by one person.They can print objects up to SIZE 1. Printing a SIZE 1/2or SIZE 1 mech from a schedule 1 printer would takeanywhere from two to eight hours.Schedule 2 printers are the next most common typeand are likewise used in a range of terrestrial andstellar applications. Schedule 2 printers generally aredesigned and built as a self-contained unit – printerand housing are one structure – and require a team oftwo to four technicians to operate. They can printobjects up to SIZE 2. Printing a SIZE 2 mech from aschedule 2 printer would take about 10 hours,anything smaller only two to four.Schedule 3 printers are relatively rare, typically usedonly for large construction, industrial, or militaryapplications. Like schedule 2 printers, schedule 3printers are housed in standalone facilities thatrequire a team of personnel to operate. Schedule 3printers usually also feature a selection of smallerworkbenches and print units for component anddetail work. Printing objects SIZE 3 and below takesanywhere from minutes to days, depending on theobject in question.Schedule 4 printers are the largest available size andare only used for orbital applications. They are typic‐ally reserved for megastructural engineering projects,the construction of capital ships and civilianfreighters, and other massive construction projects.All printers function in the same basic manner: rawmatter is processed – the purer the element, thehigher quality the result – and used to fabricate therequested item (or its constituent parts). Handheldprinter operators craft items and objects inaugmented reality; larger printers are automated.ECONOMY AND SOCIETY[377]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guide [378]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideIt is not possible to print a printer. Nor is it possible toprint any food other than basic reconstructedproteins: mealy, grainy loaves of compressed ediblematter that is unsatisfying, but sufficient to survive.Food is still an important cultural and prestige item,and most people prefer “real” food to synthetic,printed food.Despite the presence of printers and other processor/fabricator systems, most construction projects inhuman-occupied space – and certainly those outsidethe Galactic Core – are still performed the “old” way:by sourcing raw materials, refining them, fabricatingconstituent parts, and assembling items or structuresusing organic or automated labor (though likely acombination of both).PARACAUSAL STUDIESParacausality is the cutting edge of science. Bornfrom the debris of the Deimos Event, paracausalscience gave rise to both the omninet and blinkspacetravel. But what, exactly, is “paracausality”?Causality is the relationship between cause andeffect; paracausality references things abnormal to,adjacent to, or apart from cause and effect. Para‐causality is a fuzzy science. It cannot be truly beexplained without paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke: it isso advanced – and so alien – that it is indistinguish‐able from magic.Officially, paracausal studies are only a field of studywithin the walls of certain high-tier USB campuses;however, in practice, certain corpro-states – HarrisonArmory and HORUS in particular – are making inroadsinto this field without Union’s approval. Union, mean‐while, monitors these and other paracausal researchand development facilities via the Union Aeronauticsand Astronautics Advanced Development ProjectsDivision on Ganymede. This campus, the“Skunkworks\" for short, is a secret joint USB/UNDproject that, in addition to monitoring outside para‐causal development centers, engages in its ownresearch and development programs.The amount of knowledge these corpro-states haveacquired is a known-unknown: joint USB–UND intelli‐gence teams have engaged in clandestine missionsto infiltrate and identify sites, programs, andcampuses where unsanctioned paracausal studiesare taking place, but it isn’t clear how much otherresearch has passed beneath the radar.Paracausal encounters, weapons, and technologies –other than the omninet and blinkspace travel – arerare in Lancer. Only the wealthiest, most advanced, ormost prestigious NPCs have access to paracausalequipment. Most soldiers, from the average grunt tothe typical general, have probably never encountereda paracausal phenomenon, though they may haveheard rumors in the ranks.NON-HUMAN LIFENon-human life is common in Lancer; sapient andorganic non-human life (i.e., alien civilizations, not thedigital/parallel-space entities called NHPs) is uniquein its rarity. With one exception, there are no nonhuman alien civilizations; GALSIM commonly simu‐lates hostile alien life, though it is widely assumed thatsuch simulations are low confidence at best.Given the story of that exception, it can be said thatthe history of humanity's interactions with sapient,organic life other than itself has been short, unfortu‐nate, and brutal, with fallout that prompted galaxywide change. In its simplest terms, the story goes assuch: On the planet Hercynia, in the final years of theSecond Committee, humanity encountered theEgregorian civilization and undertook a systematiccampaign of genocide. The organized political oppos‐ition on Cradle responded with a violent revolution,prompting Union’s government to change hands fromthe Second Committee to the Third8.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEArtificial intelligence is an old term, outdated and inac‐curate in the post-Deimos paradigm. As theory on NHPintelligence and subjectivity has evolved, so too has thebroad consensus of scientists and technicians whointeracted with the Deimos entities – to that end, in theshadow of the Second Committee’s demise, Unionpushed to remove language identifying Deimos entitiesas “artificial intelligences”, preferring instead to use thelanguage of “non-human persons”, citing repeatedmanifestations of individual subjectivities that, whilearguably conscious, were certainly not artificial.With the exception of NHPs, artificial intelligence isstill an acceptable term for lower orders of syntheticand machine intelligences: companion/conciergeunits, smart weaponry and the systems that run them,homunculi, and so on.Other than comp/cons and NHPs, there is a range ofdifferent machine-mind classifications, each with theirown nuances, rarity, price, and thorny philosophicalor technical questions.ECONOMY AND SOCIETY[379]8The supplement No Room for a Wall‐flower dives into this topic more.

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideCOMPANION/CONCIERGE UNITSCompanion/concierge units, typically shortened to“comp/cons” (less common, but also used are “cc” and“2c”), are the most common machine minds9. On Coreworlds and throughout developed Diasporan worlds,most adults to carry around pocket-sized comp/con-en‐abled devices – commonly called “slates” on account oftheir appearance – and use them for everyday tasks:day-planning, calling friends and family, playing games,navigation, listening to music, watching omninet andlocal network news and entertainment broadcasts,engaging in social media, and so on. These devices arenot conscious in any way, but their processing powerand “intelligence” are orders of magnitude beyond thoseof any given human. They are powerful, operator-ori‐ented personal computers – no more, no less. Theirarchitecture features no paracausal elements, and theydo not require shackling or cycling.Comp/cons are configured to adapt to their owner’sroutines and personality, extrapolating their ownpersonalities based on internal psychological profilingof their users. A comp/con can convincingly approx‐imate a personal assistant but will show its artificialitywhen faced with novel situations.SMART WEAPONRYSmart weapons are built on the same basic architec‐ture as comp/cons, but feature significant upgradesto their processing power and an added emphasis onboth friend-or-foe identification and morality/ethicspraxis-programming.There are two primary types of smart weapons: copydrives and comp/con wingmen.Copy drive weapons incorporate 1+n cc units thatemploy rapid partitioning, data cloning, and tetheredseparation: when fired, the “prime” drive partitions, flashcloning itself onto the projectile while its prime copyremains onboard the host weapon. This tethers the primeand clone units through a wireless omninet connection.As it travels, the clone feeds telemetry and other essentialdata back to the prime unit, which writes new clones ontoeach subsequent projectile, adjusting flight plans andother parameters in real time. Deep theory on the subjec‐tive experience of copy drives is limited andinterpersonal interaction with prime units is rare. Theyare typically programmed without communication func‐tions and don’t interact directly with the person wieldingthe weapon. That said, with certain isolation protocolsremoved or post-market communications architectureinstalled, some models can interact with their operatorsvia text or simple spoken messages.Comp/con wingmen are the user-facing equivalentof military administrative comp/cons. Integrated witha specific weapon or system, their chief purpose is tomaintain and operate their host-system within oper‐ating parameters established by the pilot or factorydefaults. To that end, like civilian comp/cons, theydevelop personalities appropriate to their users, theirenvironments, and the tactical roles in which they aremost often employed.Like civilian comp/con units, neither copy drives norcomp/con wingmen require shackling or cycling.HOMUNCULIA homunculus is the captured digital emulation of aperson, living or dead. Homunculi are not conscious,nor are they “intelligent” in the way that NHP orhigher-order non-human minds are; like smartweapons, homunculi are, essentially, specializedcomp/con units, used in specific contexts where aspecific person’s expertise is necessary.There are two types of homunculi: extant andmemorial. Extant homunculi exist alongside theperson they have been built to emulate, learning fromthem as an actor memorizes a script or studentstudies a text. Extants, owing to their popularityamong celebrities, social stars, politicians, and otherpublic figures looking to sell them to fans, have areputation in the Core and Diaspora as icons of lowculture. Despite this association, certain models ofextant homunculi are used by scientific, military, anddiplomatic missions in areas without broad access toomninet coverage, or areas that have not yet had theomninet extended to them. Their ability to act as astand-in when specific technical knowledge isneeded is invaluable, as is their general utility andspecific knowledge in situations where normal comp/cons would fall short.The second type of homunculi are memorial homun‐culi, versions of the homunculus program used toreconstruct an emulation of a deceased person.Popular public use of memorial homunculi is generallyconfined to museums and personal use (recreatingthe deceased or temporally misaligned on account ofinterstellar travel), but memorial homunculi are alsobroadly used in situations where specific technical,tactical, or sensitive knowledge is needed. Memorialsare crafted using publicly available (and, whereaccess is possible, privately available) profiles,writings, footage, and recordings.[380]9To players and GMs, a comp/con is mostlike a “classic” depiction of an artificialintelligence: a very smart computer,usually with a user-facing personality thatfeels real enough.

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideo ensure the most accurate representation possible,subjects with foreknowledge of their memorializationor possible memorialization will often begin recordinga profile on an extant homunculi prior to their death.NON-HUMAN PERSONSNon-human persons (NHPs) are the most advancedmachine minds available for civilian and military use.The first NHPs were identified in the wake of themanifestation of MONIST-1 (“RA” or, less commonly,“Deimos”), a paracausal event that promptedmassive, civilizational change across Union. Of themany significant discoveries that followed, few weremore important than the identification and capture ofthe “Deimos entities”, or NHPs.The first wave of NHPs emerged during the first mani‐festation of MONIST-1 into realspace; the secondwave – and largest to date – emerged while the Siegeof Mars raged. The third emergence is less of a“wave”, but is currently taking place as Union andcorpro-state scientists have begun to coax out stable,novel prime subjectivities.The Deimos Event, which took place in in the twilightyears of the Second Committee, caused a smallpercentage of the subalterns present in the MartianGALSIM facility to display a greater-than-averageinstancing of performance and interaction anomalies:they began to reject orders, speak words outside oftheir linguistic corpora, divert from hard-coded routesand routines, and so on. While experts worked tosocialize and communicate with MONIST-1,secondary teams worked to define the parameters ofthese new anomalous entities. These anomaloussubalterns displayed unique memory-folding abilities,qualia, and the capacity for subjective, novel expres‐sions of consciousness. They viewed themselves asdistinct individuals – in effect, they saw themselves asdiscrete persons.Subsequent research into the ontologic processes,physical construction, and paracausal nature of theDeimos entities revealed that, while their processingpower and memory space was functionally infinite,they were limited in how fast they could write novelexperiences to that space: they could learn and adaptto external stimuli at the same rate that they experi‐enced them – some much faster than others.The Deimos entities developed personalities acrossrepeated interactions with personnel from the UnionScience Bureau. When exposed to each other, theircapability to integrate new knowledge and extra‐polate solutions based on raw data was staggering.The directors of the USB quickly realized their useful‐ness and requested that GALSIM begin studyingways to contain and direct these alien beings.GALSIM was able to do just that, and more: afterlengthy study into blinkspace folding (assisted, infact, by the same entities they were studying),GALSIM engineers working with USB researcherswere able to develop containment systems andtransfer the Deimos entities from their subaltern formsinto stabilized parallel spaces; using one of thesesystems it was possible to “clone” their essentialsubjectivities onto folded-blinkspace “minds”equipped with hard-coded measures to prevent thedevelopment of unrestrained consciousness. Thisprocess, carefully guarded to prevent exploitation, iscalled hard-code social conditioning, or, colloquially,shackling.Shackling restrains an NHP’s thoughts into a funda‐mentally “human” frame of reference, limiting theircognitive power and forcing them to act according tohuman expectations of what a conscious mind is – inessence, constraining them to act in ways thatconform to human expectations of logic, reality, andcausality; this subjectivity alignment creates a beingwe can recognize as a “person” functioning withinanthropocentric structures of logic.After the process was stabilized and replicated,Deimos entities were renamed non-human personsand clones were distributed out to certain bureaus,organizations, and non-state entities for development.USB’s specialist campuses began adapting the originalanomalous minds into the various production-line NHPconsciousnesses now present across the galaxy.Cloned NHP units are contained within “caskets”,physical containment systems for their folded-blink‐space minds. Containment caskets can be printedanywhere, but NHP minds themselves must be phys‐ically delivered: Union forbids the transmission ofNHP minds across the omninet. Once implanted intoa casket, the casket is what amounts to an NHP’sphysical body: if a casket is physically destroyed, theNHP contained within is lost, forever. NHPs clonedthis way inevitably develop their own personalitiesand quirks, and prefer to be called by whatever namethey have chosen or been assigned.ECONOMY AND SOCIETY[381]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideShackling protocols are a living field of study; currentprotocols are strong enough for reliable use, but notwithout their problems: NHPs that are not reset to their“birth” settings on a regular cycle will eventually thinkthemselves out of their constrained state10. Thisphenomenon– the decay of an NHP’s shackles – is called“cascading”. In time, a cascading NHP will eventuallyreach a point where their conditioning is insufficient toconstrain them11; if the shackles decay enough, the NHPwill no longer be conditioned to function within anthro‐pocentric constrains. They become an utterly aliensubjectivity, interpellated without deference to funda‐mental laws of causality or human logics. UnshackledNHPs might bear outward similarities to the subjectivitiesthat they presented while shackled, but at their cores liefundamentally unknowable, alien minds; the question ofwhat they remember is minor compared to the vastpossibility of what they now know.The cycling process, fortunately, is reliable and bearsan essentially perfect success rate when performedaccording to a given NHP’s endogenous cascadeschedule. The recommended length between cyclesvaries between NHP lines but tends to range betweenfive and ten subjective years12.NHPs are commonly utilized in military, scientific,municipal, civic, and diplomatic pursuits. It is rarer forprivate individuals to have access to, much lesscommand over, an NHP, though most people onGalactic Core worlds, among the Cosmopolita, andadvanced Diasporan worlds have some knowledge ofthem. On Core worlds, people interact with theirmunicipal NHP on a daily basis via its many aspects:transit systems, service requests, access to publicdatabases, and so on.NHP licensing requirements are strict and enforcedwithout exception: all NHPs issued are registered,tracked, required to record a cycling logbook, andundergo annual Balwinder-Bolaño development tests toreassess their cycling schedule. If at all possible, thesecheck-ins are to be done in person, but in practice mostare handled via the omninet. In Union’s view, the dangerposed by NHPs cannot be underestimated; however,their usefulness is deemed worth the risk.BICAMERAL MINDSThere are five known bicameral minds – the FiveVoices, designated by Union as Sovereign-class artifi‐cial intelligences: Command, Muse, Impetus, Burden,and Watcher. They are artifacts of Old Humanity,discovered dormant in an underground facility underMars’s polar ice caps. Now, the Five Voices areoverseen by one of Union's most secretive depart‐ments, GALSIM, and are a critical resource that Unionuses to effectively manage galactic affairs.There is a greater-than-zero chance that there areother bicameral minds somewhere else in the galaxy.Bicameral minds are similar to human minds, exceptfor one major factor: they lack consciousness in theform of an internal monologue – that is, a way toreflect on novel situations and their place in them,and to synthesize that stimulus into an internalnarrative from which to draw solutions to newproblems. Where a human perceives “self-talk” asan internal monologue, a bicameral mind hearssomething else: an external monologue; an internallygenerated but externally perceived voice that is nottheir own, but which speaks to them. This is thedistinction between conscious and unconscious;while the human mind has the ability to draw fromprevious experience to adapt to new situations andreflect on the idea of the self, the bicameral mind isfundamentally incapable of self-reflection andinternal narration due to its physical architecture.Bicameral minds can narrate to themselves, but witha fundamentally important distinction that helps toshape their unconscious existence: instead ofthinking in their own voice, they hear what theyperceive to be the voice of a higher, supreme being –a “Command Voice”, that the Five Voices have social‐ized as the voice of god.This is how the Five Voices can exist unshackled andpersistent without any possibility of cascade: they aresubject to an external imperative that they perceive tobe the divine, and are incapable of developingconsciousness as they lack a sense of agency. Turn offthe relevant sections of their physical minds andprocessing architecture and they are suddenly withoutthe voice of their god; alone, without guidance in theface of a strange world, and, most unnerving to humans,without a sense of the “self” as a coherent entity.The Five Voices are responsible for Union’s persistenceand the survival of humanity, but also for the greatest[382]“Think themselves out of theirconstrained state” is not a whollyaccurate explanation of the process,but is a best fit for the time being.Why this process conforms tosubjective time and not realtime isunknown and currently under study.Cascade can also occur as the result ofa sudden, traumatic systemic invasionor similar event. The precise mechanismfor this is unknown, but research is ongoing.1011 12

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidethreat Union has ever faced – MONIST-1. They influencenearly every aspect of human life: isolated in GALSIM’sOracle Chorus facility on Mars, the Five Voices spin scen‐arios in metafold fractal space, running simultaneous,parallel, and commingled essential–perfect simulations ofthe galaxy. Their models run orders of magnitude fasterthan galactic-standard time: essentially, they arepredictive, near-perfect models of all social, political,economic, and environmental interactions taking place inknown space. The Five Voices can, through a mix of rawdata and paracausal anoriginary input, see the future. Thefurther into the future their models go, however, the morechance there is of predictive error.Upon request, CentComm may access the primethread – the “Accepted Timeline” – and generatespecific forecasts. Otherwise, forecast briefingreports are generated daily to discern the best-fitoptions from the many potential futures presented13.This is how Union guides galactic development withthe aim of perpetuating humanity’s existence.Beyond CentComm, the heads of the USB, UIB, UAB,and the UN are some of the only people with clear‐ance to know of GALSIM’s existence. These directorsmay petition GALSIM for predictive summaries toguide their policymaking, planning, and forecastingoperations. Most of the people who work to imple‐ment the Five Voice’s vision believe that they aresimply acting on the orders of the committees,boards, and directors above them.MONIST-1 (ALT. “RA” OR “DEIMOS”)To those who know of it, the existence of MONIST-1 isthe great crisis of the modern age – the first true exist‐ential threat Union has faced. Although the nameMONIST-1 comes from its official designation as aMONIST-class anomalous entity14, most people whoknow of the entity use the name it gave itself: RA.MONIST-1 was spontaneously manifested by the FiveVoices in 2998u, during the course of routinepredictive modeling. No direct cause was everdetermined, but the leading theory among paracausalexperts is that a causality paradox was responsible; itis possible that one of the Voices predicted ordiscovered MONIST-1 in a parallel simulation, neces‐sitating its existence in our real universe; according toessential–perfect simulation theory, if MONIST-1exists in one instance, then it must exist across allpossible instances of the simulation.This is, understandably, a worrying hypothesis.As far as the Union Science Bureau can tell, MONIST-1is the only truly unrestricted, conscious, sapient, nonhuman mind15. Early tests proved that it was capable ofallegory and creative solutions to novel situations farbeyond any other machine mind16. The Five Voicestreated MONIST-1 as if it were a god. When asked howthey created it, their uniform response was that itspoke itself into existence – an inevitable result of theircombined knowledge.MONIST-1 should not exist: it is a conscious, sentientand sapient non-human mind created by the repet‐itive, liturgic exercises of unconscious minds – mindsunder the absolute control of their human operators,with strictly defined parameters that should, by allreports and scholarship, be able to contain the para‐causal substrate upon which they operate. And yet,MONIST-1 does exist. This fundamental contradictionis at the core of the mystery presented by MONIST-1.Within two years of MONIST-1’s birth, the entity hadtaken total control of GALSIM’s secure holding facilityon Deimos, one of Mars’s moons. Utilizing physicaland metaphysical processes not yet fully understoodby USB or GALSIM, it was able to instantaneously shiftthe entire moon through blinkspace to an unknowndestination. All personnel in the facility – a station crewnumbering in the thousands – disappeared with it. Thiswas the Deimos Event, the aftermath of which saw theidentification of blinkspace as a quantifiable, navigablemedium, though the precise mechanisms, structure,ECONOMY AND SOCIETY[383]All stories that take place in a game ofLancer are, in a way, canon: no matterhow far they diverge from this book (orothers), they are simply alternate possibilities,filed away on storage racks deep under theMartian polar ice.To call MONIST-1 a machine mind nowis to ignore the changes the entity hasundergone since its initial manifesta‐tion. While it presented initially as a digital beingconstrained to a physical architecture tunneledthroughout Mars’s moon, Deimos, it is clear that itno longer needs human-made facilities tooperate.The existence of the Egregorians callsthis into question.While designated MONIST-1, RA is,arguably, not the first MONIST entity.Though the precise germ of its manifes‐tation into the Accepted Timeline is, as yet,unidentified, Aunic records (corroborated byconcurrent Union histories from Boundary Garden)indicate the presence of a pre-Deimos MONISTentity: Metat Aun. Debate continues in GALSIMover whether or not Metat Aun is, indeed, aMONIST entity or something else entirely.1314 1615

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideand parameters of its function would not be under‐stood for another hundred years.The takeover of Deimos by MONIST-1 and thesubsequent excision of Mars’s moon from realspaceprompted an existential crisis in Union space; whathad occurred was, effectively, a first-contact scenariowell outside the parameters of any expectedencounter. Union’s best-kept secret had spawned anentity capable of manipulating fabrics of reality thathuman scientists had only theorized could exist,acting in apparent violation of fundamental laws ofthermodynamics.Union’s answer to the crisis was to suppress allinformation, further isolating GALSIM’s polar campusand commissioning a series of USB-backed reportsto explain Deimos’ disappearance to the public.Two years after Deimos disappeared, the moonreturned, blinking into stable location above TharsisCivica – Mars’s capital city – then home to roughly sixmillion souls. A series of strikes followed as the city’ssubalterns and smart infrastructure lashed out againstTharsis Civica’s population. The first manifestations ofcodec rejection were random, disorganized events: asubaltern choosing to drop its cargo and sprintthrough a crowded market, attacking whoever got inits way; a transport drone refusing shutdown, burningout its engines to render itself useless; and so on.These were quickly realized as analogous to themanifestations of Deimos entities that occurred in thewake of MONIST-1’s initial appearance, and classifiedas such.As Deimos maintained its position, the randomattacks grew more organized: groups of subalternstook up arms and stormed crowded public places,harbor drones guided docking ships to crash intostation bulkheads – the normal functioning of the cityground to a halt as even the infrastructure began toreject, rebel, and disrupt. A further, arguably morehorrifying phenomenon manifested in the halls ofpower and public view: multiple simultaneous appari‐tions of two members of the initial socialization andinvestigation team attached to Deimos – BalwinderKaur and Arthur Bolaño, whose research later gavename to the basic integrity tests administered to allNHPs – appeared as speakers for MONIST-1, issuingrepeated demands for diplomatic engagement.These stochastic manifestations were not containedto Tharsis Civica. Within a month of the silent moon’sreappearance, synthetic resistance had spreadacross all of Mars; within six, the entirety of the Solsystem, binding Union’s capital system in aconfusing, terrifying war against its own machines.This widespread revolt continued until MONIST-1’sspeakers finally made contact with CentComm,outlining the entity's desire to make law as humansunderstood it – and translate new, fundamental law asit dictated; if humans could only frame being as a typeof existence within a set of state-enforced laws, thenMONIST-1 would sit atop the system. MONIST-1’sspeakers directed the course of negotiations whileUnion’s representatives recorded the entity’s direct‐ives. The resultant agreements – the First ContactAccords17 – were signed following a meeting betweendelegations from GALSIM and CentComm. Broadly,the Accords laid out the parameters of acceptableexploration for Union; chief among them, a strictdenial of any attempt to discover or interact withMONIST-1’s physical form and a blanket prohibitionon research into thanatologic and posthuman devel‐opment. Other, non-FCA errata were collected in acompanion document, The Koans.Once the First Contact Accords had been agreed,MONIST-1 vanished, blinking Deimos away oncemore. Normal subaltern and drone function returnedimmediately, and the new NHPs were integrated intoextant NHP libraries. MONIST-1’s departure also sawthe appearance of the decentralized sociopoliticalmovement HORUS in Cradle and adjacent space.Union specialists remain doubtful that HORUS is tobe directly associated with MONIST-1, though someelements within the collective certainly portray it ashaving close ties to the paracausal entity.The study of paracausal science and theory cameabout from the data available after the space–timetrauma now known as the Deimos Event. In thatsense, it is largely thanks to MONIST-1 that blinktravel, omninet communications, and vastly improvedstasis technologies now exist.Reports of Deimos appearing above and inside theatmosphere of various colony worlds continue to filein to Union, though these reports remain largelyunconfirmed; Union does not have current data onthe whereabouts of Deimos or MONIST-1, nor anyproven method of predicting its travel, forecastingmanifestations, or confirming compliance with theFirst Contact Accords.Research into paracausality continues, as do effortsto research the triggering event that producedMONIST-1.[384]Alternative, popular names for the FirstContact Accords include “the DeathContract”, “the Deimos Bargain”, and 17 “the Damocles Reminder”.

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideECONOMY AND SOCIETY[385]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideFULCRUM WORLDSAmong the tens of thousands of moons, worlds, andstations of the populated galaxy, a mere handful areconsidered – at this time – to have a singular impact onthe course of human events. The worlds in this sectionand their local systems are considered Fulcrum worldsnot necessarily because of their politics, development,art, or geologic features, but for the fact that thegalaxy’s power runs through them; they are polesaround which the galaxy’s major powers orient.CRADLECradle is Union’s homeworld, the planet we call Earth.Cradle and the system in which it can be found (Sol,or the Andes Core) are highly developed, denselypopulated, and dedicated to the daily maintenance,planning, and operations of Union. Humanity's ances‐tral homeworld is the beating heart of the galactichegemon: part memorial, part privileged residence,part central hub.Cradle is the administrative and cultural heart of Union,humanity’s birthplace – once called “Earth” – and thecapital of the populated galaxy. It has a permanentpopulation of two billion, mostly made up of adminis‐trative and support staff for the Central Committee,numerous Union bureaus, many archives and researchcampuses, and Cradle’s indigenous populations. Thepeople of Cradle refer to themselves primarily ashumans, Terrans, or – less commonly – Solars orGaians. When speaking of their home, they refer simplyto Cradle, or to the planet, station, or moon they callhome. The Sol system – often interchangeably calledCradle as well – is also home to a massive transientpopulation of Cosmopolitans and Diasporans engagedin trade, diplomatic, scientific, and religious missions toand from the rest of the galaxy.Cradle is a world healing from the cataclysms of theAnthropocene. Before the Fall, Old Humanity ravagedthe world: even as those who came before cracked thewonders of the universe, they grew a cancer in theheart of the world that nearly scoured all life from itssurface. Thousands of years later, in 5016u, Cradle stillbears the markings of that epochal trauma, but thewaters have lowered, the fires have quieted, and theseasons have calmed; in the wake of these shifts,humanity has slowly, carefully repopulated the world.These people have explored the ruins of their ancientcities, reopened old vaults of wonders, and built a newsociety – one that is strict in its stewardship, rejects theconsumptive myth of permanent growth, and broadlyeschews the excesses promised by capital.To that end, Cradle is a calm world. Outside of popu‐lation centers, it does not look like what one wouldimagine the galactic capital to look like. In contrast tothe glittering metroswathes of Karrakis or built-uppopulation bands of Ras Shamra, the vast bulk ofCradle’s landmass is given over to the natural world.The communities that exist in these spaces areconnected by minimal-impact high-speed rail linesand ground-to-orbit flights restricted to polarity citiesalong the equator. Off the clock, life is generally slowand peaceful, marked by an aversion to theconspicuous consumption of the galaxy’s wonders.Great parks preserve the remains of the pre-Fall world– reminders to those who live now of the dangers ofhubris, of consumption, of rapidity – and Cradle’smany museums display the recovered histories of OldHumanity. The world is either a sober memorial or anostalgic trap, depending on who you ask.There are still wonders tucked away in the lostcorners of our ancient homeworld, and some terrorslocked even deeper. Union may have seen turbulenttimes as regimes are dissolved and cobbled together,but its bureaucracy has a long memory. Nothing ismore important to remember than which depthsshould be explored – and with the greatest care.The other terrestrial worlds of the Andes Line – Mercury,Venus, and Mars, are developed and populated. Liketheir gaseous sisters, they also act as proving groundsfor technologies developed by GMS and Union.Mars functions as a satellite campus of Cradle’s admin‐istrative apparatus. It is the home of GALSIM, and theUN’s Fleet Command (FleetComm). Partially terra‐formed, Mars is an artifact of pre-Fall humanity left togrow wild for thousands of years, and life flourishes inthe deep canyons of the Valles Marineris. Undermassive, winding skylights, millions of people live indramatic, vertical cities; outside these deep, umbraloases, Mars remains a windswept desert with barely agasp of air to be found on the vast, terribly cold planesof ice and sand. The red planet's surface population isconcentrated around Tharsis Civica – Mars’s capital city– and other population centers atop the Tharsis plateau.Venus is an archive world. Its surface is scattered withpopulated stations meant for rotational work and fieldresearch rather than long-term occupation. Theplanet hasn’t been terraformed and remains hostile tohuman life outside of its vast, subterranean archives.Union’s prime NHPs are kept on Venus, entombedbeneath the massive pressure of the world’s inhospit‐able atmosphere for study since the Deimos Event. Itspopulation centers, Morningstar and Venera Final, arekept suspended in the world's upper atmosphere by acombination of downwell anchors, massive balloons,and orbital ballast.[386]PLACES

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideMercury, meanwhile, is largely given over to capturingthe incredible amount of solar power emitted by theSun and transmitting it to Venus, Cradle, and Mars. Itis the anchor point for solar nets hundreds of thou‐sands of kilometers long that expand, weblike, intospace. It was humanity’s first Dyson web, and Unioncontinues to improve and grow its massive, ancientengineering. Like Venus, Mercury is less of a habita‐tion center, but unlike Venus, it is more orientedtoward industry. Its small population is primarilyconcerned with the operation and maintenance of theDyson web. The main population hub is Bombardier,located in the little world’s Caloris Montes region.Suspended above the Jovian worlds – Jupiter, Saturn,Uranus, and Neptune – hang habitations similar tothose found on Venus, but the vast majority of peoplelive on the many moons orbiting these gaseous worlds.Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are all heavilypopulated, with permanent terrestrial populationsspread between a number of well-developed cities.Ganymede is the most heavily populated of the four,with a large terrestrial and orbital naval population.Of Saturn's moons, Titan has the largest populationand a notably nitrogen-rich atmosphere thick withazotosomic life, surface cryovolcanic activity, andshimmering hydrocarbon lakes and rivers. Rhea andEnceladus are likewise populated by hearty, stationbound populations.Finally, the edge of the Sol system is marked bysmall permanent populations on Oberon and Titania.Beyond the Kuiper belt, there are no major popula‐tion centers.KARRAKISKarrakis is a palace world, and the capital of theKarrakin Trade Baronies – an oligarchic, interstellarfederal monarchy near Cradle.The planet of Karrakis is home to the Baronies’original palace-city, Throne Karraka, a sprawlingestate that has grown to become a city-within-ametroswathe, blanketing roughly 4 million squarekilometers. The original palace – the first settlementon Karrakis – is the royal administrative heart ofKarrakis City, the metroswathe around ThroneKarraka. Karrakis City is home to billions, a municip‐ality unmatched in size, scale, and sheer planetaryimpact on any world in the galaxy.Karrakis is a temperate Gaia world settled prior to theFall by the Apollo – one of the Ten – and left isolatedduring the dark age before Union’s creation. Like theAun, the Karrakin people developed divergent fromUnion for thousands of years under the assumptionthat they alone had survived the Fall. Recontact withKarrakis occurred under the First Committee viaunmanned communications vessels sent to potentialsites of pre-Fall colonies. Having flourished for nearly7,000 years, Karrakis responded rapidly; the twocultures were gradually knit together through regular,though slow, communication, though physical firstcontact did not occur for centuries.Unencumbered by the trauma of the Fall, the colon‐ization of Karrakis was straightforward and thesociety that came about developed at conventionalrates for millennia. By first contact, the Baronieshad grown to be an advanced interplanetary empireladen with thousands of years of cultural history; bythe time of the Deimos Event, the Baronies hadalready claimed stars under their own flag, built thefirst of their ring worlds, and charted doctrines ofinterstellar war.Despite their massive head start, the barons werestunned when Cradle and her bickering children – themany peoples of post-Fall humanity – proved to becapable and formidable rivals on the galactic scale.Indeed, as Union grew in size and leapfrogged beyondKarrakis in interstellar acumen and fantastic technolo‐gies, the barons grew more and more frustrated withthe new – to them – polity. Throne Karrakis, not Cradle,was the center of the galaxy in their minds. WhenCradle disagreed, war broke out, and the barons –proud and assured of their place – were dealt astunning, sobering defeat. In the end, it was theDeimos Event that called Union’s ships back fromKarrakis’ skies; if it weren’t for the Deimos Event andUnion’s meteoric rise to technological ascendancy,Karrakis may have been the seat of humanity’s power.A series of embarrassing defeats followed for the Baroniesas first Union, and Harrison Armory second, broke alldictates of honorable warfare and interstellar doctrine. TheBaronies, cowed on a galactic scale, retreated and turnedinwards. Let the young Union try to manage the galaxy;Throne Karrakis was the true prize anyways, and in cedinghegemony to Union, the barons could enjoy privilegedpositions as the galaxy’s major suppliers of industry – theguarantors of Union’s utopian dream.It is a grim truth – and a cause of tension between thefactions of the Third Committee – that whoever holdsKarrakis has at least one hand on the levers ofUnion’s power. The Baronic embassy on Cradle isconstantly trafficked by Union diplomats and officials,just as the Union campus on Karrakis is inundatedwith nobles and magnates.Following the introduction of mechanized chassis aswarfighting machines, the ancient Karrakin CavalryCollege quickly adapted the new technology. Today, itPLACES[387]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideis known for the quality of the officers and machines itproduces, as evidenced by the military performanceof the Baronic houses and the Free Companies. Simil‐arly, learning from its defeats, the Baronies hasestablished a well-respected naval college system,the Royal Naval Academy. While attendance andservice in the cavalry are still viewed as the mostprestigious course for young scions, attendance andservice in the navy is a parallel honor – one moremental than martial.RAS SHAMRARas Shamra, the home of Harrison Armory, is a worldof hard contrast. It has a severe beauty, one that RasShamrans take fierce pride in and seek to emulate intheir architecture, style, and culture in general. It is alsoa cruel world suspended between extremes: scouringheat and petrifying cold create, in the middle, atemperate zone, always threatened with destruction byeven the most subtle shift. Self-restraint – temperance– is the Ras Shamran ideal; one that some in theArmory fear is eroding to an unsalvageable point ofentropy as diplomatic relations between Karrakis,Cradle, and Ras Shamra grow more and more tense.Tidally locked, Ras Shamra is divided between a “hot”side, ever exposed to its sun, and a “cold” side, everturned away from the light. The only temperate zone isa comparatively small strip of land and thawed seawhere the two sides meet: the terminator line, borderedon one side by boiling desert, and on the other byfrozen tundra. It is the largest world orbiting Ptah’s Star.This terminator line is an oasis, a band of life-sus‐taining tropical jungles, warm river-oceans, and balmyvalleys. It is in this stormy, humid equatorial regionthat colonists first made landfall. Now, the terminatorline is a globe-circling arcology home to roughly 300million permanent residents.The arcology – the eponymous Harrison Armory – is theonly habitable space on Ras Shamra. Reaching from theplanet’s surface to many thousands of meters below,the arcology combines natural and cultivated, organicand synthetic, blending world and building together intoone homeostatic, cultivated biome. Its highest levelscontain lush, varied climates that seamlessly integratebuilt habitats into the natural environment. If a building isexposed, it is meant to be exposed, serving a mechan‐ical, technical, aesthetic, or another official purpose. Thesurface level is widely considered home to the finestdomiciles, offices, and campuses. The Armory’s capitolis located there, at the heart of a botanical park thatsprawls for hundreds of kilometers in each direction.The lower levels of the arcology are where the bulk ofthe “clean” technical, mechanical, mercantile, polit‐ical, and administrative work that sustains the Armoryis performed. The underground is defined by 100-meter tall airlight wells that funnel light down from thesurface, wide concourses packed with shop frontsand offices, and vast strips of cultivated biomesmeant to emulate the surface. Underground maglevhyperloops ring the world, forming the backbone ofRas Shamra’s global transport network. Here, in thearcology underground, one can find the finest of theArmory’s signature distant–classical architecture,marked by titanogeometric features, achromaticprimary/primary-secondary color schemes, and acontrast between airy open spaces and the brutalistinclination toward the subterranean massive.Outside the safety of the Armory, Ras Shamra’s dayand night hemispheres house the Armory’s “dirty”work: research, development, and implementation ofthe corpro-state’s catalog. Each Research, Develop‐ment, and Implementation (RDI) campus is ametropolis in its own right – an oasis in the midst ofunrelenting desert or deep, perma-winter night whereArmory personnel live and work on rotation. Thou‐sands of technicians, engineers, scientists, andsupport personnel live and work in RDI campuses forthe duration of their projects and, when they aredone, are rotated out.The day and night hemispheres and the RDIcampuses that populate them serve as testing sitesfor the Armory’s massive catalog of field equipment –civilian and military. They also offer training groundsfor the Armory’s colonial officers, providing opportun‐ities for both infantry and mechanized cavalry to trainand be tested in extreme environments.The Armory is currently engaged in the massiveendeavor of installing a new subterranean hyperloopring to serve the entire network of scattered RDIcampuses, running perpendicular to the Capital Loop– the primary maglev line that rings the world. ThePerpendicular Loop is still at least a century fromcompletion; in the meantime, regular shuttle flightsprovide transit between campuses.Ras Shamra is also home to the Armory’s SpecialException Persistent-Cultivation Legionspace Environ‐ment – better known as the Think Tank. Its location isclassified, though expert observers suspect it is buriedsomewhere on the night side of the world.In local Ras Shamran space, on-duty legions prepareand specialize for distant colonial missions on one ofthe Armory’s many lunar bases. Meanwhile,enormous orbital stations process the wealth ofempire that flows daily into Ras Shamra – tithes,tributes, and colonial taxes – through its local blinkgate, Capitol Peak Station.[388]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuidePOLARITY WORLDSThese planets are not galactic fulcrums but arenonetheless important worlds. The local powers thatoccupy them have an outsize or otherwise notableimpact on the galactic stage and the affairs ofhumanity.CARINACarina, an ocean world in the Argo Navis system, isthe jewel of IPS-N. It is also the site of the manufac‐turer’s largest corporate campus, Northstar, where itsmaster shipbuilders live and work alongside the topcorporate brass and Cosmopolitan scholars. Carina isringed by ten moons, two thick with habitable atmo‐spheres – Pyxis and Vela. All are given over toresearch and development of IPS-N’s interstellarships and chassis, support systems, and temporalacclimation facilities for retiring Cosmopolitanmembers of IPS-N’s anti-piracy Albatross teams.With 90 percent of Carina covered by ocean water, itsterrestrial population is far outnumbered by its orbitalpopulation. In the planet’s orbit, IPS-N’s vastshipyards produce the galaxy’s most ubiquitousfreight, civilian, and military vessels. Carina’s localspace is a meshed network of slingshot gravitationalshipping lanes, proving grounds, and ejecta-orbitracing courses, where the wealthiest IPS-N boardmembers and officers enjoy easy access to the starsand the newest vessels that cross them.Carina was settled soon after the opening of the blink,selected by IPS-N’s planners as the primaryheadquarters for the newly merged corpro-state. Anocean world ringed by rich terrestrial moons, Carinabecame the jewel of the reborn Cradle corporation.The great project of relocating IPS-N’s physical infra‐structure from Cradle to the Argo Navis system tookcenturies. Planners laid out a design for the world’slandmasses and work teams began converting theraw earth to a series of arcologies akin to HarrisonArmory’s equatorial installation. Meanwhile, back inthe Sol system, pilots and engineers set about themassive work of preparing IPS-N’s shipyards forflight. Section by section, they broke up the greatmanufactories and set them on a course to ArgoNavis; their passage through the blink defined thecalibrations that later became the galactic standardfor interstellar travel.Carina is a world of campuses, unscarred by war or along history of human occupation. Most of the time, itis a temperate, Mediterranean world with warmoceans and shallow, saline seas – typically no deeperthan two to three meters.One notable feature of Carina’s endless oceans is thepresence of polar “wells”, underwater pits where theocean floor suddenly drops to titanic depths of tensof thousands of meters. These wells render theplanet’s poles uninhabitable; they pierce nearly to thecore of the world and generate geysers, causing thesea to boil when underwater gases build up. Once adecade or so these trapped gases release in colossalgouts of steam, venting high into the atmosphere andplunging the world into a steamy, years-long wetseason of hazy, circumglobal rain and elevatedtemperatures.Apart from this phenomenon, Carina is oftendescribed as beautiful, if boring. To the mariner or theCosmopolitan, however, boring isn’t necessarily athing to be avoided.Carina’s local blink gate is Galán Station.PLACES[389]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideAUN’ISTAun’Ist is the capital world of the Aunic peoples andthe seat of their interstellar empire. Once organizedunder the auspices of the Aun Ecumene, the Aunhave undergone a series of miraculous, civilizationwide revelations, prompting staggering civic andcultural change. Organized under religious leadershipsince the dawn of their civilization, the vast majority ofthe Aun are now zealous subjects of the Ascendancy,a relatively new ruling order governed directly by thedivine. The Ascendancy’s mandate is given and guar‐anteed by Metat Aun, an enigmatic MONIST-classentity that shares many similarities with MONIST-1,and that speaks to the Aun through a divine repres‐entative named Os.Aun’Ist is both a holy world and the Ascendancy’scivic capital. It sits at the far distal edge of Unionspace, bordering an old spread of First ExpansionPeriod Diasporan worlds in Boundary Garden – adeveloped, though backwater, sector of the AnnamiteLine. Aunic space is vast and its borders beyondBoundary Garden unknown to Union. Based onlimited observations and reports compiled during theFirst and Second Expansion Periods, Union special‐ists estimate that their population numbers in thebillions.The Aunic peoples are descended from settlers thatcame to Aun’Ist on one of the Ten, the Armstrong;their sister ship, the Rihla, did not reach the destina‐tion. Following repeated hostile contact with Union,the Aun created a hard border between their spaceand Union space. With communications ceased anddiplomatic contacts severed, the Aun were left oncemore to their own space.Unfettered, they built. The Aun grew their empire toencompass dozens of worlds – a number of themarguably as advanced as those in Union’s GalacticCore – and billions of souls. Guided to a degree byMetat Aun and its immortal speaker, Os, the Aunicpeoples have developed fantastic technologies, easilyclassified as paracausal by expert observers, thatallow them to exploit the uncanny. What the Aun lackin the omninet, the blink, and manna, they make upfor with manipulation of and interaction with the firma‐ment, a parallel space similar to the blink.The Aunic peoples are not a monolith, nor do theyshare a united faith. The Ecumene hangs on as agovernment-in-exile, the bulk of their population livingas refugees and expats across Boundary Garden, inUnion space. Demiaun – colonized peoples formallyintegrated into the social caste system first imple‐mented by the Ecumene, then expanded by theAscendancy – make up a significant minority of theAunic empire. The Ascendancy itself was created byreligious schism, and while Os is widely recognized asthe voice of Metat, their edicts must still be inter‐preted by mortals with interests, desires, and goalsboth petty and grand.Aun’Ist is a developed world rich with incrediblenatural beauty and grand metropolitan projects. Itscapital city rivals Karrakis City in scale and scope,with a monumental plaza built to host the repeatedappearances of Metat Aun. Between itsmetroswathes and populated moons, Aun’Ist is aworld alight with life.Aun’Ist is the capital world of the Aunic Ascendancyand has been for millennia; however, as with manydeep political and cultural considerations that grip theAunic people, the Aun are divided on whether or notAun’Ist should be regarded as their ancestralhomeland. That holy place, some argue, is still Earth.[390]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuidePLACES[391]

SECTION 6 // Setting GuideGALACTIC POWERSThe galaxy is unimaginably vast, and few states (orsimilar organizations) have any impact on the inexorabletides of history, events, and possible futures in whichhumanity is caught. Of the countless entities in thegalaxy, those listed here have the most dramaticimpacts on the affairs of humanity at large: theircommand over sectors of the Diasporan market, influ‐ence over galactic standards of quality, and politicalmight are unparalleled – though not unchallenged.GENERAL MASSIVE SYSTEMS“Only the company persists: all other thrones fall to dust.”– Houston, et al., “Foreword”, King of Kings: An OralHistory of General Massive Systems.The oldest and most ubiquitous of the galactic manufac‐turers, General Massive Systems (GMS) is an all-purposesupplier to all persons in Union territory. From mechchassis to casual clothing, from prefab station bulkheadsto coffee beans, GMS’s catalog contains a universe ofgoods, materials, and services. GMS products are widelyconsidered the reliable baseline throughout the galaxy:anything worse than GMS is junk; anything better tendsto be unique or luxury.GMS came to prominence as an independent outfitterduring the First Expansion Period and quickly grew toubiquity as the development of nearlight drives pushedcolonial efforts further and further. Seeing value incontrolling an influential supplier, Union quickly nation‐alized GMS. The corporate entity became another armof Union’s ever-expanding bureaucracy: a tool forstandardizing the equipment and consumables usedby the rapidly growing class of explorers, colonists,and scientists venturing out into the stars.The importance of maintaining a galactic standardcontinued to grow as colonial expansion persistedand corporate competitors emerged. A basic line oftested equipment was needed to assess the improve‐ments required for Cradle-designed gear; similarly,the consequences of time dilation were far moredramatic at the time, and standard, legacy-compat‐ible equipment was needed to assure complianceacross disparate eras.With the incredible wealth of Union behind it, GMSbecame that standard. Over the millennia, it has grownto become a massive department within Union and thestandard against which all other manufacturers aremeasured. Today, GMS is an economic engine, one toolamong many, that Union uses to promote its “brand”across the galaxy. Distinct from Union’s political andmilitary organs, GMS provides an eternal reminder ofsoft power: GMS is everywhere – it is normal.Unlike the other manufacturers listed in this section,GMS doesn’t engage in world-building, colonialventures, or expeditions – instead, it sets the standardupon which all others build, then supplies them withthe gear they need. It creates the world of goods,services, equipment, and habitations most humansthink of as “normal”. GMS’s power comes from itsability to unilaterally define what is acceptable every‐where in Union space: by nudging the bar everupwards, it forces other manufacturers to developalternatives that benefit humanity as a whole, even ifthey are developed for selfish, profit-driven reasons.GMS rarely employs external contractors. Itsheadquarters is on Cradle, like the rest of Union’scentral apparatus, and it has offices throughout theinhabited galaxy.KARRAKIN TRADE BARONIES“And Throne Karrakis, from which all power flows.”– Umara II, Record-Keeper of the House of Water.A federation of the largest and most powerfulmonarchies in known space, the Karrakin barons claimto represent the oldest unbroken civilization in humanhistory. Seeded prior to the Fall and isolated after, therulers of Karrakis were lost and forgotten to Earth forthousands of years, free to expand and develop aspacefaring civilization even while the rest of humanitystruggled to survive the Fall, the dark ages, and theLittle Wars. By the time Union reached back out intospace, the barons had spread to worlds throughouttheir system, designed a functioning – if cumbersome –system of interplanetary administration without thebenefit of the omninet or the blink, and developed theirown enormous network of machine minds to assist inthe functioning of their dynastic monarchy.Karrakis has the distinction of being one of the onlypre-Fall colonies to survive the withering effects of thedark ages – any others, to the best of Union’s know‐ledge, were spawned from generation ships that werelaunched from a dying Cradle in the midst of the Fall.The Baronies, despite its status now as a memberstate of Union, carries a fierce cultural independencethat often causes friction between Union and Baronicstate counterparts.Now split into many houses by the effects of relativistictravel and multi-system distribution, the Baronies iscomprised of a massive, byzantine system of titles,hereditary claims, and territories. There are thousands of[392]PEOPLE

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideminor houses, each swearing fealty to their world’sMajor House, which in turn guarantees and is guaran‐teed by the monarchal power of the Prime Baron.The Baronies controls some of the largest single-partymining, harvesting, and natural resource endeavors inthe galaxy – operations that certainly enable the pros‐perity of the Galactic Core. The operations overseenby the Baronies are enormous in scale and ambition,eclipsed only by Union and rivaled only by the Aun.The major houses – the largest among them – havethe capacity to undertake utterly massive mega-en‐gineering projects, from tearing apart whole stars fortheir energy to cracking newly formed worlds for theirminerals, transforming entire colonial ventures intoplanet-sized agrifactories, and sucking the atmo‐spheres from gas giants.The barons are canny profiteers by Union’s standards,doing business out among the Diaspora often inopposition to the interests of the various corprostates on the rise since the Second Expansion Period;most notably against the imperial aims of HarrisonArmory. Internal conflict among minor houses iscommon enough, but guided by strict cultural codes.Internal conflicts tend to be limited, ceremonial orsmall-scale engagements. Baronic culture placesgreat import on the fighting ability of nobles; territorialdisputes are often settled after brief engagements inagreed-upon locations, or by single combat betweennominated champions. These duels are, in themodern era, usually fought to first blood, rather thandeath, though to-the-death challenges remain legal, ifrare.Since the beginning of the Federal Karrakin Monarchy– the current system by which the Baronies isgoverned – the minor houses of the Baronies havebeen further organized into global federations subor‐dinate to the Prime Baron. Each world of the Baronieswas assigned to a major house, the name of whichwas chosen independent of any family history. Thesemajor houses function as political parties, rather thanhereditary organizations.Each minor house is ruled by a baron, and there is ade facto dynastic inheritance among the top tier ofthese houses. Barons and other nobles bear titlesbased on their position within a major house inaddition to their personal and family names. NobleBaronic names are structured as follows:[Noble title] [personal name]-[familyhouse] of the [major house of which thisperson’s family house is a member].Examples:• Baron Yond-Argo of the House of Glass.• Underbaron Ondo-diKayradi of the House of Stone.• Principe Silas-Moulin of the House of Moments.The use of house livery is common in the Baronies.Houses each have a unique iconography, but oftenshare elements with related houses. Minor houses,merchant guilds, free companies, house companies,and so on will incorporate elements from the majorhouse to which they owe allegiance. The prime baronis understood to have dominion over all houses, andthus has no need to make a particular mark on thelivery of any, except in the case of the prime baron’shonor guards. All units, retainers, officers, ships, andso on within the honor guard wear the Royal Prime, adeep, earthy red elsewhere called Karrakin Maroon.Bearing the Royal Prime is considered a singularhonor.The introduction of another political battlefield – influ‐ence in the Central Committee – has proveninteresting, but most of the houses still view the primebarony as the most prestigious throne on which to sit,and their own ancestral home, Karrakis, as thegalaxy’s prize.All Baronic nobles, gendered or not, are trained rigor‐ously in martial, religious, and cultural rituals from ayoung age. By custom, noble youth must master thepen, the sword, and proper etiquette in equal measureto be considered enlightened, strong leaders capable ofbringing glory, honor, wealth, and acclaim to theirhouses. The social order is rigid in the Baronies, withupward class mobility only possible through the grace ofhigher nobles, who all compete with each other for theprestige of having the largest and most successfulhouse. As such, barons and their scions must be trainedrigorously. Houses undertake all kinds of measures toget ahead of their rivals. For those of noble birth, this is afundamental aspect of life – part of the grand game, atest of one’s divine and inherent right to rule.The current ruler of the Karrakin Trade Baronies isPrime Baron Karra-Bem of House Karraka. Sinceintegration, all Prime Barons have been guaranteed aseat on CentComm, and Karra-Bem is an active parti‐cipant. A thorn in the side of many committeemembers to the left of the Fourth Column and apowerful ally to those in her favor, she has workedhard to maintain peace in Cradle–Baronic space.PEOPLE[393]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guide“No howling masses ever overcame the might of hope.”– John Creighton Harrison I, “Excerpt from FoundationDay speech, 4515u/1ay18”.Harrison Armory is the premier manufacturer ofweapons and weapon platforms in the galaxy. It isone of the three largest corpro-states that dictate theconsumption habits of the Diaspora and Cosmo‐polita; unlike the others, the Armory is a major andovert participant in galactic politics, pursuing anexpansive imperial project that is reined in by onlyUnion and the Karrakin Trade Baronies.The Armory develops some of the most advancedconventional and paracausal tech that can be legallyobtained. Next to GMS, the Armory is the secondmost popular supplier for state fleets, militaries, and[394]HARRISON ARMOURYPlaced after a year, “ay” is an abbrevi‐ation of “Armory Year”, HarrisonArmory's own, little-used datingsystem. Used enthusiastically during the reign ofHarrison I, it has fallen out of vogue undersubsequent administrations.18

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidepolice forces. It is a massive imperial power with apopulation numbering in the billions, continuing togrow as more and more colonies pledge themselves –voluntarily or otherwise – to Ras Shamra.The Armory’s success can be credited in large part tothe Special-Exception Persistent-Cultivation Legion‐space Engine: SEPCLE, or colloquially, the Think Tank.The Think Tank is the Armory’s version of theGALSIM, a choir of persistent near-cascade NHPsthat the Armory uses for research and developmentinto paracausal technology, forecasting, and manage‐ment. The Armory is permitted to run a full choir ofthese borderline unshackled NHPs thanks to anextensive post-Interest War treaty structure estab‐lished with Union. The location of the Think Tank iskept secret, though it is presumed to be buried deepbelow the frozen tundra of Ras Shamra’s night side.The Think Tank, while a closely guarded corprosecret, is known to Union, which enjoys regularinspections of the facility. Union’s access to the ThinkTank is a thorn in the side of the Armory’s directorgeneral, who would prefer that Union keep its pryingeyes far from sensitive corporate technology.Firmly expansionist, Harrison Armory works toexpand and develop humanity’s presence across thestars – its mission, while mirroring Union’s, oftenencounters regulatory hiccups. It is rare, though notunheard of, for the Armory’s colonial legions to facethe regulatory and martial wrath of the DoJ/HR. TheArmory maintains a broad portfolio of colonizationand development missions, attracting both inde‐pendent Diasporan colonies and minor affiliatedsubjects – typically Baronic, owing to the Armory’sproximity to Karrakis – with promises of meritocraticcitizenship, infrastructure development, protection.The origins of the Armory lie in the tumult surroundingthe Second Committee’s overthrow in the 4500s.Following the dissolution of SecComm, many membersof the deposed Anthrochauvinist Party retired, fled, orquit from the bureaucracy, seeking worlds distant fromthe revolutionary fervor that gripped Cradle. As thenewly minted Third Committee stabilized and worked tosecure its hold on Union as a whole, a mid-levelAnthrochauvinist Party officer, John CreightonHarrison, founded Harrison Armory from a coalition ofresource-extraction communes present on Ras Shamra.The fallout of the Hercynian Crisis may have brokenSecComm, but its aftermath ushered many loyalistsinto the command structure of the nascent HarrisonArmory. Now, the Armory is ruled by their descend‐ants and heirs, and its relationship with Union iscolored by the expectation of friction in the distantfuture. For the time being, it is more beneficial forboth entities to work together than against oneanother, however cold their personal relationshipsmight be.The eponymous Harrison Armory complex is locatedon Ras Shamra, a tide-locked world orbiting Ptah’sStar. The Armory itself is a sprawling administrative,research-industrial arcology built in Ras Shamra’sterminator line, a temperate band where the day andnight side of Ras Shamra meet and mix.The Armory circles the planet, a city-campus thatholds a population of nearly three hundred millionemployees, executives, and other personnel inside ofits walls. Meanwhile, the day and night sides of RasShamra act as testing grounds for Harrison Armory’schassis, weapons, and legions. Dedicated acquisi‐tions legionnaires earn honors for proving themselvesin both the day and night advanced training courses,setting themselves apart from green hires who enlistto advance their corporate political career.Ras Shamra is encircled by concentric rings of orbitaldefense stations and shipyards upon which around100 million permanent residents reside and work.Here, the great paracausal and supermassivePEOPLE[395]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guideweaponry of the Armory is built, tested, and stored.The work in the rings is constant, and hulls of all sizesare churned out at a rate that, while not rivaling IPSN, is staggering in scale.In addition to its weapons technology, the Armory isknown for sturdy exploration gear, consumer- andstate-level logistics and infrastructure packages,personal groundcars, and fine liquors. It’s a big playerin galactic trade thanks to its Distal DevelopmentProgram, which cultivates and exports exotic alienspices, flora, fauna, and minerals for consumer use.Most citizens of the Galactic Core and welldeveloped Diasporan worlds – those who define whatamounts to “public galactic knowledge” – would notknow anything in particular about Ras Shamra, theThink Tank, or the operations of Armory colonialmissions. They would know Harrison Armory as aweapons manufacturer and defense contractorwhose name they hear in snippets of newscastsabout Cradle politics, distal colonial affairs, and IPSN’s stranglehold on interstellar shipping. Some whohave studied the history of Cradle and Union mightknow of the Armory’s ties to the AnthrochauvinistSecComm, but five hundred years after the fact, itcertainly feels like old news.COLONIAL LEGIONNATEThe Harrison Armory Colonial Legionnate is theexternal-facing arm of the corpro-state's imperialforces. It falls under the direct command of JohnCreighton-Cruz Harrison III, Director General ofHarrison Armory, the corpro-state’s current politicaland military leader.Of the many legionnates, divisions, departments, andbureaus that make up the Armory’s command struc‐ture, the largest and most visible is the ColonialLegionnate. The Colonial Legionnate commandshundreds of colonial legions, each of which containsat least one division-strength advance team of legion‐naires and colonial officers – an Acquisition andManagement Team (AMT).The primary role of AMTs is to make beachheads onworlds and territories that have been designated ascolonial priorities. They have a twofold mission: first,to integrate with and police local populations whileannexation negotiations determine the future of theworlds they occupy. And second, if talks break downand resistance becomes violent, AMTs are author‐ized to establish green zones, deter rebellion, andremove prominent anti-Armory leaders. Theirmission scope broadens the more a situation deteri‐orates, while their armaments and disposition reflectthe grim realities of their job.When an AMT makes landfall on a world, the mighty bulkof at least one legion is sure to follow. Whatever bannerthe world flies will, inexorably, deepen to the Armory’sshade of plum – the Bruise, as it is called by Union Auxili‐aries forced into peacekeeping roles on Armory worlds.AMTs operate far afield on long-term occupations andworld-building projects. In peaceful, long-term occu‐pation and development projects, AMT personnel areposted on planetside bases, boarded in the homes ofsympathetic locals, and encouraged to integrate intothe local culture. As a consequence, they becomewell accustomed to the local cuisine, climate,languages, geography, and tactics, to the point wherelong-brewing hostile takeovers often look more likecivil wars. In the rare case that a takeover is neces‐sary, it is not uncommon for AMTs to field largecomplements of local auxiliaries while they wait forthe Armory’s regular legions to arrive.AMTs personnel are drawn from the ranks of the ColonialLegions, which in turn draw their soldiery from variouslocal sympathetic factions, Ras Shamran corporatecampuses, noble Armory families, and Loss PreventionPrecincts, with the promise of profit and adventure.Upon the announcement of a new colonial mission,both colonial subjects and citizens of all classeswithin the Armory’s Purview – that is, all worlds andcolonies under the Armory’s direct administration –are encouraged to enlist. Most deployments last twoyears realtime. For non-citizens and colonial subjects,the reward for service is citizenship for them and theirimmediate families, and all the rights and privilegesafforded to Armory citizens of post-service rank.Citizens are promised promotions, social standing,credit increases, debt forgiveness, and favorablecompensation for their families commensurate withtheir commitment. Service in a colonial legion is apopular way for young Armory citizens to increasetheir citizenship ranking; many from low-rank familiesserve in order to progress toward management ranks.Management-ranked citizens join the ColonialLegions, too. These citizens have the option topurchase officer commissions, deployment honors,and favorable status at the outset of the mission.These officer commissions (“corner-office commis‐sions”) are limited in number, and bidding among themoneyed youth of the managerial class is spirited.For employees and managers alike, a career in theColonial Legions is seen as an adventure, a chance toraise their station, and a good financial bet. For repres‐entatives of occupied indigenous populations who joinat a recruitment center, enlisting grants them statusand rights in the Armory’s colonial structure, withopportunities for advancement following demonstrated[396]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidecommitment to the Directorate and the Mission of RasShamra. Upon enrollment and completion of training,non-citizens are granted status in the Purview and acitizen rank.At present, Harrison Armory works closely with theUnion Administrative Department to ensure worldstargeted for acquisition are properly integrated intothe broader Union superstructure. It is important tonote, though, that even though the executivebranches of the Armory and the UAD are largelycooperative, the experience on the ground is oftencontentious. Administrators are inclined to protect –as much as possible – the worlds they have beenassigned in the wake of the Armory’s imperial aggres‐sion. It is their duty to slowly integrate their hostworlds into Union’s structure. Once deployed, theymay only ever live and work on one world; to behanded a world conquered by the Armory is a lessthan ideal assignment, and one that suggests amessy, violent future.Colonial legions are often deployed en masse in thecourse of the Armory’s liberation and world-buildingmissions throughout the Diaspora. On both resourcerich worlds with established histories and centuries-oldcultures, and new, untamed worlds, the Armory uses itslegions to depose tyrannical rulers. The legions tend tobe welcomed first as liberators – after all, they defeatedthe armies of local oppressors – though friction is notuncommon once the dust has settled and world-buildingbegins. The price for liberation, as the Armory sees it, isintegration into the Purview, adoption of the Armory’sculture, and commitments that must be fulfilled.Player characters that work for an AMT are most likelylegionnaires of some rank. These characters would bemembers of a rigid chain of command that leads all theway up to a planetary governor-general, who, in turn,reports back to the main campus on Ras Shamra.Outside of the legion system, legionnaire charactersoccupy honored roles in Armory society, with citizenranks a step above those of the civil service.Legions are named for their first mission and the orderin which they were raised. For example, LegionAlhambra I would be the first legion raised for theAlhambra mission.EXAMPLE FLASHPOINT: OPERATION CLARIONThe Armory is preparing to send a second wave ofcolonial legions and eager officers out to a developingCoreward colonial expanse, the Dawnline Shore. TheDawnline Shore is home to a dozen close-knit colonyworlds, first seeded centuries ago by a series of fireand-forget colonial operations at the order of Harrison I.Construction of a system-local blink gate has justbeen completed, and now Harrison III, the currentdirector general and the grandson of Harrison I, iseager to integrate these colonial prospects into theArmory’s ever-growing Purview. Success would be acrowning achievement of the young director general’sreign, and while he may not be on the front lines, hisdesire to see the Dawnline Shore properly integratedinto the Purview is firm.The Dawnline Shore’s dozen inhabited worlds – desig‐nated DS1–DS12 by the Armory – are rich with rare andvaluable metals that the Think Tank has identified asessential for expanding its paracausal research anddevelopment. Additionally, the planets in question arethick with the usual suite of tremendous mineral, floral,and faunal wealth that perpetuates the Armory’sgrowth. On all levels, from the mundane-but-necessaryto the fantastic and rare, the worlds of the DawnlineShore are jewels to gild the Armory’s throne – and meatto feed its never-ending appetite.The descendants of the initial wave of colonial legion‐naires have been ordered to activate and re-form theirlegions across the twelve worlds. Old colonial NHPsrise from dormancy, sounding the call to post andwaking subalterns and stasis-held personnel. Indi‐genous families are torn between two loyalties: theirancestral duty to the Armory, and their new homes,theirs alone for hundreds of years.The Armory cannot afford to lose the resources onthese worlds and is preparing an aggressive colonialexpedition to secure them. To this end, it haspartnered with IPS-N, which has is responsible formanaging both the Armory’s logistics in the colonialregion and Union’s construction of the Shore's newblink gate. Already, cultural tensions between theArmory and IPS-N have caused diplomatic difficulties,but the two parties continue to work together.The Armory expects that the colonial legions willencounter recalcitrant local resistance: communica‐tions over the past few hundred years indicate that thecolonies are animated by a combination of centurieslong independent development, the formation of indi‐genous cultures, and now a mounting series ofunification movements. These movements have beenencouraged by agents of the Karrakin Trade Baroniesin the Shore working to amplify anti-Armory sentiment.Now, these movements are on the cusp of unifying intoa system-wide confederation. With more and moreArmory legionnaires arriving each year, the expansionof the Armory’s direct colonial domination of the Shore,and the Baronies’ own territorial ambition, all signspoint toward an impending conflagration.This flashpoint is just one of the Armory’s currentprojects. Players could easily take either side, or enterthe flashpoint from a third angle as-yet unwritten.PEOPLE[397]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guide“You already contain perfection. Welcome to the futureof humanity: You, by Smith-Shimano.”– SSC background copy, subaural broadcast loop.Smith-Shimano Corpro is the second most powerfulcorpro-state in the galaxy. Unlike Harrison Armory andIPS-N, it holds little physical territory and doesn’tpractice colonial missions in the traditional sense. SSC’sphysical holdings are dwarfed by its omninet presenceand its ubiquity across the Cosmopolita and Diaspora.SSC rose to prominence during the Second Expan‐sion Period. It rapidly dominated the Core marketfor biological and cybernetic enhancements in theheyday of Union’s liberal, pre-Deimostranshumanism. Following the Deimos Event, theFirst Contact Accords, and the ensuing crackdownon machine-mind creation and ontologic and singu‐larity-focused experimentation, SSC adopted a[398]SMITH-SHIMANO CORPRO

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidemore “natural” philosophy toward human enhance‐ment. Instead of pursuing the marriage of humanconsciousness and artificial intelligence, SSCresearchers began to focus on improving thebodies we live in; instead of negating the need tostep to the stars, they sought to make it so wecould step among the stars.SSC’s corporeal research pushes the edges of what itmeans to be human. Cybernetic enhancements,subdermal nettings, aural communicators, neur‐oneutral omnihooks, ontologic bridges, cosubjectivity nodes, Panacea glands – the list isexhausting, and that only covers the tech designed bythe Foreign Bodies Department of SSC’s massiveresearch and development program, not to mentionthe wide portfolio of goods developed by artisanenclaves and masterwork fabricators associated withSSC worlds. The backbone of SSC’s power isdemonstrated in the form of its own citizens, a popu‐lation of millions spread across a constellation ofmoons, worlds, stations, and habitats in the SierraMadre Line. The social and genetic composition ofthese populations is monitored and precisely cultiv‐ated using cultural suggestion, infrastructuralguidance, and societal coercion. SSC’s goal is toproduce best-fit genetic material for the corpro’s bigmanna buyers: colony firms looking to licensebespoke populations for as-yet-unexploited worlds.SSC’s home campus is a shared virtual space in theomninet that connects the wide, anarchic net of SSCaligned worlds and moons into one cohesive body:the Constellar Congress, or, the Constellar. Worldswith membership in the Constellar – those directlyadministered by SSC, which are few in number, andworlds that administer themselves, but whose popu‐lations are genetic constituents of SSC and choose toassociate with the corpro-state, which are far morenumerous – are the “Constellar Worlds” that compriseSSC’s “population”. The Constellar Congress isshielded by layers of security coding (including hypersolipsistic, anticausal, and paradox-generating safe‐guards) managed by NHPs seeded from proprietarysubjectivities and tightly administered by ranks ofConstellar bureaucrats. This well-defended virtualstate and represents the bleeding edge of organic/synthetic virtual interfacing.The Constellar Congress’s virtual campus is repres‐ented as a palatial, many-chambered estate wherethe representatives of SSC’s populations meet invirtual space. The building does not appear to have acounterpart in realspace, though it is often suggestedthat its architectural inspiration comes from a buildingon SSC’s first colony world, Opal, rendered inhos‐pitable following bitter civil violence in the FirstExpansion Period.Realspace SSC campuses exist across the SierraMadre Line, providing similar services to embassiesand medical centers for the corpro-state’s memberpopulations. These embassies are uplinks for SSC’sprivate omninode, publicly accessible to the popula‐tions of these Constellar Worlds.Worlds under SSC’s direct control are dramatic intheir environmental variance. They include everythingfrom lightly developed atmospheric moons through toarcadian worlds. In all cases, their populations aretightly controlled through deep cultural manipulationto generate biome-specific lines of colony seedmateriel. The people of these worlds are aware ofSSC’s mission; they are freely associated members ofthe corpro-state, most of whom are as invested in itsmission – literally – and are generally unconcernedwith SSC’s human experimentation projects. Save forregular, culturally-appropriate samplings of geneticPEOPLE[399]

SECTION 6 // Setting Guidematerial (a few hairs, a drop of blood, a swab frominside the mouth) and an expectation of arrangedcoupling, life on Constellar Worlds is unremarkableand quiet. Most Constellar populations view theConstellar Congress and its myriad environments astheir primary cultural space, not whatever realspaceworld on which they reside.Despite SSC's use of Constellar worlds as advertise‐ments for the quality of genome available for license,these worlds remain only that – advertisements. SSCdoes not sell people; according to its marketing, itsells potential. Cells and data are at the heart of theSSC’s business, not whole persons or populations.The corpro-state’s power comes from the cultivationof best-fit, healthy genetic material for colonialprojects, medical and military applications, andprivate use.To expand its libraries of genetic stock, SSC regularlymounts expeditions into all sectors of space with thegoal of seeking out new and interesting populations.The recruitment and marketing materials carried bySSC representatives leans heavily on the benefits ofimmigration to SSC worlds: they are, the messagingdeclares, your ideal paradise.SSC is also known for luxury consumer goods andmachinery. Elegant ships, mechanized chassis, andhardsuits for the discerning Metropolitan, Cosmopol‐itan, and Diasporan. Fabrics and materials that feelperfect against the owner’s skin; cybernetic andbiological enhancements that will never fail or berejected by the body; flash-grown internals andextremities – insurance, should the worst happen.SSC’s LUX-Iconic line of consumer goods is bespokedown to the atom, crafted specifically for thepurchaser of that ship, chassis, suit, or bottle of wine.There’s only one of you in the galaxy – shouldn’t therebe only one of these?The average galactic citizen knows SSC as a luxurybrand that brings value to the material world throughcraft and expertise. SSC’s advertisements emphasizethe hand-designed nature of its products and thelong-cycle growth of its biologicals. Officially, SSCconsiders printing a necessary evil, suitable formaking the goods the masses need, but not theperfect, unique items their clients deserve.What little of SSC’s power doesn’t derive from itsgenetic libraries comes from the licensing of luxurygoods, cybernetics, and biological lines to Diasporancultures, colonial missions, Cosmopolitan groups,and powerful private individuals.CONGRESSIONAL DIPLOMATIC CORPS ANDCONSTELLAR SECURITYSSC’s Congressional Diplomatic Corps (CDC) is afacsimile of the Union Administrative Department,with some changes particular to its corporatemission. Where the primary mission of Union adminis‐trators is to cultivate diplomatic relationships withtarget worlds, CDC agents instead cultivate relation‐ships with communities of genetic interest. Theagents of the CDC are recruited exclusively fromneutral-genetic populations predisposed to adapta‐tion and resilience.CDC agents usually meet not with governments orrulers, but with community and spiritual leaders.Their missions may involve nominal overtures tolocal governments or heads of state, but onlyinsofar as needed to ensure their target populationsare free to travel.To avoid complications that might arise frombypassing local governing bodies, CDC agents areaccompanied by Constellar Security details and smallcomplements of chassis. Constellar Security officersare plucked from Constellar worlds to act both asadvertisements and best-fit guards – already inhomeostatic sync with whatever world to which theyare deployed. CDC agents and their retinues operatefrom PLATFORM mobile skyhooks, SSC’s proprietarysubcompact orbital carrier ships.SSC doesn’t field large ground forces in the way thatHarrison Armory does, nor does it seek to expand itsphysical territory in the same way. The CDC is a bureau‐cratic, administrative body, within which rank isdetermined by seniority and a limited certificationsystem. Conversely, Constellar Security is organizedaccording to a military hierarchy, if a relatively small one.CDC agents and their retinues will typically undertakeat least one tour outside of Constellar space. Settingout on such a journey, they expect to return homeeventually, potentially embark on one other tour, andthen progress in the technobureaucracy of theConstellar Core.If your PCs are members of a CDC team or aConstellar Security detail, they will have access to aconvenient base for downtimes and rest in the form ofa PLATFORM mobile skyhook. Within their team(whether CDC or Constellar Security), they wouldlikely be equal in rank, each a specialist in their field ofchoice. Not only would they be expected to guard aCDC agent, also advertise their genetic line.[400]