Flyover Country: Chapter 5

Sketch by Kunrong Yap

Continued from Chapter 4.

The PCs have a pretty good haul: approximately three tons of assorted pretech junk (with a market value of about 50kc a ton, per the old SWN supplement Suns of Gold), various more-or-less useful TL5 knicknacks, and a bunch of data. Some schematics, the locations of eleven other facilities like the one they've just looted, and centuries of geoengineering observations. They know that the latter data will be particularly valuable on Opis (Mustang's and Sarai's homeworld) or Munda, two planets struggling to maintain ancient terraforming systems. Altogether, they figure they're looking at a quarter million credits or more—enough, even after paying Manny and Elias their cuts, to fix up the ship and have way more cash left over than they've seen in the campaign thus far.

All they need to do is get it out of a hole in the ground deep in a dense urban slum and onto their ship. There's nowhere in the immediate vicinity of Manny's construction site for their ship to set down, and they don't want to draw attention to themselves by trying to winch the loot up into a hovering starship or anything like that. They figure they'll just sneak it out disguised as construction debris—a dump truck leaves the site most evenings, so they'll line up an extra truck (Batias knows a guy, of course), load it with all the portable loot, and head for the dump in a two-truck convoy.

BQ flags down a motorcycle taxi and speeds away to the spaceport to get the ship ready. If nothing bad happens on the way to the dump, the other five will just rumble on down to the port and fly away unsuspected. If things go haywire, there's enough open space at the dump to set the ship down.

* * *

Now, my players may have been largely ignoring my peripheral NPCs and Milieu machinations, but the NPCs haven't been ignoring them. Tu Samir has been spying on Manny for the Bautistas; surely somebody has been spying for the Najeebs too, right? Well, sort of. Manny's beloved secretary, Gloria Moretta, was recruited as a mole for the syndicate, and she's been feeding information to her handler, Orlando Ilunga, but Orlando has gone rogue.

When Gloria informed him that Manny's workers had found some kind of buried pretech facility, rather than pass the info up the syndicate's chain of command, he contacted the mysterious, mononymic corporate agent Ashbrook, who he knows is interested in any pretech finds around Freeport. Ashbrook is, among other things, a fixer for Mputu Manufacturing, a local subsidiary of Khabaran megacorporate giant Echelon Shipbuilding & Engineering, which is heavily engaged in pretech research. Orlando figures (more or less correctly) that the take will be in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, and even a 10% cut will be life-changing for him.

Can Orlando trust Ashbrook to deliver on that promised 10%? Unclear, but he's greedy (or desperate) enough to roll the dice. In order to keep the site under observation in case Gloria gets cold feet (or gets cut out of the loop), and in order to have muscle on hand, he's contracted local private-security firm Sunrise Strategies (who are connected to neither the Bautistas nor the Najeebs but the Umba family across town). He's paying them hundreds of credits—a very large chunk of his meager personal savings. Orlando needs results, and fast.

Ashbrook, meanwhile, has not only gotten herself looped in regarding the Sunrise surveillance, she's also retained the services of a small Khabaran PMSC called Eminent Alternatives; they have eight soldiers standing by with an armed gravflyer, advanced drones, and weaponry that significantly outclasses the players'. Whereas the syndicates just want to shake Manny down for money, Ashbrook is willing to blow up half the neighborhood to get the goods, especially if there's something more significant down there than junk and stims (and she has a better sense than anybody else involved of what this site actually was). She does want confirmation that the PCs have unearthed something worth messily stealing, though.

* * *

Blissfully ignorant of all this but confident in their talents, and especially in Krissa's precognitive powers (which half the crew actually know about now, as opposed to their players, who haven't been able to help metagaming a bit), the PCs wait for their truck. Batias's guy, a part-time driver, part-time model named Konstantin Hossain, rolls up, and with the help of a crude gravsled Roman has MacGyvered together, they quickly get the goods into the truck's bed. They decide that Krissa and Mustang will clamber up there with their loot, concealed by a tarp, while the other three will squeeze into the cab of the truck with Konstantin. The regular crew of the other dump truck—the one actually loaded with debris bound for the dump—will be joined by two of Manny's rifle-toting guards.

The players' faith in Krissa is, of course, well-founded. As it will many, many, many times to come, her Terminal Reflection ability foils the enemy's plans. Sunrise Strategies operatives, shadowing the trucks with a drone, have laid an ambush: Three gunmen will block the trucks' forward path while one steps out behind it; they'll get a look in the beds of the trucks under the pretense of checking the drivers' papers, then simply shoot everybody in the trucks if one or both are carrying the goods.

Forewarned, Konstantin accelerates rather than braking, plowing through one of the gunmen while the others dive for cover. Krissa and Mustang throw the tarp off, the PCs open fire, and they swiftly dispatch two enemies, although the one behind the trucks manages to fatally shoot one of Manny's guards before being brought down in turn. Krissa surreptitiously saves the mortally wounded guard with her biopsionic Remote Repair power; he comes to bewildered, unaware of how he managed to survive.

Speeding toward the dump, the crew call for BQ to bring the ship straight there. They pull the truck with the loot right up to the ship's cargo ramp and hurriedly begin loading (the cargo bay isn't quite tall enough to just drive the truck into the ship).

More operatives (the sniper-and-drone team that had been surveilling Manny's construction site and another four-man fireteam) arrive but hesitate to attack, opting to wait for support from Ashbrook's mercenaries. No such luck for them; Krissa's Terminal Reflection kicks in once again, just as the gravflyer is about to swoop down on the crew and spray them with heavy machine gun fire. The PCs, the truck drivers, and Manny's guards dash up the ramp, the gravflyer's attack bounces harmlessly off the ship's sturdy TL4 hull, and the crew flee the scene, unfortunately leaving behind a literal ton of pretech relics. (They sensibly loaded the most important stuff, including the computer systems, first, however.)

They speed back to the spaceport, drop off the drivers and guards (and pay them a little extra for their trouble), then ring up Elias and assess the situation. Everybody agrees: It's time to get off Morrow and head for the Commonwealth, where they should have little trouble selling their pretech junk and there should be an institutional buyer for the geoengineering data. Elias will shop the locations of the other observation stations locally.

Meanwhile, the guard Krissa saved contacts Sarai: His brother is in trouble. Could the crew take him in, get him off Morrow? He'll meet them at their hangar as soon as he can. And of course they're happy to help—he can pay for passage, right?

* * *

When I turned to my trusty name generator to name the miraculously saved guard, I got "Alexander Ilunga." And it's not like there are an inadequate number of surnames to choose from; I've got like 750 options in there. Two Ilungas—coincidence? No way. This was fate. They must be related!

Yes, the very guy who helped some corporate vulture try to rip the PCs off and nearly got them killed, Orlando Ilunga, has now come to them begging for passage off Morrow, having no idea that his brother's ship-owning (well, leasing) acquaintances are the very people he just crossed. Having no idea that, but for Krissa's intervention, he would have been responsible for his own brother's death. Quelle horreur! (Did he not realize that Alexander would be in danger? He did not. Alexander only showed up at the construction site after the crew recommended that Manny round up some guards. Alexander happens to be a decent shot, and he needed a little extra money…)

A quick interview with the frantic Orlando—who explains that he double-crossed one of the syndicates, he was involved in a botched heist, his former employers want him dead—clues the players in to his identity. He, on the other hand, is still none the wiser. There's some talk of turning him over to the Najeebs or just leaving him to his fate, but craftier heads prevail: Maybe they can use him to get to Ashbrook and get the rest of their stuff back. Or maybe they can just squeeze him for an exorbitant fare as a passenger, since he's something of a captive market. (They definitely do that second thing.)

BQ has Orlando strip and takes his clothes out into the spaceport (the others, meanwhile, find a shipsuit for Orlando to wear). BQ finds a guy who looks very approximately like Orlando and offers him 50 credits to put the clothes on. The guy, no fool, asks, "Is somebody trying to kill whoever was wearing the clothes before me?" But he's feeling lucky: He'll do it for 150 credits, if he gets to keep the clothes too (they're pretty sharp). BQ wishes him luck, and off he goes, running down the spaceport concourse.

Around the time the crew take off, planning to head for the neighboring Marquez system, the running man gets shot and killed. Alas, poor Donald Nunes. We hardly knew ye.

Paths in the Sky

For a while now, I've been thinking about how to design a narrative-oriented lifepath character generator derived from Mongoose Traveller 2e; I started out trying to adapt that one directly to Stars Without Number but quickly found myself instead trying to build one that's system- and setting-neutral instead. There are a few mechanical incompatibilities between the systems, the Traveller tables make some setting assumptions that don't mesh with SWN, and system neutrality just generally makes a tool more useful (and more of an interesting design challenge).

Going system-neutral means either abstracting any stat outputs of the generator (reducing them to, e.g., “gain a physical attribute bonus at the GM's discretion”) or ditching them entirely. This is fine, because the flurry of stat bonuses and penalties you get in Traveller are some of the lifepath system's least-interesting outputs. I don't want wildly different outcomes in terms of power; I want distinctive characters. (One problem that does arise here is aging—in Traveller, penalties to physical stats are also penalties to health and hardiness. Aging is probably out.)

Skills are a bit more important than attributes in most sci-fi TTRPGs (some, like 24XX, don't have attributes at all), but they also vary wildly. I think they're best abstracted and left to the players and GM to negotiate (i.e., notes like “gain a generalist skill package representing basic military training” and “gain a specialist skill package representing your academic studies”).

So stat bonuses and penalties are going away, or at least being abstracted. Skills are being abstracted. Aging penalties are probably going to be limited or elided; maybe I'll slap a five- or fix-term limit on characters. What else can go? Straight cash isn't very interesting, and neither are cash budgets to acquire weapons, armor, etc. Anything that gives players analysis paralysis right at the start of the game, especially if “making the right choice” depends on system knowledge (or poring over the rulebook for half an hour), is a bad idea.

What's left—what's the good stuff? Connections. The connections rule in MgT2e, which rewards players for explaining how their characters came to know each other, is great. Gotta keep that in some form. NPC connections are great too—friends, enemies, ex-lovers, rivals, clients, and patrons. These give characters depth, give the GM some hooks and levers, and offer good bridges for PC connections. Organizational connections are interesting too: society memberships, union cards, military ranks and campaign ribbons, letters of recommendation, and so forth. Relatedly, failed checks during the lifepath can be really interesting, if handled well (more interesting than many successes). The university dropout, the sergeant who tried for a commission and failed, the assistant professor who didn't get tenure—it changes nothing mechanically, but suggests a perspective, an attitude, a chip on the shoulder.

In that same vein, and moving a bit farther from what's actually in the MgT2e rules, debts are a lot more interesting than financial assets (and debts don't have to be financial—just ask Chewbacca). Wounds are interesting too, whether emotional or physical. A gnarly scar, a utilitarian prosthetic, a tendency to flinch or start at a certain sound. Some of these things feel cheap—affected and unearned—if you just declare them by fiat while cooking up a character, but become really cool when you come by them honestly. The same goes for possessions that make a character more distinctive: a signature weapon, a favorite coat, a treasured necklace. Mementos of important events, keepsakes from important people.

* * *

Now that I've got a decent sense of what sort of outputs I want (and don't want), how many different paths should lead to those outputs, and how complicated should they be? I want to cover as many classic SF archetypes as possible but without creating an overwhelming number of choices, yet I want enough options that two players are unlikely to roll on the same tables much, and I want a somewhat realistic menu of choices while still skewing things toward the adventurous (i.e., it should be possible for your character to be an office worker or a starving artist, but most of the paths should involve spaceships and/or lasers).

Some careers should offer structured advancement (e.g., military ranks) and some should offer more volatile and less granular advancement (e.g., that starving artist might become a superstar, or at least find a generous patron, but they'll more likely just keep starving). I probably want to avoid careers that don't offer room for advancement at all, for a pretty broad definition of "advancement."

So what are the archetypes I want to work toward? Firefly offers a pretty classic lineup: the Captain, the Muscle, the First Mate (essentially an extra Captain crossed with some backup Muscle), the Pilot, the Mechanic, the Doctor, the Ambassador, and the Psychic. It also gives us the Mysterious Preacher, who represents a wild-card spot—substitute Starving Artist or Walter Mitty or whatever you will. Despite the very different setting and scale, Star Trek gives us a similar cast: Captain, Chief of Security, First Officer, Helmsman, Engineer, Doctor (or Nurse), and occasionally Psychic Counselor. We might also get a Science Officer, an Operations Officer, a Communications Officer, and various wild-card alternatives to Shepherd Book (a Bartender or two, a Chef, a "Tailor").

To simplify a bit, then, I'm looking for the lifepath to spit out characters who fit at least five core roles: Captain (lead), Pilot (fly), Engineer (fix), Doctor (heal), and Muscle (fight). It would be good to represent Scientist (research), Diplomat (negotiate), Scout/Spy (sneak), and Technician (program) too, although those skills could conceivably be folded into Doctor, Captain, Muscle, and Engineer, respectively. Whether Psychic is a unique career or just a special knack a character has (or whether it's simply not an option) depends on the setting. And there should be some narrow but accessible path for the stubborn soul who wants their character's area of expertise to be bonsai gardening, interpretive dance, accounting, or something else entirely removed from spaceships and lasers.

There doesn't have to be, and in fact I don't want there to be, a one-to-one correlation between lifepath career X and in-game role Y. Some careers (especially military ones) can lead to many different specializations, and I want various paths to lead to the same role in different ways (your Pilot could be an ex-Navy hotshot, but he could also have apprenticed in a merchant crew or been a farm boy who used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16. I'd like to keep careers simple and generic (i.e., easier to use as a blank slate to project different setting ideas onto). The army, the marines/espatiers, the militia, the police—ideally, they can all be folded into a generic “uniformed armed service.”

Finally, I like the element of risk in the MgT2e lifepaths: some careers are harder than others to get into, and failing to get in forecloses on your some of your options. There should be a number of first-term choices (like the university) that you need to pass a check to get into, and the choices you don't need to roll for should offer some small perk if you choose them straight away, rather than settling for them after failing at something else (e.g., if you try to get into a military academy but fail, you get assigned enlisted service at random; if you volunteer to serve, you get to choose your skill package and get a bonus to your advancement roll to become an NCO). Nothing so major that failing a first-term roll feels like a disaster, though. Failure should be fun and interesting!

Below, an early draft of the first couple rolls/choices in character creation.

* * *

You grew up (2d6)…

2. On a barbarous world barely in contact with the rest of the galaxy.
3. In an enclave of some sort, set apart from the dominant culture around you. (+1 to join underground organization)
4. Aboard a starship or space station, never knowing a natural gravity well.
5. In a conflict-riven environment marked by constant violence.
6. On a civilized but underdeveloped backwater world.
7. In a working-class family on a densely populated world.
8. In comfortable circumstances on a highly developed world.
9. A military brat, moving from base to base with your family. (+1 to enroll at service academy)
10. In a government compound, the child of state officials. (+1 to pass civil-service exam)
11. Among the first generations of colonists born on an untamed world.
12. In the lap of luxury, at the pinnacle of society. (+2 to any first-term roll)

As a young adult, you (d8, or player's choice)…

1. Applied to one of the service academies.*
2. Applied to an elite university.*
3. Took the civil-service exam.*
4. Tried to join an underground organization.*
5. Joined the civilian workforce, whether at the family farm or a megacorporation.
6. Struck out on your own as an entrepreneur or entertainer.
7. Shipped out on the first tramp freighter that passed through.
8. Enlisted in the military with an eye toward becoming an NCO.

 

*The first four require a successful roll, with some of the backgrounds offering bonuses; failure forces the player into one of the latter four (possibly restrictively, e.g., committing to a service academy means having to enlist if you don't get in, or don't graduate).

Flyover Country: Chapter 4

"Nob City" by Félicien Nourry

Continued from Chapter 3.

By the time Krissa, BQ, and Batias make it to Manny's construction site (having stopped along the way to sell the pilot's laser pistol and the various shit they ripped out of the gravcar), it's fairly late in the afternoon. Keeping mum about the mess they'd gotten themselves into and out of—and the several thousand credits they'd made—they question the others about what they've learned. Mustang and Roman have tapped their underworld networks for info about Manny, but learned nothing juicy. Sarai has been schmoozing at a karaoke bar, and although she's learned nothing at all about Manny or the job at hand, she has made the acquaintance of a down-on-his-luck businessman named Hoop Barrett (more on him later). Time to meet Manny.

Mansour Saleh is in early middle age, younger than Elias. He's very short, wears a great big beard, and is, by the standards of the Collines, a rich man, having worked his way up from junk dealing to  moneylending to slumlording and now construction. As Elias predicted, Manny is dismayed when six people show up (“It's not a six-person job. It's barely a one-person job. I'm not paying for six people!”), but he's susceptible to flattery and quickly charmed by Sarai's easy manner and fluent French. He brings her, and through her the rest of the crew, up to speed.

There are a several dozen people working on the site, roughly divided into two shifts (day and night); there are also dozens of people living around the construction site, on all four sides of the lot, who could conceivably be keeping an eye on what's happening. The mysterious find, however, is cordoned off behind and below a palisade of scaffolding and tarps. Only about a dozen people know what's actually going on under there: Manny himself; the night foreman, Cecilia Saxena, who's been supervising the excavation, and the small group of workers who've been doing it; the day foreman, Tu Samir; and Manny's secretary, Gloria Moretta. The ruin was originally discovered on Tu's watch; the workers who first encountered it got moved to the night shift.

Manny wants to talk money, but the crew insist on first having a chance to evaluate the find. Manny leads them under the tarps and shows them: Emerging from the earth at one corner of the foundation pit is a smooth, white convex expanse of some kind of ancient composite material. Definitely pretech. The PCs put their heads together and determine a few basic facts, including where the entrance is and that they could probably punch their way through with a demo charge, although that seems like it's probably an unacceptably unsubtle way to do the job. Krissa, meanwhile, has realized that the structure is psychically responsive; she's pretty sure that she could telekinetically "touch" an activator for its systems. It's just that nobody else knows she's a psychic yet.

The crew decide to employ a little stagecraft to impress Manny with how difficult and dangerous the job is. Roman cooks up a flashy but harmless chemical reaction to make it seem like the structure might flash-fry an intruder who monkeys with it, BQ throws in a bunch of intimidating technobabble, and Sarai eventually persuades Manny that the crew (and Elias) deserve 40% of the take.

While this all happening, a breaking news bulletin arrives:

Just before noon today, a gravcar belonging to Khabara-based multistellar corporation Minara Foods was hijacked in Freeport. In a brazen attack, at least three heavily armed and armored assailants seized the vehicle and forced the pilot to take them into the upper slums, several kilometers east of the city limits, where they grounded and sabotaged the vehicle before escaping on foot, narrowly eluding Minara security. The gravcar pilot was recovered alive; she is injured but in stable condition. The lone passenger, Minara Vice President of Purchasing and Wholesale Simon Katib, who appears to have been the target of the attack, is missing and feared dead. Minara security requests any information related to the identities of the assailants.

* * *

Having provisionally secured the bag, the crew split up. BQ thinks they might be able to activate some kind of door interface if they can wake the facility's dormant systems by broadcasting the right radio signal, so Roman and Mustang get to work on that while he scans the structure and takes notes. Krissa and Batias go to "reconnoiter the perimeter" ("watch soap operas in the quarters Manny has offered them" and "find the nearest bar," respectively). Sarai interviews the night-shift workers as they arrive.

Cecilia Saxena, a burly woman with a cybernetic arm, is chatty and forthcoming. It's an open secret, she explains, that Tu Samir is in the pay of the Bautista syndicate, helping them keep tabs on Manny's operations. The Najeeb syndicate undoubtedly has a mole of their own in Manny's organization, although whoever that is must be more discreet than Tu; Cecilia doesn't know their identity.

As night falls, a follow-up news report comes over the air:

Tefera Personal Defense has issued a statement regarding today's attack on a Minara Foods gravflyer, asserting that the entire incident, including the hijacking, occurred beyond Freeport city limits and that there was no failure of the security network in Sainte-Odile. They assure the public that this is believed to have been an isolated incident and that there is no expectation of subsequent attacks. In response, representatives from Minara acknowledged that their vehicle was operating in the so-called "Collines," but insisted that it was engaged in routine company business and in no way provoked the attack.

BQ wants to keep investigating the pretech ruin, but the others decide to call it a night, advising Manny to post armed guards. Mustang goes to hang out with Krissa; Roman and Sarai join Batias at the bar, where Sarai's efforts to solicit favorite recipes from the locals are stymied first by Roman inveighing against the insalubrious drinking water in the Collines and launching into an impromptu (and surprisingly well received) chemistry lecture and then by Batias getting rip-roaring drunk and projectile vomiting all over several people, including the proprietor. They get kicked out and drag Batias back to Manny's apartments.

Krissa has used her oracular powers both to scout for danger and to check on how her crewmates will react if she lets them know she's a psychic. At least some of them seem inclined to react positively, which gives her the confidence to confess her big secret to Mustang and Sarai and explain that she can wake the pretech systems without them having to find the right signal frequency—although they can still fake the radio signal for the sake of the others, particularly BQ, who comes from a planet where people are inclined to see psychics as witches in need of burning. They all bond a bit. We learn that Mustang got into the whole rootin'-tootin' Wild West thing when she was cast as the lead on the children's program Annie Oakley's Adventures in Infinite Space.

Late in the night, when all of the PCs are abed—even BQ, who's set up a cot in the tarpaulin tent that shrouds the ruin—a primitive (i.e., TL3) drone comes buzzing and snooping around the construction site, trying to get a look under the tarps. One of Manny's guards shoots it down, and Mustang and Roman manage to recover a partial recording from its innards, showing a couple of balaclava-wearing operatives sending the thing on its way. They all get back to bed, with plans to reconvene in the morning.

* * *

A hungover Batias contacts a local fixer and for-hire intelligence analyst he knows, Fatemeh Harbi, and sends her some stills from the video along with the specs of the drone. She can't be certain who the operators are, but takes a guess: a local private-security firm called Sunrise Strategies, connected to neither the Bautistas nor the Najeebs but rather the Umba family, whose Freeport territory is well to the north. Not necessarily information they can act on, but it does encourage them to get moving.

Mustang declares that she's figured out the signal, Krissa pushes the psychic doorbell, and (as precognitively foreseen), a hardlight hologram of some kind of anthropomorphic exotic bird pops up in front of the pretech ruin. It addresses the crew in an archaic form of Mandate that most of them can't make heads or tails of, but amateur archaeologist BQ has taken some correspondence classes on Classical Mandate and is able to serve as interpreter.

The hologram identifies itself as the custodian of the facility and demands that the PCs identify themselves or leave the premises; after some back and forth about the passage of time, the state of the Sector, and the condition of the facility, however, BQ manages to persuade the thing that it's too damaged to be able to judge whether the PCs really are or aren't a maintenance team come to put things right, and it had better let them in so they can make repairs. It does.

The facility is small—just six rooms—and dilapidated, but intact. Turns out it was a monitoring station keeping track of the long-ago terraforming of Morrow and later geoengineering efforts. There's nothing  extraordinary in it, but there are a bunch of functional computer systems and literal tons of near-priceless pretech junk. It takes the crew only a few hours to identify the most valuable and transportable items, with some remote help from Elias.

They pocket a few odds and ends (pretech cosmetics, TL5 tools, holocodices, translation discs, a roachpopper, polymorphic nanites, a TL5 espresso machine…), connect with the computer systems, identify some valuable data, and prepare to extract everything. Batias scurries off to find a data storage unit to back everything up in case ripping the servers out renders them permanently inoperable, for which he ends up paying a hefty markup. Now they just need a plan for getting everything onto the ship.

* * *

I had the ancient holographic construct speak Middle English (i.e., a cobbled-together mix of bits from Chaucer, the output of a Modern English to Middle English translator, and stuff I made up), then texted translations to BQ's player, who got to interpret and deliver them to the others however he wanted. Fun! Silly!

I also lined up all sorts of peripheral characters and Milieu machinations and set a breadcrumb trail of clues for my players to follow to figure out who was sending drones to spy on them, who the Najeeb mole was, what shadowy figures were trying to poach their treasure trove, and so forth. And the scoundrels mostly ignored them, banking on their ability to smash, grab, dodge danger with precognitive psychic powers, and make a rapid getaway in their powerful spaceship.

Was their confidence misplaced? Find out next time!

Lore24: April

"Village" by Sergey Vasnev

 

Continuing from March. Late again, and for the same reason. Not doing a great job of actually coming up with one thing every day, but hey, approximately seven a week ain't bad, right? And I'll redouble my efforts to do it correctly. (Starting tomorrow.)

April is the Gene Wolfiest month:

1. Duchess Thekla and Chatelaine Sophia are identical (?) twins; Sophia governs from their family seat as regent, while Thekla roams the stars with her comitatus in the torchship Farewell to Refinement, searching for who knows what.

2. The Continuum (aka "the union"; still not 100% certain about names) weapon manufacturer Charis produces firearms sought after all over the Pale.

3. Although the machine intelligence that ancient drug discovery depended on is now forbidden, drug manufacture is a simpler affair, and myriad formulas survive, some jealously guarded: recreational drugs, drugs to induce torpor for interstellar voyages, drugs to sustain the trance cogitors function in, and more.

4. A secret society called the Benthic Lance searches, in its glacially slow manner, for something it believes to be buried beneath the seafloor on an ocean world somewhere in the Pale.

5. The laws of the Empire (it's a capital E now, why not) are bewildering to outsiders, particularly visitors from the Continuum, but visitors are subject to the law all the same. Two frequent points of friction between empire and Continuum are amercement (payment or service demanded by a lord to settle a claim of trespass) and distrainment (when a lord simply seizes what’s owed, or what they feel is owed, by force). Via the process of replevy, fortunate or persistent petitioners can get their distracted possessions back in a court of law; the quickest, easiest way to resolve a demand for amercement is often just to offer one's service willingly.

6. “Adulterine improvements” are stations, ports, or other facilities built within a lord’s fief but without their approval. Some are hidden from view, tunneled into asteroids or the like, while others are brazenly placed in the far reaches of a weak lord's territory.

7. In most of the Empire, the commoners can be divided into the vassal minority (i.e., free persons; “citizens” in the language of the Continuum) and bordar majority (enserfed persons tied to their domicile and subject to an annual chevage by their lord).

8. Whereas in the Continuum the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Information labor endlessly to maintain mutual intelligibility of the universal language among their myriad worlds, recording and transmitting new coinages and correcting linguistic drift, the language of the Empire has fractured into a thousand dialects. The nobility all learn the same ossified, formal ancient speech, but the commoners represent a veritable Babel. On one planet—or on one continent of one planet, even—a vasal smallholder's plot might be a virgate; on another, the equivalent property is a sulong, and a virgate a unit of measure; on still another, the sulong is a unit of measure, a smallholder's estate is a carucate, and a virgate is the plot worked by a bordar.

9. Erre (or eyre) is a lord’s right—usually exercised on the emperor’s behalf by heralds, although vassal lords with subvassals are expected to perform erre themselves—to inspect the holdings of any vassal at any time. The lord or herald performing erre will convene a hallmote (i.e., a manorial court) and demand the fief's customal (i.e., an abstract of the customs of a particular manor) and extents (i.e., formal valuation of a given manor and its holdings).

10. In some parts of the Empire, the lord may impress their bordar subjects into service in the manorial household, whether as ancillae and famuli (female and male servants, respectively) or military personnel (the mayne or mesnie, i.e., the household guard).

11. Every century (as reckoned on Aaru), and in certain rare emergencies, all of the emperor’s direct vassals are expected to appear in court at Spire, an event know as the Assizes.

12. A palatinate is a fief whose lord exercises imperial powers as a proxy for the emperor; many systems ungovernably distant from Aaru are so ruled either directly (as in a march palatine) or via a high-ranking vassal lord whose seat is only a few light years away (as in a duchy palatine).

13. A pittancer is an officeholder, usually religious but sometimes part of a manorial household, who distributes alms and charity to the poor.

14. The names, structures, and makeup of military units raised locally in the Empire, either for in-system action or, in rare and dire circumstances, for some grand fossato, vary widely; they might be called banners, banda, minghan, or by any of dozens of other names. Basic unit sizes range from the low hundreds to several thousands. Some are all conscripted bordars, other exclusively vassals, many a mixture.

15. Everybody knows that the Rule forbids humans from crossing the Pale and leaving the Sanctuary, but there’s little agreement about whether Outsiders are beholden to the Rule, or to what extent it constrains them. Are they conversely forbidden from crossing the boundary? Are they permitted to enter, but forbidden from leaving? No one is certain.

16. The Judges, Arbiters, mischievous demons, or avenging angels imagined (or known) by some to enter the Pale and interact with humans are described variously: as luminous beings beneath human-like masks; as creatures of once-perfect whiteness soiled by their transit through these low domains, like dirty snow; as an incompressible mass of blinking eyes and howling mouths; as animate void.

17. In the popular imagination of the civilized (Ruled) systems, the Recusant Worlds are all in the thrall of abominable powers: tyrannical thinking machines, genetically modified philosopher-kings, hive minds. Such things do exist, or at least have existed, in the dark corners of the Pale, but the more mundane and much more common reality is small populations leading a hardscrabble existence, without the benefit of advanced technology whether proscribed or permitted.

18. It is possible to induce torpor in humans and safely hold them for years in a hibernatory state at temperatures near the freezing point of water, but if true cryogenic sleep ever existed, its secrets are lost. Tall tales are common in which ghost ships drift between the stars laden with frozen colonists, tens of thousands of years old, or survivors of lost ages wait in hidden vaults deep underground for some signal at which they will rise to lay claim to the Pale—or to gather their banners and assault the throne of heaven.

19. Missions on behalf of the Continuum outside its borders are undertaken by Commissars-Expeditionary and their adjutants—usually a troika representing the Ministries of Concentration, although larger (or, very rarely, smaller) parties are sometimes marshaled.

20. On Kaimana, near the heart of the Empire, the ducal seraglio grew so vast, over the course of countless generations, and became so inextricable from the functioning of the manorial household, that it eventually merged with the administration. The dukes receded into a figurehead position and eventually disappeared from public view entirely, living out lives of hedonistic bliss—one imagines—deep in their maze of a palace while a small army of courtesan-bureaucrats sees to the duchy's affairs.

21. Not all of the systems in the volume of space governed by the Continuum belong to the Continuum, strictly speaking. Uncoordinated and "less-coordinated" worlds exist at various points on a centuries-long timeline of gradual, uncoercive integration into the greater polity.

22. Interstellar piracy requires tremendous coordination and years of planning, and its execution is a long, lonely, dangerous enterprise. Pirate vessels coast for years at relatively low velocities to intercept torchships (which cannot afford to maneuver much, especially on long-haul voyages) near their destination systems or to pillage slowboats deep in the void.

23. The ecosystem of Berken is dominated by the feral descendants of several species commonly kept as pets long before the Continuum was established.

24. The proliferation in the Empire of cults around mystery traditions, oracles, and proscribed entities, so worrisome to the Commissars of the Continuum, is generally self-regulating. Little sooner than the rise of the Cathedral of Spring comes the advent of the Covenant Against the Cathedral of Spring, and the new faith ebbs with a tide of schism and theological recrimination. It is difficult, too, for even the strongest faith to leap from star to star, even along the banks of the River; proselytes seem to lose their way in the labyrinthine corridors of the great ferries.

25. A knightly cohort charged to reclaim a lost colony in the Chattra system arrive after a decade in transit to find that the herald's now 25-year-old report of murder and mayhem seems to have been mistaken—the supposedly extirpated noble house whom the emperor granted the fief (with whom none of the newly arrived knights is intimately familiar) is safely ensconced on their throne.

26. The ancients did cruel and degenerate things with artificial humans. Explorers have recorded ruins in which, it seems, lab-grown bodies were teleoperated in environments inimical to human life or its mechanical simulacra. Intense radiation, for instance, ruined even the hardiest clone bodies, but not so quickly that they could not serve for a few short days of labor.

27. On Bakayan, a tree grows whose fruit is so delectable that, fresh, it’s said to be cripplingly addictive. The preserves and other shelf-stable derivatives that reach neighboring systems are merely delicious.

28. Throughout the Pale, on almost any world with an environment even remotely resembling those in which humans evolved, one will find the near-universal rudiments of human civilization: goats and bamboo. A thousand strains of each exist on a thousand planets and moons, heir to all manner of genetic meddling across tens of thousands of years, yet still substantially resembling their distant ancestors from prehistoric Earth.

29. Traditionally, the Pale is understood to contain one thousand stars; in fact, it has somewhat more than a thousand star systems, many of which have more than one star, so that the total number of stars is perhaps half again one thousand or more. Nevertheless, the Pale is sometimes referred to as “The Thousand Suns,” and the Empire as “The Thousand-Sun Empire,” or simply as “The Thousand Suns” itself. Although the Empire controls, even notionally, not much more than half the Pale, it may indeed contain a thousand stars, or at any rate close to that number.

30. A researcher found to have been privately conducting illegal experiments in the field of machine intelligence has, disgraced and awaiting censure, apparently burned herself to death; the remains match her genetic record. Commissars-Detective of the Ministry of Safety suspect misdirection—and, if the human remains are the product of cloning, a conspiracy to assist and protect her.