Torchship Seraglio

It is the year 2345, and humanity has exploded onto the galactic stage.

Three centuries ago, our species finally escaped its cradle and expanded across the Solar System. From a fragile Lunar outpost, expansion accelerated as Earth's great nations competed fiercely for prestige, resources, and survival. Mars and Ceres. Venus and Mercury. Jupiter and its moons. Each decade brought a new frontier, and with each frontier, new players entered the game. What began as a contest between a dozen nations and a few supranational blocs soon ballooned into a chaotic swarm of hundreds of factions, corporations, and freelance operators by the early 22nd century. After all, why risk national assets on a dangerous asteroid mining venture when it could be outsourced to ambitious privateers?

With their help, humanity not only colonized the asteroid belt but also pushed outward to the icy realms of the outer Solar System. Fusion power, finally tamed though still expensive and temperamental, propelled this advance. But the dangers of fusion engines — the so-called Torch ships — led almost every colony and habitat to ban them from approaching too close, lest a catastrophic malfunction obliterate an entire settlement. Torch ships were relegated to the vastness of space, banned from landing on planets or entering asteroid stations, forever powerful but distant.

Two centuries ago, the interstellar void was finally conquered with the invention of the Liebermann-Funko Jump Drive. Delicate, massive, and insatiably hungry for power, this device could create a shimmering bubble that teleported itself from point A to point B — so long as neither point was too close to a significant gravity well. It was not practical to fit a jump drive on every ship, nor was it possible to operate one inside the tight gravity well of a star system like Sol. Instead, massive carrier vessels were constructed: lumbering giants that ferried smaller ships between stars but could never themselves approach the worlds they serviced, forever exiled to the deep, dark edges of systems.

Thus emerged a three-tiered hierarchy of space travel. Jump ships carried parasite vessels across interstellar gulfs, freeing them from the monstrous burden of a jump drive. Torch ships, powered by dangerous fusion drives, roamed the void between planets but were barred from nearing population centers. Finally, shuttles — often little more than pressurized cabins atop chemical rockets — ferried cargo and passengers between Torch ships and planetary surfaces.

A century ago came humanity's final great war — the one that shattered old allegiances forever. In a universe where communication within a system was still throttled by the speed of light, and messages between systems had to be physically carried aboard courier ships, no empire could maintain cohesion. Supranational blocs crumbled. Attempts at star-spanning control collapsed under the weight of distance, latency, and the terrifying fragility of infrastructure — a single missile could annihilate a jump ship and sever a system's only link to the galaxy.

Power devolved. Nation-states clung to Earth, but elsewhere, humanity fragmented, diversified, and reinvented itself. Religious orders seized entire planets to found theocracies. Political zealots carved out new homelands on frozen moons. Extremists hollowed out asteroids into fortresses. Trillionaires bought entire worlds for their own private utopias — or dystopias. What was everyday custom in one place became a criminal offense in another. Humanity became truly diverse again, for the first time in centuries.

Today, the hardy pioneer, the bold explorer, and the cunning trader are more vital than ever. They venture ever deeper into the Milky Way, seeking new worlds to colonize, new asteroids to mine, new gas giants to harvest, and new trade routes to weave through the galactic wilderness.

The stars have never been closer — or more dangerous.