Chapter 2 — The World in Brief
This is the world in brief — enough to understand who you are and where you stand before you build a character. The full history, the peoples in depth, and the politics of the Shore are waiting in Part VII. For now, here is what every Wanderer knows in their bones.
Index§
They got on it anyway§
Roughly fifty years after astronomers found it, humanity made a decision that defied every instinct of self-preservation and confirmed every instinct of stubbornness: they got on the rogue planet.
It was called Wanderstar, and it was not going anywhere hospitable. It had no sun. It was moving fast enough that no star could ever catch it. It was headed — in the loosest possible sense — toward the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 160,000 light-years away, and at its own unhurried pace the trip would take something like ninety million years.
None of that stopped anyone. They got on it anyway. What followed was the longest and strangest chapter in human history.
Not all of them — not even most. Only a sliver of humanity ever boarded, a few million at the very most, for reasons no history has ever agreed on: the pull of the anomaly, the certainty that the window would never reopen, faith, desperation, or simple proximity. The rest stayed on an Earth that, as far as the migrants ever knew, carried on without them — and that they could never send word to again, then or in the eight thousand years since. Earth's fate is one of the things the Shore does not know about itself.
The crossing§
The first generations lived underground in the dark, drawing heat from the planet's radioactive core, farming in tunnels lit by artificial suns, building cities in a gravity that felt slightly wrong in the way that dreams feel slightly wrong. They survived. Their children did better.
Over about fifteen hundred years they built a whole civilization down there — and then, studying the exotic physics of Wanderstar's impossible existence, they cracked faster-than-light travel. That changed everything. The destination that had been ninety million years away was suddenly reachable in a human lifetime, and the slow voyage of a doomed rock became the founding of a new home.
The Shore§
The Large Magellanic Cloud got a shorter name in the shorthand that stuck: the Shore. It is humanity's home now — hundreds of inhabited systems, each with its own history, its own politics, its own version of who belongs and who doesn't. It was settled unevenly and over thousands of years, which means no two worlds tell the same story about how they got there.
Wanderstar itself is gone. It passed through the Shore too fast to be caught and continued on into intergalactic space, receding, unreachable. Nobody is going back. The Shore is all there is, and it is enough.
The four peoples§
Eight thousand years of divergent history split humanity into four peoples. They are all human in the ways that matter and all different in ways that matter just as much. Heritage is purely a matter of who your character is — it carries no mechanical effect — but it shapes everything about how the Shore sees them.
Sleepers went into cryo and waited. Some froze near Earth and remember a world that is now 160,000 light-years and an unimaginable span of time away. Some froze near the end and carry the culture of Wanderstar's underground civilization. They are still waking up — ballistic arks keep arriving in the present — and every one of them opened their eyes somewhere else, somewhen else, into a life they did not live through.
Wanderborn rode the full crossing awake, generation after generation in the underground dark. They are adapted to it — pale, elongated, with huge close-range eyes and large ears, navigating by a faint constant chittering that no other people can quite hear the point of. They carry a continuous cultural memory of the voyage that nobody else can match. They arrived late, ejected when Wanderstar swung through the Shore, into worlds the Seeders had already spent millennia building.
Seeders are the descendants of the FTL Vanguard, the first wave to jump ahead and begin finding worlds and making them livable. They are the oldest established civilization in the Shore by a margin of thousands of years: shorter, stockier, weathered by generations of frontier labor, with hardy constitutions earned the hard way. They also built the Companions.
Companions are the fourth people: engineered from animal stock by the Seeders as labor, and recognized as people after a rebellion whose details are disputed but whose outcome is not. They are free, and have been for a long time. Their lineages are without number, though four are most common — Hounds, Ferals, Warrens, and Drays. What that freedom actually means, in practice, on any given world, is a live question.
Together — contentiously, imperfectly, carrying all that accumulated history — these four peoples are humanity. The Shore is their home. They are not going back.
Who you are§
You play Wanderers: people who, for whatever reason, are not staying put.
Maybe the Shore's institutions have failed you. Maybe you've chosen a life outside them. Maybe you're chasing something, running from something, or simply constitutionally incapable of settling down in a galaxy that rewards exactly that quality. The Shore is vast, and there is no shortage of places that need someone willing to go where settled people won't. That willingness is the whole job.
What the game is§
Wanderstar is a tabletop roleplaying game set in this world, and it uses a straightforward 2D6 system explained over the next several chapters. Your character's life before play is built through a career system that trades in narrative probability rather than optimization: you might finish character creation with everything you planned for, or with a trauma you didn't expect and a contact who will complicate your life for years. That's the nature of a life actually lived.
What you do with that life — in the Shore, among its peoples, on the frontier and in its institutions and in the spaces between — is the game.