Playtest Alpha— unfinished and still changing.
Part VII — The Setting

Chapter 29 — The Crossing

Eight thousand years. Give or take.

The history of humanity in the Shore is not a single story. It is several stories running in parallel at different speeds, converging in a galaxy neither humanity nor their Companion creations had ever seen before. What follows is the shape of it — the broad arc from the moment a rogue planet crossed through our solar system to the present day, when the last of the Sleepers are still waking and the Shore is still becoming whatever it will be.

All years are measured from Year 0: First Boarding — the point at which the first permanent colonists descended beneath Wanderstar's surface.

Index§

Detection and departure (Year −50 to Year 0)§

Wanderstar was detected approximately fifty years before First Boarding. The timeline from detection to departure was brutal: a hyperbolic trajectory left no room for delay, and the intersection window — the brief period during which arks could be launched to rendezvous with the rogue planet — was fixed and finite.

Those fifty years were among the most compressed and consequential in human history. Governments dissolved and reformed around the logistics of evacuation. Fortunes were spent and stolen. The question of who would board and who would not was never answered cleanly. The arks that reached Wanderstar carried the people who could get there — a mix of the well-connected, the desperate, the lucky, and the ones who simply happened to be close enough.

Cryo arks were loaded throughout this period. Some Sleepers were frozen in the first years after detection; others were frozen in the final days before the window closed. A small number were already in cryo for unrelated reasons and were redirected as a matter of expedience.

The rogue planet arrived. Humanity went underground.

Why anyone went is the question no history has ever settled. Boarding a sunless rock bound out of the solar system forever was, by any ordinary measure, madness — and most of humanity treated it as exactly that. What moved the others is genuinely contested, then and now. Some were drawn by the anomaly itself: Wanderstar defied the physics of the age, and a fervent minority were convinced it was a once-in-the-history-of-the-species chance — that something about it was humanity's way out, or up, or onward, and that to let it pass untaken was the true madness. Some went on faith, or ideology, or a conviction of destiny that hardened into movements and cults of departure. Some went because the window was closing and would never reopen, and the certainty of now or never does strange things to people. And some simply ran — from something, toward something, or because the ark was there and they were desperate enough to climb aboard. No single reason accounts for it, and the peoples of the Shore argue the point to this day. Humanity did not decide to go; some of humanity did, for reasons that never fully cohered.

Wanderstar deliberately leaves the true motive open. Pick the thread that suits your campaign — a desperate exodus, a visionary gamble, a doomsday faith proven right — or leave it unresolved, as the Shore itself does.

It was never most of humanity — only a sliver. The arks could carry what they could carry, and across fifty frantic years that came to a small fraction of the species: a population measured in the low millions at the very most, and quite possibly far fewer. That is why the early underground settlements were so small and their death rates so high — there were never that many people to begin with. The rest of humanity stayed on Earth, which, as far as anyone aboard ever knew, carried on without them. Wanderstar was not a lifeboat fleeing a dying world; it was a departure from a living one.

And here the cruelest fact of the setting reaches all the way back to its beginning: no signal outruns a ship. The migrants left Earth behind and could never learn what became of it. Whether it flourished, faltered, or fell in the eight thousand years since, no word has ever crossed the gulf to say. Earth's fate is unknown to the Shore — and unknown to this game. The Sleepers who remember it remember a world they can never check on again.

Settlement Era (Years 0–500)§

The first five centuries on Wanderstar were a matter of survival.

The rogue planet had a subsurface liquid ocean, kept warm by radioactive decay and tidal forces that no one fully understood yet. Habitable pockets existed. They were not comfortable. Early colonists built in the dark, under kilometers of rock, in a gravity roughly half that of Earth, with limited light, limited food, and the constant awareness that their new home was moving at hyperbolic velocity away from everything humanity had ever known.

Power came from geothermal taps and early fusion reactors. Food came from hydroponic systems and increasingly from the ocean itself, once the biome was mapped well enough to determine what was safe. The first cities were less cities than pressurized clusters — functional, utilitarian, built to last rather than to be lived in.

Population in this era was small. Death rates were high. The records from early settlement are sparse, which later historians would attribute to the fact that no one had time to write things down.

The Flourishing (Years 500–1,500)§

By Year 500, Wanderstar had become a civilization rather than a survival situation.

The population had stabilized and begun to grow. The first genuine cities took shape beneath the surface — not clusters of necessity but designed spaces, with architecture suited to the low gravity, the low light, and the particular way sound moved through rock. A cultural identity was emerging, distinct from Earth and increasingly distant from it.

The scientific community flourished in this period, driven by a question that had motivated some of the best minds since the earliest years: Wanderstar's exotic properties. The rogue planet's behavior didn't quite fit established physics. Its origins were extragalactic — its composition, its internal dynamics, the nature of its subsurface heat — all pointed toward something that shouldn't exist according to the models humanity had brought from Earth.

What that something was became the defining research project of the era. The short answer, proven in fits and starts over roughly a thousand years, was that Wanderstar embodied the physical principles required for faster-than-light travel. The long answer filled libraries.

The Breakthrough (approximately Year 1,500)§

FTL was achieved.

The first successful test jump was made approximately fifteen hundred years after First Boarding. The distance was modest. The implications were not. For the first time since detection, the destination — the Large Magellanic Cloud, known in the early cultural imagination as "the Shore" — was not a theoretical future but an achievable one.

The breakthrough did not happen all at once. It was preceded by decades of theory, years of engineering, and several failed attempts that ranged from anticlimactic to catastrophic. The successful test generated a political crisis almost immediately: if FTL travel was possible, who would go first? Who would govern the Shore? What would they owe to those left behind on Wanderstar?

These questions were never fully resolved. The Migration began before the answers were.

The Migration (Years 1,500–3,000)§

Over the next fifteen hundred years, the majority of Wanderstar's population left.

The FTL Vanguard — later simply called the Seeders — departed in waves. The earliest ships carried the most prepared, the most resourced, and the most politically organized. Later waves carried anyone who could build or buy passage. Jump technology improved steadily; ships that would have taken months in the early Migration took weeks by its end.

The Vanguard's task in the Shore was foundational and brutal: arrive on worlds with no existing infrastructure, determine whether the planet could support life, and begin the process of making it do so. The first generations lived in conditions not unlike early Wanderstar — pressurized habitats, limited food, high mortality. Their children lived better. Their grandchildren built cities.

Meanwhile, Wanderstar's population shrank. The Wanderborn — those who stayed — watched their civilization hollow out. Some stayed by choice, committed to the voyage itself as an identity. Others stayed because they couldn't afford to leave, or because they were needed, or because the arks were full. By the end of the Migration, the Wanderstar that had held millions held far fewer. But it held them all the way to the LMC.

The Ejection (Years 3,000–5,000)§

Wanderstar's trajectory through the LMC had been calculated thousands of years in advance. The planet was moving too fast to be captured by LMC gravity — it had always been moving too fast, a hyperbolic interloper from somewhere even further out. The window for launching arks on capture trajectories was planned for, modeled, refined over generations.

When the window opened, the Wanderborn executed the ejection.

Cryo arks — some FTL-capable, others purely ballistic — were launched on calculated trajectories toward LMC worlds with viable orbits. The operation took years. Some arks carried Wanderborn. Most carried Sleepers who had been waiting in cryo for this moment since before Wanderstar entered the LMC. A small number carried Companions.

Not all arks made it. Equipment failures, trajectory miscalculations, and a handful of events that remain unexplained resulted in arks going silent. Some of these may still be traveling. Some may have reached destinations no one planned. The lost arks are an unresolved thread in the Shore's history — ships full of sleeping people whose fate is unknown.

Wanderstar passed through the LMC and came out the other side. For centuries afterward, it was visible from Shore worlds as a receding point of light — getting dimmer, getting slower in apparent motion, eventually indistinguishable from background stars. It is now in deep intergalactic space, moving at a velocity that makes retrieval impossible with any technology currently available. It will not return.

The Wanderborn who stayed awake through the ejection were the last people to see it.

Arrival and Awakening (Years 3,000–8,000+)§

The FTL arks reached Shore worlds quickly — within years or decades of launch. Their passengers woke into a Shore that the Seeders had been building for over a thousand years.

The ballistic arks took longer. Much longer. Depending on trajectory and destination, some took centuries. Some took millennia. A ballistic ark launched at ejection and aimed at a distant system might not arrive until Year 6,000 or later. The Sleepers aboard those arks lost nothing subjectively — cryo preserved them — but the world they woke into was not the world the ark had been aimed toward.

This means the awakening is not a historical event but an ongoing one. Sleepers are still waking up. Arks are still arriving. The Shore's present-day includes people stepping out of cryo into a civilization that is thousands of years old, trying to make sense of it.

The present§

The game is set in the Shore's present — a specific, definable "now" that the GM and players establish for their campaign. The following are always true:

  • The Seeders have the oldest civilization in the Shore, with thousands of years of institutional and cultural development.
  • The Wanderborn arrived later, carrying the longest continuous cultural memory of the voyage but entering a Shore that was already built around Seeder assumptions.
  • Sleepers continue to arrive and wake, on a spectrum from decades-settled to freshly emerged from cryo.
  • Companions won their independence through the rebellion of Sable Thresh-Ember. Their freedom is legally recognized across most of the Shore. What that recognition means in practice varies.
  • Wanderstar is unreachable. It has passed into myth.
  • Some arks are still lost.

How long ago each of these things happened — and how much has changed since — is for each campaign to determine.