Hope System

Once upon a time, Hope was a bright-eyed and burgeoning young colony: the latest in a century of interstellar exploration and colonisation missions that marked the Stellar Renaissance. One day, however, all of that changed. The winds of finance and commerce shifted, the appetite for risk and for the prestige of trailblazing faded, and the funds dried up. Hope’s backers abandoned it almost overnight.

Promising terraforming schedules were suddenly impossible without the funds and equipment they needed to get off the ground. Within a few decades, one of the Foundation’s most hopeful young colonies had become a bitter and disillusioned shadow of its former self. Hope never resisted the shackles of Foundation authority, never vied for independence. When it ceased to be a smart investment, the Foundation and its corporations simply abandoned the system.

These days, Hope is a system marked by old grudges and bad blood. It has a reputation as a stronghold for pirates and separatist movements, including the notorious Anti-Foundation Front, but it’s also a pit stop for those travelling deeper into the Rim. Most people who pass through Hope see the Xerxes Refuelling Station and nothing else before they continue their journey.

It adds insult to injury, knowing that the colony is cut out of what little profits they might still have seen as a stepping stone on the way to other systems.

Xanadu

The primary colony of the Hope system, an arid desert world with a sparse population. Most of the world’s population lives in a pair of massive impact craters called the Central Basins. Unlike the outer deserts, the basins have their own weather cycle, a relatively hospitable climate, and an ecosystem that’s almost stable. Some of Xanadu’s population also lives in the massive geothermal plants at the desert settlement of Mesa Roja, or in the pirate towns that dot the frigid northern wastes of the Serenity Highlands.

Xanadu City is the planetary capitol. As far as the Xanadian Planetary Authority is concerned, the rest of the colony exists primarily to support Xanadu City and connect it to space. The Nuftva Transit Hub, a ring-shaped orbital station that encircles an enormous globular casino and resort, is the backbone of that connection (it’s named after the Nuftva Lines, an artwork etched into the desert by the planet’s earliest settlers).

Despite being a barren desert world, Xanadu is home to a surprising bestiary of meta-Terran lifeforms. Most of these were custom extremophiles designed as a cheap and sustainable terraforming mechanism. When the terraforming effort collapsed, many of these meta-Terran specimens escaped from captivity and became the invasive life-forms that are now simply part of life on Xanadu.

Xerxes Refuelling Station

A deep space station owned and operated by Xerxes Corporation. The largest station of its kind in Hope, it is a corporate and Foundation-friendly presence in an otherwise hostile system. The administrators of the XRS maintain a delicate balance with Xanadu and Kaiping, whom they need for fuel and food - but who wouldn’t work with Xerxes if they didn’t need the money. The XRS is where you can find the best tech and the best ships in the system, but everything comes at a premium - whatever you want will cost you far more than the same goods would back in the Core, where they’re nothing special.

The Hope Belt

The system’s asteroid belt, with some rocks as small as golf balls and others the size of moons in their own right - all separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers of empty space. Independent colonies, mining concerns both domestic and foreign, and pirate bases proliferate in the Belt, which rivals Xanadu in terms of total population. Every major player in Hope has some stake here, including those who call it home and claim independence from both Xanadu and the Foundation.

It’s common practice in the Belt to take old asteroids that have been mined out and abandoned, and to turn their defunct facilities into “speakeasies” where rogue traders, pirates, and revolutionary firebrands rub shoulders daily. The most prominent of these is the Foundry, an old industrial facility that was reclaimed by pirates from its former corporate stewards. Since then, the Foundry has become the hub of the Belt’s complex politics - with factions constantly shifting between independence, a united Belt, or allegiance to various political powers.

Kaiping and Kingfisher

Kaiping is one of the twin moons of the system’s gas giant, Levant. The Kaiping Outpost is the only significant colony, though it’s more like a moonbase. Its inhabitants spend weeks at a time on the planet below, using aerostatic rigs that collect gases from Levant’s atmosphere for processing into starship fuel. The culture of Kaiping is somewhere between a village and a ship’s crew; an austere life, but a happy one. It’s not permitted for outsiders to bring guns or other military equipment into the colony by order of Chief Engineer Qadan, Kaiping’s leader.

Kingfisher is the larger of Levant’s two moons, almost a planetoid in its own right. It’s covered by layers of thick ice, but subsurface oceans of liquid water are home to alien microbes and the Kingfisher Outpost, a “bubble settlement” deep below the surface. Kingfisher is sponsored by and heavily connected to Kaiping, and is mostly a scientific outpost performing research into the possibility that the moon may one day support a full-fledged colony. Recently, however, disturbing events have occurred in the Kingfisher Outpost that may throw its safety into question.

Calypso

A radioactive, high-gravity world covered in a constant radioactive drizzle that is only broken when it erupts into a violent lightning storm. It’s home to alien flora and fauna that are uniquely adapted to radiation, and the most prominent organism is a “zombie mold” that reanimates dead wildlife to spread its spores.

The craggy, eroded surface is covered in strange, complex structures that are believed by some to be alien ruins. However, no comprehensive survey has established their authenticity due to the dangerous conditions. There are also rumours of enormous deposits of raw diamonds that can be found in those ruins. Those rumours are enough to attract foolhardy treasure hunters, despite the planet’s myriad dangers and the official scientific quarantine that it’s under.

Vesper

The closest planet to Hope’s star, but it’s surprisingly cool. Much of the surface is covered with oceans of ammonia, and the atmosphere is corrosive. Equipment and metal degrades quickly, making the planet largely uninhabitable. Due to its inhospitable nature, it is largely untouched by humankind - though pirate vessels sometimes lay low for brief periods in the billowing clouds of corrosive gases, which are completely impenetrable to scanning and sensors.

At some point in the past, the Xanadian Navy devastated Vesper with orbital bombardment trying to flush out pirates, and the surface still bears ugly scars of the conflict.