Hope System

Once upon a time, Hope was a bright-eyed and burgeoning young colony: the latest in a series of ambitious colonisation missions known as the Interstellar Renaissance. One day, however, all of that changed. An ultimatum was broadcast to the colonies, the Foundation tightened its grip on the reins of power, and 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. Even though it remained faithful to the Foundation, the colony fell into disarray - and by the time the War of Pacification ended, one of the most hopeful young colonies had become a bitter and disillusioned shadow of its former self.

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 an unavoidable pit stop for those travelling deeper into the Rim. The powers that be refuse to just give that up and stop pursuing their interests here, even as they do their best to cut those who live here out of their share of the profits. Most people who pass through Hope see the Xerxes Refuelling Station and nothing else before they continue their journey into the stars.

Places of Interest

Xanadu is an arid desert world with a sparse population, and it’s also the primary colony of the system. Most of the world’s population lives in a pair of massive impact craters called the Central Basins. They 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 pirate towns that dot the frigid northern wastes of the Serenity Highlands.

Everything in the Central Basins seems to revolve around Xanadu City, the planetary capitol and crowning jewel of the Xanadian Planetary Government. As far as the government 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). The planet’s orbital neighbourhood is also home to the Wu Military Base, located on Xanadu’s moon. The Xanadian Navy considers the whole moon to be military space, and special clearances are required to even approach it.

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 to terraform the planet. 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.

Locales: Xanadu City, Black Hills, Mesa Roja

Xerxes Refuelling Station is 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, who 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 Incorporated Territories, where they’re nothing special.

The Hope Belt is 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 - it 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 them 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.

Locales: The Foundry

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 is 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 resemble alien ruins and whose origins are unexplained - and there are 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 is the closest planet to Hope’s star, but is surprisingly cool. It is covered with oceans of ammonia, and its atmosphere is corrosive. Equipment and metal degrades quickly, and the planet is 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.