Setting Principles
Disconnected diaspora. Humans have unlocked technology that allows them to travel between the stars faster than the speed of light. Yet a voyage between two systems separated by vast distances can still take weeks to complete. Interstellar travel is a significant endeavour, and distant colonies can be almost completely cut off from civilisation at large. It means that even in the far-flung future, there are still distant frontiers and unexplained mysteries out there in the dark.
We’re alone. Many of the worlds that mankind has found and settled have native biospheres - too many to be mere coincidence, according to some. Despite that, humans have yet to find sapient life anywhere in the universe. Attempts to develop true artificial intelligence have been ongoing for decades, but only sophisticated autonomous programs have been the result. Humanity seems to have been left to its own devices - at least for now.
It’s a strange universe. On the face of it, it may seem that humanity is utterly alone in the universe. Yet everywhere humans have settled, they’ve been greeted by inexplicable mysteries. Some of those mysteries can be found out in the open, baffling the Foundation’s greatest minds - like the poorly understood principles behind faster-than-light travel, or the suspicious abundance of alien life throughout the Foundation. Others are the subject of ghost stories and urban legends, half-believed superstitions warped by whispered retellings.
High tech and low life. The Foundation has fusion power, antigravity technology and faster-than-light travel. However, these revolutionary technologies are mostly the domain of the rich and powerful - particularly the megacorps and the oligarch dynasties that hold the greatest power within the Foundation. Advanced technology and scientific breakthroughs have not fundamentally changed the power structures of the Old Earth; they have only reinforced them. If you choose to live beyond the influence of these structures, you pay for freedom with hardship and struggle - and often with technology that wouldn’t be out of place in the present day.
It’s not over yet. The forces that run the affairs of humanity can seem insurmountable, but they’re not. They haven’t won yet, and there are still people and places beyond their influence. Hope is a rare and precious thing, but it still exists in the universe. It won’t survive without a lot of help, though.
Culture
The origin of humanity in the Foundation was the Beyonder, that fateful vessel which brought humanity from the ruins of Old Earth and into their new home amidst the stars. They were a collection of scientists, engineers, pilots and mechanics drawn from across the nations of the Old Earth, but the people who inhabit the Foundation today have kept little of their old allegiances and affiliations. The imprint of these old traditions can still be seen in the languages people speak and the religions they follow, but the Old Earth is a mythological and hazy time for those who have come after.
For every piece of the Old Earth that was recovered from the databanks of the Beyonder or reconstructed from the hazy recollections of the first colonists, ten things were lost. The Foundation is, after all, a post-apocalyptic society that was built from remnants and fragments of what came before. Its culture is an irregular alloy of the old and the new, mixed and remixed until no one can tell where one ends and the other begins.
Religion
Many of the religions of the Old Earth are still observed in something close to their original forms throughout the Foundation. However, centuries of interstellar colonisation has also made plenty of room for new beliefs and ways of believing. Entirely new religions and new denominations of old religious systems have appeared - often restricted to a handful of connected colonies, or even to a single planet.
Cults and fringe beliefs are extremely common. They may not have much power in the grand scheme of things, but they can be very influential on a local scale. Transhumanist cults react to the rise of cybernetics and genetic engineering technologies; “biological essentialist” sects form in opposition to them. Ancient belief systems like animism or ancestor worship now share space with conspiratorial beliefs about all-powerful artificial intelligences. The mysteries of otherspace, and the recent discovery of alien ruins in distant systems, is just more fuel for that fire.
The religion that is most influential within the Foundation is Founderism, which is something like a state religion. It’s based around Captain Malcolm Shaw, who piloted the Beyonder into the wormhole known as “Heaven’s Gate”. According to Founderists, piloting an asteroid base into an unknown, unstable wormhole should have been a doomed act of desperation, the last gasp of a dying civilisation. The fact that the Beyonder emerged into a new Garden of Eden instead is evidence of the existence of a higher power, at least as far as Founderist dogma is concerned.
They believe that Shaw, guided by God, carried humanity from the excesses and corruption of Earth on a new Ark, to colonise the cosmos. The version of Founderism embraced by the Foundation government emphasises their connection to Saint Shaw (“the Founder”) himself, and the divine mandate over mankind that implicitly gives them.
Language
The first colonists hailed from the Old Earth, and they spoke languages that would be recognisable to those who dwelt there. Many of the languages they didn’t speak were recorded in the Beyonder’s databanks, though there are a great number that have been lost forever. Many hundreds of years have passed since then; not every language of the Old Earth has survived and remained in usage as humanity has spread amongst the stars. Of course, communities and revival movements that use a rare language for cultural reasons are not uncommon, but most of the Foundation never needs to learn a language other than Universal.
Universal is the official language of the Foundation, and the common tongue of all spacefarers. It’s a modified version of Mandarin Chinese riddled with loanwords and simplifications - close enough to its origin that someone who speaks Universal can puzzle out the old manuals and reference documents from the Beyonder, but still very different from the language that was once spoken on the Old Earth. If you’re in a spaceport that sees passengers from all over the Foundation, you’re almost certainly reading or speaking Universal.
Universal is not the only language spoken in the Foundation, though. The other languages brought to space by humankind - along with a handful of brand new ones - can still be found in places. They’re much more marginalised, though, and tend to be found only in specific contexts - they’ll be spoken by a certain community or subculture, for example, or used only by members of a certain religious institution. Some examples include:
- English is the language that Captain Malcolm Shaw’s journals were written in, so the language has attained an almost ecclesiastical status in Founderism. In the core worlds of the Foundation, knowing English is seen as a sign of “the right kind” of education.
- French is most commonly encountered in the form of a few old, rare texts that are still in circulation. They tend to be old books of philosophy and theology, so knowing French marks you as someone who is interested in old and obscure questions of morality.
- Hindi has undergone a revival in the outer Rim, initiated by a group of colonists that set out for distant stars during the initial boom of the “Interstellar Rennaissance”. They were a “family business” that spoke Hindi as a first language, and as a result there is a cluster of Rim systems where Hindi is the primary language instead of Universal.
- Russian is comfortably obscure, but is preserved by a number of notable families that can trace their roots back to the original Russian faction of the Beyonder. The descendents of those families have a great deal of pride for the role their ancestors played in the earliest days of the Foundation.
- Spanish is often used in scholarly circles thanks to the work of Dr. Lucia Moretta, a classicist from the “First Cohort” onboard the Beyonder. She feared her native language would fade away, and dedicated the rest of her life to translating every significant work she could get her hands on. Some of the texts she translated are no longer available in their original form.
You’re much more likely to find settlements or groups that use other languages out on the Rim, where the normative influence of the Foundation is weaker.