Editing Star*Drive

The main far-future setting of the [[Alternity]] line.  Star*Drive is set at the dawn of the 26th century, and humanity has spread out across the Orion Arm.  The first galactic war saw the end of colonial rule from Earth, while the century-long second galactic war forged the colonies into a dozen powerful stellar nations united into three alliances.  The growing nations have encountered dozens of sentient species, of which several stand out. Much of the lore was reused for [[d20 Modern]]'s ''[[D20 Future|d20 Future]]'' supplement.

=== The Great Alliances and Stellar Nations ===

Known space in the Star*Drive setting is divided under the governance of 13 stellar nations.  In the century long crucible of the Second Galactic War, these nations formed three military alliances which persist to the present.

* '''Expansion Pentad''': Generally regarded (even by themselves) as the aggressors of the Second War, the Pentad is not a unified force but rather an agreement to divide the galaxy between two powers (a'la the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), namely the the Thuldan Empire and Voidcorp.  The junior members, Hatire and the Nariacs, are effectively client states of their respective neighbors.  A second puppet of Voidcorp, the Dreth Commonwealth, was destroyed in the war and most of their space was used to form one of the Concord neutralities.

* '''FreeSpace Alliance''': The principle obstacle to the ambitions of the Pentad was the twin states of the Orion League and the Orlamu.  Sharing a common border and similar societal values, the two combined are more than a match for either Voidcorp or the Thuldans on their own.  Their chief accomplishment in the war was preserving the Borelian Republic from being annexed by the Pentad.  For much of the war FreeSpace was on good or neutral terms with the nations of the Profit Confederation, although whenever the Pentad threat was checked the two would engage in standoffs and skirmishes over disputed border colonies.

* '''Profit Confederation''': By far the least stable of the three alliances, the Confederation formed in desperation by nations caught between the Pentad and FreeSpace.  But each brought unique qualities that made the alliance an effective if not necessarily unified force.  The combination of well armed Austrin armies backed by the peerless StarMech navy, operating from the centralized space of the Solar Union, and financed with the economic might of the Rigunmors preserved them all from the Pentad's aggression.

===The Second Galactic War===

The Pentad's basic strategy was that VoidCorp would tank the Rigunmor, and their puppets would tank the Austrins, while the Thuldans did most of the actual offensive work of bringing the war to the Orlamu and Orions.  

As it worked out, the Rigunmor-VoidCorp theater was mostly fought in gridspace, with neither side seeing much profit in kinetic warfare.  The Nariacs were successfully able to tarpit the Austrins but only with continuous material support from VoidCorp.  The Thuldans succeeded in taking a lot of space until their navy got drawn into a fight they shouldn't have taken and got blasted, and the Orions sent assistance to the Borealians to turn a creeping slow Hatire advance into a FreeSpace counterinvasion of Pentad space to force the Thuldans to send support to the Hatire. 

As all the participants exhausted their reserves, and with population numbers starting to sag, the Thuldans and Orions secretly began negotiating a treaty.  The secession of Insight along the Rigunmor border shattered the remaining Pentad will to fight and brought everyone to the table to consider the Thuldan-Orion proposal.

===Alien Races===

* '''[[Fraal]]''':  The gray aliens; slender, telepathic humanoids with black eyes, the fraal arrived in the Sol system thousands of years ago, having forgotten both their homeworld and their destination.  Over the centuries they attempted to communicate with humanity but without success until humans began to colonize the solar system.  The combination of terran mass reactor technology and fraal gravitic propulsion made the stardrive possible, allowing faster than light travel.  After contact, Fraal society divided into the ''builders'', who live among humans, and the ''wanderers'', who went back into isolation.  

* '''[[Aleerian]]s (Mechalus)''': The nice borg; a fully cyborgized species.  Typically pacifists but they don't regard cyberwar to be violence.  Their trade agreement with the Rigunmor Consortium leases mechalus recruits as contract hackers and tech experts to anyone who can pay.  

* '''[[Weren]]''': Hulked out trolls with fur.  Weren are a brutish pre-modern species that recently invented flintlocks and printing, with the same effect that those inventions had on Earth (ie, [[Renaissance|the thirty years war]]).  A small recruiting outpost in the wastelands allows individual weren to take their chances in the stars, but those who leave may never return.  While most who emigrate become soldiers or mercenaries, a surprising number adopt the Orlamu faith and become missionaries.  

* '''[[Sesheyan]]s''': Batpeople.  A primitive race of nocturnal avians, the sesheyans have the ignominious distinction of being the first species enslaved by humanity due to not reading the fine print on their trade agreement.  Most free Sesheyans live outside the law as pirates and criminals.

* '''[[T'sa]]''': Excitable velociraptors.  The t'sa colonized several systems without FTL before humanity encountered them, and consider themselves to be a sovereign stellar nation (despite being as outnumbered as the [[Tau]]).  However, the t'sa have an inquisitive and cosmopolitan nature, and have emigrated throughout human space even as their home nation has continued to grow.

===Stellar Nations===

* '''Austrin-Ontis Unlimited''': Austrins are every stereotype of a redneck gun nut.  Their nation is run as a minarchist corporation, where every citizen is a voting shareholder.  The nation's primary export is weaponry, and their unifying cultural hallmark is an appreciation of personal autonomy, honor, and possession of firearms.  Perhaps predictably, dueling is legal in Austrin territory provided the dispute is sufficiently grievous and the forms are followed to the letter.  As a people, the Austrins have a special dislike of Nariacs due to the events of the second war.  The Austrin-Nariac frontline was quite simply the most brutal and barbaric of all the war's many theaters, with advanced weapons and cybernetic soldiers reducing battlefields to bloodsport.  

* '''Borealis Republic''': The Borealis Republic began as an experiment in neo-monarchical government.  Through the widespread use of cloning, a small wealthy elite colonized several planets with an army of serfs to do their bidding.  This initially worked fairly well, with their territory growing by leaps.  However, during the first galactic war a clone revolt triggered a civil war that kept Borealis occupied and largely out of the colonial campaign against Terra.  The civil war ended with the simultaneous elevation of all clones to the rank of knight, and the abdication of the king.  Since then, Borealis has shifted to a more intellectual peerage, with academic achievement as a stand-in for noble titles.  The second war did not go well for Borealis, and were it not for the assistance of other nations they would almost certainly have been destroyed.

* '''Hatire Community''': The Hatire started as literal Space Amish.  They emigrated from Earth to found a new colony based on their ideals of simple living with minimal technology.  No sooner had they done this when they discovered an ancient alien holy site on their new world, which they interpreted as nothing less than a mission from god.  After completing the generational task of deciphering the alien works, they began sending missionaries out to spread the Cosmir's wisdom; and their first target was their godless imperial neighbor, the Thuldan Empire.  Politically and militarily, the Hatire were a client state of the Thuldans even before the second war, but during that conflict the Hatire methodically spread their faith until today almost a third of the empire worships Cosmir.   

* '''Insight''': Insight was originally a division of VoidCorp responsible for the development of gridspace hardware and software.  Given the value and importance of this field, they were given a great deal of latitude in how they ran themselves and it became a lavishly well funded bastion of freespeaking radicals in the company.  However during the second war this division began using the war to organize its own secession behind the scenes.  Geographically concentrating its assets and consolidating its control over elements of the security division, Insight's secession cut a deep gouge into VoidCorp that they were in no position to address due to their precarious war situation, and hastened the acceptance of the Orion-Thuldan peace process.  Since then, Insight has been an upstart rogue in interstellar politics; it is by far the smallest and militarily weakest nation, but their mastery of gridspace is rivaled only by the Mechalus of Rigunmor.

* '''Nariac Domain''': The Nariacs did not originally set out to be Space Communists, it just sort of worked out that way.  They were a group of settlers who founded a colony on a marginally habitable planet with little margin for error or waste.  Through tight social and economic control they were able to thrive, and subsequently began settling other worlds using the same ethos.  Because they need to get maximum utility out of every one of their scarce population, cybernetic enhancement is common and accepted.  When the second war began, the Nariacs were quickly annexed by VoidCorp as a client state and tasked with keeping the Austrins busy.  Nariac cybersoldiers clashed with Austrin fireteams for almost a century.  But the Nariacs don't reciprocate the Austrin's dislike of them, instead resenting VoidCorp for putting them in that position.

* '''Orion League''': The Orion League was formed by the voluntary union of four small colonies that banded together for mutual defense against pirates.  Their founding set out a bold, idealistic goal of a free, republican democracy.  Their lofty idealism made them very appealing to the Fraal, and more of their kind settled in Orion space than anywhere else.  In the 26th century, Orion is by far the most diverse and open society in the stellar ring; while it isn't the largest nation by territory, economy, population, or military strength, the Orions are overall a very strong and stable country that doesn't blink at the threats of its rivals.

* '''Orlamu Theocracy''': The Orlamu are often described as the sister state of the Orions, as the two share a mutual border, have mutual respect for rights and liberty, and were allies throughout the second war.  However, the Orlamu are in some ways the most inscrutable of the stellar nations.  They are governed by a [[Adeptus Mechanicus|technocratic priesthood]] that worships drivespace, and outside of ensuring basic law and order, this religious order is rather removed from the daily lives of the citizenry.  Oddly this doesn't foster much resentment and strife, as it is a government that basically works and anyone who wants a say in things is free to take the cloth or leave and join the Orions.  The Orlamu produce by far the most advanced and powerful stardrives, giving their navy and their favored allies an enormous military advantage in projecting power.

* '''Rigunmor Star Consortium''': The Rigunmors are essentially renaissance-era Venice in space.  They believe, or at least their leaders profess to believe, that success is self justifying.  That the wealthy ought be in charge because they are wealthy.  By this reasoning, they choose their leaders by audits, picking the richest person and putting them in charge.  Strangely, it has worked out for them so far.  The greatest feat of the Consortium has been the discovery and capitalization of the Mechalus of Aleer.  Every year, thousands of Aleerian recruits serve terms as leased contract workers for the Consortium; their proficiency with gridspace tech ensures that Rigunmor is never far behind the likes of Insight and VoidCorp in cyberspace.

* '''StarMech Collective''': One of the smallest nations by population, the StarMechs were originally a shipbuilding corporation who used diplomatic chicanery to carve out a territory for themselves during the peace negotiations of the first war.  Much like the Austrins, the StarMechs are a corporate nation where every citizen is a voting shareholder.  But where the typical Austrin is a rugged individualist and their nation is concerned with making guns, the typical StarMech is a lazy, high-IQ engineer who just wants to design cool starships and then relax while their GIGANTIC army of robots does the actual work of building them.  Imagine the Trade Federation from Star Wars and add margaritas and you've got the basic picture.  The Collective builds the best starships in known space, period.  It was this factor alone that kept them alive in the Second War.  It was their fleet and the Orlamu fleet that snapped the spine of the Thuldan navy at the Battle of Songham, basically ending the threat of a Pentad takeover of the stellar ring.

* '''Thuldan Empire''': Imagine if Elon Musk successfully colonized another world with his army of fanboys but then went a little weird in the head, declared himself the god emperor and started unironically quoting Mein Kampf.  That's basically the Thuldans; founded by a superstar corporate mogul and hellbent on uniting the galaxy under human rule.  The Thuldans led the anti-Earth coalition in the first war, and are blamed as the instigators of the second war.  Culturally, they're a caricature of Nazis, championing athleticism, scowling at intellectuals, and practicing genetic manipulation.  Ironically they're the most tolerant nation with regards to mutants, and most of their people have some degree of genetic engineering.  

* '''Union of Sol''': The Union was a creation of the peace treaty at the end of the first war, and was granted everything within fifty light years of Sol.  This sounds like a lot but it really isn't.  The Union has the highest population density of any stellar nation.  They settled every rocky world and then started working on the gas giants.  Being at the center of the stellar nations, Sol is a nexus of commercial activity that rivals the Rigunmor for raw wealth and economic power.  But their main rivalry is with the Galactic Concord, who they regard as an usurper of Terra's traditional role as the leading world of humanity. 

* '''VoidCorp''': 90's era Microsoft in space; literally and unironically.  During the first war, VoidCorp emancipated itself from its parent corporation MicroTel and sided with the colonies.  VoidCorp is the third of the "corporate nations" but they are the only one to take the concept to its extreme.  Every VoidCorp citizen is an employee of VoidCorp from birth to death; there is no retirement and you can't quit.  Employees are sorted out into an oppressive caste system via their two letter job rank code.  Obviously this is already enough to make VoidCorp ignomious; but they also have the dubious distinction of being the first nation to enslave an alien species (the Sesheyans).  Voiders are quite simply hated by pretty much everyone, not least because their system of corporate confuscianism actually seems to work pretty well.

* '''Galactic Concord''': Much like the Union, Concord was the product of a peace treaty.  The second war left large swaths of the stellar ring decimated, and while the will to fight was exhausted, the tensions that had led to the fighting remained.  Concord was the solution, a new neutral power with a gigantic navy to govern the border zones and prevent a third war.  Concord also solved the problem of the T'sa; since first contact, the T'sa had maintained their claim to independence.  The boundaries of Concord encompassed the entire T'sa cluster, effectively taking the matter off the negotiating table and making T'sa-human relations Concord's problem.
** '''Concord Prime''': Hosting both the Concord's capital and the T'sa cluster, Prime sits between Austrin and Nariac space.  This region of space suffered the worst damage of the war due to continuous terrestrial battles that devastated the most readily colonizable planets.  Most of this territory had been the Dreth Commonwealth, and it speaks to VoidCorp's respect for Austrin firepower that they needed two sacrificial buffer states to protect their territory.  
** '''Concord Taurus''': Separating the Thuldans from the StarMechs, Taurus encompassed the active battlefields of the Thuldan invasion of the stellar ring.  Several nations had already fallen to the Thuldan advance before the StarMechs, with the assistance of the Orlamu neighbors, succeeded in drawing the Thuldans into a decisive space battle at Songham.  Taurus is composed mostly of former StarMech space that the Thuldans had taken and ceded in the treaty.
** '''Concord Sagittarius''': Situated between the Borealians and the Hatire.  The Borealis theater was something of a side-show in the war, with Orion expeditionary forces using the defense of Borealian independence as a pretense to open their own counter-offensive distraction front against the Pentad.  Sagittarius encompasses the former space of the Leodal States, one of many weak nations that fell in the opening years of the war.

{{Alternity}}
[[Category:Roleplaying]]