Introduction

In 2108, humanity discovered the spike drive, the first faster-than-light engine, and began to colonize the stars. As they expanded outward, eventually some spacers began to develop psychic and psionic abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, and precognition. Humanity harnessed these psychic abilities in tandem with advanced technology called “psitech” to make wondrous advances. They eventually developed psitech powered jumpgates, which shortened the transit time across the galaxy down to mere days, making spike drives obsolete.

Then the Scream happened. In 2665, after more than 500 years of human colonization throughout the galaxy, everything came crashing down. Without warning or reason, every psychic in known space either died or was driven permanently insane all at once. The event became known as the Scream, and the period that followed it was the Silence. Planets are cut off from each other. Developed worlds with their megacities could no longer import the resources they desperately relied on. Frontier worlds often had the resources they needed to survive, but they were totally cut off from interstellar commerce. All of the large scale psitech and the people who had the knowledge and training to use it were lost. It was nothing short of a galactic apocalypse.

Time moves on though. Some worlds still had access to ships with spike drives, which while much slower than jumpgates, did still allow for some level of interstellar travel. It may be a very long time before anything resembling galactic civilization exists again, but certain space sectors are rebuilding themselves. After another 500 years, the Silence has been lifted. The year is now 3200. Welcome to the Phoenix Sector.

Some space sectors are dominated by democratic governments, some by warlords, and some by tyrannical AI’s run amok. The Phoenix Sector is dominated mostly by mega-corporations. There are three corporations that function as the leading factions, the industrial juggernaut, General Kinetics, the highly-secretive Toyama Holdings, and the relative newcomer Daedalus. The fourth major faction in the sector is the Shrike Imperium, an alien religious order. The Shrike are a bird-like alien race, native the Phoenix Sector, who had already begun colonizing planets when humans first arrived. Thousands of years ago, the Imperium waged a massive civil war against the rest of the Shrike and either killed or converted nearly every member of their race.