Player Reference: Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge: 

• You may have heard of Earth, but it is so lost to time and distance from where you are that there’s no particular reason to care about it.
• Sentient aliens are uncommon, and range from near human to unrecognizably exotic.
• Roughly 1 in 10,000 people are Psychics, capable of producing paranormal effects by manipulating metadimensional energy.
• Cheap Postech starships travel to adjacent systems in a 6 days. The best Pretech starships can cross 6 systems in the same span.
• Given centuries of isolation, many human colonized planets are now abandoned ruins waiting to be scavenged. Others are populous, but unrecognizably alien, transformed by their unique circumstances. 

• Even strong governments have a short reach. Anyone outside of immediate civilization likely sees to their own defense.
• Adventuring life is dangerous, but opportunities abound. Organizations of all kinds commonly rely on talented freelancers to do dangerous and specialized jobs they can’t or won’t perform themselves.
• Some forms of technology, called Maltech, are widely considered vile and forbidden:
    ◦ Unbraked A.I.s
    ◦ Tech that directly enslaves or controls human beings
    ◦ Tech that can destroy or blight entire planets
• The ‘Central Corridor’ is a matrix of connected worlds that have maintained a thriving trade and communications network, while the ‘Outer Rim’ systems are much more isolated and lawless.
• ‘The Network’ is a decentralized, corridor-wide communications array consisting of tens of millions of NetLinks, which are basketball-sized drones spread ubiquitously throughout the central corridor. 

• Drill rudders, media channels, com channels, a highly regulated ‘interweb’, and a heavily encrypted ‘underweb’ are accessible from almost anywhere in the central corridor, Although a few thousand NetLinks have been deployed to various reaches of the outer rim, they are few and far between, and those that haven’t already been sabotaged may still take a long time to relay data back and forth to the nearest NetLink in the array.

Tech levels:
0 - Stone Age
1 - Metal Tools, Domesticated Labor, Animals
2 - Fossil Fuels, Mechanization, 1800's or so
3 - Electronics Information Technology, Primitive Space Travel
4 - Postech: Spike Drives, Lasers, Cybernetics
5 - Pretech: Transhuman Control of Biology, Physics, & Energy