Foreword
Arcturus is a galaxy teeming with intelligent life, where vastly different conscious beings collide and interact constantly. Though historically these interactions have not always been amicable, today most people live in harmony as citizens of the Unison Network.
Are you one of these citizens, conjoined with the unified galaxy? Or are you independently minded, refusing to live as part of a greater whole?
The role of this wiki
I'm excited for you to dig into this world and place yourself somewhere in the vast galaxy! My goal with this project is to make it easy to fit yourself into an existing society, or to create an entirely new one, without finding yourself at odds with some of the fundamental inner workings of Arcturus. These articles ought to give you a feel for how most things work—how the Network treats conjoined and unconjoined peoples, how much of the galaxy is "known," how specific species and peoples see each other—so you can feel confident in your character's backstory, background knowledge, and attitudes.
If you find these articles don't do that for you, it means they need work! Please reach out to me if you have any questions, not only so we can figure out the answer together, but also so I can improve this resource for everyone else.
The scale of the world
One unusual feature of working with an entire galaxy is that—get this—a galaxy is really big. 150,000 light-years is a lot of distance, and that's just one of the spatial dimensions. In fact, nearly every time I sit down to think about the game, I find myself wondering, How big is this place again? Am I getting the scale right?
There are two answers to that question: firstly, yes, I think we can get the scale right, at least on a mechanical level. We'll probably get used to how far our ships can travel on one fuel cell array, and approximately how far a handful of planetary systems are from one another. But that broader feeling of uncertainty in the face of a galaxy's vastness is one that should never really go away. We're never going to understand intuitively just how much space there is from one galactic edge to the other—or even between two planets in the same system, for that matter.
It's taken me a while, but I've realized that that might be a feature rather than a bug; it means there's virtually always room somewhere to imagine up new groups of people, and new cultural dynamics between them, in their own new star cluster. So regardless of how populated Arcturus already is, you will always have free reign to create something beyond the scope of just a character concept, if you so desire.
The limitations of our system
We've already experienced some of the fun of Hyperlanes' "rougher edges" when it comes to low-level combat abilities. Additionally, I've noticed a number of higher-level gambits in the book that seem to have been unnecessarily nerfed—even some with direct D&D equivalents. I will be attempting to tweak some of the "cheese" mechanics (unfortunately), making them into more balanced yet still viable options, as well as buffing some of the lackluster abilities that should be more powerful.
Thus, if you plan on building a gambit-pulling character, please be sure to use this wiki's gambit list rather than the book's; my adjustments will already be included. (It may also just be easier to click through tabs on your computer to read gambit descriptions than to scroll through a huge PDF!)
And as always, if you see a change I've made that you don't agree with, please reach out to me. Just about all of you are more versed in TTRPG mechanics in general than I, so I value your opinions greatly.
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