Daily Life & Culture

Edrazion is, by its very nature, a mishmash of cultures with different values and traditions, making it difficult to identify overarching traits. Still, a few things can be said about the “typical” resident.
While a few places within the galaxy come close to achieving a post-scarcity economy, most people have no choice but to work for a living. Capitalism looms large in both personal and planetary exchanges (kept that way in part by the influence of DUSTCorp), and the rich inevitably dominate the poor, who in turn do their best to become rich. Quality of life for those at the economic bottom varies dramatically—on Edras Station, the government makes sure no sentient being goes hungry, but harsh worlds like Apostae see no problem with forms of economic bondage that are slavery in all but name. Most people in the setting have fairly mundane jobs, whether it’s feeding the system via vast hydroponic farms, hauling goods back and forth between worlds, running stores and restaurants, or laboring at a thousand other everyday jobs.
Socially, most residents tend to be live-and-letlive types—anything else is difficult to maintain when your government and even your neighborhood might contain a dozen different races from 50 different cultures. Prejudice tends to be reserved for the most familiar and the most foreign—people police those similar to them and fear the incomprehensibly alien—yet most folks realize that trying to impose their own values on others often ends up driving away valuable opportunities. As the old saying goes, it’s best to let aliens be aliens—and hopefully customers. This means that even individuals who don’t fit well into the cultures in which they’re born can often easily find acceptance by changing location, contributing to the constant churn and migration of people across the galaxy.
Yet even within primarily monocultural societies, simple exposure to the vast array of different races and ways of life just beyond the horizon has tended to make residents less cognizant of minor differences like ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on. Who cares about the skin color or marriage arrangements of the neighbors in the apartment beneath you when your upstairs neighbors are giant sentient jellyfish that form new aggregate entities every time you ask them to turn down their cetacean-pop dance mixes?
Perhaps the biggest cultural unifier in the galaxy is religion. Since everyone—well, almost everyone—eventually dies, and worship of a divine being can help determine the fate of your eternal soul in the Outer Planes, religious choices are practical as well as social signifiers. Edrazion plays host to a bevy of different living deities and consort gods, whose congregations mostly live together in harmony. While there are the occasional outliers - usually powerful beings of the Drift or other Planes worshiped as gods by Forerunner aliens - almost all known divine beings are recognized in the Ministry Divine, a pantheon of sorts that traces its genesis all the way back to ancient Edras. Over the millenia, there have been changes to the Ministry Divine, but the structure has held firm since time immemorial… more or less.
Arts and entertainment are constantly changing in the worlds of the Vast, with fads disappearing as quickly as they arise. At the moment, gritty Akitonian shumka beats and Edras eyebite rock are becoming popular in many rougher venues, while upscale nightclubs play delicate Vercite ether-ballads or Aballonian-produced euphonics—music designed by advanced computing to directly stimulate aural pleasure centers, creating a perfect listening experience. High fashion remains dominated by the sleek styles coming out of Kalo-Mahoi, the eternal punk look of Edras Station’s trash-glamorous Spike, and the gothic severity of Apostae. Sports like brutaris, starlance, and ship racing persist in popularity, though most people find their thrills with VR parlor games or holo and stillframe shows. The most popular of these latter are inevitably Karashia’s blood-soaked reality broadcasts, constantly decried by censors but never actually crossing the line into illegality. Of late, ordinary books have even seen a surge in popularity, perhaps in part due to legendary lashunta holo star Cashisa Nox declaring a preference for well-read consorts.