Step 1: Background

What is your character’s origin? Were you born in a slum on Earth before the Fall or raised in a protected enclave? Were you an early space colonist or an indentured worker?

Each background provides you with a package of active and knowledge skills. Note these on your character sheet. Don’t dwell too long on your choice — you’ll have an opportunity to acquire other skills and switch some skills around in later steps. For field skills, a short selection of common fields is listed, but you can choose your own (Skills). Alternatively, leave the field unassigned for now and decide on it during game play.

Colonist

You were an original settler of Earth orbit, Luna, Mars, or a smaller outpost elsewhere, before the Fall.

Enclaver

On Earth, you lived a life of precarious but protected stability in a defended enclave.

Freelancer

You were a cog in the wheels of hypercapitalism, taking whatever gigs came your way.

Hyperelite

You lived in the top percent, with abundant wealth and resources.

Indenture

With nothing to lose, you sold yourself into a work contract for the off-world hypercorps.

Infolife

You are an AGI, a digital consciousness born of software code.

Isolate

You eked out a self-exiled existence in a remote habitat or ship on the fringes of occupied space.

Lost

You are a legacy of the doomed Lost Generation, undergoing an accelerated-growth childhood that left most others sociopathic or insane. You must purchase the Psi trait in Step 10.

Underclass

You are a veteran of the slums, favelas, ghettoes, and flooded cities of Earth. You used whatever means necessary to get by.

Uplift

You are an uplift: the latest generation of bonobo, cetacean, chimpanzee, corvid, gorilla, neanderthal, octopus, orangutan, or parrot raised to human levels of intelligence.

Random Background

If you’d rather determine your background randomly, roll 1d10:

Roll	Background	Roll	Background
1	Colonist	6	Infolife
2	Enclaver	7	Isolate
3	Freelancer	8	Lost
4	Hyperelite	9	Underclass
5	Indenture	10	Uplift