[**There is a lot of set up in this one, jump to the BOLD BRACKETS to get to the goods, you filthy meatbag.]**
*Worlds on the edge of the galaxy have a way of bringing people to them. Sometime it’s the call of adventure: the promise of untapped mineral wealth or dormant archotechnology vaults that make people climb into cryptosleep caskets and leave behind not only their families, but the very century or millennium they had been born into (Lightspeed travel is miraculous stuff, but time-dilation doesn’t cut deals). Sometimes glitterworlders just get tired of the endless orgies and buffets and feel the need for the one thing you can’t buy: unfulfilled desires.*
*Most of the time, though, people don’t end up out here by choice. Urbworld tradeships tend to cut corners on their onboard AI containment protocols for cost reduction purposes, and that leads to collisions, deflections, and outright rampant course plotting. Hence, any given Rimworld is littered with the corpses of hundreds of ships… and thousands of castaways. And if they can survive the elements, the mechanoid AIs-in-exile, the genetically engineered insectoid monstrosities, and the genuine alien nightmarebeasts that call the Rim home, refugees band together, carve out a living, and look enviously back up to the stars that shit them onto the barely-livable rock. Factions that scrape together enough ship parts to support a space program are rich… And become targets for the Rimworld’s other inhabitants.*