SETTING DOSSIER // 2190
The Setting
Earth is declining. The off-world colonies grow. The corporations own the contracts, the medicine, the ships, and the future.
FILE 010 // PRESENT MOMENT
2190: The Present Moment
Two hundred years ago, our species believed the future was bright. None of it would last. The population peaked and declined. The institutions that organized orderly civilization collapsed. The corporations that had been one player among many became the dominant force.
Human beings are not extinct. They are employed. A contract with a government or corp is the key to limb replacement, cancer cures, better pay, and a better Squares placement. It has become, practically, the only way to "get ahead" on Earth. Most never come close to getting a chance.
FILE 011 // EARTH
Earth & the Squares
Earth survives inside sealed habitat megastructures. Universal basic income sustains a vast, stagnant population in stacked habitation blocks — the Squares — where corporate recruitment is the only door out.
Most Squares dwellers will never vote. Practically, they are more concerned with whether they can land a contract — labor, City Police, CMC Marines, or directly with a Corp — than with the franchise paths system that nominally grants working-class people political voice.
EARTH // HABITATION BLOCK // "THE SQUARES"
FILE 012 // THE EIGHT MAJOR CORPORATIONS
The Corporations
Three Tier 1 megacorps form the apex. Four Tier 2 vertical specialists dominate specific industries. A constellation of Tier 3 independents fills out the rest. They own the contracts; they don't sign them.
AI Manufacturing · Artificial Persons
Mitchell-Hashimi
The setting's dominant power and maker of Artificial Persons. Every M-H unit is potentially a networked surveillance asset for the corp that built it. Officially the ICA is autonomous; practically it is an M-H puppet.
Biological Person Manufacturing
Rydell Corporation
Premium vat-grown Biological Persons, memory-implant technology, identity research. Founder Wyatt Rydell — "the old man" — is still alive and still shaping the corp. Most Apex-7 Bios believe themselves human.
R&D · Substrate · Combat Machinery
Voss Technologies
Formerly Voss-Calder. Licenses substrate to every manufacturer and fields dedicated combat machinery and the elite Bio "Voss Dragons." A classified anomalous-biology program studies Q-substrate and Species 13 material.
Military · Security · Logistics
Reingarten Group
Diversified conglomerate and the Colonial Defense Corps contractor. Defense Systems is reasonably clean; Security Services is compromised. The family at the top doesn't know which arms have been touched.
Logistics · Transport · Gate Traffic
Brennan-Khan
Two regional families, one merged corporation, controlling Atlantic and trans-Pacific routes. Conventionally corrupt — bribery, smuggling tolerances — but not touched. They ferry cargo for the corrupted corps without knowing what they're moving.
Pharmaceutical · Medical Infrastructure
Lassiter-Hecho Pharmaceuticals
The medical-contract framework on which the entire economy depends. Clean at inner-system facilities — but Outer Rim clinical-trial sites are running unauthorized research. Care is mortgaged against years of labor.
Mining · Terraforming · Heavy Industry
Goldstone Group
Diversified industrial conglomerate that pioneered the colonies. Currently clean — and a recruitment target. The campaign hook: Goldstone is just now being approached. Will players be there when it falls, or before?
Medical Diagnostics · Detection
Sandoval Diagnostics
Sole manufacturer of the Hall-Blum apparatus — the only reliable Bio-detection equipment, sold only to corporate compliance divisions. Their diagnostic products are everywhere; the detection asymmetry shapes everything.
Wealth Services · The Anchorage
Klaes Group
The wealthy class's accidental intelligence service and operator of the Anchorage. Old-money discretion that quietly accumulates more leverage than its tier suggests.
Terraforming Atmospherics · Life Support
Iverson Atmospheric
The machinery that turns hostile atmospheres breathable — and the life-support systems that keep sealed habitats alive. Quietly aware of anomalous phenomena at corporate-research sites.
FILE 013 // POLITICAL ORDER
The Compact & the Collective
▣ THE EARTH COMPACT
Weak but real political body. Maintains courts, taxation, and the Compact Marine Corps. It preserves the appearance of law while the corporations maintain everything else.
▣ THE PEOPLE'S COLLECTIVE
Rival state-corporate political system operating colonies the Compact cannot reach. Its own military, its own manufactured-being industry — generations behind, and far more reckless in its research.
CMC // DEPLOYMENT BAY
Campaign Modes
One ruleset, six ways to die. Crew Expendable supports radically different tables — from marine deployments to noir investigations to lonely frontier survival.
GS-426 // Goldstone
Styx
Terraforming colony; the setting's largest in-progress atmosphere project. Survivable — but its processors run modifications that exceed safety spec, and M-H has placed sealed research equipment on-site. An incident is overdue.
GS-223 // Mitchell-Hashimi
Lothos
A small moon and the site of a partially intact Progenitor installation — the largest archaeological discovery in human history. Under 30 staff. Public knowledge is essentially zero. Personnel rotate out fixated on what they saw.
GS-318 // Goldstone
Marlow's Reach
Mining colony, ~1,100 contracted laborers. Respiratory disease is endemic — and its progression doesn't match any known occupational illness. The dust contains trace material no one has fully characterized.
GS-161 // M-H / ICA
Tartarus "Tart"
Maximum-security penal colony — and the corporate-research substrate of last resort. Drug trials, anomalous-biology exposure, artifact testing. A research population dressed as an inmate population. ICA doesn't review.
TOTTENHEIM FIELD // ANOMALOUS PHYSICS
FILE 015 // THE MARGIN
The Margin & the Tottenheim Field
The Margin surrounds the Field. The Field itself is a black-hole-like cosmic anomaly — not a nebula — first identified in 2134 and sold to the public as a beautiful curiosity.
Corporate study revealed its margin holds 4 to 500 times the energy of fusion, and beneath it: Progenitor remains. The Progenitors encountered the anomaly, tried to study it, and were destroyed. Humanity is doing the same thing, slower, with worse losses.
▣ SPECIES 13 // ICA QUARANTINE — DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
Existence acknowledged. Details withheld from the public archive. Universal armor. Acid blood. A lifecycle the corporations would rather you never learned to recognize.
Further documentation is restricted to authorized Keeper materials.
TRANSMISSION // SUBSCRIBE
Go Deeper into the Archive
Setting notes, art drops, and development updates as the dossier expands.