LaGrange

The Verse

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The Verse

The Verse: node under docs/brain/knowledge/universe.

LaGrange is a space western on a grim frontier. Humanity spread across nearby stars, built institutions too large to control, and made or

LaGrange is a space western on a grim frontier. Humanity spread across nearby stars, built institutions too large to control, and made ordinary life depend on machines owned by distant dynasties. The Fold is the dread beneath that human system, not an excuse for it.

This page is the resolved player edition of the setting. It gives you what a character can reasonably know without publishing unresolved author notes or settling mysteries that belong in play.

History and Timeline

  • 2123: the first Light Huggers leave a failing Earth. Sublight arks continue to launch for roughly three centuries.
  • By 2441: generations in stations, belts, and hostile gravity have already produced divergent engineered and adapted human lineages.
  • 2441: the first Fold ships make true interstellar expansion possible.
  • Around 5123: the present. Old arks still arrive, carrying people, technology, disease, ideology, or stranger damage from different eras of the exodus.

Earth's location is known. It is a toxic, biohazard-ravaged grave world, officially abandoned and unofficially scavenged. Day One pilgrims, corporate raiders, and other expeditions still go there. A changed remnant of humanity survives in the ruins. What truly happened during the collapse remains part record, part propaganda, and part myth.

Travel, Distance, and the Fold

System drives serve local and nearby routes. Longer travel depends on scarce LaGrange Cores, Fold routes, and crews able to survive them. Travel and communication are slow enough that contracts, prices, loyalties, and even news become local facts. A distant authority may be sincere and still arrive months too late.

Asset Realisation owns the Cores and therefore the principal travel choke point. A Core also holds back the pressure it crosses. Repeated use worsens local Fold danger; every jump can carry legal risk, surveillance, and physical consequence. No public account proves the Fold's origin or final fate.

Core, Inner Worlds, and Rim

The Core worlds are crowded hive arcologies: powerful, monitored, technologically dense, and failing under their own load. The Confederation has real law and real idealists, but it is weak and substantially captured. Its unified Legion is the largest cohesive military force in the verse.

The Inner worlds are dynastic glitter worlds owned by the Families. Their wealth is visible in orbital bands, private fleets, and lives insulated from the systems that feed them.

The Rim is sparse and personal. Clans, warlords, free ports, colonies, pirates, and corporate expeditions hold power where they can. Reputation, salvage, barter, and force may matter more than a remote decree. The Rim is not empty; it is unevenly connected.

The Families and the Nine

The Families own the Nine corporate pillars. House is a name for a Family organisation, not a separate level of government.

  • Asset Realisation owns the LaGrange Cores and treats people, debts, technology, and worlds as assets to be realised.
  • Argus controls the commercial face of information and Kadiss media.
  • Meridian Exchange controls finance, underwriting, and much of the machinery around trade.
  • Numen certifies and restrains machine intelligence.
  • Surikov Dynamics supplies arms, vehicles, and private military power.
  • Helix controls gene-craft and much of the augmentation economy.
  • Helios Foundry supplies energy and heavy industry.
  • Drift Logistics moves freight and dominates licensed salvage.
  • Lao Agriculture controls food, air, and biological supply chains.

Corporate forces are not one army. The Legion, House navies, PMCs, security divisions, pirates, clan fighters, militias, and warlord crews overlap, compete, and conduct deniable violence.

Kadiss and Rek

Rek is the Core's currency. A transaction may move through a Kadiss-linked rek chip or physical rek-chits. On the Rim, bullets and water are currency, and settlements may substitute barter, reputation, debt, or force.

Kadiss joins identity, payment, licence, access, and surveillance. It is powerful in the Core and weaker off-grid or on the Rim. It is not omniscient: forged records, dead zones, unconnected people, delays, and competing local systems all matter.

People of the Verse

Engineered human lineages, baseline humans, synthetic frames, and genuine xenosapient species coexist. A character may be born, made, or extensively rebuilt. The catalogue retains a few legacy field names for mechanical compatibility, but people in the setting speak of species, lineage, origin, and synthetic frame.

Contact with xenosapient life is piecemeal and local. The compendium gives players rules for many species; that does not mean every civilian, official, or system knows all of them.

Life and Conflict

Air, power, food, cells, clinic access, transport, licences, and functioning machinery are material constraints. Debt and shift work shape Core life. On the Rim, distance turns small failures into disasters and small reputations into law.

Day One, corporate proxy wars, lost arks, uncontacted systems, damaged Cores, and Fold incursions are active pressures rather than a single mandated plot. A campaign can begin with an authored ready crew, a generated crew, or characters made by the players; all three routes are equally valid.

What Remains Unknown

The exact reason humanity fled Earth, the ultimate nature of the Fold, the full reach of uncontacted life, and the future of the Cores remain open. Characters can discover evidence and factions can claim answers. The encyclopedia does not decide those mysteries in advance.

Cross-References

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