The stores are set in the region known as The Rim, the very edge of human explored space. It’s a frontier not unlike the American Wild West or the Australian Goldfields of 1800s where people come to find their fortune – or to hide from their past.
It’s also a place of devastation and loss, where a once mighty alien civilisation has crumbled to dust in the wake of a millennia-ago war.
In the early days of the Expansion, the wonder and excitement of discovering ancient alien ruins quickly turned to caution and tight government control when an artefact thought to be a child’s toy levelled a city block and rendered the surrounding area uninhabitable for decades afterwards.
Private citizens trading in alien artefacts was quickly declared illegal – which, of course, gave rise to a thriving black market trade.
The Union, a loose collective of inhabited worlds is responsible for upholding the law but what law there is, is often corrupt, allowing both big business and the criminal elite to flourish with little oversight.
There are a handful of inhabited alien words within warp distance of the Rim but the chaos of the millennia-ago war that destroyed their civilisation is so imprinted on their collective psyche that they tend to shun space travel and any interaction with outsiders. Humans visit these worlds at their own peril.
The Rim is a region of limitless storytelling opportunity. If you can imagine it then someone, somewhere is probably doing it.