Project Anabasis Development Diary #1 - Sins of the Father

[MattAtlas]

Project Anabasis Development Diary #1
Sins of the Father

Premise

Hello, everyone! It’s time for the long awaited development diary that unveils the lore side of the setting we’ve developed for Anabasis. For starters, I want to apologize for this diary taking longer than I thought. We had to essentially group together and decide once and for all the general lines of what we were doing for the timeskip and the overall situation of the most important elements of the setting (megacorps, nations, starting area), which can be harder than expected when you have to get six or seven people on the same page. After that, I realized it was pretty hard to write such a monumental development diary. When you’re revealing something you’ve been working on for a full year, you can get kind of focused on small details and you want the delivery to be perfect. Okay, that’s all. Let’s get to the real development diary.

Firstly, the timeskip we have decided on is twenty years. Originally, this was supposed to be fifty years, mainly because in the beginning Anabasis was a story mostly about just a different setpiece of the universe, but I later decided to change it for two simple reasons. The most important is that the closer a timeskip is to a certain event, the more intimately it is felt by the characters, and the more it shapes them. A fifty year timeskip would have essentially turned the event we plan Anabasis around into little more than a lore memory, and I figured that it would’ve been not only far less interesting, but we’d be repeating the same pitfalls we’ve fallen into up until now. Additionally, writing fifty years’ worth of lore is a lot! Either we'd be spending an insane amount of time writing up lore to fill those fifty years with, or we'd have to leave a large amount of blanks in the interest of time.

One of the central aims with Anabasis’ setting is to give everything meaning. What I mean by that is that we want there to be a central thread that can be followed to understand why everyone is here – something that connects every character, intrinsically and unescapably, so that everyone feels connected to the setting. The gameplay mantra we’re following is that no character should be disconnected from the round. Similarly for the setting, no character should be disconnected from the main events of the setting. We want characters from different planets to be able to relate to eachother through their reason for being on the ship; something more compelling than simply “money”, something that gives everything we do a certain gravitas. In a twenty year timespan, this central thread has to be such a gigantic shake-up that it fundamentally changes the galaxy. We want to revolutionize the setting to be full of conflict and gameplay avenues, and that can only happen with a galactic change. 

All of this means that the sins of the father must come to an explosive conclusion.

The Second Interstellar War

“What have we done?”
– Unnamed Biesellite Aspirant over the ruins of Earth, 24XX

You’ve read that correctly: the central event that will fundamentally shake everything up is the Second Interstellar War. I chose something like this because the changes that our setting needs to become interesting are drastic and can really only be accomplished with international conflict shaking up the galactic order to a massive degree. The reality is that everything we have in lore is too static and too stable for us to really magic up any sort of other reason for things to deeply change to the level we want. 

The existing battle lines can be guessed by attentive article readers as this is something we’ve been building towards for a bit already. It’s important to mention that there will be no retcons to lead us here, everything that happens will happen canonically IC. This is also a good time to reveal that the final canon arc of the Horizon will cover the beginning of the 2IW and the Horizon’s involvement in the crisis, which will provide a neat avenue for any characters that you want to bring over to NBT2.

The 2IW will last for approximately twelve years, which means that Anabasis will begin eight years after the war. This is particularly relevant because in the setting we imagined, the reconstruction process has begun, but the galaxy as a whole still feels the raw scars of a war where a previously unimaginable amount of people have died over human greed. This is also where what I mentioned about timeskip length comes on – a fifty year timeskip would have left the characters too far removed from the second interstellar war, barring very specific exceptions such as particularly old characters (70-80+) and IPCs. With a twenty year timeskip, you as the player have the option of playing a character that participated at any stage of the war: born during, or born before.

These twelve years of war have seen no victor. The hegemons of the Spur sought to increase their influence and rule the Spur alone, but only ended up destroying most of what they held dear – no nation has been left as before. Earth and Biesel were destroyed beyond repair through weapons of unimaginable sin, and now stand in desolate ruins as grim reminders of a past that once was. All semblances of authority in Biesel collapsed, and it is now a system of pirates and mercenaries lording over the once-Biesellites that now remain in the various war-torn moons and planets. The Alliance reached the brink and tipped over, having been forced to retreat from its colonies to the Jewel Worlds, betraying its promise to Humanity and leaving them to fend for themselves as they try to salvage what is left. The Coalition buckled under internal pressure and finally broke through a bloody civil war, leading to the establishment of new nations, all eager to eke out their lordship over the ruins of the Spur. The Eridani Federation took advantage of external chaos to break free from the Alliance, and now remains as a photograph of a corporate order that is long gone, with corporate executives holding onto the grains of sand of a bygone age with everything they can, a futile race against time. Elyra is a shell of its former self, its collective identity traumatized by the longest and most bloody war they have ever seen, with a myriad of planets being reduced to ashes and its bloody fortune – Phoron – completely gone. The Empire of Dominia must reckon with its new existence under Priscilla after its own civil war, dealing with the remnants of its failed colonial past as it tries to survive in an unstable galaxy. All the while, the alien nations carve out their own empires out of the ashes of Humanity’s sins.

The clearest sign of the fall of the previous galactic order is the fall of the megacorporations. Under the internal pressure caused by the greed of its members, the Conglomerate broke, with the various megacorporations scrambling about to find a nation to hold onto so that they could survive. This was a doomed prospect as the devastation of the Second Interstellar War reached extremes, and by the end, only scraps of the original megacorporations remained, divided and fractured; never to reunite under a single banner. While their “successors” may retain significant power in some areas - such as Eridani - they no longer have a stranglehold on the galactic economy, and while some are interstellar, most exist only in specific regions of space to fulfill a specific economic niche, rather than dominating entire industrial sectors.   

To be clear, we are not crafting a grimdark setting – that is far from our intention. In Anabasis, you will play the part of people who, against all odds, try to eke out the best life they can in the ashes of a new galaxy – all the while, lamenting a golden past that was denied to you by the greed of higher powers. The old international galactic order has now been lost, and the galaxy looks nothing like it does before. Phoron fields have all either been consumed to craft the weaponry with which various planets were blighted, or destroyed in the wake of war, leading to the irreversible loss of most phoron technology other than the smallest kinds for even the most privileged. No nation is capable of war any longer, but there is no more trust, and so a cold war between most nations falls upon the Spur as a whole. Freelancer and mercenary companies have risen to fill in the void that the nations have left, some even ruling their own speck of the Spur… and that is where you come in, the crew of a humble freelancer ship in the ruins of Tau Ceti – once a shining symbol of Humanity’s technological progress, now a lawless land.

Regardless of the misery that has befallen your world, you – a freelancer or a corporate, nothing more than an ordinary person – are determined to carve out your own life, no matter what. The corporations and the old nations have taken your future away, but not your pride.

The Setting

“There has not been a just cause ever since the Dominians set fire to the galaxy.”
– Unnamed Elyran mercenary from Avarizia, 24XX

All names in this diary are placeholders, and not permanent.

The ship the game place takes on, the Blood Diamond, is a Solarian destroyer that was refitted in Valkyrie’s shipyards. Its motley crew is made up of anyone from any corner of the galaxy. Whether you have lofty dreams to carve your name across the stars as a freelancer or you simply want to carve out an existence for yourself, it matters not for Avarizia, the freelancing group that you answer to… as long as you pay the Tithe.

The Tithe is the central gameplay mechanic of Anabasis. Avarizia is kind enough to provide you – the crew – with a ship, the most basic of basic tools for you to work with, and a large web of contacts and contracts, so long as you provide a minimum return on their investment. The Tithe is the purpose of your voyage across the stars, your objective every month, and your sword of Damocles. For if you do not pay the Tithe, it will be your heads on the chopping block, and everyone knows it. You all know, however, that you are left to your own means, and you must fend for yourselves to reach this monthly payment. You will be paid in a percentage of the ship’s profits, assuming there is any left after paying the Tithe, that is, whereas the Captain is personally paid a large commission.

In Anabasis, player freedom is emphasized by virtue of the setting. Avarizia does not place much scrutiny on who it hires or why. So long as you can be useful to them, you can be hired. Similarly, Avarizia does not care about what happens on its ships so long as the Tithe is always brought in, and thus you can expect more meaningful and more liberal in-character conflict. Of course, you will all still need to work together, under the surely benevolent guidance of your Captain, unless you want to incur Avarizia’s wrath.

Not all crew on the Blood Diamond are freelancers, however. Avarizia often hires corporate contractors for very specific positions on its ships, often leisure positions or otherwise skilled workers that are unlikely to be fulfilled by reckless mercenaries, such as Surveyors – researchers of artifacts to sell for a profit – or some of its canteen staff. Freelancer crew have, however, never taken well to the presence of corporates among their ships. Most of Humanity still remembers the bloodshed that the corporations have directly or indirectly caused, and many of them think of corporates as unwilling or willing abetters in this misery.

Regardless of your provenance, you must all work together if you want to make it in this galaxy. The Blood Diamond’s starting equipment is dynamic and will depend on the current amount of money collected for the Tithe. The lower the money, the lower tier of equipment that will be spawned on the ship. Expect to work with the scraps if there is very little money left after the Tithe, and if you have amply fulfilled it, expect to work with better equipment… before it breaks or is sold, and Avarizia is not kind enough to replace it with an exact replica.

Most of this money will come from the contracts that the Blood Diamond will undertake, as decided by your benevolent Captain at the start of your shift. These contracts, graciously provided to you by Avarizia, can vary – from low-paying, but calm package delivery (so long as you don’t look inside the package) to high-risk, morally dubious recoveries of precise items from encampments by a well-paying pirate warlord. The Blood Diamond’s future, purpose, and morality are entirely up to you, the crew, who may be willing or unwilling participants in whichever expedition has been prepared that day to bring in some money for the Tithe.

Conclusion

“How can you guarantee that you’ll win?
– We must win at all costs. Or there will no longer be a Biesellite nation, Miranda.”
– Leaked conversation between Miranda Trasen and Ake Torvald before the start of the war

I hope you all enjoyed the presentation of the setting to come! Many things are, of course, missing. I know that many of you are likely clamouring to know the fate of the Scarabs, the rest of the Human factions, or the aliens as a whole, but those have to wait for now. Much of this lore is in progress and still needs to be worked on, and as for the alien nations, I personally won’t be the one writing about them – those development diaries will be done by their individual lore developers when they are ready. As always, if you are interested in helping any of this become a reality, please consider applying for the Development teams, whether that be Lore or code/sprite/map developers.

Feel free to ask any questions you have on the Discord or on the Forums. I will try to keep this thread updated with a FAQ.

[LynxSolstice]

Picking through the ruins of the First Interstellar War was a striking reminder of the ruins of the old and personally to me, was a fantastic background for the setting as a whole, so I sure hope we'll get a LOT of cool off-ship locations that harken to the Second.

[Sniblet]

The fact of a twenty-year timeskip alone is very significant to vaurca players, because it means that unless something changes, only the Breeders can still be alive. I'm comfortable replacing all my bugs, but I can't speak for others.

Edited December 25, 2025 by Sniblet

[NerdyVampire]

1 hour ago, Sniblet said:

The fact of a twenty-year timeskip alone is very significant to vaurca players, because it means that unless something changes, only the Breeders can still be alive. I'm comfortable replacing all my bugs, but I can't speak for others.

I'm comfortable with that too

[wowzewow]

Before anything is set in stone,

Earth should be uninhabitable, but only for human life. It should be a "green hell" overgrown city post-apocalypse kind of planet.

Biesel should be the "Fallout" style nuclear wasteland kind of planet.

So we can have cool exoplanet expeditions and stuff.

 

Also hopefully not write us into a corner if we do want to do stuff regarding Earth and Biesel. "Destroyed beyond repair" sounds pretty abhorrent, because it implies that Earth and Biesel are basically useless balls of dirt with no more stories to tell. It would sit better if it was more of "irreparable unless with great cost, effort and technology (which we don't have due to the lack of Phoron)"

 

Edited December 26, 2025 by wowzewow

[dessysalta]

Another couple of questions: How different will representatives/execs/consular officers be? And will retired or player-killed characters be able to make returns, provided they aren't actually dead? (I.e. characters that were fired or extradited)

[greenjoe]

The latter question is interesting. If a character was arrested for something,  20 years passing could well mean their sentence has passed. That or they escaped from prison in the fall of Biesel etc.

[triogenix]

21 hours ago, dessysalta said:

Another couple of questions: How different will representatives/execs/consular officers be? And will retired or player-killed characters be able to make returns, provided they aren't actually dead? (I.e. characters that were fired or extradited)

To Be Determined on both counts. We're still in the early stages here, and have not yet ironed out how we're going to handle specific aspects such as the above.

Edited January 10 by triogenix

[Shimmer]

I've been putting off writing a reply mostly to get over the 'icky wah wah new thing' feeling and come to a more level headed way to describe the various anxieties the description of what is being planned has given me. Apologies in advance if this post comes across as particularly negative, but its purpose isn't to take a massive shit on the ideas presented, but rather clear up those fears in case they were misconceptions, misunderstandings, etc etc etc.

I think the general idea of wanting to shake up the Spur's powerbase and somewhat balkanize it in order to pull it away from the 3 dominant state concert of power stalemate is necessary, I'm more concerned about the tonal shift the setting is about to take in order to achieve this.

 

On 25/12/2025 at 17:51, MattAtlas said:

To be clear, we are not crafting a grimdark setting – that is far from our intention.

I do want to touch on this one in particular. I like this. I find the general trend among most sci-fi settings to be really grim and yaddle yada where everything is misery and poverty and poverable misery suffering to be extremely banal and HILARIOUSLY overdone. Starsector, the Expanse, Star Craft, Star Wars, etc, are to varying degrees utterly miserable.

My fear stems from how the tonal shift here is being described. We are entering a technological dark age. We exist in what is functionally a post WW2 Europe, which doesn't lend to an environment that is hopeful and on the up and up. With Biesel and Earth gone, that's what, ~30 BILLION people gone in some capacity or another? This is INCREDIBLY tonally depressing!! This is the stuff I would expect out of 40k, where Mcface Mckinson of the Fleets of Malevolent Evil starwiped Hopeville Goodguys because it tickled his funny bone.

Even assuming that the destruction of those planets IS partial, or is known in advance to allow for an evacuation, or both, Earth's population is still 19 billion people. The effort to evacuate so many people, and to resettle them elsewhere... How do you feed those people, how, logistically, do you pull them out, the chaos caused by knowing your planet is about to be destroyed would be immense. Even if we promised 90% of them get evacuated, that's still BILLIONS dying in a single event.

That's incredibly grim. And it would be the background of this new setting, it'd be a key, defining, recent historical element that you cannot really ignore or talk around. This would be the equivalent of London or Tokyo or Moscow being nuked, advanced warning or not the tone that is being set isn't a hopeful one.

And this is only Earth and Biesel. And only the consequences of two worlds being destroyed, this isn't even touching the fact that the rest of the Spur is drawn into a massive devastating conflict that destroys the entire social order, massive nations broken apart, the megacorporation that had a tight grip over the Spur broken apart. And all of those having happened only 8 years ago?

And to add to that - 8 years is basically nothing. What I fear is we end up in a situation with EVERY character being intimately involved with the war. Either as veterans, or as victims, with no option to be minimally involved with the conflict if it is cataclysmic and present everywhere.

 

Which brings me to my question. What efforts will be done to alleviate and pull such a tonal shift away from grim dark? How will the tone shift from the consequence of such a devastating conflict and into something more hopeful? A massive appeal of Aurora to me is that it doesn't rhyme with much of what is available in sci-fi stories. It doesn't feel like a den of misery, trite, overdone, and beaten to death conceptually. Aurora allows for the creation of characters from 'normal' and stable backgrounds, an environment of if not outright prosperity then at the very minimum stability. Will this still be something that is possible? With such a tonal shift, and a cataclysmic conflict that will unavoidably affect EVERYTHING, how do you intend to approach this? Will this kind of origin be sacrificed for the sake of the wider narrative? Will it exist within smaller pockets? How will the 2IW affect character backgrounds? Will there be room for characters whom were entirely uninvolved? How will this be achieved? Will this be sacrificed for the sake of the wider narrative? Will efforts be placed into preventing the ship from being occupied entirely by war veterans? Is that a concern, intent, or irrelevant?

 

 

My second anxiety is that, while we are aiming to pull away from a corporate setting, all that truly happens is we draw away from corporate aesthetic, but not corporate motivations. What the fuck does that mean?

The way the new setting is being described, is that the Freelance ship, which I'll call the New Horizon (NH), is still beholden to a corporate entity, the nebulous benefactors that own the vessel who's entire motivation is to make money. Sure, it has no geopolitical aims and goals unlike the SCC, but how will it fundamentally be different to corporate roleplay if the aim is still profit oriented? In fact, I believe that in the long term, the lack of geopolitical and factional allegiances is a narrative trap. And I'll explain through examples.

Imagine the following scenario; the NH has stumbled upon a stand-off between Faction A, and Faction B. Both are offering the NH a reward of X and Y, and Y is generally considered a far better reward. So obviously you side with Faction B! Have you noticed the trap?

There is no compelling narrative here. The ship isn't siding with one or the other over political or story considerations, they aren't siding with one side or another because of sympathies, because neither matter, what is of importance to our benefactor isn't image or alliances or politics, it's profit, it's keeping the ship running and keeping money going.

Part two of that trap is, if such decisions have wider consequences, and the NH ends up less favored by Faction A after repeatedly siding with Faction B... We've just ended up in the same situation as before, where we are a corporate-ish (but not aesthetically) ship aligned with Faction B in opposition to Faction A. All the while we have lost the initial narrative considerations offered by being initially aligned with them, instead its just profit, which is motivationally weak. Why should you care for one side or the other?

 

Compare to a ship with existing allegiances. Faction A offers less money and rewards, but your ship relies on them, as dry dock, supplier, w/e, and opposing them will have DEEPER consequences for characters and not just the ship, be it through criminal charges, breach of contract, and what have you, meanwhile Faction B offers you a phoron Mcguffin so powerful it does something extremely vital for the gameplay loop that passing up a chance to get it would be really stupid. Notice how, by adding an allegiance, there is more narrative push and pull, the consideration isn't simply profit, its political, its personal, more than number going up is at stake.

 

Thus, another important question comes up; how do we seek to motivate players to side with one over the other in a compelling fashion? Profit doesn't motivate much, it's far too abstract and far too material to be truly engaging, especially given this is a video game. It doesn't tell much of a story. So how will story be integrated into this loop? Will we be completely unaligned? Will there be fallbacks to prevent the NH from accidentally falling into alignment with a faction? And most importantly - how will this new benefactor corporation be characterized? Besides profit, what are their motivations, goals, ambitions? Why should people care? If they end up being a faceless entity that isn't present and only exists in the background, isn't that worse than an established corporation with goals, influences, ambitions, and allies?

 

And going back to the tonal shift, I'm noticing the way the Freelancer ship is being painted is very... Mercenary. It's not a civilian ship, it's a military destroyer retrofitted for other duties. Does this matter for gameplay? Not at all! Whether it is a freighter, a scrapper, a battleship, it will play all the same.

But it does matter for the tone. People will naturally drift to play out a ship in the way the fluff sets it up to be. A military destroyer, retrofitted or not, will lead people to be more bellicose. Much more combat oriented, because that's what the setting has made the ship!

This gives a very mercenary HOORAH marine feeling to the entire thing. I won't repeat the question I've shot prior, instead, I'll give a different one.

Is the NH being a former military ship set in stone? Could it be moved towards a more civilian oriented designed to maintain the status of the setting as civilian instead of military? Or are we shifting away from a civilian setting into something far more militarized and conflict oriented?

It's important that the fluff communicates the purpose of the ship. A military destroyer, retrofitted into a cargo hauler, will still remain a military destroyer. It's purpose is still very bellicose no matter how many cargo containers you bolt to it.

[OffRoad99]

On 25/12/2025 at 23:22, Sniblet said:

The fact of a twenty-year timeskip alone is very significant to vaurca players, because it means that unless something changes, only the Breeders can still be alive. I'm comfortable replacing all my bugs, but I can't speak for others.

If it makes you feel better, I will have to replace every single character in my character list, with the exception of my Security IPC, which I might also shelve.

Edited January 26 by OffRoad99

[zha everything broken]

20 hours ago, Shimmer said:

[snip]

While I don't have much I 'can' say in response to your direct questions (being that I'm almost 100% code-side and not lore), I did want to just call out that IMO this was a very considered and well-written critique/inquiry. I strongly agree with where you're coming from, though I don't Expect that final product will be as bleak as you might fear (internally we do tend to mock both the grimdark and HOOAH vibes, and their general avoidance is a subject that's been gone into at some length, and still touched on).

So yeah. I don't have anything super substantive to add but I really really really like your post and wanted to call that  out.

[Sniblet]

From my reading, Avarizia is very hands-off and won’t ever be sending CC announcements ordering command to pick the path that pays the best on pain of HR action. They’re not our bosses, they’re our landlords, with the exception that our land flies around and has guns on. If we follow their rules and make rent, we’re all good. So if faction A pays worse but has better moral appeal than B, A is still on the table. If rent is almost due and we’re not on track to make it and afford fuel after, then it’s a dilemma. FTL does this constantly, and players consistently turn evil over it.

[Tex-Mex]

Even after WW2, there was absolutely people and areas which, while aware of and affected by the war in some way, were mostly normal and simply adjusted. There's no reason to believe that the entire Spur is completely rent apart and every single person's life is in utter free fall after a war. Some people might be better off, they might be destroyed, they might not have noticed much of anything. I think the war will touch every person's life in some manner, that is inevitable, but I don't believe it will completely prohibit making a civilian uninvolved character who had a relatively normal life.

I agree with zha, I don't believe the writers would nail home a grimshart setting where everything sucks all the time and no one knows love or joy anymore. I do think we will be dealing with a fucked up world following a massive war, but there are absolutely still stories of hope and rebuilding and compassion to be found. That's the same with the concerns about being mercenaries. Mercenaries doesn't mean big gun toting badasses, it just means that we work for profit. That could show itself as an ex-soldier security officer, or a retired electrician whose IRA was wiped out in the war, or a physician who wants to meet people and see the world and make some cash doing it, they are all mercenaries.

Sniblet's already said this part. We won't have a nanny telling us "you HAVE to pick Faction B, this is best for US", they only care that we pay what we owe and it's up to us to figure out how we're going to do that every time. There are so many stories we could tell through and so much more freedom that combo of simple motivation and the hands-off nature of the patron gives to us.

[MattAtlas]

Because your post is huge with a lot of questions I'm going to divide my answer into sections, since I don't like spllitting my posts into 20 different quotes.

On 25/01/2026 at 20:26, Shimmer said:

[on the tonal shift]

We live in a very privileged era. Today, we can boot up our favourite internet browser, look up the Second World War, and get an almost day-by-day retelling. You can look at the aftermath of the bloodiest war in the history of mankind and you won't read a single positive thing -- and it makes sense. In a vacuum, it will look like the greatest disaster humanity has ever faced. You'll read casualty numbers that are unthinkable, with the greatest tragedies known to us happening exactly in that time period. You will read some things that will make you question how some countries even came back from the brink. You'll see numbers that you cannot even picture in your mind, and ask yourself how exactly people were capable of this much. And yet, people recovered, even in the most devastated of countries and populations. 

This is exactly the effect that is happening here. You are reading the Wikipedia version of the new setting - and I wrote the diary this way because it's my job to sell the setting and the changes to the players - so, naturally, you're going to focus on the casualties and on the dark tones. That's intentional. I want people to see this as a complete detachment from what Aurora was, because that's what it is. Naturally, when you read things such as "Earth blew up" and "Biesel blew up" in a vacuum it'll look like everything went to shit, but as I told people on the Discord, the setting isn't infinitely grim. It's overall more grim, yes; there are more grim stories than before, that much is true. But I've always been a proponent that it is adversity that creates the best stories and characters, and not prosperity. The setting is this way so that characters have a lot of adversity to face, which means that achieving their goals is that much more important, and has that much more impact. It's that contrast that I really want to capture - the fact that humanity (and aliens) can bloom even in the wake of the most terrible of disasters because that's just how strong normal people are. That's the true core and framing of Anabasis, the strength of the little person to recover from adversity, and not so much the disaster that just passed - that's just the backdrop. In short, the devastation is only focused on in the diary because I have to tell you what changed.

Office workers, warehouse workers and the like still exist in Abasis. Society is mostly normal in a lot of places, just comparably a lot worse than during the golden age of the Spur. Not everyone's a gun toting mercenary and not everywhere is an anarchic shithole. In a lot of places, life is still stable to different degrees. Obviously someone is safer in Luna than in the pirate territories in Biesel, but life there still goes on. People aren't getting gunned down on the streets and neither is everyone a veteran. At the same time, there are places where life is truly shit. But that's an opt-in as much as playing something like San Colette is at the moment. Similarly, you can play someone from somewhere remote enough to not be involved in the 2IW, but I'm confident enough in the final product to think that nobody will do that because the alternative will be that much better.

There will be short stories published in the future about the life of the little guy, because I want to write them to get the idea across. It is currently a little hard without spoiling some things that are still in development on the lore side, but I assure you that these will happen, and they wwill clear up a lot of confusion. Right now I need people to use their imagination still.

On 25/01/2026 at 20:26, Shimmer said:

[on the ship and being beholden to an entity]

It is a mistake to think that people are beholden to anyone external to the ship. The whole purpose of NBT2 is making a ship where the players decide what they want to do on their own terms. So long as they make money Avarizia does not care and will not care, this will not change at any stage of development. It is also a mistake to think that Avarizia is a corporation; it's not. It is explicitly a freelancer company which is not a corporation, this is a very important distinction to make because it will be key to understand mercenary states and the importance of mercenaries/freelancers in Anabasis.

Tex-Mex hit the nail on the head here; you underestimate how important money can be as a deciding factor once it is properly integrated into development. We have a lot of ways in mind to achieve this that we think will do the job really well. In general, players naturally tend towards the morally good option, which is counterbalanced by the morally bad option being generally more convenient - that's one balancing factor that is very possible, just to provide one example. Having less money will always be a net negative for the players, both because you need to meet rent and also because you increase your quality of gameplay by having more money (better starting equipment, cleaner starting conditions, and so on).

I disagree that this sort of choice does not create a compelling narrative. It only does not if your character has a completely white sense of morality, and I would argue that any literary critic worth their salt would say that such a character is a flawed character. One of my favourite professors - a woman with a Ph.D in scifi studies and with several papers who teaches a masters' course in scifi leature - repeated this to us once, and I quote, "good science fiction is a thought experiment and a moral dilemma". A good character in a science fiction universe will have morals that are troubled, because that is how you create conflict for your own character, and you can advance their arc. Your character making that choice which they did not want to pick for moral reasons is all the writing fuel a writer can ask for. You need to see the game system as the facilitator for your own writing and the springboard for your character, rather than the thing that feeds you your character progression. That's exactly the intent with the money and contracts system, giving players choices to make that will inevitably affect their characters. 

When a character is aiming a gun at a foreign mercenary during a high-intensity contract, I want them to FEEL that they are murdering someone. I want the ship to UNDERSTAND that their actions have consequences. And that character with white morals forced to abide this SHOULD feel troubled. They SHOULD feel like they have messed up. Because that's just the kind of universe they live in. This does not preclude you from writing a morally good character; this makes you have to write an interesting morally good character who struggles with reconciling their morals with a fundamentally unfair universe. How does that feel for them? Did they have any other way out? Did they pick the easy way out? Could they have done anything to avoid this? These are some of the moral problems I want people to have, 

And yes, this is a tonal shift that was necessary. Aurora has been a morally good setting for years now (with fundamentally no elements of corporate dystopia left; this is a universal truth now, and not really up for serious debate) and nothing good has come of it. Arguably, it's been one of the main driving reasons for our population troubles. This is why NBT2 shifts towards a more grim setting; we need one in order to really light the flame in terms of character interactions and conflict.

On 25/01/2026 at 20:26, Shimmer said:

[on being mercenaries, and a militarized environment]

A mercenary is not necessarily a paramilitary. An Avarizia office worker who handles the NanoExcel paid leave sheets is as much of a mercenary as the guy going planetside to explore ruins. In Anabasis the term mercenary just means "someone who works for money for a mercenary company". It is not necessarily militarized in Anabasis; this is different in the Horizon's setting as "mercenary" is exclusively used in the context of PMCG. This is just something that will change overtime as culture shifts to match the new lore.

The ship being a Solarian destroyer is set in stone, yes, because it will allow us to have some pretty good lore elements that I don't want to spoil yet, and good lore justification to have ship weapons and other goodies that will help us a lot in space exploration and high-intensity stuff (like drop pods 😉).

The setting becoming more militarized is something that's brought up often in developer chat. We all want to avoid it, that much I can say. What I can say is that conflict happening more often does not equal militarized. Naturally Anabasis will have more conflict and fighting because, let's face it, that's what drives SS13 population in the first place - it's what Aurora needs in general to have a true resurrection. This doesn't mean that it'll happen constantly and neither does it mean that the setting will become militarized. We're all aware of the risks and that we're walking a tightrope, but those fine margins are what makes this setting potentially so speciall. We think that that goldilocks zone will drive so much conflict and so many moral dilemmas that will make roleplay unique and really interesting.

In short, all I can ask is for trust in your development team. Remember; the Wikipedia version of the setting is not the final product. It is a summary of changes; it is nothing more than the ingredients to the dish.