The three colonies

There was a homeworld. It is gone; the Cinder Belt is what is left of it - the shattered middle of the map, the richest ground in known space, and nobody’s. The catastrophe is also called the Cinder; the belt is the event itself, still cooling. What caused it is deliberately unsettled: the three colonies carry three accounts, and the disagreement is the engine of the game.

A voidborn is anyone born after the Cinder - which is now everyone. No living pilot has stood on ground. The word weighs differently in each mouth: in Concord a legal status, in Sepulchre the generation that carries the dead forward, in Ashaari a customer base with no inheritance.

Raising and oath

Every pilot reads “voidborn of X, sworn to Y.”

• Raising is chosen at the door, is permanent, and carries no stats at all. It gives you your voice, a word on your nameplate, the creation text.
• The oath (allegiance) is the mechanical side: leanings, territory, how garrisons read you, home, tint. It can be re-sworn - at a price, and in season.

Concord · the Registry

Registered claims and armed escorts. Nothing here flies unfiled.

The structure is accreted: districts welded on for a job, over time. The survival logic is order: registries, escorts, law. It remembers the Cinder as an administrative failure - somebody’s negligence, provable, litigable; the belt belongs to whoever registered the claim. Its voice is paperwork: writs, registries, clause numbers. Members are registered; expulsion is being struck from the rolls.

Sepulchre · the Kindred

Belt-born salvagers who bury their dead in their hulls. Nothing here is new, and no name is forgotten.

The structure is carved: one mass, three cuts, nothing added. The logic is inheritance: the dead, the rite, the right of the cutter. The Cinder is a death in the family; the belt is the ancestor’s body and belongs to whoever tends it - whoever cuts it. Its voice is rite: genealogy, the second person plural, the names of the dead. Members are adopted; expulsion is being unnamed - the one thing not forgiven.

Ashaari · the Concern

Outside money in a thousand cells. Everything here is leased, the guns included.

The structure is grown: daughter cells budded over a core. The logic is capital: buy in, scale up, move on. The Cinder was a market event; the old world was overleveraged, the belt is distressed assets, and ownership is whoever can pay to hold it. Its voice is the offer: percentages, terms, everything negotiable and nothing free. Members are vested; expulsion is being divested.

All three are right in their own colony. None of them makes the others look bad.