Editing Diaspora (section)

== Setting ==

Far enough in the future that humans have settled other stars -- the titular "Diaspora" -- and nobody remembers Earth anymore.  Faster-than-light travel is possible and instantaneous if you know how (Tech level +2 or above), but only above and below the ecliptic if you travel in far enough away from the system's centre of mass, which takes days if not weeks of travel.  Momentum is conserved, you need reaction mass to travel through space, and money makes the worlds go 'round.  Nobody knows how to make new connections, or rather, some people do but they're not telling...

Systems of the Diaspora have experienced many golden eras and dark ages, always sequentially.  There's something about a certain level of technology where a culture becomes incomprehensible to people not at their level.  Just beyond Tech Level +4 seems to be a Human Singularity where people outside the culture think they've all gone mad (like destroying neighbouring systems to harvest mass to build a ringworld, or commit suicide en masse to upload their conciousness into a sublithic computer hive), or they've just vanished without explanation (such as when they decided spacewarp their planet to somewhere with a nicer night sky, or just chuck all their technology in a panic and return to an stone-age pastoral life but erased any records explaining why).  This Human Singularity / WTF Event Horizon puts an upper-limit on technology that can be found in the cluster. Aside from the FTL travel between systems (a necessity for the genre), nobody breaks physics.

The authors state that their love of the Traveller RPG inspired them to write the game.  Indeed, the physical effort of moving to a jump point before FTL travel, the "first blood" rule where the first stress taken in combat counts for more, and other features are copied from Traveller.