Story and Setting

EXODUS is set roughly 40,000 years in humanity's future, inside the Omega Centauri star cluster: a globular cluster roughly 16,000 light-years from Earth, packed with on the order of ten million stars. In the game's fiction, that density of stars also means a density of habitable worlds, and the cluster's history is a long argument over who gets to keep them.

The first exodus

Around 2200 CE, Earth suffered an environmental collapse severe enough to drive a centuries-long evacuation. Successive arkships left the solar system for the Centauri Cluster, freezing or banking their crews for the long journey. The first wave arrived in the cluster after several thousand years of subjective ship time, but tens of thousands of years of objective time. Their descendants spread out, terraformed, and over millennia of selective engineering, transformed into the posthuman species the game calls the Celestials.

The Celestials view themselves as humanity's natural successors. They built up a continent-spanning network of transit gates (commonly called the Gates of Heaven), restructured entire worlds, and assembled a body of advanced technology fragmented across the cluster as artefacts referred to in-fiction simply as Remnants. Some Celestial sub-castes accept later-arriving humans as cousins. Most see them as a primitive remnant species, fit for use or for extermination.

Lidon and the Aslan Dynasty

The player's home is Lidon, a moon in the Malakbel system orbiting the gas giant Galarus. Lidon was the destination of a comparatively late ark fleet, one whose passengers arrived to find the cluster already ruled by the Celestials and the older Traveler Dynasties. The fleet's flagship and most of its support craft were lost; a single hardened settlement on Lidon's hot pole is now home to the Aslan Dynasty, a community of salvagers, engineers, and traders headquartered in the Persepolis cityscape.

Persepolis is a vertical city sheltered against Lidon's hostile climate, with the Oupávia Space Tower as its most visible landmark. Other Lidon locations include Lyonesse, a coastal district. The dynasty maintains a small fleet of salvage ships, and its most accomplished pilots are inducted into the Traveler caste: relic hunters trusted to make decisions for the dynasty on missions where two-way communication is impossible.

The Traveler caste

Travelers are not a military. They are agents charged with the only job that crosses the time barrier in both directions: leave Lidon, find the Remnants and other treasures the dynasty needs to survive, and bring back not only the cargo but a decision. Out in the cluster, Travelers negotiate with Celestials, settle scores with rival human factions, and make calls on the spot, knowing that the political situation back home will have shifted by the time they return. Jun Aslan, the player character, is heir to that tradition.

For Jun's personal backstory and the Traveler's tools, see The Traveler: Jun Aslan and The Recycler and Railclaw.

The relativistic problem

Every interstellar trip in EXODUS is sub-light. The ships are fast enough to take advantage of relativistic effects, which means a Traveler can cross to a star a few light-years away in subjective days, but objective decades will pass at home. The Time Dilation mechanic turns that constraint into the central narrative engine of the game: every mission permanently reshapes who is alive, who is in power, and what the home dynasty looks like when the Traveler comes back.

The Rot

The central threat hanging over the campaign is the Rot, a Celestial virus that is driving humanity toward extinction. It corrupts the worlds it reaches, and the homeworld Lidon is among those it is killing. Jun’s genetic connection to ancient Celestial technology is what makes the search for a way to fight the Rot possible, and it drives missions out into the cluster to recover the relics that might hold an answer. The infestation leaves a physical mark in the field as well: bramble-like growth that the gauntlet Lance ability can clear.

Major factions at a glance

For a deeper look at each, see Celestials and Factions.