Basic Lore

Basic Lore

Welcome to Space Station 13!

Space Station 13 takes place in an alternative retro-future 2053 where a mysterious substance called Plasma was discovered on the moon, leading to a cascade of space exploration, colonization, and corporate warfare. This cascade of events ended in the discovery of The Channel, a wormhole device that connects our solar system to The Frontier, a strange alien system with two suns orbiting a large brown dwarf Star made of Plasma.

You are an employee of Nanotrasen, a corporation with a monopoly on the plasma trade that fuels space travel within The Frontier, and you work on one of their many space ventures. From cargo crossdock stations to exploration and cartography ships, Nanotrasen controls a large number of corporate assets in the system for you to seek employment on.

Nantotrasen is performing all sorts of scientific experimentation in space, from inter-dimensional travel, to genetics, from space exploration to plasma research, and everything in between.

But not everyone is on Nanotrasen's side. On its path to monopoly, Nanotrasen has made quite a few enemies along the way, who are hellbent on causing as much trouble for them as possible.

Setting The Tone

As an employee of Nanotrasen, your character has chosen to be on one of its many Frontier properties for one reason or another. Whether you stay in the on-station dorms, or commute regularly from elsewhere, you signed on to work here. What your character doesn't know is that unlucky number 13's time is finally up: whether that be for a regular personnel change, a vacation, or because the station exploded, what was going to be a normal day on station has become anything but.

Nanotrasen is, in all appearances, an incredibly good employer, with many benefits that likely enticed your character. On-station bars, meals and lodging provided, genetic augmentation to be the lizard person of your dreams, something drew you to employment in its halls and your character should, in general, want to keep it that way.

Nanotrasen is not a cartoonishly evil corporation that keeps everyone in a cloning loop for eternal workers (in fact, only one clone of a given soul can exist at a time). Nanotrasen is not killing its employees on purpose. Nanotrasen is capitalistic, monopolistic, corrupt, and negligent, but it did not secretly kill your family to strongarm your character into working for them against your will.

Acknowledging the Fiction

There are certain game abstractions that are not represented literally in the fiction, in order to create a balance between good gameplay and lore. For example, the trip from station back home is not literally 4 minutes long, as the escape shuttle has to fly to the Channel, warp through it, reenter the atmosphere, and land at Nanotrasen HQ on Earth. Obviously, representing an entire disembarkation procedure would not make a good game, and so many of these elements are compressed. Shifts are not literally 100 minutes long in universe.

Cloning someone is not literally pressing a single button. Performing a medical procedure is not as simple as memorizing a series of 4 inputs.

Making a full account of all of these would be impossible, and there's nothing wrong with acknowledging these elements in a tongue in cheek nature. However, where these abstractions would break the overall tone, please keep in mind that your character does not know everything you know, and should respond to in-character events with some of the gravity that we would expect them to have in real life. Murder is not a simple 2 minute fix in the crew E-Z oven. It is is a painful and traumatic event that was resolved through an incredibly complex miracle of science.