Galactic Databank / Foundation
A star has been murdered. Its Wake has cut the galaxy into a thousand frightened kingdoms.
The story begins in 1 AS, the first year After Starfall. At Nox, an inhabited and strategically important star was deliberately extinguished. The Wake blinded relays, corrupted navigation, damaged infrastructure, erased selected records and isolated entire regions.
This is not a distant ruin being rediscovered. Adults remember reliable travel, functioning institutions, enforceable law and the expectation that help could arrive. The old galaxy is breaking now.
AS means After Starfall. Older records retain local and institutional dates.
Witnesses saw Nox's light contract inward, disappear into absolute darkness and return as a silent disturbance that entered hyperspace and the Force. That disturbance became known as the Wake. No recognised authority can prove who murdered Nox, why it was selected, or whether another star can be killed.
Nox was home to billions across planets, moons, orbital cities, observatories, relay stations, shipyards and artificial habitats. Its murder destroyed, displaced or trapped an inhabited civilisation.
Nox lay near a concealed hyperspace convergence touching the approaches to the Hydian Way, the Gordian Reach, the eastern Outer Rim, ancient Sith space and forgotten regional corridors. Most travellers never passed through Nox, yet their routes relied on its measurements, relay synchronisation, beacon calibration and stellar signature.
Beneath its modern infrastructure lay machinery begun by early Sith Pureblood stellar navigators, who discovered that Nox possessed a unique resonance across otherwise unrelated routes.
The Republic survives with recognised law, courts and civil institutions, but central orders can no longer be reliably authenticated or enforced. Governors and admirals decide which promises they can keep.
The Sith are rival lords, dynasties, academies, cults, fortress worlds, tributary kingdoms, secret orders, war fleets and prophetic sects—not a single stable empire.
The Jedi remain influential but divided over service, warfare, political authority, intervention, forbidden knowledge and the use of the Force in crisis.
Independent powers are being born during play: convoy nations, station communes, corporate fiefs, refugee fleets, clan territories, pirate ports and planetary leagues.
Advanced technology remains widespread. The crisis is maintaining, powering, repairing, coordinating and replacing it. Hyperlanes shift, fleets vanish, navicomputers disagree and messages arrive late, duplicated or before transmission.
The opening campaign follows the Ember Road, a surviving corridor linking isolated regions. Republic remnants, Sith claimants, refugees, merchants and local rulers all need it—and all disagree over who should control it.
