The Pact Worlds

As an atom cannot be sundered without grave consequences, so too do we divide our system at our peril. To war with each other is to ignore the rewards of cooperation and to leave ourselves exposed to terrors from beyond. We are all children of the same parent star. Though our differences make us strong and the competition of our ideas pushes us to new heights, we must never allow them to divide us. For if we do, we shall surely perish.

—From the preface of The Absalom Pact

Structure

The Pact is not a single system-wide government, but rather an association of independent worlds bound by treaty to work together and acknowledge each other’s sovereignty. Though its powers technically extend only to the facilitation of trade between worlds, interplanetary law enforcement, and mutual defense, over the last several centuries the government has gradually broadened the scope of its authority.
The Pact—sometimes formally called the Absalom Pact—was first proposed in 41 ag, in response to the increased vesk aggression threatening the whole system. Recognizing that there was no way any individual world could stand against the combined might of the Veskarium, a coalition of officials from Absalom Station, Castrovel, and Verces proposed the new arrangement, based in large part on the system that underpinned Verces’s Ring of Nations as an effective one-world government. To the coalition’s surprise, the first world to sign on to its new plan was not logical Aballon or pacifist Bretheda, but the long-mistrusted undead planet of Eox. With the military might of the bone sages on its side and the churches of Abadar and Iomedae wielding their financial and religious power to promote the campaign, the coalition quickly gained strength, and in just a few years the entire system came under the protection of the new government.
As a confederation of independent states, the Pact generally endeavors to afford its component worlds as much autonomy as possible. Aside from enforcing a brief list of universal rights granted to all sentient creatures and a somewhat longer list for Pact Worlds citizens, the government largely leaves judicial and legislative matters to the local governments of individual worlds, as long as they don’t infringe on the authority of other planets. The Pact’s primary enforcers, the Stewards, are as much diplomats as they are police, doing their best to solve issues with soft power and maintain the system’s fragile balance. The Pact is also very specific about the limits of its authority—in addition to honoring the sovereignty of its constituent governments, the Pact claims no jurisdiction over worlds beyond its solar system unless they are colonies that have requested and won official protectorate status.
Government decisions within the Pact are made by the Pact Council, which is housed in the vast senatorial building on Absalom Station called the Plenara. Every Pact World is represented on the council, each with a number of delegates proportional to its sentient population. While many matters are decided by direct vote in the council, deadlocks and issues of particular importance go to the Directorate, a leadership council whose five voting members are elected by and from the wider Pact Council every 2 years. No world can have more than one representative in the Directorate, yet the fact that this places many system-wide decisions in the hands of just five worlds means that the Plenara is a constant hotbed of politicking and alliance building, as individual worlds use their power and influence to ensure their interests are represented by the Directorate. A sixth, nonvoting member of the Directorate, the Director-General of the Stewards, is chosen independently by the Stewards and has no set term limit, serving only to advise the other directors and carry out the council’s decisions.
Not every planet in the system is a full member of the Pact. Moons are generally seen as part of their parent planet’s jurisdiction, save for those like Arkanen that have successfully lobbied for independent representation. Some worlds with limited civilization, such as Aucturn, Liavara, and The Sun, are categorized as protectorates; while such worlds are not granted full autonomy or voting rights, their representatives are allowed to speak at council meetings. Despite being a collection of many tiny worlds, The Diaspora has banded together as a single voting bloc, and in recent years a single vessel—the Kasatha worldship Idari—achieved Pact World status, with many new colonies beyond the solar system hoping to follow suit. While religious and corporate organizations have no direct voice in the council’s decisions, their constant presence via lobbyists and advisors ensures that their interests are represented as well.

Culture

The Pact Worlds are by their very nature a mishmash of cultures with different values and traditions, making it difficult to identify overarching traits. Still, a few things can be said about the “typical” Pact Worlds resident.
While a few places within the system—most notably parts of Verces and Aballon—come close to achieving a post-scarcity economy, most Pact Worlders have no choice but to work for a living. Capitalism looms large in both personal and planetary exchanges (kept that way in part by the influence of the church of Abadar), and the rich inevitably dominate the poor, who in turn do their best to become rich. Quality of life for those at the economic bottom varies dramatically—on Absalom Station, the government makes sure no sentient being goes hungry, but harsh worlds like Apostae see no problem with economic bondage that’s slavery in all but name. While Starfinder as a roleplaying game focuses on bold explorers, daring corporate agents, militant law keepers, and more, most people in the setting have more mundane jobs, whether it’s feeding the system via vast hydroponic farms, hauling goods back and forth between worlds, running stores and restaurants, or laboring at a thousand other everyday jobs.
Socially, most Pact Worlds residents tend to be live-and-letlive types—anything else is difficult to maintain when your government and even your neighborhood might contain a dozen different races from 50 different cultures. Prejudice tends to be reserved for the most familiar and the most foreign—people police those similar to them and fear the incomprehensibly alien—yet most folks realize that trying to impose their own values on others often ends up driving away valuable opportunities. As the old saying goes, it’s best to let aliens be aliens—and hopefully customers. This means that even individuals who don’t fit well into the cultures in which they’re born can often easily find acceptance by changing location, contributing to the constant churn and migration of people across the system. Yet even within primarily monocultural settlements, simple exposure to the vast array of different races and ways of life just beyond the horizon has tended to make residents less cognizant of minor differences like ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on. Who cares about the skin color or marriage arrangements of the neighbors in the apartment beneath you when your upstairs neighbors are giant sentient jellyfish that form new aggregate entities every time you ask them to turn down their cetacean-pop dance mixes?
One of the biggest cultural unifiers in the Pact Worlds is religion. Since everyone—well, almost everyone—eventually dies, and worship of a god can help determine the fate of your eternal soul in the Outer Planes, religious choices are practical as well as social signifiers. The Pact Worlds play host to a bevy of different gods, whose congregations mostly live together in harmony.
Arts and entertainment are constantly changing in the Pact Worlds, with fads disappearing as quickly as they arise. At the moment, gritty Akitonian shumka beats and Absalom eyebite rock are becoming popular in many rougher venues, while upscale nightclubs play delicate Vercite ether-ballads or Aballonian-produced euphonics—music designed by advanced computing to directly stimulate aural pleasure centers, creating a perfect listening experience. High fashion remains dominated by the sleek styles coming out of Kalo-Mahoi, the eternal punk look of Absalom Station’s trash-glamorous Spike, and the gothic severity of Apostae. Sports like brutaris, starlance, and ship racing persist in popularity, though most people find their thrills with VR parlor games or holo and stillframe shows. The most popular of these latter are inevitably Eox’s blood-soaked reality broadcasts, constantly decried by censors but never actually crossing the line into illegality. Of late, ordinary books have even seen a surge in popularity, perhaps in part due to legendary lashunta holo star Cashisa Nox declaring a preference for well-read consorts.

Public Agenda

Thanks to the magical Starstone at the center of Absalom Station, which acts as a homing beacon for ships across the galaxy, the Pact Worlds today are a vibrant system constantly bustling with both interplanetary and interstellar trade, as well as a thousand small-scale wars of culture and economics. As a jumping-off point for expeditions into The Vast, it’s never short of ships in need of explorers daring enough to launch themselves into the black in hopes of finding riches and wonders.

History

In the inhabited solar system nearest to their own, enthusiastic explorers from the Golarion System encountered the Vesk, a reptilian race that lent credence to fears of extrasolar threats. Having already conquered the entirety of their own system, the warlike reptiles longed to expand, yet had mysteriously failed to receive Triune's gift of interstellar travel. When the first explorers arrived via the Drift, the vesk received them warmly just long enough to decipher Drift technology—and then promptly began assembling Drift-capable war fleets aimed at their generous neighbors. In the wake of the disastrous Battle of Aledra, the independent planets of the Golarion System recognized the vast danger facing them and banded together for mutual defense, creating a broad alliance capable of defending against the vesk. This coalition became known as the Pact Worlds.
For the next 250 years, the two systems would remain each other’s greatest threat, skirmishing over planets outside the direct authority of either autonomy, or else engaging in limited space battles along the cordons between their systems, too evenly matched for either to commit to a full-scale assault. This so-called Silent War finally came to an end in 291 ag, when a vast, world-devouring entity called the Swarm attacked both systems simultaneously. In danger of being completely overrun, the Veskarium—as the reptilians call their empire—and the Pact Worlds signed a formal alliance, together managing to force the Swarm out of their region of space. Yet while the alliance put an end to active hostilities and opened both systems up to trade with one another, citizens on both sides recognize that the alliance was one of convenience and could fall apart at any moment.
Fortunately for the Pact Worlds, not all extrasolar contact was so violent. The insectile Shirren arrived in 83 ag, bearing nothing but goodwill and quickly integrating into Pact Worlds society. Kasathas, who appeared in 240 ag on the massive worldship Idari, proved less willing to be assimilated wholesale, yet they quickly established themselves as valuable allies. Although other sentient creatures hailing from beyond the Golarion system occasionally arrive, brought back by Pact Worlds explorers or homing in on Absalom Station’s powerful Drift beacon, the already incredible diversity of life-forms in the system means that most such creatures can easily blend in and take up residence, provided they don’t stir up too much trouble.

Territories

In a setting with nearly infinite worlds, each with their own rotation and orbital periods, tracking time can be extremely complicated. Fortunately, one of the Pact Council’s first acts as a government was to institute a universal system of measurements to keep everything running smoothly. When most people in the Pact Worlds refer to an hour, day, or year, they’re usually referring to Pact Standard Time. Under this scheme, a day has 24 hours of 60 minutes each. Through an astronomical anomaly, this happens to match the day-night cycle on both Castrovel and Triaxus, as well as the shift schedule on Absalom Station, hence its adoption. The length of the year—365 days, with 52 weeks in a year—is based on the length of Absalom Station’s orbit around the sun. When people want to refer to a particular planet’s rotation or orbit, they generally use terms like “local day” or “local year.”
Modern history records years in ag, which stands for “After Gap,” referring to the number of years since the end of The Gap in the Pact Worlds system, when memory and history once again became reliable. Events that occurred before the oldest edge of the Gap are often referred to as pg (“Pre-Gap”) and measured in how many years before the Gap they occurred, with a date like 300 pg meaning the event occurred 300 years before the onset of the Gap. On some worlds, however, scholars use the preexisting local calendars for events before the Gap. Those researching the cultures from Golarion, for instance, sometimes uncover documents referring to dates in ar or “Absalom Reckoning,” a measurement believed to have been used for nearly 5 millennia, starting with the ascension of a now-dead and mostly forgotten god of humanity named Aroden. Dating anything within the Gap is always a highly dubious proposition, and those who attempt to make claims about such things usually count forward or backward from the nearest edge, such as “roughly 500 years after the onset of the Gap.”

Technological Level

Pre-Gap records show that once upon a time, most of the worlds in the system relied on magic almost exclusively for complex and difficult tasks. Today, while magic remains a respected vocation and a means of accomplishing great deeds, technology often provides more practical, economical solutions to the same problems. Why spend years of dedicated study to cast a spell that creates light when you can buy a flashlight for a few credits? Why pay a battlemage to throw bolts of lightning at your enemies when the same funds could outfit a whole squad of soldiers with laser rifles?
This is not to say that technology has replaced magic. Rather, the two have evolved together, with inventors blending magic and technology, and corporations choosing whichever tool is cheapest and most effective for a given job. As a result, most technology involves at least a little magic, in either its functioning or its manufacture, and it’s not uncommon to see technological items bearing blatantly magical upgrades. This blending, however, means that technology incorporating minimal amounts of magic has work-arounds to remain functional even when targeted by dispelling effects—in rules terms, this means that unless an item is specifically called out as magical or a hybrid of both magic and technology, it’s considered immune to all antimagical effects. Similarly, the prevalence of minor magic in technology doesn’t prevent nonmagical classes like mechanics from working effectively on such items, so long as they don’t have extensive magical modifications.
Whereas in the ancient past, magic in the Pact Worlds was broken into many different traditions, today magic is seen as a single group of physically impossible phenomena, regardless of where it comes from or how it’s manipulated. Traditional distinctions like “arcane” and “divine” magic have long since been abandoned, and while different casters may access magic through very different means, from high-tech reality hacking to the study of occult items or the channeling of divine power, all are simply different means of accomplishing the same goals.

Trade & Transport

Communication in the Pact Worlds falls into three categories: planetary, system-wide, and unlimited. Although some powerful governments and religious organizations occasionally make use of expensive and dangerous supernatural communications, such as employing angels and devils as messengers, most residents of the Pact Worlds are restricted to the use of technology for their long-range communications.
Unlike planetary comm units, system-wide and unlimited range communicators are far too large to be portable, so they are usually integrated into starships or similarly sized facilities. Individuals without their own units can usually pay to send messages on rented ones. Receiving a message on a system-wide or unlimited-range unit requires an active Drift beacon transponder, which causes the receiver to broadcast identification and location data. Thus many criminal enterprises maintain virtual mail drops or black-market relays, trade in counterfeit transponders, or simply turn off their transponders and run dark. These transponders are standard on all starships and function as a primary means of ship identification.
Planetary Personal comm units are common, inexpensive devices that are capable of communicating with each other on a single planet or between ships orbiting a given world. Small enough to be carried in a pocket, they also come automatically integrated into all armor of 1st level or higher. While the units are powerful enough to transmit anywhere on a planet, they can be halted by targeted electromagnetic jamming or blocked by certain materials or methods. Encryption issues also make it impossible to use comm units to directly control machines, such as drones and starships. While some individuals link their comm units to operate as private, alwayson radio channels, most contact each other by entering publicly registered names or private identification codes.
System-Wide Due to the vast distances involved, interplanetary communication involves significant time delays, resulting in something closer to correspondence than conversation. The current best technology uses Triune’s network of Drift beacons—while bouncing the signal between them often mysteriously shortens the time delay beyond what would normally be possible with physics, it also randomizes the delay, making all messages within a solarsystem-sized area take 1d6–1 hours to reach their destination.
Unlimited Like interplanetary communication, interstellar communication relies on Drift beacons. Messages transmitted this way remain a fundamentally epistolary form, since they take the same amount of travel time as simply jumping to the recipient with a starship—days or weeks. Thus, courier ships and ambassadorial missions still remain popular for negotiations and time-sensitive information. As with Drift travel itself, while there’s theoretically no maximum range for this form of communication, no one has ever received a return signal from beyond the edge of the galaxy.
Information Networks Planets vary wildly in their levels of telecommunications and integration, but each Pact World has at least a rudimentary version of an infosphere: a worldwide network of digitized information. Due to the necessity of transmitting information physically, these infospheres are largely unconnected, and neighboring worlds may share core information but diverge wildly on lesser issues that haven’t been worth the effort of synchronizing. While these infospheres are often similar to Earth’s Internet, holding nearly limitless amounts of economic and cultural ephemera, all major Pact Worlds ports host basic encyclopedia-like data sets that ships can download to aid passengers in research when not in direct contact with an infosphere.

Reading the Planet Entries Each planetary entry has statistics for its diameter, mass, gravity, and so on. Since the absolute numbers mean little to most people, the physical statistics and atmospheric composition of a planet are expressed as comparisons to those of lost Golarion (which match Earth’s in every way). While it might seem complicated for planetary scholars to express everything in terms of a standard that’s no longer accessible, in fact the reference to Golarion is mostly a politically expedient construct—it allows the Pact Council to say it’s not promoting any of the existing worlds above the others.

Founding Date

41 ag

Type

Alliance, Generic

Alternative Names

The Absalom Pact, The Golarion System