The Frontier

It is the distant future and the stars beckon.   Humanity has long gazed to the stars in search of something greater. For years, humanity was studied by an ancient species of extraterrestrials known colloquially as "the Grey", impossibly advanced denizens of the stars that achieved space travel millions of years before humanity crawled out of the primordial muck. When they finally revealed themselves as Rhylodians, they blessed humanity with both interstellar travel and introduced them to the complex network of galactic satellites maintained by the mechanical, alien Errant.   With humanity's ascension, their ambition and drive have propelled space exploration faster than ever before. Paired with the advanced technology of the Rhylodians, the civilizations of the galaxy drive an interstellar expansion effort that introduced many new species to the fold and inadvertently ascended a few upstarts eager to claim the stars as their own.   Now is the dawn of a new era. A cluster of stars in the human-named Cervantes sector was recently discovered to be full of planets with tremendous potential for colonization and development. The foundations of an intergalactic society are laid out and denizens from across the stars race to prove their worth and find their place in the stars either part of this budding new interplanetary alliance or as their own powerful entities that will bow to no one.   The campaign starts aboard the colony ship Crusoe in a joint effort by humanity, the rhylodians, and atolwi to colonize the Mu Arae system, a star located on the outer rim of civilized space. For decades, both the Rhylodians and humanity have picked up curious signals of life within the neighboring systems of clustered stars, blips of intense noise that precipitate stars and planets blinking out of existence from the night sky. Mu Arae is set to be the staging ground to research and explore these phenomena in the hopes of finding the source of these disappearing stars.