Driftbound is a gritty, dystopian science fiction RPG setting, a far future in which integrated technologies, evolutionary awakening, interstellar travel, and interplanetary terraforming are commonplace. After nearly four thousand years of reaching outward, we have built what most people refer to as the territories: a massively interconnected civilization that is truly extraordinary by any human measure, yet something still so modest by the measure of the galaxy that contains it. What terrans have rendered across catastrophe and cooperation, greed and genuine discovery — and the sheer accumulated stubbornness of a species that has never accepted a given distance as uncrossable — is a sprawling network of settled worlds, terraformed moons, orbital stations, starports, drift corridors, spacefaring vessels, asteroid colonies, harsh surface domes, and numerous outposts stretching hundreds of light years in three directions from Sol, the star system where all of this began.

The settled systems closest to Sol — the Bubble, in the language of anyone who has spent time there — are dense with the accumulated weight of terran history: politics layered on older politics, corporate interests pressed against each other across borders that have moved several times within living memory, and populations that have been terran for so many generations under so many different conditions that the word itself has started to mean something different depending on where you are when you say it. Beyond the near worlds, along the long corporate spines of the Reach, settlements thin and the laws that govern them thin with them. Corporate law gets creative out in the Reach; the dark between beacons gets considerably darker. Holding all of it together from the dense political center of the Bubble to the last waystation on the far side of the Reach are the Terran Accords: the accumulated body of agreements, rights, charters, and compromises of Terran civilization across distances that were, not so long ago, considered impossible. The Terran Accords are not a government, necessarily, nor are they a cooperative guarantee. But they are the closest thing to a shared foundation that the territories has, and on most days, in most places, they
are enough to hold all of this together.

What makes any of it possible is drift jumping — navigating spacefaring vessels safely through dimensional rifts, typically through the well mapped corridors linking the territories near and far. Understanding the way of life in the territories means reckoning with the drift before anything else. Most everyone spends at least part of their time in the territories out in the space between the stars and many settlements out in the dark.