Frontiersmen

The Frontier Worlds of the Mexam Confederation are often remote and desolate places where the Forerunner Xeriscaping Drones decided, “eh, this is good enough,” and left the world a semi-arid desert with high country planes covered very sparsely in vegetation. Most of these many distant moons or rocky worlds are besieged by natural ecological maladies and recurring disasters, like global dust storms and geological activity. Not least of all among these problems are the Wild Forerunner Probes that make for hostile infestations of semi-sentient and hostile synthetic wildlife.

Frontiersman are the rough and tumble folk willing to brave these harsh conditions and eke out a life nearly divorced from the economic utopia of the Core Worlds on the ground, or in stations above, these harsh lands. On Terra or Vision a ConFed citizen may enjoy the peace of mind knowing their planet is safe, protected; they don’t need to engage in manual labour, and their education & livelihood are both insured. The Colonies are the opposite of that, where fences need mending, food needs synthesizing, and if you get hurt the nearest hospital is in orbit only 12 times a day.

Often times dropped off in the thousands to build pre-fab housing units many miles apart, the Frontiersman and their families enjoy remote isolation from one another on vast patches of land. They operate Xeriscaping stations, warehouses, biospheres, mining operations, manufacturing, or other industrial scale systems, usually underground and safe from the environment. Some have even been fully abandoned and lead a life akin to the 19th century Americas with largely primitive existences.

99.99% of all Frontier Folk will never see space. They will live and die on their homeworld totally divorced from interstellar life – some to the extent that they don’t even believe that other human beings exist on other worlds. Often deeply religious and ignorant of technology, these ConFed folk are very simple and tend to carry big guns, so it’s best to talk slow and take it easy on first encounters.

In the rare case a Frontier child does leave home, they were likely chosen for outstanding performance in Lucid Dream Games and took a spotlight to join the ConFed Navy, or got picked up by a Trade Fleet to be “educated.” This education of course involves their brains being augmented by downloading a career starting kit that eventually lets them use ship systems; modifying their bodies and minds to life aboard a starship - which for a young teenager who only knows 19th Century technology is akin to having been abducted by magical alien wizards. Their social adjustment will forever be stunted, their personally held values and personality awkward to other ConFeds – let alone other races.