The Chorus Mandate

Lethe

Lethe has no sun. It is a rogue planet on a long pass, and its people live in a ring of stations warmed by vents. The vents are failing, one station at a time. Every dark station still has people in it. You fly for Vent Four.

The campaign is told in three acts, each named by the question it asks:

1. Who do we save? Bring home whom you can from the stations going dark.
2. Is there a way out? An old levy dish in high orbit might reach past the dark, and someone might answer.
3. Who goes? The Levy Gate opens once more before Lethe drifts out of reach. Nothing on Lethe can carry everyone, so you build something that can: an ark, plated, driven and crewed. Then you choose who gets aboard, and cross the Drift with them.

The sector

Outside the campaign, the game is a living sector. Nine powers hold ground, and each one is an answer to a single question: what do you do about needing other people? Meridian Concord’s answer is “Dependency is the peace: be the room everyone has to walk through.” The Crimson Raiders’ is “Take.” Work for one power and its enemies hear about it. Wars start, run and end without you.

You can trade, haul under contract, mine, fight for pay, explore, salvage, pull somebody out, build stations and turrets, run a fleet, follow the story lines, or take a side and fly under a power’s colours.

Under the hood

The game runs on engine-v3, a genre-agnostic engine written alongside it: an entity-component system, a fixed-step loop with interpolation, a Three.js renderer with its own post chain and film grain, simulation level of detail, and positional audio with music chosen by place. The space game is one consumer of it.

The manual is written from the code rather than from memory: every number in it is a constant in the source, and the file it lives in is named.