Background: Lundmark's Nebula is a region of space particularly dense with inhabitable worlds. It was, up until two generations ago, hotly contested by the five major empires surrounding it. Things degenerated into war, as one might expect, and the infrastructures of the involved civilizations were wrecked. Said empires pulled back to their current, more managable boundaries, leaving the worlds in the nebula to their own devices. After a generation of open warfare, sadly, many of those devices were little more than sticks and rocks.

Two generations have passed, and the peoples of Lundmark's Nebula have pulled themselves into some semblence of order and functionality. Trade and interplanetary travel has resumed, and children are better off than their parents. This isn't to say that all is well: in the vaccuum the empires left, warlords, brigands, and pirates have ample opprotunities to ply their trades. And a generation of warfare left all sorts of toys laying around.

One of the major forces of stability in the modern setting is the Trade Guild. They have exclusive control over the Stargates, which are the most cost effective way of getting people, commerce, and mecha from planet to planet. Long ago, the ancients set up the stargate network between all the habitable planets in the nebula. Alas, they proved to be trivial targets for orbital bombardment, and only a fraction of the network remains.

In direct competition with the Trade Guild is the Leviathan Federation. Keepers of a race of living spacecraft, the Feds also control access to the Jumpgates, a form of point to point star-travel developed by the empire of Saint Evasculese. In theory, all five empires know how to build Jumpgates. The peoples of the nebula, _including_ the Federation, merely know how to repair them. (And no one knows how to repair a stargate.)

Jumppoints are instantaneous, closer to what you see in Buck Rodgers, but with weird machinery around them. Jumpgates are parked out in the Oort cloud, and there tend to be more of them. There are two forms of ftl: mechanical and biological. Normal mechanical ftl drives do not require that much distance from the star, but requires some. We'll stick with my standard 1000km per earthmass, meaning a trip out to the asteroid belt would be in order. Biological (ie: Leviathan) ftl has a max range about a light hour, making the trip in fromthe jumpgate to the planet much more pleasant.

Then there are the Free Traders. Theirs is the most expensive form of interstellar travel, but the most versatile. Simply possessing ships capable of faster than light drives, they are sometimes the only link poorer worlds have with their better off neighbors.

Aliens: No one has bothered to count the number of sentient species in the nebula, and from a gameplay point of view, the differences don't really matter. Think of any urban scene fromthe Star Wars movies or Samurai Jack. Their all people, some of them just got issued odder masks from the wardrob department. Some of them also were issued metahuman point values from the props department. It isn't a 'racial package', its just storyline.

Mecha: 50' anthropomorphic war machines were the primary combat units the empires used in the great war, though no side could decide on a 'standard' design, and each side had scores of 'special development' projects running around making things complicated. Wrecks, parts, and slumbering giants abound, which is how the PCs came into possession of their units. This being a drawn out war, there were also super-soldier projects in abundance as well. When someone says they are a third generation combat unit, they're referring to their grandparents veteran status, not development line.

Empires: The only pre-defined races in the campaign. If you don't want to play one, fine. And just because one race did things they way you like, don't worry. Your mecha are salvage, heirlooms, or just decided to choose you as their master.

Saint Evasculese: the monkey boys, aka humans. They primarily built the humaniform piloted mecha, such as you'd see in Gundam, Robotech, Nadesico, and Armored Core. THe buraucracy runs things, except when various ministers try stupid things to win favor with the emperor.

Fibbonachi: Our standard brutish-yet-honorable species. My standard antrho-wolf warrior race, and afficionados of beast-form mecha. Why wolves made lion-shaped robots is anyone's guess.

Ss'tor: Classic nagas: people sized snakes with a pair of arms. Came out further behind in the last war due to people's reaction to their funerary rites: the best way to honor the dead is through digestion. Tended towards the huge bio-form war machines. They're the ones that built your baby Gojira, or at least his parents.

The Collective: A loose confederation of several bug-like aliens. If it weren't for the fact the trust one another only marginally more than everyone else, they'd overrun everything. Their stuff looks buglike, complimenting the Fibbonnachi mecha, and lending a very Zoids feel to many battlefields.

Unity: The greys. Not a species to generally mix in with the general populace of the Nebula. They seem to have more resources than the other empires, but are more insular. They favor Orbital Frames: space superiority mecha, mostly humaniform, with powerful shield & antigravity generators to make them work.