Crew, mood and traits

Two generations

Every colonist comes from one of two real generations, and the calendar decides which. The founding expedition trained on Earth, slept through the half-century crossing in cryostasis and stepped out at the 2085 landing as finished adults — for the colony's first years, every person the population offers for hire is one of them. The colony-born arrive only as they grow up: nobody in the offer can be older than the colony itself, and the first locally raised students appear roughly a generation after landing, by which time the surviving founders are aging out of the offer for good.

Origin is written on every character's record — founding expedition or colony-born, with the year that proves it — and it is read straight off the birth date, never chosen. It also decides what a hire brings: founders arrive with Earth training already finished, while the colony-born start with whatever the local schools have taught them so far. Bridging that gap is the point of teaching — the founder generation's craft survives only if someone passes it on.

Every record also names a birthplace, and it is a fact stamped at birth that no later move rewrites: Earth for the founders, the raising settlement for the colony-born — and for a child born in the field, the expedition it happened on.

How long the list of people on offer runs is a question about the settlement's age structure, not its head count. Two cohorts step forward: the working-age adults, the same ones who staff every workplace, and the youngsters of school age. Each sizes its own half of the offer, so a place full of pensioners and infants offers almost nobody while an equally large one of working adults is a genuine hatchery of talent. A settlement that has stopped bearing children loses its young recruits first, long before it runs short of hands — which makes the offer's young half the earliest warning that a colony has stopped raising its own.

Families and children

Colonists can have children of their own. A child is born only to two named characters who have built a real mutual relationship — bonds are earned through shared service, never rolled — and who stand in the same place when the year closes. Births are rare and need a free bed at the mother's home settlement — the child's own roof, never a head of population — so a new family member is an event, not a statistic. And a child takes after its parents: talent and temperament come down the family line in whole pieces rather than as an average, with the odd child unlike either parent.

The child is a full character from the day of birth: correct age, both parents on record, a birth entry opening their service file, and a redacted portrait — the file simply has no photograph until the child grows into one, which the chronicle announces when it happens. Children cannot be assigned to anything and weigh nothing on the pool of capable people; at student age they start studying and assisting like any other youth, and adulthood follows the usual way.

A character with known parents or children shows a family block on their card, with each relative one click away and a family tree window that keeps even the dead in the picture. Children follow their family: when a parent's home settlement changes, dependent children move along, and their files say so.

Skills and professions

Every colonist carries a profile of skills across the colony's working domains — science, construction, medicine, combat and the rest. A profession is not assigned; it is read from what a person can actually do, and it refines as their skills concentrate. People grow through both practice in the field and formal education, and the two produce different kinds of specialist.

Experience needs time and practice. The first rungs of a craft take real seasons of work, every further one comes slower than the last, and a whole ladder is more than one career can climb from nothing: the young learn fastest, the pace declines with age, and the higher someone already stands on what they brought aboard, the more that head start matters. True mastery is either a life's work or a strong start finished here — no amount of raw talent grinds it out of a few busy years.

People also differ in how fast they learn. Talent is innate — nobody earns it and nobody loses it — and most colonists are unremarkable, with a genuine prodigy or a genuinely slow learner turning up only rarely. It buys pace, never competence: a gifted colonist does not start out better, they simply climb faster, so over a career the difference shows in what they became rather than in what they arrived as. Recruitment shows it before you sign anyone, which is what lets you tell two similar candidates apart.

The profession is advisory — an aptitude, not a job. What a colonist actually does is decided by the work position they hold: a seat on a building's workplace, taken deliberately and given up when they board a team or go studying. Aptitude says who is suited for a seat; the seat says who they are. Even the uniform follows the position, falling back to aptitude only while a person is unassigned.

Schooling is mentor-led. The Academy teaches whatever domain its seated instructor truly masters — the teaching seat asks for no profession, only real skill — and the pace of study follows the teacher: seasoned practitioners teach fastest, and a student can never be schooled past their own teacher. Retired mentors still pass their craft on around the settlement, but only as far as their own skill reaches, and always more slowly than a proper classroom.

Mood and stress

Satisfaction and stress run as separate channels. Conditions, relationships, workload and leadership all feed them, and a crew pushed too hard starts failing in ways a spreadsheet will not predict — sloppy work, conflict, worse. Temperament is innate: the same ordeal tempers one person and scars another.

Contact with home is one of those conditions. A field crew that still holds a comm link to the colony reads a mild lift — someone hears us — while a crew in radio silence feels the weight of being out of reach. Keeping expeditions inside the network is not just about information; it is about morale.

Where someone sleeps is a condition of its own. The roof over a character's bed feeds their satisfaction by its comfort and its state of repair, sets how well the night restores them, and shields them from the sky by its safety; a character with no bed at home reads the corridor, and a crew afield reads the field. Beds are handed out automatically by priority — you can pin a person to a building from their card, and the assignment holds.

Where someone is posted matters too. A seat far beneath a person's ability chafes — the more schooled they are, the more it stings — and they remember who ordered them there. Work above one's head grinds the other way: the underqualified carry the strain as stress for as long as they hold the seat. Repeated slights leave marks that outlast the posting.

Every relationship is on the record. A character's card lists who they stand with — bonds, rivalries, mentorships — and under each tie the recent events that moved it, so a grudge can be traced back to the day it was earned. Ties are one-way streets: admiration on one side can face contempt on the other. Mentorships are not forever, either — a protege who catches up to their mentor graduates out of the arrangement, and a tie that sours into rivalry breaks it.

Relationships also move between events: who shares whose quarters and whose watch slowly pulls compatible natures together and grinds incompatible ones — housing and rostering are social decisions with a long shadow. And people carry wants of their own, readable on their card: to advance, to be near someone, to get away, to be taught, to rest. A want strong enough gets voiced — an important person's request lands on your desk, everyone else is answered by their superior on the spot — and both a yes and a no are remembered.

Traits are earned

Traits are not rolled at birth — they crystallize from a person's service record. Survive enough close calls and it changes you; study long enough and it shows. Every trait cuts both ways, carrying an upside and a downside into different systems at once, so a decorated veteran is never just a bonus.

A handful of trait patterns are documented in the open records below. The rest you will meet in your own people first.