Welcome

You are fifteen years old and you are about to become the most useful person in human space for roughly seven years.

That is not a figure of speech and it is not flattery. There are twenty-eight inhabited systems and the only thing that moves between them is a person walking through a door — and a body stops being able to do it somewhere around twenty-two. So every letter, every account, every doctor wanted three doors away, every grandmother who wants to see her sister one more time, rides on somebody your age.

You are a first-through. The Threshold took you, which means you were tested and you could do it and most people cannot. You are paid. You have a bunk, a locker, a weave grown to your own body, and a name on a rota. You are nobody’s child out here and everybody’s problem, and the adults around you are extremely glad you exist and say so about once a week.

What is in this book

Everything your character already knows. The doors and what crosses through them. What the job actually does to you, said plainly. The station you live on, what there is to eat on it and where the good view is. The five peoples who are not human, one of whom is going to be your closest friend. The neighbourhood, out to about twelve light years. And then how to build your own person and how the dice work.

Nothing in it will spoil anything. There is no secret in this book. Your Games Master has a different book with all of those in it.

What is not in it

How the story goes. Who to trust. What the thing is that is about to go wrong. You will find all of that out the way your character does, which is by being there.

One thing worth saying out loud

This game is not softened. People in it can be hurt and people in it can die, including yours, and the dice are rolled in the open.

What you are owed in exchange is information. Nothing can kill your character out of nowhere. Every lethal risk is named, in the fiction, before you choose it — and if you ask “can this kill me?” you get a straight answer, every time, with no mystery and no bluffing. A door that might not take you will be described as a door that might not take you. If you walk into something anyway, that is a decision you made with your eyes open, which is the only kind worth making.

So ask. Asking is not cheating here. It is the single most useful habit a new player can build, and the people who run this game would much rather you interrupted them than guessed.