Welcome to the 24th Century.

With the discovery of wormhole transit and the first few successful jumps, humanity is spreading across the solar system. Thriving, vibrant colonies have been established on Mars and Ganymede. Stations have been set in orbit around less inhabitable moons and planets, or as waypoints for travel.

But the rich and powerful grow richer and more powerful, and over time every government crumbles in favor of corporate rule. With the discovery of a new frontier comes exploitation. Workers are sent to far-off mining colonies or refineries, either for meager pay or as punishment for crimes in a colony or station. Stations are expected to find ways to extract profit in exchange for food, oxygen, and water. Owners of officially registered independent ships are rare, as corporations control all travel through the wormhole beacon network, and the crew of a ship in the right place can drastically shift power relations between planets, stations, and colonies. 

Quickstart

This quickstart is the first thing I've made with my system, Total//Effect! It includes:

• Instructions on creating Level 0 characters. Regular people who have suddenly found themselves in an extremely not-regular situation. They'll have to use their skills, numbers, or previously unrevealed backgrounds to find their way.
• Some basics to get you started. Rules for playing and running the game, as well as 6 Professions, their starting equipment, and some other stuff that can be found in the accompanying scenario or elsewhere.
• Two scenarios:  The characters you make here are not yet among those ranks of independent ship owners. At the start of the quickstart scenario included here, they are employees of the Ceres-Io Extraction Company. CIEC has stationed them in a prefab station for collecting ore and processing it to extract hydrocarbons (Ceres-Io Central Processing 1, or CICP-1). 
  • Escape from CICP-1. As employees scheduled to process ore, their day is typically very dull: do your tasks, eat at the mess hall, head to your quarters to sleep. Today, however, is different. As raiders stream into the station and its reactor suddenly starts to fail, they'll need to find a way to get out to stay alive. Those who survive will find themselves in space, without a job and outside society...
  • The Graveyard Buckle. As employees stationed on ore collection duty, your day is typically very dull: head out, extract ore, head back, eat at the mess hall, sleep in communal bunks.Today, however, is very different. Your ore hauler was hit by a stray asteroid in the back thruster, causing it to spin out. It stabilized in a field of debris: you quickly identify it as the infamous Graveyard Buckle, a ship graveyard in orbit around an abandoned outpost near Ceres. If you somehow repair your ship or find another to escape, you will still find yourself in space, without a job and outside society...

  
  

  In short, adrift in the Liminal Void.