The Inner Sphere
The developed heart of the system — the old worlds and the corporate capitals, where law exists and is enforced selectively by whoever owns the enforcement.
Overview
Everything from the sun out to the Belt: the worlds humanity started on, and the ones it built once starting was no longer the hard part. This is the settled, profitable, heavily-administered part of the Sphere, and it is where a crew is far more likely to be arrested than shot.
Work here is social, political and commercial far more often than it is violent. A parliament floor is as lethal as a firefight on the Belt, differently — and the campaign treats it that way.
How it feels 🏙️
Corporate cyberpunk, at megacity density. Everything is vertical, layered and crowded, and every layer is owned. This is the only part of the system where population is a problem rather than an achievement — and where a person can live an entire life without needing to know how anything outside works.
- The deck is universal and chrome is ordinary. Nobody remarks on either. Going without is the thing people notice
- Surveillance is ambient and commercial, not political. You are watched because you are a customer
- Authority is bought, not held. Law exists and is enforced selectively by whoever owns the enforcement, and everybody understands the arrangement
- Crowds are cover. The one sector where a crew can genuinely disappear by walking two blocks
The old worlds
| World | Real body | Habitability | Held by | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terra Prime | Earth | garden | Concord of Terra | Homeworld, Senate, deepest secrets |
| Luna | Moon | marginal | Orion Dynamics | Flagship shipyards, elevator anchor |
| Terra-Forge ("The Forge") | Mars | hostile | TerraMech Industries | Planet-wide megafactory, orbital smelters, the X-43's origin |
| Hestia | Venus | uninhabitable | Erebus Mining | Acid-hell cloud-platform harvesting |
| Mercuria | Mercury | uninhabitable | Weyland Corp | Terminator-line solar megafarms — a managed collector cloud |
Mercuria's collector cloud
The thing in orbit around Mercury is built, owned and actively managed — not a natural solar phenomenon and not anything anyone stumbled onto. It is a collector swarm: an enormous, loosely-packed cloud of independent solar collectors holding station along the terminator line, close enough to the sun that nothing crewed goes near them for long.
Functionally it is a Dyson cloud in miniature — no shell, no ring, no single structure, just a very large number of small things flying in a maintained formation. Weyland Corp runs it, and runs is the operative word: station-keeping is continuous, losses are constant, and replacement collectors go out on a schedule that never stops.
It is the single largest power source in the Sphere, and it is the reason Weyland can afford to think in decades.
The capital worlds
Built rather than found — terraformed bodies, domed moons, and orbital habitats large enough to have politics of their own. Each major and secondary keeps its throne here.
- New Kydonia — Weyland's terraformed breadbasket
- Helios Crown — the augment capital
- Orion Bastion — the arsenal-world
- Meridian — Blackstar's neutral banking capital
- Lumen Nexus — the freight heart
- Bastion Reach — Ironveil's surveillance-utopia
- Concordia — the Senate's second seat and home fleet
- Zenith Prime — more droids than people
Related
- The Belt — the contested country immediately outward
- Corporations — who holds which throne
- Timekeeping — the master clock is on Terra Prime, which is most of why this sector matters
Status
Settled, administered, and the least dangerous place in the setting to be shot — which is not the same as the least dangerous place.