The sandbox is a realized world setting to be in. The "Story" is the story the crew tells of their adventures and exploits as outlaw operators in the world. Scum and villainy centers more around being an outlaw crew of some kind(assassins, smash n grab thugs, heist crew, vigilantes, etc. etc.), rather than say the epic calamity averting world saving heroes. the 4 players on the crew alrady seemed to have settled on being outlaw bounty hunters that take an initial leg up from an established Mob. they'll commit to that or not during the first session. More or less every outlaw crew in Scum and Villainy answers the question: Is it better to burnout or fade away? the world setting in broad brush strokes is this: No war or rebellion going on. The Empire is not a baddie or even a main plot point character of the world. It is a force of nature problem that just hangs over everything outlaws do. We are set in a specific system of the United Systems Empire, an 11 star system of minor importance to the USE, and so more attractive to Fringers. Fringers are the small sub set of the USE population that just don't want USE life, and so they live outside the USE to the best of their abilities. Space is huge huge massive big mind boggling vast. USE patrols in a solar system do ignore planets and such that are of no interest to the USE. Whatever is going on over there is whatever free USE citizens are doing. If no one cared to report a USE crime, then there is no crime for the USE to care about. So you are either in a USE location among the Legits, or you are out among the Fringers, where the de-facto powers that be are a variety of Mobs. Fringer towns range from homesteading independents, to Mob towns set up and run as various Mob headquarters, they host the bulk of the USE's citizens that didn't get in for USE life. the box of the sandbox as it were(fixed fiction that gives the sandbox some definition): small ship scales, biggest ships are maybe 4x-5x the size of our largest ocean boats today. Large class ships are spaced based only, small n med can land on planets. no mile long ships or moon sized stations. large space stations are still small towns at most 10-20k people, not massive cities of millions. no space whales or organic living ships The Way is a stand in for The Force Cyber parts are a thing, but culturally most would prefer to get something regrown. Few would give up a limb for a cyber part on purpose. We don't have FTL. Travel between stars are fixed lanes of passing through an alternate dimension(Way Space). A higher level character aim in this world can be to become a WayPilot that could navigate between arbitrary stars on their own. No need to get USE navnet data. Space ships are not also submarines. And after that the sci-fi gumbo is a jumble of things, with plenty of input for the players to shape the sand in the box too. Nature of the forged in the Dark game system. is to give the players a good amount of narrative hand on the wheel. the key to the world is to see that, thugs and legits don't really live together. You can't find a dark sketchy alley all that commonly in any legit city, even cities into the billions of people. Space is too big for any criminal to want to stay too near any police station. As well Space is too big for the police to bother trying to find just any typical thug out in it. I really like the game system Forged in the Dark, with S&V being the spacey sci-fi mashup flavor for it. A big motivation for me to GM is to share the system with more people. If you've not played it beofre i'd highly recommend you check it out.
