The lazy, rough outline of this setting, until a proper write-up and format can be established:

 

The High Frontier is a space-age setting, set in the late 2700s, dealing with a humanity that has colonized the space closest to Earth, and focusing on a subset of humanity that was left behind in the process. While it is a far-future setting, the sci-fi elements are meant to be fairly well grounded in actual scientific principles: You won't find faster-than-light travel, anti-gravity, aliens, or interstellar flight. Leaving the solar system in any permanent way is still a pipe dream, and very few people have left the Earth's immediate vicinity.

With that in mind, humanity exists in broadly four groups, distinguished by location:

 - "The Colonies", consisting of any orbital colony around Earth, at Lagrangian Points 1, 2, 4, or 5, is roughly analogous to the modern first-world; as the center-piece of humanity, they drive most forward progress, and have less reason to be concerned about people who don't belong to their culture.

 - Earth is in decline, and has been for hundreds of years. Far from a ruined wasteland, there are plenty of people still living on the planet - but the planet's still been through a lot, and humanity has tended to crystallize into isolated city-states rather than sprawling out, and as a result the idea of a "nation" is something of an antiquated one.

 - Mars, held up by many as the end goal for colonization of space, is seen as something of a dead-end. Between a couple of small domed cities on the surface and a few fairly large colonies in orbit around it, Mars is home to a relatively paltry 100 million or so people, and is mostly relegated to certain small mining operations. While Mars has regular contact with the rest of humanity, a Martian-born person in The Colonies or on Earth is seen as exotic and unusual.

 - L3, the collection of colonies at Lagrangian Point 3, on the opposite side of the sun from Earth, is where most roleplay will take place. L3 has been all but cut off from and abandoned by the rest of humanity for close to three hundred years, and can be seen as the "Wild West" of colonized space. The colonies themselves are old, and starting to break down; the distribution of power, money, and technology is incredibly disparate; fierce prejudices and old hatreds still exist in full force, remnants of the old-world nations that funded the creation of the colonies in the first place. While there are small pockets of safe and civilized space in L3, either by military junta or stroke of luck, overall it remains a fragmented, dangerous place, finally on the verge of collapsing for good.

 

Much of the group is expected to center around Medella, an independent organization from The Colonies, led by Eisende Black, who has come to L3 in an attempt to save lives. Medella consists of several hundred trained professionals, aimed mostly at filling the role of a space-age, extreme-conditions first-response team; there are members trained to operate powered armour, meant to brave whatever fires, collapsing structures, or other hazards that might be holding people trapped, and there are doctors and medics, mechanics and engineers, translators, and any number of other useful skilled responders, so that lives can be saved, people can be cured, broken technology can be fixed, and life for L3's citizens can be restored to normal. While there is a small number of military-trained personnel within Medella (L3 is a dangerous place), it is not primarily a combat mission.

It's expected that most characters born on The Colonies, Earth, and Mars will be a part of Medella. Characters from L3 are not necessarily part of Medella, and may be friendly or hostile to the cause, whether they come from the fragmented "gutter" colonies, the small number of closed, idyllic states, or the heavily-militarized, secretive war colonies.

 

While there's more to come, including a rough timeline of events in the setting and perhaps some explanation of the less-obvious technological features and guidelines for the setting, hopefully in the interim this at least satisfies some of the most basic curiosity you might have.

 

 

Wikipedia Links: Do you want them?!

Lagrangian Points, important to understand where things take place.

O'Neill Cylinders, the most likely/common colony design.

 

 

Our mascot is Roman DeBeers.  We're into hard sci-fi. Fantasy is bullshit.