Overview
“Forget everything you think you know if you want to survive here. Assume ignorance as a skill. Out here, there are Beast entities who’ll throw themselves into the line of fire for you, and others who’ll kill you or sell you out without blinking. Just like us. The anomalies don’t care you are; some will crush you into nothing, others will whisper until you lose your mind. If you live through your first encounter with the Zone, don’t mistake it for luck. She’s just letting you stay long enough to see what kind of fool you are.” - Anonymous Kiith Manaan scryer, 9533 GSY/23 AHL
The Primosk Anomalous Zone, also called the Primosk Exclusion Zone, or simply the Zone - is not a place that was discovered. It is a place that happened. Something in this quadrant of space, spanning between 2 to 5 light years in unstable radius, has broken. The structure of time, space, and thought itself appears fractured within its bounds.
The Zone lies in a forgotten corner of the galaxy - on the periphery of a little-known Taiidan Imperialist remnant kingdom. Some say a king rules there. No one knows his name. Others say no one rules, and never did.
As for the Zone’s origin, no consensus exists. The most widely accepted theory, if it can be called that, is that during the final moments of the First Beast War, the Naggarok, the ancient, mad vessel that nearly succedded with its ambition of consuming or infecting the galaxy, tried to imprint its will upon the galactic noosphere. Some believe it succeeded. Others think it failed. One thing is agreed upon: something broke. And the Zone was born.
Inside the Zone, the laws of physics and causality only apply when they feel like it. Anomalies drift through fractured wreckage. Time folds back on itself. The minds of Beast-entities or humans resonate here in ways that no one understands. Nothing in the Zone can be fully trusted - not your senses, not your readings, not your memories.
After the Naggarok’s destruction, both human and Beast scryers emerged, drawn toward the Zone for countless reasons: to learn, to scavenge, to profit, or simply to find something that might fill the void inside them. The Zone does not discriminate, but it never gives anything for free.
The detritus of the Taiidan Empire sits heavy here. Ruined space stations, abandoned research platforms, and failed reclamation projects litter the void. Some are home to scryers or enclaves. Others have been reclaimed by the Zone itself, twisted into new forms or swallowed by anomaly fields.
Homeworld: Black Static is set primarily within the Zone. There is no great war here, only stories. Stories about people, post-people, eldritch beings, and those who never asked to become anything more than what they were. This is where Marie goes. Not to escape, but to return to where something still feels real.