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The Mars Protectorate

Three hundred years after the Eugenicist Wars, the second Mage King of Mars, Michael Alexander, rules humanity from the vast under-mountain complex where the Eugenicists performed the very experiments which unlocked the Magician's Genome.

With the right silver-polymer runes etched into a mage's skin, humanity could finally reach the stars. At first, the Eugenicists bred magicians into a slave class, chained with silver etched Rune Manacles that kept this power chained to the whims of sociopathic scientists. But they were children playing with nuclear reactors, understanding little of what they unleashed upon the universe. When they gracious allowed their prized brood stallion to sit upon The Seat, they thought they were giving Desmond Alexander a tool that could only be used to detect Sleeper Mages within Sol System.

By the time Desmond Alexander united the mages, the first wave of human colonies -- what we now call the Core Worlds -- had descended into anarchy, and inestimable reams of data on magic had turned to ash, mixing with the bodies of the Eugenicists. Uniting the mages under his solar-spanning might, the Core Worlds succumbed to his demands, and a new ruling class took lordship over the galaxy.

A handful of worlds, mostly underdeveloped Mid Worlds, bowed their heads with ill grace, and accepted the ascendency of mages in matters of galactic governance and trade, but refused to let even a single mage step foot on their planets ever again. These "Unarcana Worlds" are polite enough when they discover a child with The Power, but a squad of cybernetic Mage Killers ripping you from the arms of your parents, dragging you silently to the local spaceport and always staring at you with their square pupils....it is not an experience much changed by politeness.

Here, in the Fringe worlds, far from the Mage King's fleets, his politics, and his datavaults, the ruling families of mages grow corrupt and venomous, their courtly games deadlocked for decades, with only the occasional Mage By Right stirring the status quo out of complacency. We are stuck with the technology of the 1990s for any non-Protectorate usage without paying exorbitant usage fees. Legatus, the sole Unarcana Core World, is always willing to help -- at the cost of our exile.

You are junior members of the ruling mage families of a planet on the Fringe, your allegiances, your friendships, and your enemies determined centuries ago by still-living ancestors. Whatever the strength of your magical gifts, your lives are consumed by the internecine politics that have been your real education since your first runic tattoo. You are united by a secret shared which transcends such petty short sightedness. You do not know who to trust, but you must do something about the doom you have foreseen.

And if you can cement your position while you save the galaxy, all the better.