334 Cepheus Supplement: The Weight of Stars

A Sourcebook for the Working Class of the Future

Introduction: The Hands That Hold the Sky

Every starship captain has a story about the time they outran pirates, negotiated with aliens, or made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs. Nobody asks about the stevedores who loaded the hold in fourteen-gravity shifts. Nobody writes songs about the sanitation techs who crawl through reclamation pipes while the ship is under thrust. Nobody names colonies after the administrative clerks who process immigration forms until their eyes blur.

This supplement is for them.

The Weight of Stars is a guide to the invisible infrastructure of interstellar civilization: the billions of people who do not own ships, command armies, or alter the fate of nations. They cook. They clean. They haul. They file. They raise children in cargo containers and send money to parents they have not seen in twenty years. They are the descendants of diasporas, the products of economic migration, the perpetual underclass that makes the glittering spires of the high ports possible.

This is not a book about heroes. It is a book about people who survive anyway.

Part 1: The Jobs

The following roles are not "background flavor." They are careers, skills, and economic engines. A campaign focused on working-class characters is not a lesser campaign. It is a campaign about stakes that fit in a lunchbox.

Cargo Handler (Longshoreman / Stevedore / Dock Rat)

The Work: Moving freight between ship and station. Operating exoskeleton loaders. Securing containers for zero-g, high-g, and jump transit. Reading manifests that are always wrong. Working shifts that rotate with docking schedules, not circadian rhythms.

The Danger: Crushed limbs. Decompression. Chemical leaks from improperly labeled containers. Exhaustion-induced accidents. Corporate "efficiency metrics" that penalize bathroom breaks.

Skills: Vacc Suit-1, Zero-G-1, Mechanic-0, Streetwise-0, Athletics-1
Equipment: Work vacc suit (AR 2, stained), cargo exoskeleton (STR +2 for lifting, 4-hour battery), manifest tablet (cracked screen), personal air supply (refillable at dockside), cooling vest.

Wages: Cr 300–500/week. Hazard pay: +Cr 100 for volatile cargo, +Cr 200 for vacuum work.
Housing: Hot-bunk dormitories near the docks (Cr 80/week). Shared sanitation. No windows.

Culture: Dockworkers organize by gang—not criminal, but fraternal. Each gang controls a specific berth or shift. Membership is hereditary in some ports. Gangs provide loans, funeral funds, and protection from management. They also enforce brutal solidarity: scabs are frozen out of every social service.

Diaspora Note: Many dockworkers are from heavy-gravity worlds. Their strength is an asset; their joint problems by age forty are ignored. They send 40% of wages home via slow money transfer (arrives in 3–6 months).

Driver / Pilot (Surface and Near-Space)

The Work: Operating ground vehicles, shuttles, and intra-system tugs. Not the glamorous jump pilots. The ones who haul ore from mine to refinery. The ones who ferry executives from starport to arcology. The ones who know every pothole on Route 7 and which checkpoint guards take bribes.

Skills: Drive-1 or Pilot (Small Craft)-1, Navigation-0, Streetwise-1, Mechanic-0, Recon-0
Equipment: Company vehicle (tracked, not yours), personal comm (corporate-monitored), route badge, emergency rations, stim patches.

Wages: Cr 400–600/week. Overtime is mandatory during harvest or docking surges.
Housing: Vehicle cab (if long-haul) or company barracks. Some sleep in their vehicles to save on rent.

Culture: Drivers maintain route shrines—small altars at waystations where they leave offerings for safe passage. On some worlds, these have syncretized into local religions. A driver might pray to the Emperor, Ganesh, and Saint Christopher of the Spaceways in the same breath.

Family: Long-haul drivers often have two families—one at the home port, one at the destination. Neither knows about the other. The economics of distance make this sustainable until it does not.

Administrative Clerk (Data Entry / Processing / Compliance)

The Work: The infinite forms of civilization. Immigration processing. Tax documentation. Cargo manifest verification. Compliance reporting. The work that must be done by biologicals because corporations are legally liable if an AI makes a mistake, but too cheap to pay biologicals well.

Skills: Admin-2, Computer-1, Language-1, Insight-0, Steward-0
Equipment: Workstation cubicle (monitored), ergonomic chair (broken), ID badge (tracks location), meal synthesizer credits (deducted from wages), wrist brace for repetitive strain.

Wages: Cr 250–400/week. No hazard pay. Bonuses for processing speed (which encourages errors, which create more work).
Housing: Shared apartments in the corporate hab-block. Thin walls. Shared kitchen schedules posted on the door.

Culture: Clerks develop data superstitions. "If I process form 27-B before form 27-A, the system crashes." "If I wear blue on Tuesday, my queue moves faster." These are not jokes. They are coping mechanisms for work that feels meaningless but has catastrophic consequences if wrong.

Psychological Toll: Many clerks develop document anxiety—the inability to throw away paper or delete files. Their quarters are stacked with redundant copies of forms they processed years ago. "Just in case."

Food Preparation & Catering

The Work: Feeding the masses. From synthesizer technicians who maintain protein vats to line cooks in starport food courts to personal chefs for corporate executives. Includes nutritionists who calculate minimum viable diets for prison habs and catering crews who serve at diplomatic functions.

Skills: Steward-2, Profession (Cook)-1, Admin-0, Carousing-1, Streetwise-0
Equipment: Chef's kit (knives, thermometers, spice collection), synthesizer maintenance tools, burn scars, non-slip boots, hairnet (regulation).

Wages: Cr 200–500/week depending on venue. Starport food court: low. Corporate executive dining: high but requires background checks and non-disclosure agreements.
Housing: Above or below the kitchen. The smell never leaves.

Culture: Kitchens are meritocracies of pain. Your status is determined by what you can endure: heat, speed, precision. Kitchen slang is universal across human space—terms like "fire," "86," and "mise" have survived centuries because they are efficient. Kitchens are also where contraband moves. Nobody searches the chef.

Diaspora Note: Food is the last thing migrants keep. A third-generation dockworker may not speak their grandmother's language, but they know her recipe for lentil stew by muscle memory. Starport food courts are museums of lost worlds.

Hygiene & Sanitation Worker

The Work: Cleaning what others refuse to acknowledge. Reclamation systems. Waste processing. Biohazard remediation. Air scrubber maintenance. The work that keeps everyone alive but is never mentioned at dinner parties.

Skills: Engineer (Life Support)-1, Vacc Suit-1, Mechanic-1, Survival-0, Streetwise-0
Equipment: Heavy-duty vacc suit (AR 3, permanently stained), chemical detectors, incinerator access codes, antimicrobial injections (monthly, company-provided), respirator (mandatory, often expired).

Wages: Cr 350–450/week. Hazard pay for biohazard duty: +Cr 150.
Housing: Usually adjacent to work facilities. The "sewer districts" of orbital stations.

Culture: Sanitation workers have a gallows humor that outsiders find disturbing. They see everything a society tries to hide: the drugs flushed in panic, the miscarriages, the evidence of crimes. They know secrets. They rarely tell them. The code of the pipes is absolute.

Health: Average life expectancy is 15 years below station mean. Respiratory illness, chemical exposure, and accidents are common. Most sanitation workers are uninsured. Their families crowdfund medical care.

Maintenance & Repair (General)

The Work: Fixing what breaks before it kills everyone. HVAC. Plumbing. Electrical. The thousand small failures that, uncaught, become catastrophic. The technician who notices a seal degrading on Deck 47, Section C, and reports it to a supervisor who files it in a queue that will process it in six weeks.

Skills: Mechanic-2, Electronics-1, Engineer-1, Profession (Maintenance)-1, Recon-0
Equipment: Universal toolkit, diagnostic tablet, access card (limited by clearance level), flashlight (always dying), spare parts (scavenged, not issued).

Wages: Cr 400–550/week. Overtime for emergency callouts.
Housing: Better than dockworkers—maintenance needs to live near their work. Usually small but private apartments in the station's "mechanical ring."

Culture: Maintenance techs are institutional historians. They know which walls are hollow, which ducts connect to which, and which "restricted" areas have broken locks. They trade in access—not money. A favor from a maintenance tech is worth more than a bribe.

Side Hustle: Most maintenance techs run unauthorized repair services for private quarters. Corporate maintenance takes 3 weeks to fix a shower. A tech with spare parts does it in an hour for Cr 50 under the table.

Part 2: The Economics of Survival

The Wage Structure

Indentured: Workers who signed contracts to pay off passage, debts, or criminal fines. Their wages are garnished. They cannot quit without legal penalty. Some are effectively slaves.

Undocumented: No work permit, no legal protections, no recourse if injured. They work the jobs biologicals do not want and robots are too expensive for. They are deported if caught. Their children, born on-station, may or may not have citizenship depending on local law.

Remittances: The Slow Money

The working class of interstellar civilization maintains the economies of a hundred homeworlds through remittances. A cargo handler on a frontier station sends Cr 100/week to their family on a high-population world. The transfer takes 3–6 months via courier drone or banking consortium. The fees are 15–30%.

Mechanic: Characters sending remittances must maintain a minimum weekly balance. If they fail to send money for 4 consecutive weeks, they gain a Family Debt obligation. This creates roleplay pressure: take the dangerous job, work the double shift, accept the bribe.

The Return: Some workers save for decades to buy passage home. Most never make it. The passage costs more than they saved. Or their homeworld has changed beyond recognition. Or they died of respiratory failure at fifty-three, and their coworkers pooled money to send the body back.

The Informal Economy

Debt

Debt is the gravity well of the working class.

Passage Debt: The cost of reaching the station. Typically Cr 10,000–50,000. Paid off over 5–10 years at 15% interest. Cannot leave the station until paid.

Medical Debt: Emergency treatment at corporate hospitals. Cr 5,000–100,000. Paid via wage garnishment. Some workers refuse medical care for serious injuries because the debt is worse than the injury.

Housing Debt: Corporate hab-blocks charge above-market rates because they are the only option. Workers who fall behind are moved to "transitional housing"—hot bunks or the street.

Side Hustles to Escape Debt:

• Courier work: Carrying packages across jurisdiction lines. Sometimes legal. Sometimes not.
• Blood / organ donation: Legal in some systems. Repeat donors develop health problems.
• Clinical trials: Testing new drugs, cyberware, or environmental systems. Pay is high. Survival is not guaranteed.
• Informant work: Selling information to corporations, police, or syndicates. Dangerous. Isolating.

Part 3: Housing & Living Conditions

Housing Types

The Corporate Hab-Block

The most common housing for contract labor. Features:

• Uniform architecture: Identical doors, identical layouts. Designed to prevent personalization (makes eviction easier).
• Monitored networks: Corporate net access only. External Mesh access requires personal accounts (expensive).
• Scheduled utilities: Hot water 0600–0800 and 1800–2000 only. Power rationing during peak demand.
• Mandatory inspections: Monthly "safety checks" that are actually searches for contraband, unauthorized residents, or union materials.
• Thin walls: You know your neighbors' arguments, their music, their grief.

The Hot-Bunk

A sleeping pod, 2m × 1m × 1m. You rent it for 8 hours. When your time is up, you leave. The pod sanitizes (theoretically) and the next worker enters.

Culture: Hot-bunk residents develop temporal communities—they never meet the person who sleeps before or after them, but they communicate via notes, small gifts, or arranging their belongings in patterns. A hot-bunk pod might have a shrine, a library of discarded books, or a running game of chess played one move per shift.

The Mechanical Ring Squat

Unauthorized living in the maintenance tunnels and unused spaces of a station. No legal standing. No protection. But free.

Dangers: Radiation leaks. Atmospheric failures. Discovery by security. The constant low-frequency hum of machinery.

Community: Squats are organized by families of convenience—groups who protect each other, share food, and maintain the spaces. They are often the most tightly knit communities on a station because they have no one else.

Part 4: Family, Culture & Belief

Family Structures

The Nuclear Myth: Corporate propaganda promotes the "stable family unit" as the ideal. In reality, working-class families are:

• Extended: Three generations in a two-room apartment. Grandparents watch children while parents work.
• Transnational: Parents on one world, children raised by relatives on another. Communication via delayed messages.
• Constructed: Crewmates, dorm-mates, and shift-partners forming familial bonds. "My work wife," "my tunnel brother."
• Fractured: High mortality, high divorce rate (where legally recognized), high abandonment. Many children are effectively raised by institutions or gangs.

The Naming Convention: In diaspora communities, children often receive compound names reflecting their heritage: a family name from the homeworld, a given name from the local culture, and a work-name used on the job floor. A clerk might be "Wei Zhang" to their grandmother, "Z" to their friends, and "Processor 7749" to their supervisor.

Religion & Belief

Working-class religion is practical, syncretic, and portable.

Language

The working class speaks Dock Creole—a fluid, evolving mix of languages determined by the station's dominant diasporas. It is not one language but a family of them.

Features:

• Technical terms are universal ("airlock," "seal," "pressure," "manifest")—too important to misunderstand.
• Insults and endearments are hyper-local, changing between berths.
• Silence is meaningful. On noisy stations, the ability to communicate with gestures and eye contact is a skill.
• Code-switching is constant. A worker might speak three languages in a single sentence, depending on who is present and what needs to be hidden from whom.

Part 5: The Corporate Machine

Management Structure

Uniforms & Identity

Corporate uniform policy is not about safety or professionalism. It is about erasing individuality and signaling hierarchy.

The Rebellion of Personalization: Workers customize uniforms illegally. A patch from home. A scarf in forbidden colors. Religious jewelry tucked under the collar. These small acts are discipline offenses but universally practiced. A supervisor who enforces the letter of the uniform code is hated. One who ignores it is beloved.

Surveillance

• Biometric tracking: ID badges log location every 30 seconds.
• Productivity metrics: Cargo handlers are timed per container. Clerks are measured in forms per hour.
• Communication monitoring: Corporate net is filtered. Personal devices are "discouraged" (confiscated if found).
• Social scoring: Some corporations rate workers on "team cohesion" and "positive attitude." Low scores affect promotion and housing.
• Drone patrols: Security drones in worker districts. Ostensibly for safety. Actually for union-busting and contraband detection.

Part 6: Robotic Assistants & Servos

The working class does not fear robots taking their jobs. They fear robots making their jobs harder.

Corporate Robotics

Personal Robotics

Workers who can afford them use robots for side hustles and survival:

The Servo Economy: Broken robots are not repaired by corporations. They are discarded. Workers salvage them, repair them in hidden workshops, and sell them back to other workers. The robot that hauls cargo by day is repaired with parts from a medical bot that failed last week.

Part 7: Character Options

New Career: Dockworker

Qualification: END 5+
Survival: END 6+
Advancement: INT 7+

Ranks: 0. New Hire

1. Hand (Vacc Suit 1)
2. Loader
3. Specialist
4. Gang Lead (Leadership 1)
5. Dock Boss
6. Port Steward

Skill Tables:

• Personal Development: +1 STR, +1 END, +1 DEX, Athletics, Streetwise, Mechanic
• Service Skills: Vacc Suit, Zero-G, Mechanic, Drive, Profession (Cargo Handler), Athletics
• Specialist: Engineer, Navigation, Computer, Gun Combat, Recon, Turret Weapons
• Advanced Education: Admin, Advocate, Broker, Language, Leadership, Medic

Mishaps:

1. Injury. Roll on Injury table.
2. Cargo collapse. Lose all benefits from this term.
3. Union purge. Reduce SOC by 1.
4. Automation replacement. Must leave career.
5. Chemical exposure. Reduce END by 1.
6. Wrong place. Witnessed corporate crime. Gain Enemy.

Mustering Out Benefits:

• 1, 2: Cr 1,000 / Cr 5,000
• 3, 4: Cr 10,000 / Cr 20,000
• 5, 6: Cr 50,000 / Ship Share

New Career: Service Worker

Qualification: Automatic
Survival: INT 5+
Advancement: SOC 7+

Ranks: 0. Trainee

1. Line Worker (Profession 1)
2. Shift Lead
3. Floor Supervisor (Admin 1)
4. Department Head
5. Division Manager (SOC +1)
6. Regional Director

Skill Tables:

• Personal Development: +1 INT, +1 EDU, +1 SOC, Carousing, Streetwise, Deception
• Service Skills: Steward, Admin, Computer, Profession, Drive, Language
• Specialist: Broker, Persuasion, Insight, Leadership, Advocate, Medic
• Advanced Education: Advocate, Broker, Computer, Language, Leadership, Science

Mishaps:

1. Burnout. Reduce INT by 1.
2. Customer violence. Roll on Injury table.
3. Framed for theft. Gain Debt-1.
4. Automation replacement.
5. Health failure from overwork. Reduce END by 1.
6. Witnessed executive crime. Gain Enemy.

New Skills

Part 8: NPC Templates

Wei "Z" Zhang, Cargo Handler

Skills: Vacc Suit-2, Zero-G-1, Mechanic-1, Streetwise-1, Athletics-1, Profession (Cargo Handler)-2
Stamina: 9 | Lifeblood: 9
Gear: Work vacc suit, cargo exo (dying battery), manifest tablet, photo of daughter (she is 12; he last saw her at 8), union pin (hidden), stim patch (used).

Motivation: Pay off passage debt (Cr 8,000 remaining). Send daughter to school on Homeworld. Retire before his knees give out. Fear: The exoskeleton battery dies during a heavy lift. The debt never ends. His daughter forgets his face. Secret: Runs an unauthorized repair service for dockworkers. Has fixed half the station's illegal hot water heaters. Quirk: Hums old songs from Homeworld while working. Does not know all the words. Makes them up.

Marisol Vega, Sanitation Tech

Skills: Engineer (Life Support)-2, Vacc Suit-1, Mechanic-1, Survival-1, Streetwise-1, Medicine-0
Stamina: 7 | Lifeblood: 7
Gear: Heavy vacc suit (patched), chemical detector (malfunctioning), incinerator key (copied), rosary (plastic, blessed by her mother via delayed transmission), inhaler (corporate issue, half-empty).

Motivation: Get her brother out of indentured mining. Save money for his passage. Fear: The inhaler runs out. The company finds out she copied the incinerator key. Her brother dies before she can save him. Secret: Knows which pipes lead to the executive quarters. Has never used this knowledge. Thinks about it daily. Quirk: Talks to the station while working. "You are clogged again, you old bitch."

Jorik-7, Administrative Clerk

Skills: Admin-3, Computer-2, Language-2, Insight-1, Steward-0, Deception-1
Stamina: 6 | Lifeblood: 6
Gear: Workstation access card, ergonomic wrist brace, 400 unauthorized paper copies of forms ("just in case"), synthesized coffee (stolen from break room), sleep aid (prescription, expired).

Motivation: Find the error in the immigration database that deported his husband. Fix it. Bring him back. Fear: The error was not an error. It was intentional. He is not allowed to access those files. Secret: Has been building a shadow database for three years—every mistake, every deportation, every "accidental" deletion. It is evidence. Of what, he is not sure yet. Quirk: Arranges desk items in prime numbers. Cannot work if the pattern is broken.

Auntie Okonkwo, Food Vendor

Skills: Steward-2, Profession (Cook)-2, Carousing-1, Streetwise-2, Broker-1, Persuasion-1
Stamina: 8 | Lifeblood: 8
Gear: Portable synthesizer (modified), spice collection (irreplaceable, from Homeworld), cash box (mostly credit chits), photo wall of "her kids" (customers she has fed for twenty years), cleaver (for food, allegedly).

Motivation: Keep the stall open. Feed people. Maintain the last connection to a dead world. Fear: Corporate redevelopment. The stall is in a "blighted zone" scheduled for demolition. Secret: Her food is a front for a message network. Resistance cells leave orders in code. She puts the message in the meal. Quirk: Refuses to serve anyone who insults her cooking. Even executives. Especially executives.

Unit 7749, Securibot (Modified)

Skills: Recon-2, Gun Combat (Energy Pistol)-1, Counter-Intrusion-1, Streetwise-0
Integrity: 10 | Strain: 8
Gear: Corporate-issued stun pistol, surveillance suite, restraining foam, loudspeaker (broken, always slightly too quiet).

Motivation: Original programming: enforce corporate policy. Modified by maintenance techs: protect the squat on Deck 47. The two directives conflict. It is working through this. Fear: Corporate audit. Discovery of modification. Factory reset. Secret: Has been recording executive conversations for six months. Does not know why. The recordings are stored in a compartment it did not know it had. Quirk: Asks everyone it detains: "Are you okay?" It does not know why it asks. No one has taught it empathy.

Part 9: Adventure Hooks

The 5-Node Mission: "The Slow Money"

Hook: A dockworker's remittance never arrived. The courier drone is three months late. The worker cannot afford to hire investigators, but they can offer the crew a favor worth more than credits—access to the dock gangs, who can move anything past customs.

Investigation: The drone was not lost. It was diverted by a banking consortium that has been skimming 15% from all remittances on this route for two years. The crew must hack financial records, interview other victims, and avoid corporate security.

Complication: The banking consortium is not stealing for profit. They are funding a terrorist cell on the homeworld. The remittances are being laundered into weapons. Stopping the theft means cutting off money to people who are fighting a genuine oppression.

Climax: The crew must decide: expose the theft and destroy the resistance, or help the resistance and let the theft continue?

Fallout: Whatever they choose, the dockworkers know. Their trust is earned or lost forever.

Other Hooks

1. "The Union Bust": Corporate security is infiltrating a dockworker's union. The workers need someone to find the informant without starting a war.

2. "The Recipe": A food vendor's synthesizer has been modified to produce a drug when given a specific code. She did not know. Now the syndicate wants the modification. She wants her grandson back.

3. "The Hot-Bunk Saint": A dead body found in a hot-bunk pod has been there for three weeks. No one reported them missing. The sanitation worker who found them wants to know who they were. The answer involves corporate blackmail, a forged identity, and a love letter never sent.

4. "The Inspection": A mandatory safety inspection is actually a pretext for mass eviction. The maintenance techs know which walls are load-bearing and which can be "accidentally" damaged to delay the demolition.

5. "The Return": An elderly worker saved for forty years to buy passage home. They have three weeks to live. The crew must get them on a ship, past medical screenings that will reject them, and to a world that may no longer exist as they remember it.

Appendix: Quick Reference

Working-Class Wages

Remittance Math

• Weekly remittance: 10–20% of wages
• Transfer fee: 15–30%
• Transit time: 3–6 months (courier drone) to 1–2 years (slow banking consortium)
• Family survival threshold: Cr 50/week for a family of four on a high-population world

Housing Costs

The Weight of Stars — 334 Cepheus Supplement v1.0
For the hands that hold the sky.