- Minimal Contact — The locals refuse most contact with offworlders. Only a small, quarantined treaty port is provided for offworld trade, and ships can expect an exhaustive search for contraband. Local governments may be trying to keep the very existence of interstellar trade a secret from their populations, or they may simply consider offworlders too dangerous or repugnant to be allowed among the population.
- Perimeter Agency — Before the Silence, the Perimeter was a Terran-sponsored organization charged with rooting out use of maltech technology banned in human space as too dangerous for use or experimentation. Unbraked AIs, gengineered slave species, nanotech replicators, weapons of planetary destruction… the Perimeter hunted down experimenters with a great indifference to planetary laws. Most Perimeter Agencies collapsed during the Silence, but a few managed to hold on to their mission, though modern Perimeter agents often find more work as conventional spies.