Bootleggers
“It don’t matter which planet ya’ get to; there is always somethin’ folks want that they ain’t allowed to have. Or somethin’ they ain’t supposed to know about, or do, or sometimes even be.”
 “That’s where my crew an’ I come in.” 
“We bring folks what they ain’t ‘supposed’ to be brought. Or get ‘em outta where they ain’t welcome. No judgment from us, as long as the payment is good.”
“How can ya’ pay? Well now… could be ya’ got somethin’ we can sell, or trade. Could be ya’ got somethin’ to upgrade or outfit our ship, or one of the crew for that matter. Could be we’ll let ya’ just owe us one, if it seems like we can trust ya’. Always good to have friends out here in the Big Ol’ Black. Now, what is it you were after, exactly?”
Introduction:
Welcome to Bootleggers, a tabletop role-playing about making a living in the future of human kind. A free living, that is. Even though humanity is slowly expanding out through the galaxy, most people still live their whole lives on one lonely planet. A bunch of them are probably even satisfied with that. But that kind of life isn’t for you and your crew. Not when you can get out there in the ‘Big Ol’ Black’ and see all the crazy, dangerous, beautiful, things which are out there.
How did we get here?
Well now, that’s a deep question. You probably mean the history of the Big Ol’ Black. Hmm. The best place to start is probably the 21st century by the Earth calendar. First, somebody finally cracked fusion power. That gave folks a LOT more juice than they used to have. There were lots of things that fusion power let folks do, but the most important ones came one after the other. 
First off, people made cheap, easy superconductors. Then it turns out if you run a current through a superconductor, you mess around with local gravity. Seems that’s a big deal, because pretty soon some clever folks found a way to exploit that link between EM fields and gravity. Enough power, and you can make gravity bend around you – bent enough to get moving fast. Faster than light, as it happens. No buzzing cities at ‘warp 9’ though. The tech doesn’t work as well near a gravity well. It’s something about ‘a rubber sheet that’s already stretched needing more juice to stretch it further’.
All that opened up exploring nearby stars and planets. Combine that with the emerging nanotech revolution happening at about the same time, and soon enough we had Terraforming. It’s funny how only the historians had any idea of what that meant for the future.
It had been a few generations since humanity had really had a frontier, see? A place where people could go and make a truly fresh start. No rules but the ones you make. No people except the ones you want to bring with you. Various groups started claiming planets as their own. There wasn’t as much arguing and warring about this as you might expect. Space is BIG. You could always pick someplace further out to make your home. Launch your T-Form payload a few years ahead of your people-mover and the planet would be just about ready for you and yours by the time you got there.
A lot of national economies collapsed, back then. Not enough people were willing to stick around doing a boring nine-to-five job when a whole new start was waiting for them. Of course, a few nations started cracking down on emigration. Some were even pretty successful. Now those nations are the ones without many children out in the Big Ol’ Black. That brings us close enough to the now.
What’s out there now?
Short answer? Everything. Of course there were official colonies from the nations that could afford it. The bigger corporations made their own colonies too, though they usually didn’t call them that at first. A few of those nations and corps claim whole systems and even regions of space as their own now. Religious folks were what you might call ‘early adopters’, too. Heaven-on-Earth hadn’t worked out for most of them, so they thought they’d try another planet. All manner of starry-eyed visionaries moved out with whoever they could convince. Communists, Objectivists, Anarchists, you-name-its. They’ve all got, or at least had, a colony of their own out there somewhere. A surprising number of colonies were started by folks saying ‘It’ll be just like the place we’re leaving, only you’ll get to start over.’ The siren of the Big Ol’ Black sings many songs.
What can our technology do these days? Well, the answer to that is pretty complicated too. Research and experimentation hasn’t slowed down out in the Big Ol’ Black. It has fragmented though. Back on Earth, everybody had access more-or-less the same knowledge. It seems like every colony out here advanced that knowledge in a different direction. You’ll have deep and meaningful conversations with intelligent machines. You’ll get specially built or grown parts to upgrade your body. You’ll see weapons that make you doubt we deserve to be called ‘humanity’. You’ll tap into a euphoric group-consciousness that makes you think about leaving notions like ‘humanity’ behind you. Any damn thing, really. This tech isn’t shared too often or quickly either. We can move ships faster than light, but not our transmissions.
Aliens? Nope. Of course there are rumors, but it’s always ‘a friend-of-a-friend saw something’. No one credible has ever claimed to be an eye witness to honest-to-god aliens or even their leftovers. 
What does a bootlegger crew do?
They get by as best they can. That probably seems like poor answer, but it’s the only answer that is true for all of them. With nanotech fabrication and the resources of a virgin planet, the colonists don’t suffer much from scarcity. Most bootleggers make a profit from selling what people aren’t allowed to have. Sometimes that’s physical stuff. Sometimes it’s info, or entertainment. Whatever the case, the bootleggers are likely to be criminals in most of the places they go. They deal with the powerful and the poor; the executive and the exile. 
Why do they do it? Well, some say it’s for the money. Some say they are running from problem or a threat. After a while though, most of them do it because they have seen just how much is out there in the Big Ol’ Black and they can’t imagine going back to being trapped on a planet.