Evolving from arboreal primates with specialized grasping appendages and highly developed spatial reasoning, the humans of the Garden World are as diverse as any other sapient species to emerge therefrom. In the latter days, during the collapse of the Garden World’s ecosystem, the humans were politically united. In the centuries since, they have fractured into several factions that are only nominally allied.

The largest and oldest such faction is the Dihuang Imperium, the successor of the unified polity that oversaw the evacuation from the Garden World. A highly centralized and organized state, the Imperium is ostensibly a monarchy answerable to a hereditary Heavenly Emperor–hence its alternate names of Heavenly Empire or Heavenly Imperium. But in reality it is a bureaucracy answerable to the Emperor’s Chancellor, with a variety of worlds in its hegemony to varying degrees.

Other major states or statelets in human space include the democratic Xianhue Alliance, the mercantile Nanhai Commerce Guild, and various small independent systems and pirate groups. While they all have evolved in different ways, the formerly total hegemony of the Heavenly Empire has left humanity with a common linguistic, cultural, and religious background.

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