Fraternal Order of Moon Hobos / FOMH

The history of the Hobo harkens back to ancient America, when itinerant workers colloquially known as Hobos would sneak aboard the ground-based mass transport systems their developing nation used for commerce. Hobos would disperse at stops, seeking part-time work among the settled communities, plying their trade as outsiders that were free to leave anytime wanderlust took hold of them or the work ran out. A Hobo could be anything from an down-on-his-luck professional displaced by bigger industry, a free spirit who resisted the boundaries of polite society, or a sociopath that simply could not settle long in any one place. They were defined by their remarkable nonconformity and nomadic lifestyles, not as any congruent group. A people adrift ahead of an increasingly complex culture, unwilling or unable to participate in the accepted progress of their age- their austere lifestyle slowly succumbed to history.

Times have changed, but people have not. As the UEE surges across the stars, riding its bow wave are the same dispossessed and displaced spirits of a newer, more precarious age. Smugglers, farmers, miners, soldiers, survivalists, radicals, and a hundred other categories of humanity uprooted or removed in the name of progress- all seeking the fundamental happiness and liberties humanity has always craved, denied to them by chance or circumstance.

It is a hard life on the periphery, the hazards of frontier space are without number. But in this lawless vacuum is one precious, increasingly rare commodity- freedom. In these wild spaces between empires, a culture of energetically independent operators can be found. Hard-bitten pragmatism and self reliance are non-negotiable. To repair an atmospheric processor, to bury a friend, or to earn a living plying a specialist trade- a day’s work could include anything. The only constancy in these free agents’ lives is inconstancy.

The formation of nomadic cooperatives in these circumstances is often inevitable. Disbanded militias, exiled radicals, liquidated corporations,- confraternity can often be found in this most unlikely of places, and in numbers comes security. With security comes organization, loose though it may be. With organization, comes industry.

We come then, to the modern Hobo- humanity’s common solution to the free spirit in a changing world. Professionals without the shackles of modernity, transient, minimalist, and living by very deliberately loose rules- history sees them travel again. Originally given as a title of contempt to freelancing Tiberian refugees in 2743, the term has been instead gleefully adopted by their community. Their motto of “Always Broke, Never Broken” can be heard across the settled systems, and far, far into the edges of charted space.

To a Hobo, home is where their next meal is, and their family is one of their own choosing- drawn together by the fraternity and wild magnetism of the frontier.