Basically, I was frustrated with how samey a lot of modern space sci-fi worldbuilding feels. It usually falls into one of two camps: it’s either Halo/40K-inspired with a “United Space America” or “Terran Empire” (please stop using this name unironically) and genetically enhanced supersoldiers in power armor, or it’s ultra-hard sci-fi in the vein of The Expanse/TLW, obsessed with realistic orbital mechanics and accompanied by 60 wiki pages explaining every last detail that nobody is ever going to read
I wanted to create something that felt genuinely alien and ancient, melancholic, mysterious, and unsettling, yet still strangely familiar. A setting where the unknown is part of the experience, where not every question has an answer, and where discovering the past is more compelling than having every piece of lore handed to you
The central idea eventually became: What if humanity really was the greatest civilization the galaxy would ever know? Not a fallen empire waiting to return, but one that disappeared so completely that every civilization after it can only reconstruct fragments of what it once was. Epitaph is really about living in the shadow of something fundamentally impossible to surpass