So, I've been working on starfinder playtest character concepts as well as the 1e character who will get their chronicles and perhaps play in a few conventions, and I'm interested in learning more about the first chaotic days of the gap, because I think they'd be very formative to some of my society characters (The two characters I have in mind are a gap-born Elf and an Elven Xenometric android who had the peculiar fortune of being renwed the day the gap ended on Absalom Station). Are there official sources, either in the form of fiction or lore books? Blog posts?
Here are a few of my questions;
1) Did memories of the deceased survive the way memories of living interpersonal relationships? Can those who lived through the gap remeber the faces of parents who died before the gap ended? If not, could the inability to remember anything about one's parents while clearly recognizing a baby brother lead someone to realize their parents died very recently if evidence of living with one's parents was still present in one's domicile?
2) How complete was the destruction of written and visual information? I know histories were wiped clean, and family photos were hopelessly fuzzy, but did street signs get wiped? Advertisements? Cargo manifests? "Happy 80th Birthday!" and "Happy Renewal!" decorations?
3) How did the financial situation work (specifically on Absalom Station, since that's where the characters lived)? Did people know if they rented or owned their living space? Did people still have bank account balnces they could draw from even if the earlier transaction records were wiped, or were you stuck with whatever credsticks you had on you?
Thanks for the help!
for question 1 I believe the answer was that they didn't remember past relationships and sort of woke up with people the did not recognize but could tell from pictures and belongings that there had been a relationship.
It did not destroy all data we know there are a lot of structures and paintings done in the gap. Also the end of the gap was not consistent some places it happened before or after others. From what I recall most people could sus out what their names had been from their belongings and could tell they had been in relationships but it is like an outsider coming into your house and digging around in scraps of your stuff. Some data there but most context was gone.
I don't know if part 3 was talked about. I think most bank stuff was probably just gone as for housing as mentioned there seemed to be fragments of stuff enough to at least get an idea who you were and who others in the house were and general relatedness so I think a lot of ownership stuff wound up being squatters rights type thing where you used whatever you could find to prove that is where you had lived.
The CRB mentions that people still recognized relationships, "While these people retained all the knowledge, skills, and interpersonal connections from their lives, specific memories became difficult or impossible to retrieve—a woman might have instinctively known a million tiny details about her
spouse but have had no concept of how they met or how long they’d been married." (Core Rulebook, pg. 424)
As for part 3, there surely was a great deal of chaos. Based on printed sources, when Absalom Station emerged from the Gap, no one knew if or where anyone worked, which implies no financial trails to follow.
Many starship manufacturers are noted as having lost their design documents to the Gap and having to reverse-engineer their own ships to stay afloat, which not all successfully did.
From the breaching gun weapon description:
"Breaching guns also saw widespread use on Absalom Station in the aftermath of the Gap, as security forces desperately tried to maintain control over the station’s fractured and panicked population, which often required blasting through barricades and sealed interior airlocks."
So we can infer there was significant chaos and social disorder but enough was retained by the survivors for some to remember they were members of security forces, use of equipment and tactics.