The story begins with an older teenaged girl visiting her great-great Grandmother a few weeks before her own wedding. The girl is anxious about the wedding and doesn't know her other co-wifes and her husband. So she wanted to hear some of her Grandmothers old tales. The old woman was one of the last living survivors of the colonization of this planet.
The society is patriarchic polygamous. It is said that the unique cosmic radiation in this solar system is responsible for the 5-to-1 ratio in girls to boys births.
Something happened on the supposed-to-be 20-year journey which killed the awake crew. The 100.000 colonists sleeping in cryo-stasis not knowing what happened.
An unspecified time later, many ship-systems already failing, the emergency protocol of the ship activated and the ship AI got into orbit on a colonizable planet and launched the colony pods.
The ship is still orbiting the planet. No one knowing what happened, no one knowing just how many years had passed on the ship. Some said it had to be over a thousand years if the ship system failed on such a grand scale. Others dismissed such a thing, questioning the reliability of the cryo-pods over 1000 years.
For the first decade or two, the colonists could communicate with the ship AI but couldn't really get much information out of the failing systems until the ship finally ceased to respond. The colonists who had devolved into an agrarian-society not knowing how to troubleshoot the issue.
That is the OFFICIAL story. In several sessions with her grandmother and years later with her own detective work, the girl will unravel what exactly happened on that ship.
It all began with a three-decade old plot on earth to steal a colony ship and creating a utopian society way out of the reach of Earth-Gov.