[hider=Spoilers]First there were the Draconians, a race of bipedal lizardmen, who overran a survey ship, copied it, then made raids on several worlds and besides taking slaves, they collected all their knowledge and fed it into their computers.

They took slaves from a planet known as Zayas, and for a while they were just like all the other alien races - very predictable. Then in a shocking move, they managed to trap the Draconian queens, took their knowledge database, evacuated almost all the alien slaves, and managed to seal off the planet in its own pocket dimension. Draconians who were off planet found themselves leaderless for the first time in their history. While new queens popped up offworld, they never reached the same mind-numbing level of the prior queens. Draconians became independent. 

Then the Zayans vanished, sealing themselves away, but shared some of the Draconian's shared knowledge with the others. The remaining alien races started an interstellar government, called PAX. Sometimes members of uncontacted planets wound up roaming offworld, they were called "Wilders", many of them taking temporary jobs, especially aboard ships.

Human Wilders, some generations later, started coming up with their own myths and customs, some of them very confused from their Earth origins. Somehow, some wilder introduced them all to the boardgame of Monopoly, and suddenly human crews wouldn't leave port without a game on board. Each wilder keeps a very customized Monopoly game piece, and a quarter of the board. developing whole new customs around that.

There was an event, nobody knows exactly what sparked it, but PAX quickly divided itself into various factions and fought. Some of them even used special bombs to induce solar flares and the resulting solar flare would torch the planet, usually destroying all life on the exposed face. They also developed weapons to cripple their star-drives.

Decades later, Earth develops new star drives that makes cheap travel possible and send probes out to nearby worlds outside their system and found they were compatible with their own life. However, while they're constructing the first two exploratory ships, a probe brings back a recording of floating alien warships around a mostly desert world, even tracks a small shuttle doing a bit of salvaging and heading back to the surface, finding various ships on what looked to be a spaceport and a city with a water canal next to it.

So Earth launched Project Bedlam and sends their first two ships, Azimov and Heinlein, to carefully try and figure out what's going on here. The crew of the Azimov actually makes contact, their crew are invited to come to the surface where some of them already know a half-dozen Earth languages as one of them (Jun'kai) had actually visited Earth before as part of his university studies.

They find out about wilders, about human wilders, and why they made a statue of a human in their city. They also add modules to the Azimov to boost its speed. One of the crew gets kidnapped and one of the friendly aliens, Jun'kai, helps steal their spare stardrive to get the crew member back. Jun'kai gets locked up and taken back to Earth.

It's been decades but Jun'kai is being returned to the planet Bedlam - on board the Scorpio, guarded by the Valkyrii, self-telepathic winged humanoid mercenaries who are all cloned to be female. 

Sometimes alien architecture is found, like a weird prison complex on a remote moon in Corporate space. However, the first survey team became trapped, and needed rescuing.

Sometimes there are groups of space pirates, raiding for supplies. They have a curious custom where they sometimes sell back the things they stole - a tech ransom.

And the Zayans...[/hider]