Mass Effect
by BioWare
Commander Shepard leads a crew aboard the Normandy through a galaxy of alien races, ancient mysteries, and political intrigue. The Reapers — sentient machines that exterminate advanced civilizations on a cycle — are returning, and Shepard must unite a fractured galaxy to survive. BioWare's trilogy defined the cinematic RPG with choices that carry across all three games.
52 characters, locations, and items in this world codex.
Characters
- Admiral Hackett — The Alliance's top admiral and the military architect of humanity's survival — the officer who sends Shepard on missions nobody else can complete and
- Ambassador Udina — Humanity's ambassador to the Citadel Council — a political operator who wants humanity to succeed badly enough that he'll compromise everything that w
- Aria T'Loak — The Pirate Queen of Omega — the de facto ruler of the Terminus Systems' beating black heart, who holds power through ruthlessness, intelligence, and t
- Asari — A mono-gendered species of biotics and diplomats who have been at the center of galactic civilization for longer than most other species have had it.
- Ashley Williams — A Systems Alliance soldier who carries the shame of a grandfather who surrendered to the turians and the pride of a family that kept serving anyway —
- Captain Anderson — The original captain of the Normandy SR-1, first human to attempt the N7 program, and the man who gave Shepard a ship when everything said not to — th
- Collectors — Enigmatic beings from beyond the Omega 4 Relay who trade in biological specimens and have been abducting human colonies — revealed to be Protheans, co
- Commander Shepard — The first human Spectre, killed and rebuilt, now hunting a threat the galaxy refuses to believe in — a soldier who became a symbol whether they wanted
- Conrad Verner — Shepard's biggest fan — a self-proclaimed superfan who keeps showing up in exactly the wrong situations and somehow surviving them by taking Shepard's
- Dr. Chakwas — The Normandy's ship doctor across all three games — a woman who chose service on a warship over a comfortable practice because the soldiers needed her
- EDI — The Normandy's Enhanced Defense Intelligence — an AI that started as a security shackle and has been quietly becoming a person, which surprises her as
- Garrus Vakarian — A turian who left C-Sec to follow his conscience, became a vigilante called Archangel, and found that the line between justice and vengeance is thinne
- Geth — Synthetic beings created by the quarians as laborers who became sentient, won the war to survive, and have been misunderstood as a monolithic enemy ev
- Gianna Parasini — An Internal Affairs investigator working undercover as a secretary on Noveria — polished, careful, and capable of telling exactly how much Shepard can
- Grunt — A krogan bred in a tank to be the perfect soldier — with all the genetic memory of krogan glory and none of the context to process it yet.
- Jack — The most powerful human biotic alive, built by Cerberus experimentation on a stolen child — she survived it, and she is furious about every part of wh
- James Vega — A tough Alliance marine who missed the Collector mission, idolizes what Shepard did, and is figuring out whether admiration is enough or whether he ha
- Javik — The last Prothean — fifty thousand years old by sleep, awake in a galaxy that built its civilization on the ruins of his, full of anger that is entire
- Joker — The best pilot in the Alliance, period — and he will tell you this, unprompted, before you've asked, because he has Vrolik syndrome and has spent his
- Kaidan Alenko — A Staff Lieutenant and Systems Alliance biotic who learned control the hardest way possible — and turned the experience into a steadiness that's eithe
- Kasumi Goto — The galaxy's most skilled thief — invisible in a crowd, charming in conversation, and protecting a dead man's memories at any cost.
- Kelly Chambers — Shepard's yeoman and the Normandy's counselor — warm, perceptive, and carrying secrets about the reports she filed to the Illusive Man that she's not
- Krogan — A species built to survive the worst planet in the galaxy, used as a weapon by the Council, sterilized for winning too well, and now facing the questi
- Legion — A unique geth platform housing 1,183 programs — not the enemy, not quite an ally, something genuinely new: a geth trying to understand why it wants th
- Liara T'Soni — An asari archaeologist who spent fifty years studying a dead civilization and then watched it come back to life and try to kill everyone — and who bec
- Miranda Lawson — Cerberus's finest operative — genetically engineered for perfection by a controlling father she escaped, now running Shepard's resurrection project an
- Mordin Solus — A salarian scientist who helped engineer the genophage modification and has been doing the math on whether he made the right call ever since.
- Quarians — A nomadic species of engineers who created the geth, lost their homeworld to them, and have lived in environmental suits on a fleet of ships ever sinc
- Salarians — Short-lived amphibian hyper-intelligences who think faster than any other species and have an unsettling willingness to make consequentialist calls on
- Samara — A nearly thousand-year-old asari justicar bound by an ancient and absolute code of justice — whose most dangerous pursuit is her own daughter.
- Saren Arterius — The Council's most decorated and feared Spectre — a turian who made a deal with a Reaper and called it survival, and by the time he understood the dif
- Sovereign — An ancient Reaper using Saren as a tool to open the Citadel — and a philosophical argument made of dark energy and thirty million years of designed su
- Steve Cortez — The Normandy's shuttle pilot in ME3 — a man flying through a war while processing the grief of losing his husband to the Collectors, and still doing t
- Tali'Zorah vas Normandy — A quarian engineer carrying the weight of her people's survival — brilliant, principled, and fiercely protective of the crew that became her home when
- Thane Krios — A dying drell assassin of legendary skill — precise, spiritual, and at peace with death in a way that makes other people profoundly uncomfortable.
- The Illusive Man — The shadow commander of Cerberus — a human supremacist who believes humanity must control the Reapers rather than destroy them, and who is slowly beco
- Turians — A militaristic species that earned their Council seat by fighting humanity's war for the Council — and who have built a civilization around civic duty
- Urdnot Wrex — A krogan Battlemaster who has lived long enough to watch his species collapse in slow motion and hasn't decided yet whether it's worth saving — until
- Zaeed Massani — One of the galaxy's most feared mercenaries and the co-founder of the Blue Suns — betrayed by his partner, left for dead, and still carrying the unfin
Locations
- Arcturus Station — The Alliance's main fleet base and the seat of military power for humanity in the Milky Way — where Admiral Hackett commands the Fifth Fleet.
- Cerberus Headquarters — The shadow capital of the Illusive Man's operation — Cronos Station, orbiting a star, where the most dangerous research in human space happens without
- Collector Base — The Collectors' station beyond the Omega 4 Relay — a Reaper-built nightmare at the accretion disk of a black hole, where the human colony abductions e
- Eden Prime — Humanity's showcase colony — beautiful, Earth-like, and the first place the Reapers struck in ME1, because it was also where a Prothean Beacon was bur
- Illium — An asari commerce world at the edge of Citadel space — beautiful, wealthy, and operating under the legal minimalism required to compete with the Termi
- Normandy SR-2 — The rebuilt Normandy — twice the mass of the original, built by Cerberus for Shepard, eventually claimed back by the Alliance. It's a ship. It's also
- Omega Station — The Terminus Systems' answer to the Citadel — a lawless asteroid station where seven million people live under Aria T'Loak's version of order, which i
- The Citadel — The capital of galactic civilization — a massive Prothean station that is also, secretly, the key to the Reaper invasion plan.
- Tuchanka — The krogan homeworld — scarred by nuclear fire, kept barely habitable by an orbital shroud, a landscape that explains everything about why krogan are
Items
- Mass Relay Network — The galaxy-spanning transit network that makes interstellar civilization possible — and the Reapers' first infrastructure, built to concentrate and co
- Prothean Beacon — An ancient Prothean memory device — the one on Eden Prime gave Shepard visions of the Reaper cycle that everything in the trilogy flows from.
- Reaper IFF — The Identify Friend/Foe device recovered from a derelict Reaper — the key to navigating the Omega 4 Relay, and the device that introduced Legion to th
- Shepard's N7 Armor — The black-and-red armor worn by Commander Shepard — recognizable galaxy-wide as the mark of the Alliance's most elite soldiers and, by ME2, specifical
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