It occurs to me that I should have come up with some in-universe lore to explain the presence of Star Frontier races when Sorrack introduced his Dralasite character, but that all eluded me for some reason. Anyways, now with a new Yazirian and Vrusk character coming soon, I feel like I should rectify this.
I've been working a bit to have the SF races fit in FS, and explain why they're not major powers like the Galactic Federation, the Novim Council, or the Yar Clanarchy... While I have a lot of notes taken on the Vrusk and Dralasite, I managed to finish the Yazirians. So you can all tell me what you think.
Yazirian
When the early human settlers started colonizing the systems near the Duergan's Star system (circa -310 GFT), one of the first planet they settled was Loridian in the Kassel system. There they met an indigenous race of simian-like humanoids calling themselves the Yazirian and having settled themselves in the Meridian Strip.
Some of the early stories the early human settlers heard from the local Yazirians was of some of their territory lost to "the blinding light" or "the terrible darkness", both event having happened "a long, long time ago" leading the settlers to realize that Loridian wasn't as side-locked as originally though, but that such change of the Meridian Strip would gradually happen over the span of hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years, and as such to be of little concern to them. They also heard stories of "worm demons", probably referring to a now-extinct worm-like apex predator, but no evidence of such predator even having existed was ever found...
Sadly for the Yazirians, things were only going to get worse for them after the initial contact; as history has shown us things don't usually go well for the natives of a colonized area... Word soon spread of resource-rich Loridian and its primitive natives, and many unscrupulous businessman or seedy fortune-seeker quickly flocked to the planet, bartering with the local population to purchase large swaths of land for next to nothing. The local Yazirians were also exploited, put to dangerous work on exploring and extracting resource on the dark side of the planet for a mere pittance as they were seen, and used as cheap labor.
In fact, in -182 GFT, a particularly ruthless businessman decided it would be cheaper to have his Yazirian workforce brutally butchered rather than pay them what little they were owed. The crime was only discovered 3 years later as the mass grave of those Yazirian workers were randomly discovered by another surveying expedition. The brutality of those crimes shocked the human settlers, and incensed the local Yazirian population. It took 2 years to finally apprehend the businessman in question, after an interstellar chase. He was quickly found guilty after the initial trial, but it took another 4 years of him exhausting all of his appeals before he finally got executed for his horrible crimes against the Yazirian people (who were just about to start an uprising on Loridian at that point).
After those events, the Yazirians' conditions improved, and when the Galactic Federation was formed, they were offered full membership within it, both to help them improve their lot even more, and as penance for the atrocities committed against them by humanity. It became quickly obvious to the Yazirians that they would never become a major power on the Frontier and this offer was probably their best chance, what with being limited to living on a relatively thin stripe of eternal twilight on their own planet, and having already ceded large swath of this habitable land to the humans a long time ago. The slope the Yazirians had to climb looked steep indeed...
Help eventually came from an unexpected source: The Erakai. When in 290 GFT, Erakai merchant ships participated in the first and historic cross-species colonization of Loridian with the humans, the Erakai quickly formed a bond with the local Yazirians as both races had many things in common, such as their ability to glide (annual friendly gliding competition between Erakai and Yazirians are held on Loridian to this day), and having suffered bloodshed at the hands of the humans (the tragic first contact from back in -296 GFT). With the help of their new Erakai friends, the Yazirians managed to create their own corporations, and attempt to beat the humans at their own game. Now, today, the Yazirians (sometimes called Loridinians by those who are not in the know) own 4 of the 11 corporations which are part of Loridian's Syndicate Council, including one which is part of the top 3. They've also managed to re-purchase land ceded to human settlers, though, much of it is still firmly in the hands of other corporations, or the Galactic Federation. This might not seem like much, but given where they started, and how much they accomplished with what little they had, and in such a short amount of time, it is simply amazing and inspiring.