The World

The Way Left. We Didn't.

A century after the colonial mining consortium sealed the orbital elevators, the surface remembers everything. Five factions hold what's left. Choose one. The rest become enemies.

Backstory

A Century Without the Sky

They called themselves The Way. A consortium of orbital colonies that arrived hungry and stayed long enough to gut a planet. For three generations they sank shaft after shaft into the crust, lifting metal, ore, water, and biomass to the upper rings. They left nothing on the surface that wasn't broken or radioactive.

When the last shaft collapsed and the price of orbital lift exceeded the price of what was being lifted, they sealed the elevators behind them. The colonies still float overhead. They watch us through old satellites. They do not answer when we transmit.

On the surface, the wells run yellow. The trees grow strange. The seasons came back wrong. But people stayed — the ones who couldn't afford a lift ticket, the ones who refused to leave family graves, the ones who simply weren't told. That's who we are. The ones who weren't worth taking.

"They called it Earth. We call it ours now. The difference is that we stayed." — inscription, abandoned Hollow Lord shaft entrance
A surface settler beneath a colonial sky

The Five Banners

Pledge yourself to one to unlock its territory, gear, and contracts. The other four will turn on you.

Keepers of the Old Faith Tech-Scavengers Hollow Lords The Network The Forgotten

The Keepers of the Old Faith

Heal the land

Religious movements that believe Earth is a living entity and that The Way was a parasite drawing blood from a wounded body. They perform rituals to heal the land — burning offerings of pre-contact technology, anointing wells with herb-water, walking the perimeter of every wound the consortium left in the rock. They hoard pre-contact technology not to use it, but to keep it from being used.

"The shafts are the wounds. The runoff is the bleeding. We are the bandage. We do not stop pressing." — Keeper homily, recited at every solstice

Doctrine

  • Earth is a living being and was wounded by The Way.
  • Pre-contact technology is sacred and must be quarantined, not destroyed.
  • Every settler owes the land a tithe of restoration — herbs planted, wells purified, shafts sealed.
  • Industrial-scale mining is heresy. Hand-tools and rituals only.

What They Offer You

  • Sanctuary in groves and shrine-camps across the wilderness.
  • Access to ritual herbalism — antidotes, water purification, radiation resist.
  • Bonus reputation for sealing collapsed Hollow Lord shafts.
  • Blessed weapons — slow but with stacking restoration effects.

What They Want From You

  • Recover sealed pre-contact tech and bring it to Keeper sanctuaries.
  • Plant moonleaf at marked rift-wound sites.
  • Refuse to trade with the Tech-Scavengers and Hollow Lords.

Standing Enemies

  • Hollow Lords — they reopen shafts the Keepers seal.
  • Tech-Scavengers — they sell the corpse of Earth to anyone with coin.

The Tech-Scavengers

The ruins are a market

Nomadic clans that hunt for old-world technology in the ruins. They are the surface's best mechanics, chemists, and hackers — almost everything that still functions has passed through scavenger hands at least once. They keep no shrines and no kingdoms. They keep routes. They trade with the orbital colonies through black-market drop sites, smuggling salvage up and bringing medicine, optics, and credit chips down.

"Worship is what you do when you can't fix it yourself." — scrawled on the side of a salvage rig, attributed to no one

Doctrine

  • Old-world tech is neither sacred nor cursed — it's inventory.
  • Routes matter more than territory. A camp that doesn't move dies.
  • Loyalty is a contract with an expiration date.
  • If the colonies will pay for it, scavenge it.

What They Offer You

  • Black-market vendor access — buy contraband, sell stolen goods.
  • Best gun attachments, scopes, silencers, and prototype gadgets.
  • Caravan routes — passive gold income from trade posts.
  • Hacker contacts who can decrypt pre-contact data caches.

What They Want From You

  • Recover specific tech assets from named ruin sites.
  • Run smuggling caravans between scavenger waypoints.
  • Disrupt Network checkpoints that interfere with their routes.

Standing Enemies

  • Keepers — they hoard what scavengers want to sell.
  • The Network — checkpoints, tariffs, registries. Scavengers hate registries.

The Hollow Lords

Shelter is the only currency

Warlords who control access to the deep shaft mines — the abandoned tunnel networks left behind by The Way's extraction operations. The shafts are the only reliably safe shelter on the surface: stable temperature, no radiation, defensible chokepoints. The Hollow Lords charge for entry. Sometimes in coin. Sometimes in years of indenture. They rule through fear because the alternative they offer — the open surface — is worse.

"Above ground, you die at the weather's pace. Below it, you die at mine. I am slower." — attributed to a Hollow Lord at the gate of Shaft Seventeen

Doctrine

  • The shafts belong to whoever can hold them. Right now, that's us.
  • Shelter is a service. Services have prices.
  • Loyalty is enforced. Sentiment is not required.
  • The surface is for raiding. The deep is for keeping.

What They Offer You

  • Shaft fortress access — the safest base locations on the surface.
  • Heavy weapon and turret schematics; armor with deep-rock plating.
  • Conscript crews — cheap, expendable NPC labor.
  • Toll-bridge politics — ally with one Lord and the others fall in line.

What They Want From You

  • Raid rival camps and bring the spoils back as tribute.
  • Defend a shaft entrance against a coordinated assault.
  • Eliminate Network informants and Keeper sealers.

Standing Enemies

  • Keepers — they want every shaft sealed.
  • The Network — they organize the people Hollow Lords want compliant.
  • Each other — Hollow Lord politics is mostly internal civil war.

The Network

The closest thing to law

A loose alliance of surface communities connected by a hardline data network running through the old fiber-optic lines that, against all odds, still function. They share weather data. They share raid warnings. They share grain prices and antibiotic supplies. They share the names of people who have broken treaties. They are the closest thing the surface has to a government, but they are not a government — they are an agreement, renewed daily.

"We share warnings before we share food. That order matters." — Network charter, fragment

Doctrine

  • Information is the only thing that scales. Hoard it and the network dies.
  • Treaties are public. Violations are public. Memory is public.
  • Voluntary cooperation, enforced by reputation, backed by collective action.
  • The colonies don't watch. We do.

What They Offer You

  • Real-time raid warnings broadcast to allied camps.
  • Trade post protection — caravans on Network routes are escorted.
  • Reputation system that follows you across every Network camp.
  • Diplomatic seals that grant safe passage through neutral territory.

What They Want From You

  • Repair fiber-optic relay stations to extend network reach.
  • Extract testimony from Hollow Lord prisoners.
  • Refuse to harbor known oath-breakers.
  • Stand a militia call — Network camps defend each other.

Standing Enemies

  • Hollow Lords — they jam relays and traffic in conscripts.
  • Tech-Scavengers — they evade tariffs and run unregistered routes.

The Forgotten

Their gods do not answer to ours

Isolated communities that have reverted to pre-industrial subsistence. They have no contact with the colonies and no interest in The Way. Many do not know the colonies still exist. They have their own gods, their own wars, their own peace. They are not hostile by default — but they are not asking to be saved, either, and they will defend their borders against any banner that arrives flying.

"We do not need your wires. We do not need your shafts. We do not need your faith. Leave the seed-bag at the boundary stone and walk away." — Forgotten welcome ritual, translated

Doctrine

  • Subsistence is sufficient. Surplus invites theft.
  • The colonies are a story we no longer tell.
  • Strangers are tolerated. Banners are not.
  • Our dead remain in our ground.

What They Offer You

  • Untouched biomes — the only places with full clean water and unmutated game.
  • Heritage seeds, hand-forged tools, herbal medicine recipes lost elsewhere.
  • Genuine peace if you arrive without a banner and stay quiet.
  • Refuge from any other faction — the Forgotten honor parley.

What They Want From You

  • Unbind from your current faction before crossing their border.
  • Trade in goods, not in coin. Coin is suspect.
  • Carry warnings between Forgotten villages — they have no Network.
  • Defend a village from a raid that doesn't touch your camp at all.

Standing Enemies

  • None by default. They will become enemies of any faction that ignores their borders.
  • In practice: Hollow Lords raid them most often.

Bind a Grudge. Bear It Forward.

You don't have to pledge on day one. The surface will let you wander. But sooner or later every camp flies a colour, every raid arrives under a name, and every grudge you carry comes from a banner you can point to.

▶ Enter the Surface