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Something happened while the world slept. No one who remains can remember what it was. When people woke, they retained their names, their skills, their language, their personalities — but every memory of the world itself was gone. History, relationships, institutions, context — all erased. Massive numbers of people disappeared, and with them, any memory that they ever existed.
The Event is the central mystery of the world. It was not simply destructive — it may have been constructive. Memories were removed, but a common language appears to have been installed (evidenced by the fact that the Thaw, who were partially resistant, speak differently from everyone else). This suggests the Event wasn't a catastrophe. It was an intervention. By whom or what, no one knows.
No faction has the answer. Several have theories, and those theories define their identities and drive the conflicts between them:
The truth remains unknown. It may never be revealed, or it may emerge slowly across expansions and lore drops.
The Event didn't kill people directly, but the aftermath did. People woke confused, disoriented, and afraid. Riots broke out. Fires were set. Violence erupted with no institutional infrastructure to contain it. Buildings were destroyed, people died in large numbers, and the survivors carry that collective trauma as oral history — the Chaotic Beginning.
Every faction is, in part, a response to the Chaotic Beginning. The Parish formed because people needed meaning after the violence. The Pack left because they saw what humans did to each other and wanted no part of it. The Syndicate rose because someone had to impose order and they did it through leverage. The Rigs survived because they were useful — you don't kill the person who can fix the generator.
The Chaotic Beginning is over, but its scars are everywhere: burned-out buildings, entire blocks that never recovered, and grudges between factions rooted in who did what during those first terrible weeks.
The entire game takes place in a single city. Not a nation, not a continent — one city. It is the whole world for virtually every person alive. There is no known civilization beyond its edges, and the idea of leaving is so psychologically terrifying that it functions as a kind of boundary without walls. The city is simply called "the city" or "home." It was probably a real city once with a real name, but no one remembers it.
Geography and feel: Think Baltimore or Detroit in climate — four seasons, hot summers, some snow in winter. An ocean borders one side. The city is a decayed urban landscape: structurally intact in many places but falling apart at the seams. No municipal maintenance. Riot damage from the Chaotic Beginning never repaired. Major buildings still stand but they're empty, crumbling, repurposed. People squat where it makes sense based on their faction and the number of people they need to shelter.
Beyond the edges: Highways lead out of the city but go nowhere anyone's confirmed. Expeditions were attempted in the early years — no one traveled more than about fifty miles and came back with anything of substance. No other settlements. No other people. Just infrastructure fading into wilderness. The expeditions stopped, and now the question of what's out there has become a cultural taboo. The implication that they might be all that's left was too heavy to keep testing.
The ocean: Present on one side of the city. Its role in the economy and faction dynamics needs to be defined — fishing likely exists and is probably controlled by whoever holds the docks (likely the Syndicate). If the ocean is hostile or toxic, that needs to be established. Either way, it can't be ignored.
Scale: Probably ten thousand people at most. Possibly fewer. This means factions aren't armies — they're communities of hundreds. The tournament doesn't field militaries; it sends a faction's best handful of fighters. Everyone knows the fighters personally. Losses are felt individually.
State of decay: The city is simultaneously decaying and stabilizing. Some factions maintain their territory; others uproot and relocate when a building becomes uninhabitable. Infrastructure degrades over time. The Signal may be accelerating this by rerouting power from the grid to sustain its own systems, which gives other factions a concrete grievance against the machines.
Resources are limited. Food, medicine, clean water — there's never quite enough. Periodically, a tournament occurs. Resources appear at designated locations. An arena exists (possibly an old stadium or plaza in neutral territory). The rules are somehow understood without being explicitly communicated. Factions send fighters. Winners receive supplies. Losers go hungry.
No one questions the tournament's existence because nothing in their world makes sense, and one more unexplained system that happens to keep them alive doesn't register as strange. The tournament infrastructure — the arena, the resource drops, the implicit rules — simply is.
The Unseen: Behind the tournament, behind everything, there are organizers. But they are so far removed from the city's reality that no one knows they exist. They are not a rumor, not a conspiracy theory, not a shadowy government. They are completely unknown. They may view the factions as entertainment, as subjects, as something else entirely. Some factions understand the tournament differently — some see it as a blessing, some as grim necessity — but none suspect it's being orchestrated. The Unseen are not counted among the ten factions and may never be directly revealed, or their existence may emerge gradually across the life of the game.
The tournament's emotional register is important: it's not a grand gladiatorial spectacle. It's a brutal municipal event. Like if a city's neighborhoods competed in a blood sport every season for resource allocation, and everyone accepted that this was how it worked. There's tension beforehand, violence during, and then everyone goes back to coexisting awkwardly. The Syndicate runner who took your bet last week is the person whose fighter just broke your faction member's arm in the ring. You'll see them at the water station tomorrow.
The dominant tone is melancholy punctuated by moments of horror, connection, tension, and small hope. The world isn't grimdark — it's tired and sad and occasionally beautiful. "You Can't Win 'Em All" energy. People doing their best in a situation they'll never fully understand.
Life is largely nomadic and homeless. People squat where it makes sense. Some factions hold territory more firmly than others. There's no formal government, no police, no municipal services. Water, food, electricity, and shelter are secured through faction infrastructure, scavenging, and tournament winnings.
Children born since the Event have no amnesia (they never had memories to lose). They've grown up in this world and it's the only one they know. Their perspective on the factions, the Event, and the city is fundamentally different from their parents' and this generational tension is a largely unexplored thread.
Each faction represents a different philosophical answer to the same question: You wake up with no memory of the world. What do you do?
Every faction is the hero of its own story and potentially the monster in someone else's. The horror in this world is largely perspectival — the Grove woman thinks she's fine; the Rigs mechanic who sees her at the water station is terrified by what she's becoming.
Mutations exist. The Event and/or the city's changed environment have physically altered people in localized, faction-specific ways. These changes exist on a spectrum — everyone's been changed a little, some factions more visibly than others. The mutations serve both narrative and practical purposes: they drive inter-faction fear and distrust, and they create visual distinction between factions in-game.
Territory: Downtown core — high-rises, old bank vaults, commercial strips, the marketplace, likely the docks.
Identity: Opportunists who woke up in places of commerce and leverage and immediately started taking. They don't care about the Event. They think everyone arguing about the past is a mark. They run the closest thing the city has to an economy and control access to trade.
Theory on the Event: "Who cares? The game is the game."
Mechanics: Economy, gambling, Wager, scrap hoarding.
Key relationships: Trade with the Rigs for muscle and machines. Exploit the Grove's dependency by controlling supply lines. Try to broker access to the Thaw's memory fragments (information is currency). Find the Parish useful because religion keeps people docile. Probably control fishing/docks if the ocean is a food source.
Tone: Confident, transactional, amoral but not cruel. They're the faction most likely to shrug at the tournament and run side bets on it.
Territory: Industrial outskirts — garages, body shops, a freight yard. Smells like diesel, sounds like hammering at all hours.
Identity: People who woke up understanding engines and welding and building. They can't explain it, but that knowledge became identity. Blue-collar, practical, almost monastic in devotion to craft. They don't build for ideology — they build because it's the only thing that feels real.
Theory on the Event: Deeply fractured internally. Old guard says machines are tools. A growing internal faction has found things in old server rooms that suggest something digital was involved — and they're terrified of the Signal because of it.
Mechanics: Momentum, durability, Plating, Overdrive.
Key relationships: Primary trading partners with the Syndicate but resentful of the arrangement. Deeply suspicious of the Signal. Respect the Pack from a distance. Quietly disturbed by the Grove. The Rigs mechanic who's horrified by the Grove woman's mutations might not notice his own hands have gone slightly metallic at the knuckles from thirty years of handling scrap.
Territory: A cathedral or cluster of churches in a historic district. The architecture felt sacred before anyone could remember why. They've expanded into surrounding buildings but the cathedral is the heart.
Identity: The fastest-growing faction because they offer the one thing nobody else can: certainty. The amnesia wasn't a catastrophe, it was a baptism. The old world was wrong and it was wiped clean. They offer community, meaning, and answers in a world defined by not knowing.
Theory on the Event: Divine intervention. The amnesia is sacred. Anyone trying to reverse it is committing blasphemy.
Mechanics: Auras, positioning (religious hierarchy), zealotry buffs. The Voice (centerpiece unit) replaces the old Sonic-Boom Titan.
Internal complexity: A genuine spectrum from true believers providing real comfort to power-hungry leadership exploiting the faithful. They're not simply villains — in a world of total uncertainty, the people offering meaning are providing a genuine service.
Key relationships: Ideological enemies of the Apothecaries (faith vs. science). Suspicious of the Thaw because memory fragments threaten the "forgetting was a blessing" narrative. The Syndicate quietly funds them. They want to "save" the Pack. They consider the Drift either divine messengers or abominations. They send missionaries to the Pack; the Pack sends them back with fewer fingers.
Territory: The hospital district — old medical campus, research wing, pharmacies and clinics. Chemical smell. Other factions go there reluctantly when sick enough.
Identity: People who woke up knowing chemistry, dosages, compounds. Almost immediately, other factions pointed fingers: "You did this. You drugged the world." Their obsessive experimentation is driven by guilt as much as curiosity. They're trying to prove — to themselves more than anyone — that they weren't responsible. They keep almost finding the answer, which is terrifying.
Theory on the Event: Chemical or pharmaceutical in origin. An airborne or waterborne compound caused mass amnesia. They're trying to isolate it.
Mechanics: Consumables, Brew generation, powerful temporary buffs with potential side effects. Their glass is always full but you never know if it's medicine or poison.
Mutations: After thirty years of self-experimentation, they have side effects they hide under masks and gloves.
Key relationships: Hated by the Parish. The Grove is their most unsettling mirror — both factions defined by consumption, but the Apothecaries believe they're in control. The Syndicate wants their products. The Thaw are their most valuable and frustrating subjects — memory fragments that might be chemically unlockable.
Territory: The park — a massive Central Park analogue but wilder and stranger. Trees too tall for thirty years of growth. Undergrowth that moves when there's no wind. Grove members live inside it and always return to it.
Identity: NOT the plant faction. The addiction faction. A commune that discovered mutated flora could heal, sustain, and nourish — but the relationship deepened past the point of return. They feed their dead to the soil. The soil feeds them back. They're people with root-dark veins, thorn-wrapped tools, and a disturbing tolerance for pain. They're not evil — they genuinely believe the garden saved them and would share its gifts. The fact that it's slowly consuming their community is tragic, not villainous.
Theory on the Event: They don't really have one. The garden provides. Why ask more? This lack of curiosity is what makes other factions deeply uncomfortable.
Mechanics: Consumption, scaling, Compost (recycle dead units into buffs), Guard. They get stronger as the fight goes on.
The horror is perspectival: A Grove member thinks she's fine. The Rigs mechanic who sees her at the water station notices her fingernails have gone dark, her pupils don't dilate, and she smells like wet soil even though it hasn't rained.
Key relationships: The Apothecaries study them with horrified fascination. The Hive is their biological parallel that neither group acknowledges. The Pack avoids Grove territory — even their animals won't enter. The Syndicate controls trade routes the Grove needs for things the garden can't provide.
Territory: Outside the city proper — the treeline, ruined suburban sprawl reclaimed by nature, the hills beyond. They come into the city to trade and fight but don't stay. Their territory isn't marked; you just realize you're being watched.
Identity: People who rejected settlement entirely after the Chaotic Beginning. Over thirty years they've built a culture around pack structure, territory, and survival instinct. They use animals (dogs, birds, beasts of burden) but humans lead — they've adopted animal social logic, not become animals. The alpha leads, the pack follows, the weak aren't carried.
Theory on the Event: "The old world built things it couldn't control and it ate them. We won't make the same mistake." Anti-civilization, anti-technology. They might be right.
Mechanics: Pack tactics, token spawning (mix of humans and animals), Camouflage. They overwhelm through numbers and ambush.
Key relationships: Respect the Rigs grudgingly but think they're fools for trusting machines. Terrified of the Grove on instinct. The Parish sends missionaries; they return them damaged. Avoid the Signal and the Drift entirely. Treat the Thaw as equals — fellow survivors of harsh conditions. Living at the city's edges, the Pack probably has the most exposure to whatever's beyond, and their refusal to talk about it is telling.
Territory: A warehouse complex or industrial park near the park's edge where insect populations exploded post-Event. Identifiable by the ever-present hum. Interiors reorganized in non-human logic — walls removed, passages connected, everything flowing.
Identity: The most unsettling faction. People who settled in a zone of mutated insect life and were slowly integrated into a collective ecosystem through pheromone exposure and neurological changes over a generation. They're still human. They still speak. But they think in overlapping patterns, don't mourn individual death the way others do, and are eerily calm together but anxious when alone.
Theory on the Event: They don't experience the question the way others do. Individual memory matters less when you're part of a collective present. They're becoming something new and they're oddly at peace with it.
Mechanics: Tokens, board flooding, Hatch, Last Stand. Losing individual units makes the collective stronger.
The horror is perspectival: The Hive members think they've found peace and belonging. To everyone outside, a dozen people turning to look at you simultaneously with the same expression is a nightmare.
Key relationships: Biological cousins to the Grove, which neither group is comfortable with. The Parish can't decide if they're an abomination or divine transformation. The Apothecaries want to study the pheromone integration. Everyone else finds them unnerving in ways they can't articulate.
Territory: No fixed territory. They move between zones, tolerated but watched, never quite welcome. They may have carved out a small pocket that's subtly alien — a few blocks where light hits differently and air tastes like metal. Others cluster at the ragged edges where the city meets whatever is beyond.
Identity: Non-human beings who were either here before the Event, arrived during it, or arrived after. Nobody knows, possibly including the Drift themselves. They communicate, trade, and participate in the tournament. They insist repeatedly and with genuine frustration that they didn't cause the Event and are victims of it too. Their own pre-event memories are fragmented in ways that parallel human amnesia — which either supports their claim or is a convenient coincidence. In the amnesia world, no one can say with certainty that outsiders don't belong, because no one has a frame of reference for what's normal.
Theory on the Event: They don't have a unified answer, and this is itself revealing — whatever the Event was, it affected them differently from each other, fragmenting even their own shared understanding of themselves.
Why they fight: The tournament is the one place their claim to belonging is taken seriously. A Drift that wins a round is a Drift that got counted. They need the same food, water, shelter, and scrap as everyone else, and the arena is how outsiders earn a share.
Mechanics: Glass cannons and first strikes. Surge abilities that resolve before ordinary combat. They don't endure — they spike, hard and fast, and then they're gone. Chain reactions ripple across the board in ways that feel slightly wrong, as though the rules bend around them.
Key relationships: The Parish can't agree on what they are — divine messengers or abominations. The Apothecaries want to study their biology, and the Drift let them, up to a point. The Syndicate treats them neutrally because everyone's a potential transaction. The Pack avoids them on instinct. Every faction has a different theory about the Drift, making them a narrative fulcrum.
Territory: The city's northern edge, in tight, disciplined camps. Shelters over-insulated for the local climate, built like they're still expecting a blizzard. They arrived within the last decade.
Identity: Hard, quiet people from frozen regions far to the north. They migrated south because they were starving. They carry the most politically significant trait in the world: they remember more than anyone else. Not full memories — fragments, dreams, half-visions, a word that triggers something. The cold regions were affected differently by the Event.
Language barrier: They speak differently from every other faction. This raises a disturbing question: if everyone else woke up speaking the same language, was that language imposed during the Event? Did the Thaw partially resist whatever rewrote everyone else? The Apothecaries lose sleep over this implication.
Theory on the Event: They don't theorize. They dream. And the dreams don't agree with each other.
Mechanics: Crowd control, lockdown, Frostbite (debuff/slow/paralyze), high health, methodical attrition. They don't rush. They endure.
Key relationships: Everyone wants something from them. The Apothecaries want to chemically unlock their memories. The Parish wants to silence them. The Syndicate auctions their dream-fragments to the highest bidder. The Pack respects their toughness. They trust almost no one.
The conflicts are driven by two things: survival (territory, resources, tournament stakes) and belief (competing theories about the Event).
The Blame Triangle: The Apothecaries, the Signal, and the Drift are all accused of causing the Event by different groups. All three are trying to prove their innocence while being the factions most capable of solving the mystery. But they can't easily cooperate because the Apothecaries suspect the Signal, many humans suspect the Drift, and the Drift and Signal don't fully trust each other.
The Faith/Science War: The Parish and the Apothecaries are ideological enemies. The Parish doesn't want the mystery solved; their power depends on the answer being divine. The Apothecaries are driven to solve it. This is the oldest war in a world that's only thirty years old.
The Memory Economy: The Thaw's memory fragments are the most valuable commodity in the city. The Apothecaries want to study them. The Parish wants to suppress them. The Syndicate wants to sell them. The Thaw themselves are haunted by them.
The Mutation Spectrum: The Grove, the Hive, and to some extent the Apothecaries are all being physically changed. This creates both biological parallels and mutual unease between them, and drives fear and distrust from the more "baseline" factions like the Rigs and the Syndicate.
The Civilization Question: The Pack rejects the city entirely. The Parish and the Syndicate represent two different models of social order (meaning vs. leverage). The Signal represents a non-human form of civilization. These competing visions of how people should organize are as much a source of conflict as any resource dispute.
Melancholy as the baseline. Horror as perspective. The world is sad and tired and occasionally hopeful in small ways. People doing their best in a situation they'll never fully understand. Violence is routine and municipal, not epic. The tournament is grim necessity, not spectacle.
But horror is absolutely present — it lives in the gap between how a faction sees itself and how others see it. Every faction is the hero of its own story and potentially the monster in someone else's. Mutations, behavioral changes, and ideological extremism all read differently from inside and outside a faction.
The soundtrack titles capture the arc: from catastrophe (A WARNING: WHILE WE SLEPT, EVERYTHING FALLS APART) through disorientation (ALL WRONG, IS THIS LOSS) to grim persistence (HARD TIMES, SCRAPING OFF THE RUST, WE ALL GOT CHOICES TO MAKE) and fragile, ambiguous hope (I THINK WE'LL STAY, REVIVAL, YOU CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL).