Ever-rising sea levels forced mankind to adapt, and now the majority of the human race live aboard vast floating arkologies; most of these city-states are united as Nations of the Oceanic Alliance (NOA), although there are independent arkologies pursuing their own agendas.

The arkologies are threatened by the Hadal Collective; originally a network of experimental undersea habitats, the scientists of the Collective began to experiment with Dark Life; microorganisms previously undescribed by science, descendants of trees of life unrelated to our own, with entirely different biochemistry. Whether by design or accident, members of the Collective became infected with Dark Life, altering their brain and body chemistries. Mutated to survive underwater, the Hadal Collective began building freakish biomechanical weapons and launched attacks upon the arkologies, forcibly converting prisoners to join their ranks.

The arkologies have fought back with the Deep Knights; undersea mecha that engage the Collective’s biomechanical monstrosities and root out their ocean floor hives. But Dark Life has already begun to infect the arkologies, leading to the appearance of strange cults and horrible mutations. Several cities have fallen to this plague, and fleets of warped pirates roam the oceans, harassing the NOA. The agents of Tidewatch fight to stop any more arkologies succumbing to sects, mutants, and terrors that have crawled out of the sea.

It is likely too late; Dark Life has probably infected everyone. The Deep Knights and Tidewatch can only hold back the darkness in the hopes that a cure can be found, before humanity is replaced with something from the depths.

 

For centuries at least, maybe for thousands of years, the cunning folk have guarded Britain against demons and spectres and monsters from other dimensions. In modern times, the role had become more theoretical and symbolic, as science slowly pushed magic into oblivion.

 

Now, magic is fighting back. Portals are opening in industrial estates, abandoned petrol stations, multistorey carparks. Civilisation is being infiltrated by vampires, reptilians, merfolk, and freakish star beings. Things from ancient myth and urban legend stalk the streets, preying upon the unwary.

 

The cunning folk have trained for this, but are untested. With one foot in modern life, and one foot in a mystical past, they straddle the border between reality and possibility. Their actions will decide if a balance can be reached, or if one side will win out.

 

There was once a world, ruled by a global technocracy, where nothing was beyond the reach of science; there were no ethics or practical concerns to hold back even the most unhinged research. Those scientists discovered and invented many wonderous and terrifying things, and finally, they broke the world.

 

Fierce storms roam constantly across the planet, remaking reality in their wake, fusing what was with things from elsewhere. All manner of freakish species now haunt the ever-changing ruins of a fallen civilisation, including the descendants of warped biomechanical experiments from the time before. In this new world, death is often something that can be walked off, although the dead risk becoming hollow ones; mindless terrors that exist only to consume life.

 

Adventurers can make use of weapons of weird science, as well as hover vehicles and powered armour; they also have access to strange abilities unleashed by the quantum storms.

 

In the far future, humanity had raised cities across the solar system, and succeeded in terraforming Mars; but experiments performed upon preserved organisms in the Martian ice resulted in a plague of biological horrors that brought down civilisation. Mars was quarantined, leaving the survivors to fend for themselves in a post-apocalyptic world. Now, wheeled warriors race across the Martian deserts, competing with each other for resources whilst fighting the twin threats of the Nergal mutants, and the drones and cybernetic soldiers of the ARES corporation.

The grand idea of posting ideas and art every day isn’t really panning out, so I’m switching to a weekly schedule. Maybe at some point I’ll flesh out some of these RPG ideas. Maybe.

In the closing days of 1946, Operation Highjump reached Antarctica. Ostensibly a mission to establish a new American base on the continent, the real objective was to investigate strange ruins seen emerging from the ice. In doing so, the naval personnel somehow let the Spheres into our world.

 

Even many years later, nobody really knows what the Spheres are. They vary wildly in size from as small as a marble to as wide as a city, hanging impossibly in the air. Some Spheres roam about randomly, others are static. They do not respond to interference, but they have caused devastating effects through their influence.

 

Each Sphere alters reality in a radius around it that is proportional to the size of the Sphere. Within their influence, strange creatures and phantoms appear, the environment and beings within it are altered.

 

The Spheres are all different in appearance, and that appearance is related to the effects that they generate; a solid black Sphere might create shadow monsters, a rocky and cracked Sphere covered in channels of lava might turn the area into a volcanic hell full of fire elementals, and a Sphere that looks like a mechanical device might spawn a race of robots.

 

The arrival of the Spheres has obviously plunged the world into chaos, and the survivors must use their dieselpunk technology to defend themselves against the myriad dangers conjured into existence.

 

In the near future, humanity is an endangered species. It wasn’t until the world had fallen apart that the cause became apparent; a code hidden within fast radio bursts from an extragalactic source. An unknown agency embedded the code into viral media, somehow inducing cognitive changes in a substantial percentage of those that viewed it, as well as causing strange errors in any electronic system which the code passed through. Many of those affected began to propagate the code, either online or via such means as graffitiing public spaces with mathematical symbols.

 

The behavioural changes gradually became more violent, leading to an upsurge in horrific crimes and widespread civil unrest, a situation that dissolved into chaos as computer systems succumbed to serious malfunctions. Physical changes followed the mental ones, people mutating into rampaging reptilian horrors. Where these mutants were concentrated, in the major cities, the environment began to change; a hostile, alien ecosystem seemingly spreading out of nowhere.

 

This is where humanity finds itself now, driven into enclaves in the wilderness as the planet turns against them. There is hope, however, in those few who have experienced a different response to the code, developing bizarre new powers with which to fight back. Combined with as much cutting-edge technology as the survivors could savage, the fate of Earth is not yet sealed.

 

In a retro-future, humanity has conquered the solar system, for the most part unaware of the true dangers of the void they move through. That blackness is what ancient cultures called the underworld, the place where the dead dwell, and it is up to the brave few who have the necessary knowledge and powers to drive spectres and hungry ghosts back into the dark, to keep humankind safe from what lurks in the gulf between worlds.

With tensions running high following NATO’s Able Archer exercise of 1983, various branches of the Soviet scientific apparatus are tasked with improving military capabilities or finding ways to ensure continuity of the Communist Party in the event of nuclear war. Project Shlyuz is a group that straddles both objectives, having found a means to open gateways into parallel universes.

Mir-711 is a colony established by Project Shlyuz on a world that is very similar to Earth in many ways, whose native inhabitants have reached a medieval level of technology, hardly tapping into the vast natural resources available. Paranormal phenomena are common in this place, as are strange creatures and races; most striking are the Blyudtse, vast flying discs of ice, the upper surfaces of which are carved into cities. Abandoned by the beings that created them, these cities are nonetheless riddled with strange dangers, and can have devastating effects on the body and mind of those that explore them.

Project Shlyuz is equipped with technology from shadowy departments across the USSR, technology considered science fiction in the 1980s; micronised computer systems, massive transport VTOLs, powered armour. With science and Russian spirit, the bizarre new world will be conquered for the benefit of the USSR.

The cities and factories are swallowed by forest now, forest in which the wolf-folk, the skin-changers, hold dominion. No longer repressed by human knowledge, by the straight-jacket of scientific fact, magic moves through the trees, it dances in the sky as eerie light.

Man is not yet gone, but confined to the last industrial enclaves, farmed for blood by vampiric masters, the rulers of a technological underworld. There are battles yet to be fought between the surface dwellers and lurkers below, and alliances to be made with strange spirits and rogue machines.

The werewolves can be roughly divided into the Midguard, who can shift from human to wolf, though most often assume a form somewhere in-between; the Primals, who live wild as giant wolves, and can at best morph into a humanoid wolf-form; and the Junk Dogs, ostracised by the others for maintaining human language and technical expertise, they live as humans and can only shift into a wolf-man form.