World Primer
The world you know
The Lethean Age takes place so far after the old world that the old world is not a memory. Its towers, roads, vaults, machines, and foundations survive as part of the landscape. A cracked highway may run through a forest because something under the road still remembers the road. A sealed door may hum after geological ages because the machines inside it never received permission to stop.
The people of the present do not live in the ruins of yesterday. They live in a world that recovered into something strange.
What everyone knows
Every player character can begin with this understanding:
- The land is dangerous, but it is not empty.
- Settlements survive by trade, law, walls, and useful people.
- The miasma is everywhere except in dead zones.
- Some people and creatures can channel the miasma into powers.
- Old-world artifacts can still work, but nobody fully understands them.
- Redoubts are vast structures that should be avoided unless you are prepared to die.
- The Law makes trade, shelter, and mixed settlements possible.
- A person outside the Law can be refused shelter, trade, and mercy.
What characters do not begin knowing
Characters do not begin with the true history of the Catastrophe, the complete origin of the miasma, or the hidden motives of deep powers beneath the world. They may find fragments, contradictory data, old inscriptions, malfunctioning voices, or witnesses who are wrong in useful ways.
When the table learns the truth, it should feel discovered, not assigned.
The miasma
The miasma is a web of nanites, picites, and femtites too small to see. It permeates soil, water, air, ruins, and living tissue. It shifts with place and weather. People speak of it as mist, wind, color, pressure, omen, or mood, depending on local custom.
The miasma is not a force outside the world. It is part of the world. It can repair, distort, preserve, poison, awaken, and respond. Some organisms channel it biologically. Some machines interface with it technologically. Most people only live inside it and try to read its signs.
The miasma has eight color spectra:
| Color | Rarity | Player-facing note |
|---|---|---|
| Red | Common | Often associated with force, heat, body, or surge effects. |
| Orange | Common | A common color whose detailed play meaning remains rules-defined by powers. |
| Yellow | Common | A common color whose detailed play meaning remains rules-defined by powers. |
| Green | Common | Often associated with life, growth, adaptation, and Verdant effects. |
| Blue | Common | Often associated with signal, clarity, cold, or distance effects. |
| Violet | Common | Strange even when common; often tied to unusual sensitivity. |
| Black | Very rare | Entropy, negation, shadowed channels, or dangerous deep effects. |
| White | Very rare | Mending, restoration, clarity, or unusually clean channeling. |
The exact rules for a power tell you what colors it needs. The story tells you what those colors feel like at the table.
The Winds of Change
The Wind is the moment-to-moment availability of each color of miasma in a place. Each color has a current level, from absent to saturated. When the Wind changes, some powers become reachable and some become impossible, depending on which colors rose and which fell.
Players should treat the Wind like weather. It is not personal. It is not fair. It is the world moving through you. The full rules live in Psionics and Traits.
The Law
The Law is the minimum compact for civilization. Its exact words vary, but its substance is shared:
- Do not kill within the walls.
- Do not take what is held by another.
- Do not eat the flesh of the sapient.
- Do not break a trade freely made.
- Do not deny shelter to one who is of the Law.
The Law is maintained by recitation. At a gate, a market, or a formal meeting, "Are you of the Law?" is not small talk. It is a binding social declaration. Breaking that declaration can cost a character shelter, trade, faction standing, and the protection of every settlement that recognizes the compact.
Settlements, wilderness, ruins, and Redoubts
Settlements are the places where the Law has enough strength to matter. They offer shelter, trade, repair, rumor, faction contact, and consequences.
The wilderness is not empty space between settlements. It is ecology. A wetland, forest, waste, coast, highland, irradiated zone, and deep ruin each shapes the miasma and the creatures that live there.
Ruins are old-world strata. Entering one is closer to entering a cave than entering a city. You may find artifacts, data fragments, strange materials, toxins, or living things adapted to corridors no one has walked in ages.
Redoubts are different. They are vast old-world structures, many still active. They may produce armies, alter the local miasma, defend themselves, or ignore you until you cross a boundary you cannot see. A Redoubt is a campaign problem, not a casual destination.
Tone at the table
The Lethean Age is dark wonder, not grim routine. The world is dangerous and ignorant of its past, but it is alive. A working relic is not a joke. A cargo-cult ritual is not stupidity. A settlement's taboo may be the only surviving operating manual for the machine that keeps its water clean.