The Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest is the first regional canon to be developed for the Lethean Age. The geography is the real-world Puget Sound and Cascadia, projected through the Catastrophe's tidal disruption, the Broken Moon's reshaped coastlines, and the geological-time persistence of Lattice-maintained infrastructure. The Everett enclave is the worked-up settlement and the introductory adventure module. The rest of the region is sketched here to give Everett a hinterland, not to commit to canon that has not been earned by play.
The region after deep time
Puget Sound is not the Puget Sound the old world knew. The Broken Moon's altered mass and orbit produce tides that no pre-apocalyptic chart could predict, and the regional coastline shows it. Some old shorelines are dry bedrock kilometers from the current waterline. Other old uplands are now intertidal. The deep navigation channels the old world dredged have silted and re-cut on their own schedules. The Sound's water is brackish where it should not be and fresh where it should be salt. Mariners learn this generation by generation; the old maps, when they surface from ruins, are useful only as starting points.
The Cascades are still the Cascades. The mountain spine has not moved on human timescales, and the rainshadow it casts across eastern Washington is still the dominant climatological feature of the region. The rainshadow has become a miasma-shadow as well. The wet western slope carries one nanite profile (green-rich, blue-active, biologically saturated); the dry eastern shadow carries another (red-baseline, often violet-touched, with a sparse but stable Miasm). The boundary moves seasonally with the Winds. A traveler who crosses a Cascade pass crosses two ecosystems and two channeling environments at once.
Mount Rainier still stands south of Puget Sound, larger now than the old world's records show it (eruptive history through the elapsed time is unrecorded). The mountain is a candidate Redoubt host -- a vertical structure on a vertical scale, with the right magnetic signature for a buried defense platform -- but the canon has not committed. World Masters running the region may treat the mountain as a sleeping Redoubt, a Vril-ya access shaft, both, or neither.
The Olympic Peninsula is a region of dense miasma-weather isolation. The peninsula's old-growth temperate rainforest has continued to grow for geological time, sustained by the Saturation-era Substrate that infiltrated the soil and the trees both. What the peninsula looks like in the present is unknown to anyone living east of it. It is candidate Eloi territory: sealed enclaves in miasma-rich pockets, populations optimized for an environment they cannot leave. Or it may be empty. The canon has not committed.
The Everett enclave
Everett is the worked-up settlement of the region. The real-world city sits in Washington state, roughly thirty miles north of old Seattle, on the eastern shore of Puget Sound. The Lethean Age Everett is what is left of that city after deep time.
In Book 7 sec. 7.1.1.3's typology, the Everett enclave is a Carehold: a settlement anchored by the memory of a hospital, where the local Lattice favors medical Seeds. The folk do not call it that. They call the place by inherited local names and by the felt function of the place. In the OOC narrator voice this handbook uses, the anchor is the broken structures of an old-world hospital, and the small cluster of surviving municipal buildings around it; the folk-facing name for that anchor remains an open canon question (see the end of this chapter). What the folk do know is that the place mends.
In the rubble of old Everett, then, among the broken healing-place and the small cluster of surviving municipal buildings, there is a relatively safe enclave. It is not a great city. It is a hard-won pocket of order surrounded by ruin, industrial danger, scavenger roads, unstable relics, and things that move when they should not.
The Carehold's anchor remains the heart of the enclave. The municipal buildings form its bones. The surrounding rubble is its shield.
The people of Everett survive because they understand three facts:
- The walls are not enough.
- The world outside is terrible, but necessary.
- Those who can go out and return with value are worth more than those who merely endure.
Adults, non-adults, and Adventurers
The enclave distinguishes between ordinary adults and those permitted to become Adventurers.
An ordinary adult may work, marry, repair, plant, guard, barter, and serve within the enclave. They are part of the community, but they are not free to come and go as they please. Their place is inside the known safety of the walls.
An Adventurer is different. An Adventurer is an adult who has proven that they can leave the enclave, survive the outer world, and return with something that makes the enclave stronger. Adventurers are permitted to come and go because their going has been proven useful. They are not merely wanderers. They are licensed risk.
The Tenfold Mayfair
The Tenfold Mayfair is the Everett enclave's spring rite of becoming. It is held on the spring balance day, when day and night are equal. The enclave also performs a corresponding rite on the autumn balance day. Together, the two rites divide the year into seasons of testing, preparation, judgment, and return.
The challenge
The candidate must leave the safety of the enclave and survive outside its walls for one full moon. Survival alone is not enough. To be recognized as an Adventurer, the candidate must return with tribute judged by the council of elders to be Tenfold.
The traditional phrase:
Bring back the means for ten to live.
A Tenfold tribute must provide for more than the candidate. It must be worth the risk of allowing one person to leave the protected order of the enclave and return as someone with the right to come and go. The candidate must prove that their freedom is not a drain on the enclave. Their freedom must become a source of strength.
What "Tenfold" means
Tenfold does not always mean exactly ten people for exactly one day, or ten meals, or ten weapons, or ten bodies. Tenfold means that the tribute must be capable of sustaining, protecting, powering, reproducing, informing, or otherwise improving the enclave at a scale beyond the individual. A thing may be Tenfold if it does one of the following:
- Sustains roughly ten people.
- Defends roughly ten people.
- Enables roughly ten people to work, travel, recover, or survive.
- Permanently increases the enclave's ability to provide for itself.
- Creates a durable advantage that clearly exceeds the value of the candidate alone.
Approved tribute -- remembered examples
The following are remembered examples of tribute that satisfied the Tenfold Mayfair. They are recited at the rite as both teaching and inspiration.
| Tribute | Why it was Tenfold |
|---|---|
| Six refugees of breeding age | Future population, labor pool, marriage prospects, and genetic resilience. The elders count future hands, future children, future kinship bonds, and future defenses, not only mouths to feed. |
| Shoulder staff of a killing black ray | Not valued as a weapon for one fighter, but for changing the balance of defense. A single bearer could stop a monster, break a charge, or deter a raid. Its presence protected more lives than its bearer's own. |
| Water-cleansing device | The canonical example of repeatable yield beating one-time haul. A repeatable source of clean water satisfies Tenfold immediately. Recited at every Mayfair. |
| Speaking torso of a metal-man | Could not walk, could not fight, was still accepted. Translation, negotiation, warning, and recovery of lost speech were judged Tenfold. (Canonically an Android remnant; the cognitive Lattice persists when mechanical components fail.) |
| True wealth | Not coins. Portable capability: weapons, working cells, usable ammunition, live Verdant Glass, repairable relics, beasts, medicines, functioning tools, or enough high-quality material to change the enclave's prospects. |
| Herd of strong-back quadrupeds | A stallion, two mares, and a colt. Breeding stock, haulage, trade capacity, field labor, and military mobility. Living systems that reproduce are valued more highly than one-time hauls. |
| Floating ball of energy and its prod | A wonder you cannot operate is not Tenfold. The prod made it usable. Controlled energy is value: light, heat, intimidation, power, ritual significance, possible defense. |
| Personal transformation into a power | A candidate whose personal powers have become powerful enough to protect, sustain, or materially strengthen the enclave may be accepted as their own Tenfold tribute. Rare; ordinary toughness is not enough. |
| Signal tower alliance | An allied settlement is a major tribute. A functioning signal link is warning, trade, diplomacy, rescue, marriage, military aid, and shared knowledge. The enclave values anything that makes it less alone. |
Rejected tribute -- remembered failures
These are also recited at the rite, as warnings.
| Tribute | Why it failed |
|---|---|
| Devices that worked once | A flicker is not a future. |
| Wonders no one can understand | The elders do not reward mystery by itself. Mystery must be harnessed. |
| Flying armor that ceased to move | Power that cannot be sustained is spectacle, not tribute. |
| False medicines and dead preparations | Confidence is not efficacy. The world is full of old containers with confident markings. |
| Insufficient bulk wealth | A useful armload is not Tenfold. A cartload might be. A route to a continuing supply is better. |
| Insufficient personal power | A bad-ass is not enough. A shield for ten may be. |
The elders' judgment
The elders judge Tenfold tribute by asking: does it work, does it last, does it scale beyond the bearer, can the enclave use it, can it be defended, can it be repaired or reproduced, does it create future value, does it endanger the enclave more than it helps. Repeatable output is preferred over one-time gain. A tribute is stronger if it benefits the enclave even when the candidate is absent. A dangerous tribute may still be approved if its value is great enough and its danger can be managed.
Folk sayings
- "Bring back the means for ten to live."
- "One leaves. Ten must gain."
- "A brave fool comes home empty."
- "A weapon is not Tenfold until it guards more than its hand."
- "Water is always Tenfold if it keeps coming."
- "A road may feed more mouths than a harvest."
The rite as living Project Challenger ideology
The Tenfold standard's underlying value -- foresight, durable advantage, scalable benefit, preparation over raw capability -- is precisely Project Challenger's faction value (see Project Challenger and The Law). The Everett enclave is a plausible Project-Challenger-descended community, even though no living member of the enclave remembers the name "Project Challenger" or its original ideology's source. The rite is the faction's value made into a social ritual. The Mayfair is what Project Challenger looks like after generations of being practiced rather than preached.
Verdant Glass
The people of Everett know that certain pieces of old glass -- black slabs, bright cards, broken plates, smooth relics -- can persuade the Lattice to do useful things. They do not call this computation. They do not know what a smartphone, tablet, PDA, or data card was. They call these things Verdant Glass because the best of them coax life, water, growth, warmth, medicine, signal, or other useful order from the invisible world.
Most glass is dead. Some remembers. A few still want to grow.
What Verdant Glass actually is
The OOC view: Verdant Glass is salvaged pre-apocalyptic computational hardware that still interfaces with the Substrate at the Lattice layer. The folk distinguish two folk-categories that mirror two Substrate layers. The Winds of Change are what most Wind-callings channel (Bloodborn, Sage, Mage of the Weave); the Verdant Glass / Lattice is what the Cultivators tend and what the ancient tech runs on. Both are real and both can look wondrous, but they behave differently. The Winds are weather. The Lattice is machinery. The folk learn to feel the difference even when they cannot name it.
Seeds, Slates, and Totems
The small, card-like forms are Seeds: immutable orchestration patterns. A Seed contains one fixed pattern. If it lives, it does what it does and nothing else. It may call dew. It may grow fruit. It may teach a machine to print bandage film. It may wake a signal node. It may do something stranger. A working Seed can be tested, named, priced, traded, and judged.
The larger handheld forms are Slates: mutable orchestrators. A Slate can host, read, tune, combine compatible Seeds, adjust parameters, display old-world information in incomprehensible ways, or modify how nearby miasma responds. A Slate is more powerful than a Seed and more temperamental. A working Slate is a portable workshop of possibility.
A Verdant Totem is a working Seed, Slate, or paired device that organizes the Lattice into doing something repeatable and useful. A Totem may condense water, grow fruit, produce edible fungus, stabilize soil, make medical film, amplify signal, or perform another reproducible benefit. The folk category is practical, not taxonomic. If it reliably makes the miasma do a useful thing, people call it a Totem.
Totem classes
| Class | Mechanism | Dependency |
|---|---|---|
| Local Totem | Uses a nearby host device: printer, emitter, hydroponic chamber, medical fabricator, signal relay, purifier, or other relic infrastructure. | High output and precision, but host-dependent. If the host fails, the Seed may remain valuable but cannot express its full function. |
| Solar Totem | Self-contained and light-dependent. Internal systems use sunlight or bright ambient energy to power low-yield orchestration. | Slow but trusted because it does not require settlement-scale machinery. Darkness or deep weather can interrupt it. |
| Broadcast Totem | Draws on long-range miasma fields, ancient signal infrastructure, or continuing old-world transmissions. | Location-sensitive. May work in Everett, weaken in Tacoma, fail in a dead zone, or become dangerous near a Redoubt. |
| Living Totem | Partially biological or bonded with a living host. May regenerate, adapt, or reproduce limited function. | Valuable but never casual. May drift, mutate, become handler-dependent, or develop behaviors that resemble hunger. |
Yield, quirks, and failure
Yield is the repeatable output of a functioning Totem: liters of clean water per day, edible mass per week, medical dressings per moon, signal range extension, soil area reclaimed per season, power stabilized per cycle. A Totem has commercial value only when its yield can be tested and described. Unknown wonders are not currency. They are gambles.
A revived Seed or repaired Totem almost always has a quirk: produces only in sunlight, requires periodic handling, attracts insects, produces a useful output with an unpleasant byproduct, drifts unless retuned, interferes with nearby Totems. A quirk does not make a Totem worthless. It makes it real.
Common failure modes are drift (output changes over time), burnout (component or Lattice layer exhausts), interference (two Totems degrade each other), dependency failure (host fails, sunlight disappears, field drops, Living Totem mishandled), and misinterpretation (judged dead because no one knows its required conditions). Cultivators are valuable because they find the hidden condition.
The Verdant economy
The post-collapse Everett economy is not based on coinage, precious metals, or symbolic money. It is based on portable capability. A thing has value because it keeps people alive, powers useful devices, produces food, water, medicine, shelter, or information, enables travel, defense, trade, repair, or communication, or can be exchanged across settlements because its output is understood. The most respected forms of value are those that produce repeatable benefit over time.
Dead glass is bulk. Live code is wealth.
Recognized currency categories
The Everett model recognizes four broad currency categories. (This diverges from the Book 7 sec. 7.2.1 Crystals + Scrap canon and is an open canon question for resolution; see the bottom of this chapter.)
| Category | What belongs | Trade role |
|---|---|---|
| Energy currency | Chemical, Solar, Atomic, Fusion, Crystal, and Living Cells. Also charged receivers or portable power units when locally trusted. | Strongest cross-settlement currency because nearly every settlement needs power and output can be tested. |
| Ammunition currency | Arrow / Bolt, Small, Large, Ordnance, and Energy ammunition classes. | High-liquidity field currency for small exchange, guard payment, scavenger contracts, dangerous-road barter, emergency trade. |
| Verdant currency | Live Seeds, Live Slates, Verdant Totems, Warm Glass lots, Greenhouse-certified glass. | Life currency. Often inconvenient for minor trade, but among the highest forms of wealth because it produces future value. |
| Bulk salvage | Dead Glass, broken Slates, scrap metal, skins, building materials, cable, tools, relic fragments, other useful material. | Not worthless, but rarely Tenfold unless present in large quantities or tied to a reliable source. |
For the trade mechanics available at the table -- power cell classes, wealth, appraisal, and Trade and The Law -- see the Player's Handbook: Equipment and Trade.
Ammunition attunement
Ammunition in the Everett economy is understood by class, not precise caliber. Given ambient miasma, an appropriate weapon, and roughly one hour, ammunition of the correct general class can be coaxed into compatibility with a specific item. The Miasm adjusts dimensions, fit, propellant behavior, casing interfaces, energy frequency, or other compatibility factors. It does not create mass from nothing. Small attunes to small-class weapons. Large attunes to large-class weapons. Energy attunes to energy weapons. Ordnance remains ordnance. This is why ammunition is liquid: it is portable, divisible, immediately useful, and not trapped by obscure old-world manufacturing standards.
Greenhouses
A Greenhouse is a controlled repair, revival, and tuning environment for Verdant Glass. It may include old-world machinery, miasma lenses, humidity chambers, light arrays, signal cages, living fungal matrices, or relic interfaces. Many are warm, humid, bright, sealed, overgrown, and dangerous.
They don't fix Seeds. They grow them back to life.
A Greenhouse Keeper holds political weight comparable to a warlord, a medic, or a gate captain. Greenhouses do not manufacture Verdant Glass in the ordinary sense. They help dead glass grow back toward function. A Cultivator uses a Greenhouse to sort Cold Glass from Warm Glass, revive Dead Seeds, stabilize Live Seeds, repair Slates, tune Totem outputs, identify dependencies, measure yield, reduce dangerous quirks, and interpret whether a device is a tool, a hazard, or both. Cultivators cannot make anything from nothing, cannot guarantee revival, cannot always understand a restored Seed, cannot always prevent drift, and cannot always repair a Slate whose core Lattice has failed. This uncertainty is why Verdant Glass retains a salvage economy.
Social roles
| Role | Function |
|---|---|
| Scavenger | Recovers glass, cells, ammunition, tools, relics, and host machines. Feeds the economy by bringing dead possibility into places where it might be revived. |
| Cultivator | Converts uncertainty into value -- appraises, revives, stabilizes, tunes, interprets. Settlements with Cultivators are richer than settlements without them. |
| Elder | Judges Tenfold tribute and determines whether a candidate's offering strengthens the enclave enough to justify Adventurer status. Their judgments shape the future economy and population. |
| Adventurer | The caste permitted to leave and return. Social purpose: acquire Tenfold value from beyond the walls. |
| Trader | Establishes exchange ratios among cells, ammunition, Verdant Glass, salvage, beasts, food, water, services, and information. |
| Greenhouse Keeper | Controls access to the rare machines that can revive glass. Politically as significant as a warlord, medic, or gate captain in many settlements. |
Folk sayings
- "Dead glass is bulk. Live code is wealth."
- "Most glass is dead. Some remembers. A few still want to grow."
- "They don't fix Seeds. They grow them back to life."
- "A sack feeds today. A Seed feeds tomorrow."
- "If it will not wake, weigh it."
- "Warm glass lies less than traders."
The Cultivator
The Cultivator is the Lattice-pure calling and the Everett enclave's distinctive class tradition. Where Mages, Sages, and Bloodborn channel the Winds of Change (the miasma's volatile power-flow), the Cultivator works the Lattice -- the stable, programmable data-dimension underlying the Substrate.
A Cultivator does not cast spells. A Cultivator wakes the dead, tunes the half-alive, commands the functioning, and repairs the broken. Their craft is technical, deliberate, and slow. Their power is reproducible. The folk call them "gardeners of reality." Some Mages call them rivals. Some Sages call their craft Lawless. Most enclaves call them by name.
The Cultivator's primary stat is proposed as INT (the Lattice rewards comprehension, not innate channeling), with WIS as a defensible alternative if the class leans more "interpretive gardener" than "engineer." The class is INT-keyed in the working draft and pairs naturally with Android and Cyborg origins, since both of those types have native Lattice access through their Lattice architecture.
The Cultivator is a candidate thirteenth class. Confirmation as a permanent addition to the roster is an open canon question. The class and its proposed subclasses (Seedsmith, Slatekeeper, Greenhouse Keeper, Totem-Wright, Cyber-Cultivator) are documented in the Player's Handbook class files.
Other regional locales (sketch)
The following are mentioned by the Everett source material or implied by the regional geography, but have not yet been worked up as canon. Treat them as scaffolding for future development, not as binding description.
| Locale | Sketch |
|---|---|
| Old Seattle | Ruined, large, immediately south of Everett. Mixed strata, Mending-era and Saturation-era construction interleaved. Redoubt presence unconfirmed. |
| Tacoma | South of Seattle. Mentioned in the Verdant Glass canon as a place where Broadcast Totems weaken (compared to Everett). Possibly a different Miasm field. |
| The Cascade passes | The historical trade corridors between the wet and dry sides of the range. Migration routes, scavenger roads, faction-disputed. |
| Mount Rainier | Candidate Redoubt host or Vril-ya access shaft (open canon). |
| The Olympic Peninsula | Dense miasma-weather isolation. Candidate Eloi enclave territory. |
| The signal tower alliance | Mentioned in the Tenfold tribute records as a tribute category. Implies at least one and possibly several functioning signal-tower nodes in the broader region. Locations not yet fixed. |
Open regional questions
- Mount Rainier as a Redoubt site, a Vril-ya access shaft, both, or neither -- pick one before the first session that takes characters near the mountain.
- Verdant Glass economy reconciliation with Book 7 sec. 7.2.1 canon (Crystals + Scrap). Three reconciliation paths are flagged in the Everett source; not yet resolved.
- Whether the Cultivator promotes into the main class roster as a permanent thirteenth class.
- The geographic reach of the Everett-style Verdant orchestration culture. Is it Puget Sound only? Cascadia-wide? Does it extend to the Eloi (if any) in the Olympics?
- "Mayfair" canon spelling -- found-word coinage (preferred), corruption of "May Fair," or borrowed neighborhood name. Default per source: (a) found-word.
- Autumn balance rite -- parallel rite, counter-rite (accounting of the spring cohort), or something else. The source mentions it but does not define it.
- What happens to a candidate who returns alive but without Tenfold tribute. Send them back out next year, demoted permanently, banned from the rite -- the source does not say.
- Whether the Tenfold rite formally accepts Android and Rur candidates (almost certainly yes, but worth a one-liner confirming once the rite is canonized).
- The folk-facing name for the Everett Carehold. Book 7 sec. 7.1.1.3 establishes Carehold as the OOC typology; the Everett source uses "the hospital" as narrator-facing shorthand. The settlement needs a folk name (an exonym or local toponym) that the residents actually use.
Cross-references
- The Land -- broader geography, the Broken Moon's tidal effects, the Fallen Redoubts framing for Rainier.
- Project Challenger and The Law -- the rite's ideological lineage and the Law as the backdrop the Mayfair operates within.
- The Substrate -- the Lattice and Winds distinction the Verdant Glass economy depends on.
- The Peoples -- Eloi as candidate Olympic Peninsula population, Android and Cyborg synergy with the Cultivator class.