Lethean Age Setting Handbook
The Setting Handbook records the world's actual history, the actual nature of its phenomena, and the regional facts that the surface peoples have lost, forgotten, or never knew. It is the out-of-character canon bible. The Player's Handbook presents the in-setting view of the same world. The two are paired projections of one canon, written for two different audiences.
The regulations remain authoritative for exact adjudication until a handbook section is reviewed and promoted. The handbook may repeat and reorganize canon so it can be read as a single book rather than as a collection of implementation documents.
How to use these files
Read only what you need.
| File | Use it for |
|---|---|
| 01-using-this-book.html | Audience, voice, tone, the Forgetting as a design conceit, how the spoiler boundary works. |
| 02-the-true-history.html | The ten ages: Expansion, Flourishing, Upvolving, Mending, Saturation, Redoubts, Withdrawal, Catastrophe, Long Dark, Present. |
| 03-the-substrate.html | What the miasma actually is, the eight colors, the persistence of old-world infrastructure, psionics as Substrate symbiosis. |
| 04-the-peoples.html | The Splintering: Eloi, Morlocks, Beastfolk; the Unremembered Peoples: Rur, Androids, Cyborgs; the Vril-ya in their true posture; the branches of sapience. |
| 05-the-land.html | The Broken Moon, the Fallen Redoubts as planetary defense platforms, biomes and miasma weather, ruins as geological strata. |
| 06-project-challenger-and-the-law.html | The Poison Belt, what survived, the mental factions, The Law as social engineering, the Challenger legacy. |
| 07-pacific-northwest.html | The PNW after deep time, the Everett enclave, the Tenfold Mayfair, the Verdant Glass economy. |
| 08-bibliography.html | The literary lineage: Wells, Hodgson, Bulwer-Lytton, Doyle, Shelley, Jefferies, Flammarion, Capek, Gamma World. |
What this handbook assumes
- You are reading as a World Master, a designer, or a player who has chosen to be spoiled.
- The truths recorded here are not available to player characters by default; they are discovered fragment by fragment in play.
- Continuity errors in the deep timeline are canon: somebody with more power than sense pushed a button they did not understand.
- The world is physical and old. Nothing in it is supernatural. The strangeness is engineering nobody alive understands.