Alright, so, how do I break down a year-old, constantly-updating setting?
factions or races?
I guess I can do factions as I do races. don't ask where the animal people come from, that'd take all day.
All right, here goes.
*BIG INHALE*
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ the Sunset Republic is the largest and third oldest of the major factions, founded 13 years after the collapse and spanning from Oregon to Baja, Hawai'i to Vegas, with it's capital in Sacramento, where the President and Heavenly Guru rule, each equally powerful as part of an ancient peace treaty after a war, though tensions are high.
It's religion, the Way of Harmony, four great wisdoms: -the Wisdom of Atlantis, which is the secret power of the Motive Force and arcane technology. This one exists mainly to keep the Fulgurites from revolting. -the Wisdom of Lemuria, which is the power of herbs and meditation -the Wisdom of Mu, which is the destiny writ in the stars -and the Truest Wisdom, which is that every story and every myth is partly true, as reality is consensus. This one exists to keep the less politically-powerful religions from revolting.
the Sunset Republic is extremely diverse and consists largely of Therianthropes, human-mammal hybrids, such as catmen, dogmen, and others. Robots and bugmen exist, but are rare, with jellymen, psicines, and bushmen even rarer.
Much of it's culture takes elements from pre-Collapse east asian cultures, as Californa had taken in a large influx of Japanese immigrants a few years before the Collapse, alongside their historical love of asian culture, but in the 200 years the real history has been lost and the fact that the samurai and ninja protecting their elites where ever foreign is completely unknown to most.
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the Democractic Republic of Gasket is a powerful nation located over the scattered mounds of gravel thinly strewed across the plains that used to be Austin, and controlled much of old texas. They are built around the Grand Fabricator, a massive, sapient, completely-automated archeotech factory that can produce anything asked of it if supplied with materials. As a result, Gasket was a slave-holding dictatorship until a recent revolt overthrew the dictator and brought in a democractic, capitalistic system of governance.
Gasket City itself is basically hot gotham, being a very compact yet sprawling city, henned in from old walls to keep old barbarians out that have since past, narrow streets shadowed by towering brick banks, sleezy restaurants, dirty apartments, and fulgurite churches that serve only to channel the HEAT. The people consist largely of humans, though their old slave race, the Bushmen, also exist in large numbers, same is true for robots. Crime is rampant; organized syndicates, anarchist gangs, and corrupt officials rule the cities, whilst outlaws, counter-revolutionary slavers, and raider tribes poke and prod at the outskirts.
Outside of Gasket City, it's various frontier towns are largely independent and free to do as they please, as long as they further the elite's goals in restoring civilization to Texas. Many from the large cities nearer to the capital flew to the frontier, hoping for a life of freedom as a cowboy or ranger, but usually just end up as a tired farmhand with back pain.
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New Orleans is the most important city on the continent and is an all-devouring black hole of culture. Many nations have sought to conquer it and indeed may have, only to then discover a week later that they no longer own their ships, and then a month later realize that this is now their home, and then after a year they’re just one of the locals. New Orleans is a great beast that gobbles up people, food, water, and luxury goods, and a crucible where only the interesting, useful concepts and ideas of foreign cultures survive to fuse into its eternally refining alloy of society. It assimilates all it touches and cannot be stopped.
New Orleans is a hive city, as sea levels rose it, already sunken below sea level, built a great wall to keep the floodwaters out, preventing it from growing outwards and so instead, it grew tall. Now New Orleans is known as "The City that Leaves a Wake in the Clouds" and landlubbers who see it for the first time are awestuck and paralyzed by it's sheer majesty. Thousands are born in New Orleans, and thousands die, every single day. without pause, without interruption, without end, and it will continue, forever.
New Orleans' docks are a megastructures themselves, being home to hundreds of drydocks, ports, harbors, and wharfs where sailors, fishermen, merchants, and pirates dock and rest. Everything that exists can be found in the city markets. Every race that exists has a population in it's apartments, and it's so big and so ancient, not even it's rulers, the robotic Autocracts, know what exists buried in the muck and mire under the city roots, where the Old City used to be.
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The Fulgurites are one of the largest religions in the post-collapse United States. They are the cultural descendants of atheism before technology progressed far enough for real atheism to return and are behind much of the surviving knowledge. Their covenants are vital sources of knowledge of lost technology and are the patrons to many expeditions into old bunkers.
The Fulgurite Covenant worships the Motive Force, a distortion of the cycle of energy from two centuries of oral tradition, mismemory, and torn pages that’s been turned into a sort of omnipresent life energy that permeates all things. They believe that everything that operates under its own power, from squirrels to plasma cannons, possess a soul or spirit made out of a sliver of the Motive Force that flows through them, resulting in them being animistic pantheists. Due to their belief that all energy returns to the Motive Force, they also believe in a kind of reincarnation. When they pray to a piece of lost technology at a shrine, they are attempting to attune to it, awakening its dormant (or reviving it’s lost) spirit and allow it to conduct its blessed energy through them to grant guidance, knowledge, or fortune. Places like the Grand Fabricator or the depths of New Orleans are sacred spots and places of power, where the Motive Force is closest to earth.
-the Fulgurite Dynamic Laws are: 0: all things are equal to the Motive Force 1: The Motive Force is infinite and eternal, cycling through and powering all things. 2: Entropy will one day come to claim the universe and destroy all things. 3: The Motive Force seeks equilibrium, and those who horde or reject it shall face destruction.
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I'm cutting it off here, these four are the "need-to-know-for-the-setting-to-work" groups, so ask for more if you want, like the auto-nomads of the Great Plains, the great underground war between centipedes and ants that surface-folk know nothing about, the human hive mind in Seattle, ETC at your own digression.
