A world design document.
New Terra is the desert remnant of a planet once simply called Terra. Roughly four thousand years ago, a globally connected, resource-devouring human civilization was reduced to ash — its numbers crashed to the tens of thousands, its infrastructure obliterated, its knowledge severed so completely that the average person alive today knows about as much of that lost age as a seventeenth-century European knew of ancient Mesopotamia. What survives of it survives as ruin: junkyards, broken foundations, and fragments of writing that are half-technology, half-scripture to the people who find them.
Terra was never a purely human stage, however. Two other peoples reached its surface from elsewhere in the sky, long before humanity climbed back out of its post-cataclysm caves, and have been fighting each other over the same stretch of swamp for longer than any living human record extends. New Terra, as it exists today, is the layered result of at least three separate catastrophes — one human, two off-world — settling into an uneasy, only partially rebuilt present.
Four thousand years ago, something ended the old civilization — "reduced humanity to ash," in the words of survivors' own oldest accounts. What that something actually was is not recorded anywhere that has survived; only its effects are known. Population collapsed into the tens of thousands. Global communication and shared memory were lost outright. For most of the intervening millennia, humanity existed as scattered, feral survivors clinging to the wreckage of a world it no longer understood.
Only in the last few hundred years has this begun to reverse, in a period known as the Geolithic Era — a compound of geodesic and Neolithic, describing a stone-age society rebuilding itself tool by tool, except that its most important "tools" are the fragments of a single surviving pre-collapse engineering text. That text — attributed, in the oldest surviving copies, to a figure named Buckminster Fuller — was not read by its finders as an engineering manual. It was read as revelation. Its central, physical miracle is the geodesic dome: a structure capable of sustaining life and vegetation in New Terra's harshest deserts, and the single technology responsible for every meaningful population increase humanity has managed since the fall.
Dome-building is not a secular craft. It is administered by an order called the technomancers — half engineering guild, half priesthood, whose rituals are inherited synergetics terminology worn smooth into liturgy, whose cathedrals are the domes themselves, and whose most precious relics are any surviving pages of the Fuller text. Access to domes is, functionally, access to population growth itself, which makes the technomancer order one of the most powerful factions on the continent while it quietly presents itself as mere craftsmen.
New Terra's known landmass forms a rough bowl, ringed almost entirely by mountains. Within it:
Bipedal, adaptable, and numerically dominant, though not always culturally dominant — several major cities and institutions belong wholly or partly to non-humans. Every human alive today carries vitiligo: not a disease, but a permanent, species-wide genetic scar left by the population bottleneck of four thousand years ago. A crash to tens of thousands of survivors is exactly the kind of event that fixes a trait in an entire descendant population regardless of any advantage it confers — meaning every human, without exception, carries visible physical proof of how close their species came to vanishing outright.
Human civilization draws its naming and mythic architecture from ancient Sumer — Urok, Bad-Tibira, and Eridu are the oldest cities of the old world's own founding myth, worn onto New Terra's map as if humanity, given a second chance at civilization, unconsciously reached for the very first names civilization ever used. Human society is factionalized rather than unified: pacifists, militarists, and scientific innovators exist as named, competing strands of the same species, and the balance between them shifted decisively after first contact with the Gourdkin, when an entire hidden nation of small, sophisticated, sustainability-minded people demonstrated that scarcity-driven conflict was not, in fact, the only way to live. That contact is credited with sparking the pacifist movement and the sustainability-and-renewable-energy ethic that now runs alongside the technomancers' dome-building project.
Grave Keepers, a human warrior class, paint their faces in imitation of a skull as tribute to the cataclysm — very possibly a deliberate echo of the vitiligo every human already carries, foregrounding in ritual paint the same scar the species wears on its skin every day without remarking on it.
Seven-foot-tall feline humanoid exiles, not native to Terra at all: their true homeworld was destroyed, and what remains of their people arrived on this planet carrying nothing but their gods, their dead, and their language — Wampustongue, or Marekaj Pale, a hybrid of Haitian Creole and English. Their culture reads as elvish sensibility grafted onto real-world indigenous and diasporic tradition: a long-displaced, fading people whose reverence for ancestors and for the sun is likely aimed, at least in part, at a sky and a homeworld that no longer exist anywhere they can see them. Their nomadic hamlet lifestyle, their reluctance to build anything as permanent as a true settled empire, and their instinct to keep to themselves even while trading and occasionally integrating with humans, all read as the behavior of a people who have already lost one permanent home and are wary of fully committing to another.
Wampusfolk are gifted potion-brewers ("Petyon Dlo Navèt"), textile-weavers producing intricately patterned rugs, tents, and armor passed down across generations, and warriors who see themselves as predators rather than prey. Their spirituality is Vodou-derived, oriented around ancestor reverence, land-spirits, and solar ritual. Two classes are unique to them — the plant-and-nature-focused Botanist and the color-theory-based ranged attacker the Painter — and they share a third, the reclusive knowledge-gathering Hermit, with their oldest and bitterest enemy.
Also off-world in origin: the last roughly two thousand survivors of a single crashed vessel, brought down by a solar flare violent enough to trigger an electromagnetic pulse and permanently disable their technology. The crash caused catastrophic knowledge loss, and the Mothmen have never re-established contact with their homeworld. Their settlement, Nukuch, takes its name and much of its cultural sensibility from cosmic horror — a people whose surviving technology and aesthetic still carry the chrome, ray-gun-era optimism of a retro-futurist starship, now curdled over an unknown span of time into secrecy, dread, and half-forgotten forbidden knowledge. What outsiders experience as Mothmen reclusiveness is not, primarily, a cultural choice: it is the natural behavior of a people whose own history was largely erased in the crash, with genuinely little left even they can reliably tell you about themselves. Whatever advanced hardware the ship carried, disabled rather than destroyed outright, may still exist somewhere within Nukuch, unclaimed by anyone who fully understands it anymore.
Their war against the Wampusfolk over the Eridu Swamp began before humanity had even climbed back out of its post-cataclysm caves — meaning it has likely run longer than any human historical record on the continent, waged by two peoples who arrived from elsewhere, lost everything else, and kept only each other as an enemy. It is entirely possible that neither side any longer remembers why the war started; only that it continues.
A small-statured people whose true homeland, the Land of the Gourdkin, is an entire sovereign forested nation sealed north of the central mountains — a place so cut off from the rest of the continent that first contact with them was, from the human side, treated as nearly mythical. What humans generally encounter are expatriates: small diaspora populations doing xeriscaping and civic engineering work in cities like Bad-Tibira, and holding a real if quiet political seat — the gourdfolk league — alongside the gangs and technomancers who rule Urok-Kabur. Their cultural register reads as Wizard-of-Oz energy: a hidden, whimsical-coded civilization discovered by outsiders who had assumed their own harsher rules were simply how the world worked, and whose contact with the Gourdkin directly reorganized human ideology toward pacifism and sustainability. Their signature class, the Dunce, specializes in persuasion, buffs, and debuffs delivered through festival performance and theater — diplomats and entertainers as much as engineers, publicly unthreatening while privately influential, much like the nation they come from.
Not reptiles, but humans who fled underground during the original cataclysm and evolved reptilian traits through millennia of convergent evolution rather than descent from any lizard stock: scaly, blood-red skin from a diet of the abundant cave lizards they hunt, tall and powerfully built, and functionally blind, relying entirely on echolocation. They are organized into hierarchical, alpha-led pods of up to two hundred, with a primitive but genuine culture — blood-dyed cave art, stone tools, fire, burial of the dead, and likely coming-of-age rites — undercut by a hostility to all outsiders so total that they attack on sight. No fixed capital is recorded for them, plausibly because a blind, echolocating, deeply insular people organized into scattered pods simply has no need of one. They stand as one of the few dangers in New Terra that is native to the planet itself rather than an inheritance from off-world catastrophe.
Recorded only as rare, occasional sightings around Bad-Tibira. No homeland, culture, class, or history has yet surfaced for them anywhere on the continent — the single largest remaining blank in New Terra's map of its own peoples.
Urok-Kabur is ruled by no single sovereign, but by a standing tension between seven powerful gangs, the gourdfolk league, and the technomancer order — the latter of which controls dome access, and therefore population growth itself, while presenting outwardly as a craft guild rather than the city's true power behind the throne. Over the last two hundred years, this arrangement has taken Urok from thirty thousand residents to three hundred thousand, largely on the strength of alliances with the Wampusfolk, Gourdkin, and Mothmen.
Bad-Tibira, founded by the followers of the end — an apocalyptic or millenarian sect whose specific beliefs have not survived in any detail — governs itself communally, runs its own markets and food programs, and is hard-capped under ten thousand residents purely by its lack of geodesic domes: a population ceiling that is, in effect, a mark of religious and political distance from the Fullerite order in Urok rather than a simple resource shortfall.
Pyebwavi and Nukuch are two off-world exile capitals separated by a formally disputed border, locked in the oldest continuous conflict on the continent. The Land of the Gourdkin remains sovereign and largely unexplored by outsiders. A cross-racial military institution, the Guardsman School, trains candidates from multiple peoples — human and Wampusfolk recruits are recorded training side by side from childhood — culminating in a final duel between finalists for a limited number of guardsman positions, though the institution's formal relationship to any of the above governments remains unclear.
At least four distinct systems coexist on the continent. Wampusfolk practice an ancestor-and-solar Vodou-derived faith, very possibly oriented toward a homeworld sun that no longer exists in any sky they can see. Urok's nobility maintains a reverence cult around the honey bee and honey mead, treating the insect as a symbol of industry and unity and the mead itself as a luxury good reserved for the wealthy and powerful. The technomancer order administers a Fullerite doctrine treating a surviving pre-collapse engineering text as scripture and the geodesic dome as its central miracle. Bad-Tibira's founding ideology, the beliefs of the followers of the end, remain almost entirely unrecorded beyond the fact of the city's founding. Mothmen belief sits closer to inherited cosmic dread than to worship in any conventional sense — an unease, encoded into their culture, about exactly how much of their own history is simply gone and unrecoverable.
Wampustongue (Marekaj Pale) blends Haitian Creole and English and is the most linguistically developed language recorded on the continent; no comparably distinct human or Mothmen language has yet surfaced, which may simply reflect humanity's status as the setting's unmarked, default culture. Traditional Wampusfolk music and dance — compas, rara, konpa, played on accordion, washboard, electric guitar, bass, keyboard, and drum set — draws mixed-race crowds at venues like Mouye Sab in Bad-Tibira, alongside traditional wampusfolk breads and potions, evidence that Wampusfolk culture is not merely tolerated elsewhere but genuinely celebrated.
Wanda Roll, a three-eight-sided-dice-and-playing-card gambling game, was invented in Bad-Tibira's black markets and later spread to the Wampusfolk of the Eridu Swamp — a piece of cultural diffusion running along the same desert-to-swamp trade axis as everything else, and a game whose name is likely gallows humor about the very predator the region's caravans must survive to reach anyone at all. Urok's Violetta Fontenot Museum of Salvaged Art formally curates before-times artifacts — toys, cultural relics, scrap, notes, art, music, books — giving the setting an institutional, not merely folk, relationship with its own lost history.
Salvage remains the base resource layer of the human economy: the Junkyards and the Pipelands supply the raw material of the Geolithic revolution. Dome access, gatekept by the technomancer order, is the single scarcest and most politically valuable resource on the continent — more valuable than any weapon, since it alone determines whether a settlement's population can grow at all. Urok's flea market trades in spices, salvaged artifacts, crafts, and trinkets; honey mead functions simultaneously as a religious symbol, a luxury commodity, and a class marker among Urok's nobility; and Bad-Tibira runs a softer, more communal economy of markets and food programs alongside its black-market gambling underworld. Isolated pieces of genuinely superior Mothmen technology — disabled by the flare that downed their ship rather than destroyed outright — may still exist within Nukuch, unclaimed by any outside power and possibly not fully understood even by the Mothmen themselves.
The playable classes of New Terra double as a record of what each people values. Human classes — Roamer (motorcycle mechanics and low-tech augmentation), Card Summoner (holo-card creature binding), Technologist (Crowley-esque electrical mysticism), Crowbar (potion-fueled brute strength), Beekeeper (hive-mind swarm tactics), Grave Keeper (skull-painted, potion-boosted warriors honoring the cataclysm) — collectively paint humans as the continent's technologists, gamblers, and brute-force specialists. Wampusfolk-exclusive classes — Botanist and Painter — confirm a culture that values plant-craft, color, and artistic self-expression as much as combat. The gourdkin-exclusive Dunce confirms a people whose real influence runs through persuasion and performance rather than force. The Scribe, open to any race capable of literacy, decodes lost texts and uncovers hidden lore — the closest thing New Terra has to a formal historian class, and plausibly a natural rival or junior order to the technomancer priesthood itself. The Hermit, shared uniquely between Mothmen and Wampusfolk — the two combatant off-world exile peoples — stands as the one confirmed cultural bridge between otherwise warring nations: both sides, it seems, produce solitary knowledge-keepers, even if neither side can fully explain to the other why the fighting continues.