DYSTOPIA RISING EVOLVED (3.0)

A guide to Genre and our major themes

A Post Apocalyptic Setting

Generations ago and hundreds of years, civilization fell. The nature of The Fall, to most, remains a mystery; and the illuminated few who know enough to posit at its underpinnings are among the brightest and most brilliant minds of an age. The skeletons of highrises perforate the skin of the Greater Wastes like so many leperous hairs. Between them lie cities overtaken by obscene greenery, vast dunes of vitrified sands and the rough-shod sanctums of wasteland warlords whose underlings stalk the trade routes between settlements. The air is thick with old pollution and, were it not for the mutation granted to the Survivors in the shadowy annules of history, complex life would be impossible for the denizens of this ruined world.

“Four-hundred years since The Fall, but it took the years since to Lose it All.”

EXPERIENCE AND VISUAL DESIGN CUES

In our setting we enforce the Post Apocalyptic by highlighting the disconnect between the halcyon past and the painful present. Nothing is new, and what is newly made is weathered. Ancient synthetics, undecomposed in the hundreds of years since The Fall, have been repurposed by people who have no context for their original design. Worked metal, like license plates and street signs, are the Survivor’s most basic armor against the threats of the Greater Wastes. Homes, warehouses and shopping malls are either rotten to their foundations - or look nothing like their Pre Fall facades; rebuilt over hundreds of years by generations who, iteratively, forgot how their ancestors did it.

THE HOPEPUNK GENRE

After every nightfall, a sunrise. And after every plague, a renaissance. Hopepunk is the notion that the world is harsh and unforgiving, but that we are equipped to deal with horrors beyond our scope if we band together and enforce change. The gritty, unyielding belief that the world will get better the longer we work at it, matches the gravity of the setting’s horror; and rises to meet it. Hopepunk should be the balancing element to Survival Horror in the genre of our Post Apocalypse.

.“If we arrive at Freedom awash in gore, still stand we upon her shores.”

EXPERIENCE AND VISUAL DESIGN CUES

In our setting, we enforce Hopepunk by reclaiming the broken pieces of the fallen world and ingeniously repurposing for life in the post-apocalypse. This can look like anything from ramshackle buildings made from reclaimed wood, to clever applications of synthetic textiles in a costume. Be it spark-plug jewelry, rocket-engine trains, licence-plate armor or machetes made from old lawn mower blades; the Hopepunk does not waste the resources left to us by those who failed. They employ them liberally and creatively so that this time we might succeed. Hope punk also is enforced in our setting by the community that the survivors have built. Much like the physical resources of the past, our forebears and ancestors left us tools and skills to build our fellow strains to be better. Be it by blade, conflict, or breaking bread at the same table. Survivors are always looking to push the world through the low moments, to bring about the Sunrise.

THE GRAVECORE GENRE

Against a backdrop of struggle and strife in the post-apocalypse, looms the underpinning logic of the Dystopia Rising genre. Fundamentally, that logic is: Imprint Defines Reality and Imprint is Stored In The Infection. The personal narrative, the core identity of the self, determines what returns from the Morgue after we die, and that blueprint is contained in the complex organic structures of our brains and the greater network of information that is the Mortis Amaranthine. This logic extends across the entire setting. Our vision of something, our belief, manifests insidiously from the Grave. We are not separate from the Mortis Amaranthine, we lurk on its bespotted shoreline. The Mortis Amaranthine absorbs our bodies after death, reclaiming our bones and our blood and our memories to some great bank of information stored in the mycolic deep structures of the Infection, and then it churns us back out again via a complex system of dedicated structures; called Morgues. Each time we die and pass through the Mortis Amaranthine, we lose some integral part of our personhood, our narrative, and we return changed and challenged by what we saw there. This process, interpreted by hundreds of scientists and thousands of prophets, is the cyclic fate of all who live and die in the Greater Wastes. When the cost of rebirth becomes higher than the sundered mind of the dead can afford, however, they cease to exist as entities capable of making choices independently from the Mortis Amaranthine. Instead, when they return via the Morgues they do so eternally as deeply imperfect copies, as stumbling shuffling undead, commonly referred to as zombies, their personalities absorbed into the unknowable gestalt whole - rendered snarling predators occupied only with the consumption of biomass.

Lurking within the Mortis Amaranthine lies something almost like intelligence. Referred to as Grave Minds, their distinction from the Mortis is generally only understood by specialists. But if the Mortis Amaranthine is the sweeping river in which the imprints of all who have ever died whorl without form or complexity into a blind eternity - then the Gravemind is the hyperconcentrated imprint that drift and spin through the greater turbulence of the Amaranthine, drawn together, by circumstance or some greater logic, to complexity.

“Take my bones and take my blood, take my breath, my sight and skin, Take it all and make it mud, and build me up from clay again.”

EXPERIENCE AND VISUAL DESIGN CUES

In setting, we enforce the Gravecore genre by highlighting the visceral, industrial, inhuman and otherworldly. Psionic crystals, calcified biomass that grow in the brains of grave-touched mutants, are rendered into psychedelic drugs by common and greedy men. The Gravemind scene, the experience of passing through the Mortis Amaranthine after death but before rebirth, is often reminiscent of a DMT overdose - all confusing iconography, bloodstained pipework, harsh and inorganic colors that tread the fine line between the industrial and the biological. Memories, faded and ill-kept records, are replayed endlessly in the vast but unthinking theater of the dead. The Mortis is too complex, and too huge, for a single ego to comprehend. And so in this liminal space, the dead parse infinity as anecdotes of their own lives, parables from stories, and conversations with entities beyond their ken.