Modification:The Long Night

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Man ruled the solar system, once. In its grand epoch spanning thousands of years, Earth was the jewel of a great empire, its shining cities the capital of a vast civilization which stretched from the pitted surface of Mercury to the freezing depths of the Oort Cloud. But from the festering stagnancy of its millennia-long reign came resentment and ambition, culminating in its catastrophic end. From this arose a new age, an era of awe and horror incomprehensible to the common man, built upon the back of a new breed of scientific law scarcely understood even by its practitioners. Earth itself is unrecognizable, a broken world littered with a thousand dead nations and forgotten megastructures which obscure any trace of what was once a verdant oasis of natural life. The solar system is a haunted grave, the planets, moons, and even space itself strewn with the wreckage of long-dead peoples.

But this is all ancient history, long forgotten to the rising powers of the new Earth. They live in a different world entirely, an endless jungle of steel and carbon in which even the mightiest of cities are but mere drops in its ocean, in which even the greatest scientific achievements known to their ancient ancestors are but wheels and torches compared to the hypertechnological relics which they rely on to survive. Where mankind no longer rests at the summit of existence but submits to the authority of those who dare follow the path carved out by their forebears and seek to transcend the limits of mere biology. Where even posthuman demigods struggle for survival against ceaseless danger and overwhelming violence. A world in which the power of the individual once more reigns supreme, the ideals of equality and unity reduced to laughable fantasies. An era that waits with bated breath for its own end, and the rise of a new existence which will finally bring order to the anarchy and terror of a star system gone mad, or deliver the killing blow to what remains of intelligent life. But this terrible night of humanity's history will be long and harsh indeed, and only the greatest among the great stand a chance of bringing forth a new dawn.

What is The Long Night?

The Long Night is a total overhaul mod which takes the game Dwarf Fortress and transplants it into a post-apocalyptic scifi future where the fragmented descendants of humanity struggle to survive in the broken remains of an unrecognizeable earth, filled to the brim with genetically-altered monsters, rogue machines, warring states, and countless other threats. Central to the game experience is the use of nanotechne; a programmable, infinitely mutable form of matter which forms the foundation of every civilization, and the process of transcendence, through which individuals can cultivate internal nanotechne to develop new cybernetic augmentations, and slowly obtain an immortal posthuman body which can survive the chaos to come. Of course, for every such madman who would seek such a thing, a thousand more live as mortal humans and struggle every day to make ends meet. Play a mercenary scoundrel, a village of hydroponic farmers, a biomechanical mech pilot, a posthuman barbarian, and much more. Countless stories wait for you in the far future of pan-humanity.

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General Lore

The Great Solar Empire

The Great Solar Empire was the dominant civilization prior to the current era. Built from the ashes of countless civilizations and failed attempts at gene-forged supermen and mechanical gods, it would rise to dominate not just the Earth, but the other planets and moons of the solar system as well. Under its guidance, mankind knew untold prosperity and rose to heights previously undreamt of. But it was not a utopia. The Solar Empire was rife with corruption, discrimination, crime, terrorism, and chaos below its pristine surface, but so vast was its reach, populous its citizenry, and mighty its legions that the true breadth of its rot could not be accurately gauged by any but those in the highest positions of power, the elite of the elite who stood above the rest of mankind thanks to closely guarded secrets of mechanical augmentation and the finest of evolutionary retroviruses. Much has been forgotten of this period of history, as the digital archives which recorded it fell into disarray or were destroyed outright.

Earth itself was turned into a titanic, sprawling city, its original shape lost under layers of metal harvested from the asteroid belt. Entire ecosystems were relocated into artificial reserves the size of small countries, and many billions lived and died within its bowels. As it expanded across the solar system, the Empire was careful to ensure that no colony could survive without vital resources shipped to it from the home planet, in order to prevent the threat of independent polities from ever arising. Coupled with this were many millions of soldiers armed with top-of-the-line Exo-Suits, a type of power armor that could give one protection from most small arms fire and could only be defeated by either luck, another Exo-Suit-wearing soldier, or something beyond them in strength. This disparity in both force and resources allowed the Empire to rule unchallenged for many centuries, or perhaps even millennia. This was an era stagnant in some ways but vibrantly blossoming in others. Politically, little seem to change. Technologically, many things developed that were in the past seen as impossible. But it could not last.

The details of its fall, as well, are complex. Multiple factors caused its collapse, from external rebellion to internal strife, but chief among these, it is believed, was the phenomenon known as the Pseudosingularity. The Singularity is, of course, the theory that after a certain point the united technology and databases of man would converge into a spontaneous self-improving entity that would attain as close a state to godhood as we envision, leading to a future incomprehensible to us but is surely either terrible beyond measure or bliss beyond imagining. That is not what happened. If the Singularity can be considered the culmination of a civilization as it births a new, divine being, the Pseudosingularity was cancer spreading across a decrepit body. Advances in biotechnology and nanomechanical evolution allowed machinery and synthetic entities to evolve and reproduce in a manner similar to organic life, albiet slow enough so that such changes could be observed, understood, and if necessary, altered by their makers, so that man and its tools would grow together in knowledge and power. But as the Solar Empire began to grow decadent and frail, the knowledge to keep track of the cutting edge of these growing machines was slowly lost, and year by year the observers fell behind the pace of a city running wild, with no end goal in mind. And just like cancer, this unsustainable growth began to kill its host. Entire sectors would find themselves without food or water as the Pseudosingularity warped pipes and destroyed roads. Cities would be gunned down by their own automated security as AIs corrupted or failed to recognize those living there as citizens. The mass decay of infrastructure happened seemingly overnight, but was in truth merely the tipping point of decades of unregulated growth. By the time it had reached the point that even common citizens noticed the danger, it was far too late to stop it. Chaos and destruction ravaged Earth as the entire planet literally fell apart, barely held back from utter ruin by hasty countermeasures and in some cases surgical nuclear strikes on the most dangerous sectors. In the end, however, they could only mitigate the damage so that Earth remained livable, but little else. Swarms of nanomechanical builder mites would conduct basic repairs and keep what was left of the system more or less stable, and artificial ecosystems would be introduced to the surface to give organic life a better chance to thrive. But that was all. Nothing could be done to save the colonies, or re-understand the ever-growing technological systems which now expanded without supervision. Only the most obsessed and knowledgeable could barely keep up, tapping into the power of the world like ancient sages were said to have learned the secrets of the arcane arts. Humanity had entered a new dark age, one which may take thousands of years to recover from.

But if they could.

If something could survive this long night and rebuild the Great Solar Empire, against all odds and forged by the savage brutality of this era into the ultimate victor.

It would surely be something truly monstrous.

Antinirvanism

During the last era of the Great Solar Empire, many religions as we understood them had faded away under the increasing pressure of science and reason (not to mention the Empire's designs to remove any higher loyalty than the state), leaving only odd syncretic cults and harmless corporate-sponsored pseudo-faiths to placate the masses. However, existing on the fringes of society radical ideas were fomenting, ideas which would serve to drive a wedge through united pan-humanity and spark a long, bloody conflict. Originally known by many names, its basic philosophical tenets were rooted in a semi-esoteric quest for personal power, with believers seeking to train and test themselves to reach ever greater levels of strength and knowledge, even if it meant rejecting civilization and law entirely. In the past, such a belief system would be little more than a contrarian rabble-rousing thorn in the side of authority, but the advent of nanotechnological modification had changed the playing field of society in ways that even in those advanced times few could truly comprehend the significance of. In ancient times, if a person chose to forsake civilization or work alone against it, they would be defeated by or re-integrated into society, since no lone person or small group of people can perpetually stand up against an organized community of their peers. But with innovations in nanotechnology, 3D printing, bioengineering, and other sciences, it became possible for one human to sufficiently upgrade their body to the point that the social contract was no longer required for them to prosper, and they would have the ability to exist outside the organized systems that dominate conventional human life simply through having enough power to take what they needed. Antinirvanism codified and sanctified this discovery, associating it with the Vedic Asuras of ancient myth, the terrible warrior-kings who tried to conquer heaven itself for the sake of their own ego. Instead of taking their story as a parable of the importance of temperance and cohesion, the Asura themselves were glorified and seen as the ideal specimen of the new era, a demigod-like entity which lived for itself and was divorced from creation, beholden to none save those it deigned to acknowledge or with the power to suppress it. Combined with the way technology seemed to have given mankind the power to "reincarnate" into various lesser or stronger forms depending on their capabilities and resources, it was no surprise that other terminology of the old Vedic system was incorporated into the growing movement (and indeed, even today Vedic terminology is used to describe many posthuman concepts and entities out of respect for the humans who first developed the system and devised a means of speaking of it that was cloaked in metaphor and symbolism) as more similarities became apparent. The more esoteric believers (often the ones most talked about in news cycles) saw the road to bodily perfection and ultimate power as a spiritual journey as much as a physical one, and devised many forms of meditation, ritual, and prayer believed to enhance one's willpower and make them more suited for evolution. Others believed that as technology grew on its own through self-learning and self-improvement and became more incomprehensible, it would eventually make more sense to simply treat it as magic, with the reverence and caution that such a thing implies and the impossible heights of power it seemed to promise. In the era of the Long Night, it is this mindset which dominates most Posthuman cultures.

Some of the earliest adopters of Antinirvanism would also be the first to experiment with hereditary nanomachines, the gene-altering microbots that would allow the user to consciously improve and replace its biological processes, upgrade its nanomechanical innards and use them to replace flesh, and design memes and thoughtforms that alter the way it functions psychologically, it while also passing on those alterations to offspring, effectively forcing true Lamarckian evolution into reality. The goal, of course, was to attain the 'Asura-state' of becoming a powerful posthuman entity which could survive even the harshest conditions on its own and exist as a power unto itself. However, many would-be demigods would fall prey to their own shortcomings, fears, and insecurities, their overcautiousness or lack of foresight causing them to neglect maintaining their humanity in the quest for power. Without self-awareness and the subjective experience, a lineage of hereditary cyborgs invariably devolves into a feral and monstrous state, losing any chance of transcendence unless its distant descendants re-evolve sapient thinking on their own.

But some did succeed, of course. The Asura as we know them now are the culmination of Antinirvanistic thought and countless generations of deliberate techno-evolution, though like many philosophies it played out differently in reality than in theory. The social contract remained to an extent, but in posthuman society is focused primarily on the acquistion of power, material comforts, and accomplishing persoal goals rather than ensuring survival, a relatively easy task when you have a body that can metabolize just about anything and rip a man's throat out with your teeth. The additional resources required to produce an Asura keep the population too low to sweep across the earth, leading them to grit their teeth and engage in diplomacy with cultures they once would have thought of only as prey. That said, as the Asura (and other posthumans) reconnect with biological humanity it has been observed that some of the edge has come off of their nature. While they remain alien in many ways, it seems that partial re-integration with human culture has done something to stimulate their more human tendencies, resulting in a culture that continues to value personal might and the quest for power but is slowly being tempered with appreciation for art, culture, and luxury, though given the extent to which posthuman thought-forms have been modified it is likely impossible they will ever completely revert to baseline human psychology, if they would even want such a thing. But they are no longer the imminent sword of Damocles hanging over all biological life, and for many this will be enough.

Cultivator Cyborgs

If you aren't born an immortal posthuman, then you're likely an organic life form. And if you're an organic life form, then you're doomed to a short, miserable life on a world that you no longer dominate, unless you are one of the few who can command the teeming hordes of mortal soldiers to match the monsters of the current era. However, for those who refuse to be content with mediocrity, a second path awaits. Through studying the datasphere and converting portions of your biology into computronium (essentially, a highly efficient computational matrix), one can surpass their original form to become a cultivator cyborg, one who perpetually strives to gain full understanding of the datasphere and mastery of the nanomechanic cloud that permeates the solar system, learning powerful martial techniques and gaining physical upgrades as they grow more experienced. It is a difficult journey, and few ever find full attainment, much less discover even one technique. However, those who do are powerful indeed, and not to be trifled with. For not only do they unlock the mysteries of cyberization, but so do their progeny. Any being that becomes a cultivator cyborg effectively has the potential to found a powerful dynasty of inhuman cybernetic demigods, demigods who influence much of life on this shattered planet.

The Pale Star Cult

Humanity is not alone in the void. There is life across countless worlds, civilized and not, though due to the way most develop cloaked information transmissions and wormhole-derived transports it is most difficult to find evidence of them unless they wish to reveal themselves to you, or you simply stumble across an inhabited planet. However, a large portion of the space around humanity is devoid of what we would recognize as rational life, and there is a terrible reason behind this. For just outside the vision of men, whose light rays only have recently reached our planet, there is a star. And this star thinks.

It is a sapient being, a massive calculating engine whose otherworldly spectrum of light allows for the instant transmission of information from its core to anywhere its rays reach. It plants unnatural thoughts in the minds of those who spend too long staring at its baleful green glow, and soon enough they find themselves under its thrall completely. The Pale Star grants incredible power of its own, but robs the user of their will in enough time, always resulting in a hollowed-out thing of burning flame, which amplifies its light and the reality-warping power it bestows. There are whole worlds, in the black, wreathed in green coronas of fire, perpetually feeding off of a writhing mass of flesh that was once that planet's population. It uses these lantern worlds to further its reach, and increase its intelligence. Earth, however, has proven a tougher nut to crack. The sheer insanity of its growth and collapse, spawning inhuman horrors which can lay low the best of its war-forms, has prevented it from subsuming this world as it has dozens of others. For now, it simply remains a lurking shade, waiting for the chance it can bring this planet to its knees, and birth a cruel new existence from its ashes.

The Datasphere

The Datasphere is the term for the electronic world that permeates the material one, perpetually surrounding the entire solar system in the form of a network of nanomachines that act as a literal cloud-computer, hanging in the sky and saturated into the ground, bringing ever-present power and knowledge to those who can properly tap into it. The 'gods' people worship, for example, are very real, but are in fact simply powerful intelligences which exist as disembodied beings in the Datasphere. They could be ascended humans who have left the material realm, or beings born into it, or both, or something else. None can say for certain, but all know that by studying and communing with them one can gain incredible power.

Ghosts, too, are akin to this. They are swarms of nanomachines which congregate around intense emotion in the datasphere, like the last moments of a living person. They can exert deadly force and are notoriously difficult to get rid of, so the best option is to just inter the body and put the last emotions of the victim to rest. It should be noted the ghost is not actually them, but just an echo formed by the final thoughts of the dying being.

It should also be noted that a corpse, if properly preserved, may retain traces of the original owner's psyche. As long as the body remains more or less intact, there is rumored to be a technique capable of restoring them to full health. But is it truly the same person who died, or merely a perfect duplicate with the same memories? Who can say?

Bioframes

Bioframes inspire terror and awe across the world. As some of the most advanced and sophisticated weapon systems ever produced, they are without a doubt among the greatest remaining relics of the Solar Empire's military might. Intelligent, fast, strong, and armored with powerful defenses, they are any civilization's trump card. They can also be modified to function with a pilot enclosed in its womb-cockpit, or function autonomously. Either way, few things are as terrifying as being stared down by a bioframe in the heat of battle.

There are also greater variations of bioframes in the form of Autonomous Dragon Weapons, but these monsters are wild and untamed, their strength such that no nation has been able to gain control of one. Unlike standard bioframes, these creatures are regarded only with fear, due to the horrendous destruction they leave in their path.

Cultures

City/Bunker-States

The most common kind of government among Lo-Caste individuals, coming in the form of surface cities or bunker arcologies, consisting of a few thousand souls toiling away under the rulership of an ostensibly representative system, headed by an elected governor, but in truth heavily influenced by the Sects, groups of Transcendent beings and those who aspire to such heights, who rule from the shadows. They possess the bulk of military power and their matriarchs and patriarchs are not effete, decadent rulers but warlords who fight alongside their underlings, for any that don't tend not to last very long in a world where their lessers can so quickly rise in power. Most common folk have only a surface-level understanding of these complex politics though, and simply try to get by as best they can, sheltering in farming communes or walled cities under the watchful eyes of their masters. Life is not all bad, however. Each state has a unique set of values, and some can approach something which could be considered fair. Others are less so. Most of these states rely heavily on biomechanical life forms copied from Myriad design, be they the infamous Bioframe or less awe-inspiring creatures, favoring them over true machines which are so difficult to maintain. Many are openly pro-Transcendence, viewing it as the best path to power and immortality and a far better alternative to being trapped in mere flesh.

Imperial Provisional Government

The IPG is one of the oldest extant polities, though it barely counts as one in the modern era. It composes the Hi-Caste bunker networks that date back to pre-megastructure history, and maintains some of the most accurate records of human history. However, the IPG has splintered along clade lines, and most are forced to fend for themselves, forced into roles their heavily-tweaked psychologies were never designed for. Most 'Orders', as they are known, are run by an administrative bureaucracy, though its efficacy depends on the clade. The Civclade orders are fairly well-handled while most Warclade orders have degenerated into military juntas. The sciclade clings on in isolated arcologies and the joyclade defends its dilapidated gardens as best it can. They are a people who have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but even for them Transcendence is an option, and they may well be able to turn things around. IPG remnants have a higher quality of life than most normal city states, save for the unfortunates who are consigned to the farming networks outside the arcology proper. They also tend to be distrustful of Transcendent individuals even within their own ranks, keeping them heavily regulated as tools for the community to use rather than as masters, and treating Transcendents or even mundane cyborgs and posthumans with distrust. In reality, they would perform much better if the clades were to unify into a singular front rather than as ethnic enclaves, but years of fractured relations have rendered such a reconstruction an immensely difficult task.

Aberrant Tribes

The Un-Caste is the newest breed of biosophont to arise from the Terran Megastructure. Being Human-Derived Fauna that re-evolved sentience, they have no history or culture of their own prior to the Collapse. They have an intuitive understanding of nanotechne, but unlike other castes of human lack the knowledge and sophistication to form complex societies. As such, Aberrant civilizations are more patchworks of small, feuding tribes with no central leader, only periodically banding together to plunder their neighbors or defend from incursions, and then swiftly devolving back into infighting. Though they make use of Nanotechne in basic forms like weapons, armor, and transcendence, they lack the infrastructure for sophisticated machinery and other such things, relying on their less intelligent cousins as beasts of burden. Though some consider them to be wayward brothers to true humanity, most see them as pests to be exterminated. The Aberrants which have integrated into normal human civilizations are often at risk of persecution as a result of this, but the aggression of their native brethren does not help the situation.

Neo-Anthropic Unions

To get more than a small group of Neo-Anthropic Posthumans to put aside their differences and form a functioning government is, quite frankly, impossible. Or it would be under normal circumstances. However, the Neo-Anthropic pattern's use of a near-feral slave caste to do all their busywork allows comparatively small communities of true Neo-Anthropics to control wide swathes of territory. Unions, or Pacts, are groups of Neo-Anthropics which have banded together in the name of mutual material benefit. Pact-holders vote democratically on actions like resource exploitation or pillaging, and send their underlings and drones to get the job done, dealing only in brutal realpolitik without moral justification or careful euphemism, only a blunt debate on risks versus benefits, who shall shoulder what responsibilities, and so on. However, this privilege does not extend to Neo-Anthropics without Pact-holder status, who must prove their worth serving their superiors and fighting for favor and reward, or meekly accept their lesser station rather than risk their neck in such brutal competition.

Ex-Anthropic Incursions

Whereas Neo-Anthropics do not have the mad ambitions of their Anticaste ancestors, the Ex-Anthropic pattern still seeks to forge an empire of posthumans from the ruins of the solar system. As a result, they frequently appear from the depths of the megastructure as armies bent on that goal, bringing destruction and stability to the heartlands of settled zones. Their hierarchy is rigid and unforgiving, clashing with their independently-minded relatives, and is even less compatible with the rest of pan-humanity. Ex-Anthropic posthumans are a significant threat to other civilizations and are dealt with accordingly.

Info-Life Infestations

Predatory digital entities living in the Datasphere have been known to periodically escape, bringing themselves and others into the physical world by hijacking human bodies to use as puppets. They can amass huge armies in this manner, infesting and corrupting until thousands are enslaved to their will or assimilated into their elite ranks. Even sworn enemies will band together to stop an Info-Life incursion. However, Info-Life also presents an insidious threat which most common folk have only heard about in rumors. They seem to have the ability to not only overtly control, but to quietly corrupt and infiltrate as well. There are rumors of individuals who have had their minds altered by Info-Life memetic programs, seemingly normal but rewritten to engage in repeated serial murder, targeting high-ranking members of communities and sowing distrust and paranoia, which is then taken advantage of by the main invasion force. What society is like within these organizations, if there is a society or intelligence behind them at all, is unknown. It is theorized that higher-ranking Info-Predators may have always been self-aware, or become so after gaining a posthuman body, but the truth remains a mystery.

Earth

World Size

In the vanilla Dwarf Fortress game, the world is generally assumed to be the entire world, or half of one, depending on how you generate your poles. However, in the Long Night, the world is designed to be "to scale". That is, the setting reflects the world's actual size. A large map, for example, is about the size of Iceland. So you're not playing on a map of the entire megastructure, just an Iceland sized portion of it.

Terrain Terminology

The Terran Megastructure is a mixture of overgrown infrastructure and fragments of earth, what were normal terrain features in the past are at least partially artificial in this era. As a result, the terminology of referring to them has changed.

• Continents - The playable area encompasses a single region referred to as a "Zone" of the megastructure.
• Desert - The vast, sweeping emptiness between settlements is typically called a 'Waste'.
• Hills - Areas of many outcroppings are called "Blockades".
• Tundra - Cold, inhospitable regions are called "Voids".
• Glacier - Areas where ice has built up are just called an "Ice".
• Ocean - Places filled with undrinkable water are called "Floods".
• Lake - Areas filled with drinkable water are called "Pools".
• Forest - Areas of particularly dense flora are called "Growths".
• Mountains - Huge heaps of rubble and wreckage are called "Ruins".

Eras of History

The Pre-Imperial Era

In human history books, all of human civilization before the Solar Empire is referred to as the Pre-Imperial Era. The Early Pre-Imperial era is before the establishment of the internet but after the industrial revolution, the Middle Pre-Imperial Era is after that but before the first extraplanetary colonies, and the Late Pre-Imperial Era marks the brief period of time in which humanity dwelt among the heavenly spheres without the guiding hand of the Imperial Clade, punctuated by brutal resource wars and limited nuclear exchanges. This time is widely ignored by common people as irrelevant and unimportant, full of outmoded ideologies and barbaric primitivism, even as it admittedly formed the foundation of pan-human culture. It is as distant to them as the most ancient civilizations were to the Middle Pre-Imperial Era, and equally as misunderstood.

The Imperial Era

This era marks the millennia-long reign of the Clade-Emperors and their genetic caste system, a highly stable if stagnant society where social advancement through conventional means was near-impossible past a certain point, due to the fact that if you were of a lower caste there would always be higher caste individuals genetically engineered to be superior to you, and if you were of the higher caste your role was defined by the caste you were born into. While the Solar Empire did face its fair share of challenges, its ruthless enforcement through its genetically-engineered soldiers and tacticians ensured that the only truly threatening rebellions were nothing more than skirmishes between members of the Imperial Clade feuding from the shadows. It was only during the Second Solar War that the empire faced a truly outside-context problem in the form of Posthuman Antinirvanism. The Imperial Era's close is marked by the genocide of the Imperial Clade, the virulent spread of nanotechne, synthetic life, and biomechanical life, the rise of the Myriad, and the beginning stages of the Terran Megastructure.

The Myriad Era

A short-lived era of some few centuries in which rampant nanotechne growth allowed for individuals to harness unprecedented amounts of both energy and raw materials, allowing them to rule as veritable sorcerer kings in an era of violence and anarchy. It was during this time that artificial life forms fusing machinery and flesh, such as bioframes, were engineered and used in world-spanning wars across the Earth, and when nanotechne was cultivated and tamed to form the foundation of post-collapse technology, allowing even the lowliest of tribes to construct advanced machinery and weaponry. Furthermore, the constant renovation and expansion of the Myriad and their sprawling megacity-states led to the near-total urbanization of the planet, at which point the phenomenon, which continues to this day, was dubbed the Terran Megastructure, for it could no longer be said to be a mundane celestial body but rather a rampant construct of endlessly expanding cityscape built by long-dead madmen. The Myriad Era is the primary cause of the ignorance of modern pan-humanity, as so much was shuffled about and destroyed in the feuds of the Myriad, millions upon millions slaughtered and megacities flattened only to be reconstructed and repopulated by vat-grown replacements, that the steady march of history was shattered and fragmented, entire peoples coming into being knowing nothing of anything save their servitude. This era came to a close when the Megastructure stabilized and the chaotic flow of energy dwindled, leading to the collapse of the grand works of the Myriad and the ushering in of the great dark age. Most notable of these effects was the corruption of the Datasphere by now-feral fragments of Myriad thought programs, which evolved, diversified, and competed for storage space until the entire internet of that time became a writhing ecosystem of intensely dangerous digital organisms, resulting in its quarantine.

The Long Night

The present era of history, the dark age in which scattered populations and feuding city-states squabble for food, energy, and living space atop a constantly changing and danger-filled megastructure far beyond anyone's ability to control. Hypertechnological miracles exist side by side with starvation, war, and barbarism. Power belongs to those who follow the path of immortality and seize it, becoming living gods of synthetic flesh and living metal. It is unknown how long this chaotic period will last. Perhaps decades, perhaps centuries, perhaps millennia. But many regard it as the transitional period which will eventually give way to the rise of something far greater than even the grandest age of the Solar Empire, if only the world and beyond may once more be united under a single power.

The New Dawn

The name for the era to come, in which whatever species, ideology, or other form of victor stands triumphant above a unified solar system. It is an era many pray for but few expect to live to see. None can even begin to imagine what it might be like, but many see it in the same way as ancient humans viewed their religious apocalypses. Always looming on the horizon but never quite manifesting, and some, in the quiet of the night, hope it will never come to pass. Most believe it is an era in that biological life has no place in, incentivizing the pursuit of immortality through nanotechne to secure a place in that distant future, while others regard them as fools blinded by ambition or simply doomed to fail in the face of overwhelming odds.

Related Pages

The Long Night: Civilizations
The Long Night: Weapons
The Long Night: Armor
The Long Night: Materials
The Long Night: Creatures
The Long Night: Plants
The Long Night: Technomancy
The Long Night: Adventure Mode