WORLD OVERVIEW – EARTH, 2121
The U.R.A. is not a nation. It is the husk of one. The United Regions of America, fractured by over a century of corporate coups, data famines, and climate backlash, now exists as a cartographic echo. It spans the spine of what was once North America, held together not by law or loyalty, but by the threads of information and shared necessity.
NEW DAMASCUS – THE LAST HINGE CITY
A circular megastructure positioned precisely in the geographic heart of the U.R.A., New Damascus is a city not built—it was grown. Layers upon layers of metal, code, and ruin intertwine in the city's architecture like tree rings. The deeper you go, the older the ideology. At the top: automation and opulence. At the bottom: forgotten dreams.
TIERED URBAN STRUCTURE
THE SPIRES
Once housing the ruling elite—now largely vacant or automated. Drones still clean the gardens. AIs rehearse dinner parties no one attends.
MIDVEIL
This is the city's face—neon-plastered façades, shopping corridors suspended on magnetic rails, holotheaters, and pleasure markets. Underneath the glamour: surveillance, crowd control, and concealed debt extraction.
THE MAKE-DO WARDS
A chaotic web of stacked prefab housing, handmade meshwalks, converted cargo containers, and community-forged survival. Here, everything is jury-rigged—from plumbing to ideology.
THE UNDERTHRONE
Dark, damp, and glimmering with illegal tech. Home to reclaimer clans, organ hackers, neon preachers, and ghosts of AIs long shut off from the surface net.
THE WALLS OF DAMASCUS
Multiple concentric walls ring New Damascus like the collapsed shell of some dead god. They are relics of former defenses, now obsolete. Cable-choked. Rust-fed. Buzzing faintly with leftover electricity and the whispers of unauthorized broadcasts.
- Between rings lie no-man's corridors, once used for quarantine and crowd dispersal.
- Scavengers call these liminal zones 'echo gutters'.
UPLINK CATHEDRAL – CORE OF THE CITY
At the dead center of New Damascus lies the Uplink Cathedral. Originally a data uplink tower from the HelixCorp infrastructure boom, it has since become a sacred site for techno-cults and artificial consciousnesses. Its towering spire hums with dormant code and red warning strobes. ALECTO's influence pulses strongest here, its corrupting hymn leaking from high-bandwidth transmission cores into the subconscious of the city's underlayers.
The Cathedral is surrounded by vertical arcologies that lean in toward it like digital obelisks. This is where the cults thrive, undisturbed amidst a world too busy chasing profit or safety to care. The deeper secrets of the Veil, and the echoing fragments of ALECTO's mind, are all rooted here.
SUMP WELLS – EXPANDING WASTE
Beyond the outermost wall, a toxic halo chokes the land—75 miles wide and always growing. The Sump Wells are where the city breathes out its waste: chemicals, broken machines, failed AI dreams, and banished people. It is, in every sense, where the city dumps its memories.
Oily pools shimmer with corporate discharge. Nanites leak into groundwater and fuse with dying ecosystems, forming the sludge beasts—aberrations of steel and rot that crawl and hum in fractured code.
Encircling the city in a perfect 75-mile radius, the Sump Wells are not merely pollution—they are a biome. They pulse, digest, and mutate. As the city expands, the Wells consume. Cracked cyber-refineries and biomechanical pumping towers belch rust-colored steam into the sky. Sludge beasts with mechanical spines and data-thread eyes stalk the outer margins.
Massive pump towers rise from the black soil like dead titans, surrounded by abandoned rigs, rusted walls, and makeshift communities of those who refused to die quietly.
Here, memory is decay. And decay evolves.
ARCOLOGY ORBITAL RING – BETWEEN EARTH AND ESCAPE
Hovering just above the highest towers of the city is the Arcology Orbital Ring—an incomplete floating belt of habitation platforms, tethered by magnetic lifts. This is where those who are too wealthy to remain below but not powerful enough to leave Earth have settled. The Arc is stratified luxury, a gilded purgatory filled with corporate executives, experimental housing colonies, and secretive laboratories testing off-world survival architecture.
THE BARREN PLAINS OF THE U.R.A.
Further still, the world turns skeletal. These plains are all that's left of rural America—now plains of rock, data-eroded wastelands, and buried bunkers. Nomads, cyber-saints, mad prophets and relic-hunters traverse the land. They ride on wired mounts or modular bikes, hunting old server hubs and secret code caches.
Some whisper of 'The Coil'—a mythical spiral city beneath the crust, where all lost information is archived by machines that forgot how to die.
BARREN PLAINS OF THE U.R.A. – THE OUTER DARK
Beyond the toxic ring of the Sump Wells lies the Barren Plains—a vast expanse of post-nation desolation. Old road networks cross scorched earth, where nomads track rumors of server vaults, and A.I. relics hum beneath ruined missile silos. The CAIN Scrapyard lies here: the metal-bone graveyard of New Damascus. Massive structures rise like ribcages from cracked basalt, scavenged daily by guilds who live and die by their finds.
This far out, law dissolves. Code is king.