A world risen from its own ruin
Everything below is spoiler-free: names, factions, and places as they'd appear on a map — not what happens to anyone in them.
The Great Cataclysms
Generations ago, a rupture torn through the fabric of reality unleashed a cascading series of disasters that drowned coastlines, split continents, and tore open the boundary between this world and whatever lies beyond it. Old-world nations collapsed. New ground rose from the earth. The dead, in places, stopped staying dead.
Two ancient cosmic powers — Order and Entropy — long sealed away, found their way back through the rupture. Both are gathering armies for a final, prophesied battle: the Reclamation. Humanity, caught in between, is running out of time and ground to stand on.
Where people still live
The Plateaus & Remnant Lands
The last stable, livable ground left in the world, thrust up during the Cataclysms. Small, isolated city-states cling to the high ground here — some hopeful, some as cruel as anything that came before. Their edges are watched by wary militias.
The Nether
The lowland wilds beneath the plateaus, where the dead don't stay buried and things that were never quite human hunt in the dark. Crossing into it is not a decision made lightly.
The Interior Seas
New seas that swallowed the old coastlines when the world's waters found new shape. Where the maps used to show cities, they now show water.
Ruined Dallas
A half-remembered old-world city, its skyscrapers collapsed and its roads littered with the past, now scraping by as a rough waystation for travelers with nowhere better to be.
The Port Lands
A hardscrabble frontier community, one of many small settlements where survival is negotiated daily — sometimes with prayists as judge and jury.
Contested Territories
Beyond the settled plateaus, the land is loosely claimed by individual prayists, whose zones can rival small nations in size. Crossing into another's territory is rarely simple, and rarely welcome.
Factions & social orders
Prayists
Chosen from the Godless and possessed by a power of Order or Entropy, prayists walk among the survivors as harvesters of souls for the coming war. Unbound by local law, they are feared, resented, and sometimes deferred to as informal arbiters of who lives and who is claimed. Many communities regard a prayist as worse than the Cataclysms themselves — something to flee on sight, though a desperate few seek one out anyway.
The Godless
Those who steadfastly deny that any god exists at all — and, for exactly that reason, the only pool from which new prayists are ever drawn.
Elationists & Abhorists
Remnants who've taken up worship of Entropy's Descendants (Elationists, marked by self-piercing) or Order's Ascendants (Abhorists, marked by self-branding), emulating the very forces that come to claim the marked and take them away.
Tweeners & Roamers
People destined to remain on Earth regardless of how the Reclamation ends, identifiable by a simple lack of markings. Roamers are Tweeners without a settlement to call home, often moving in groups for safety.
Revenants
Known more colloquially as "Ghoulies" — those killed by a prayist's failed harvest, who rise again as something no longer quite alive, and no longer quite killable by ordinary means.