Atrius

Atrius is a world built on the ashes of armageddon. A world where ancient war engines rust and rot in farmer’s fields, where the ruins of once-mighty cities bloom in spectacular verdant displays every spring. It is a world where the people wield magic and half-understood technology in great hunts of feral machines, where the miraculous living metal Vitium flows through the cells of every living thing, where ancient AIs who both saved and damned the world are worshipped as gods. Atrius is a land of great treasurers and great mysteries, where riches and danger alike can be found in the remote reaches of the world. All that is needed is the courage to reach out and seize such opportunities.

A World Remade

Many centuries ago, Atrius was a world of wonders, of great cities raised by magic and technology. Miracles were made mundane and there was nothing that its inhabitants could not achieve. The world was guided by the benevolence of the Great Minds, AI gods who worked to better the lives of their subjects.

A great catastrophe, the Unmaking, put paid to that as the machines that the Atrians of the past relied upon went mad, and a great war erupted. The machines built their own god, a malevolent and murderous intelligence called the Ironmind, and made war upon the world.  By the time their wrath was averted, Atrius was changed forever.

Modern Atrius is a world built upon ruins. Undead-infested nuclear wastes scar the lands and feral machines roam free, still following ancient and corrupted protocols. Ruined cities crumble to dust around the rusted corpses of machine gods while new civilisations are founded. Atrius’ organic people; humans, raknin and duren; have learned to share their world with feral machines as well as with the gregarious steelborn and enigmatic vitareen. Indeed, the line between living and mechanical has been well and truly blurred, for all living things on Atrius are infused with the arcane nanomachines of Vitium, a miracle of metallurgy that helped them survive the Unmaking and aids them still.

The Unmaking and Vitium

There is little concrete information on the Unmaking, and much of it has become obscure myth and half-remembered legend. What is known is that the machines that once served the people of Atrius went rogue and became bent on the extermination of all organic life. Blindsided by the sudden assault, entire nations were wiped out before the organic peoples of the world managed to band together and begin to fight back. Great weapons were fired to decimate machine armies and some of the gods themselves came to fight on behalf of Atrius’ living creatures.

For all their valour, however, the fight was not enough and it became clear that Atrius’ machines would destroy all living things. The machines were lead by the Ironmind, an AI mind too intelligent to outstrategise, too determined to outlast and too quick to rebuild to cripple. Instead of stopping the machines, one of the Great Minds, the goddess Raela, devised the plan to subvert them. With the help of her sister Aera she created Vitium, a nanomachine mixture designed to rapidly seek out organic lifeforms and bond with them on a cellular level, while she sacrificed her life to trap the Ironmind on the Transcendent Circuit, cutting off its control of its armies.

As Atrius burned, choking on the fumes of war and environmental collapse, the surviving gods began the Infusion. As more and more nanomachines spread out and joined with the battered survivors of Atrius, the machine assault was blunted, their murderous objective subverted and confused. Many of them became inactive without commands from the Ironmind, while others began to wander in a semi-feral state, eternally searching for new battles to fight. Without the Ironmind to direct them, the machines became lost.

Vitium remains all across Atrius to this day, aiding living creatures in innumerable ways. The nanomachines in their veins help fight diseases and repair injuries, and provide augmented reality overlays for living creatures. Every living thing on Atrius has grown up with feeds of information running across their vision, and use this to interact with the world around them on a huge information network, made from nanomachine link to nanomachine link. It provides Atrius with the common language of Vitos (VitOS, or Vitium Operating System Langage).

As a symbiotic machine system, Vitium is highly adaptable for those who know how to customise it, and many adventurers use it to help them in their travels. It can track the wellbeing and fitness of those it’s bonded to, provide a running record of ammunition and bodily health, and be used to alter the user’s body and magic to give them access to special abilities.

Glowlanders

Glowlanders are the descendents of the Unmaking’s victims, organic and inorganic, human and posthuman. They wield magic, steel and blackpowder against the machines and monstrosities of the Glowlands, banding together for mutual protection. Many die violent, painful deaths out on the ice, but for those who survive to make it back they can win fortune and esteem beyond all measure.

Glowlanders are, as a general rule of thumb, desperate. Atrius can be a difficult world to live in, even its most well-populated and established regions, but the Glowlands are perhaps its most inhospitable place, their danger matched only by the scorching deserts of the southern Cancerlands. Those who come to this place do so because they have no other choice, running from the law or creditors, from their past or otherwise so in need of money that they will risk everything to venture out into its pitiless reaches.

They live violent lives, and they do not live long unless they too learn to wield violence. Feral machines are not interested in negotiation, its hungry beasts cannot be tamed and the landscape itself is utterly, brutally indifferent. The lot of a Glowlander is a harsh one, with only a few ever truly escaping, but still people come. They gather at the outposts on its borders, they form bands to quest inwards, swap stories and loot and advice.

Glowlanders are a diverse bunch, and can be grouped into two primary categories; hominins and machinoids.

• Humans are the original inhabitants of Atrius, those who built the Great Minds and the machines before their world was shattered.

• Duren are a people the descendants of a desperate attempt to turn normal humans into supersoldiers. The process that made them succeeded, but was so hasty that they are a short-lived people prone to disability. In turn, they have built a society around managing and supporting all of its members.

• Furae were forged to serve the storm-god Karathon, a strange fusion of human and avian. Where humans have hair, furae have feathers, and a pair of great wings where their arms are.

• Raknin are diminutive posthumans marked by the covenant they made with the angel Weaver. Raknin have eight eyes, can grow silk from their palms and are even capable of short-ranged telepathy with one another.

• The Steelborn are those machines who were not consumed by the Ironmind’s fury, freed from their servitude to the machine god by the God-AI Chainbreaker. Steelborn are humanoid machines, built from sturdy, blocky frames at the great volcano called the Forge.

• Vitareen are beings formed from pure vitium, living liquid metal that developed free will and a mind of their own accord. They are vaguely humanoid, often with ill-defined features and bodies that flow in and out of their shape as they please.