What you need to know about New Earth Your character is a denizen of the New Earth in the year 2850, a dweller in the savage wasteland left behind by a cataclysmic disaster two centuries ago. Nanomutated abominations, radioactive badlands, amoral raider tribes, and the sheer unrelenting strain of survival all conspire in an attempt to make your life a short and brutal experience. Old Terra was ruled by the masters of the Terran Mandate, the shadowy Directorate that ensured that the nations of mankind’s birthworld maintained a peaceful and harmonious stasis. Change was an enemy to the Directorate, and troublemakers were exiled to the frontier colonies around distant stars. With the help of their psychic enforcers and the AI godminds known as the Maestros, the Directorate maintained an iron grip on the core worlds. Common citizens had access to marvelous medical and communications technology, including the nanite Dust that wove Old Terra’s atmosphere into an omnipresent network. Communications were under the unblinking eye of the Maestros, channeled and restricted as appropriate to “social harmony”. Malcontents received sympathetic care from AI social services or midnight visits from Directorate security forces. Few persisted in their discontent. This utopia under glass ended in 2665 with the Scream. A massive pulse of metadimensional energy washed outward from the depths of the void, searing the brains of humanity’s psychics. The teleporting Jump Gates that connected the core worlds were wiped out of existence when the choirs of psychics that operated them were obliterated. Most psychics perished in this otherworldly fire, but some survived in a haze of savage madness. These Crazed included some of the most powerful psychics on Old Terra, and they lashed out at their masters before a shattered world even understood its peril. All over Old Terra, precognitive nanocoders struck at the failsafes on the Mandate’s massive power plants. Red blooms of nuclear fire erupted to spew crimson death and black ash into the hostile sky. Elsewhere, the emergency Highshine disaster recovery system engaged to pour torrents of stabilization nanites into Old Terra’s atmosphere. The Crazed twisted the Highshine system, altering its function from medical stabilization and decontamination into terrible, flesh-warping violation of its sickened victims. Nanomutants rose from the wastes, forbidden easy death by the Highshine’s grip. Two hundred years have passed since the Scream, and the world of Old Terra has been lost forever. Modern descendants of the survivors of those end times now huddle in small enclaves, struggling to resist the terrible corrosion of the badlands, the incursions of mutated beasts, and the pangs of their own privation. Your character is a native of one of these enclaves, equipped by experience and nature with the gifts necessary to survive the savage wastes. It may be that the dangers outside will claim them young, or it could be that their fearless deeds will yet herald a second dawn for their people. Only time and your choices will tell.
