CORTEX VORTEX
A post-scarcity civilisation built out of the ashes of the Human–Mekanimal wars, held together by old wars and older lies. Technology, mysticism, body modification, media culture and cosmic politics collide across a colonised solar system.
The system's furnace and its bank. Plasma facilities, megacities riding the corona, and tech elites living inside the light that pays for everything else. Whoever controls Sol sets the price of power, literally.
ENERGY
Solar-panel wings and old money. Mercury runs hot, fast and secretive, and the mobile megacity Vapor City keeps itself permanently in the dark, moving with the night. Synthfairy noble houses trade influence here in rooms nobody outside ever sees.
NOBLE HOUSES
Terraformed into alien jungle through engineering and alchemy. Bellezza is beautiful and Algoranda commands the Venusian Army. The alchemical relics people whisper about are active forces, and somebody is already using them.
CONTESTED
Heavy industry moved off-world and the cradle was preserved as a living sanctuary. Home to enduring Pure H. Sapiens, Mekanimals, Synthfairies and Dilluvians. It looks unchanged to outsiders, which is exactly what thousands of years of uninterrupted advancement buys you.
PRESERVED
The convergence point of power, innovation, law, military command, finance and entertainment. Oasis I lies in ruins under Olympus Mons as a monument. Oasis II is where your campaign almost certainly starts, and where the Cosmic Proelium fills an arena the size of a city district.
CAMPAIGN HUB
Outposts, smuggling routes, pirates, renegade factions and outlaw economies. Also Alliance blacksites and rapid-response platforms nobody officially admits to. The place your crew goes when the capital stops returning calls.
HOSTILE
Gravity as politics. Orbital platforms, shipping lanes and the moons that hold them, including Ananke, where labour disappears into contracts nobody reads twice.
ORBITAL
Ice, harvest and old prestige. The rings are a resource and a border at the same time, and the families who work them do not think of themselves as Alliance citizens.
FRONTIER
Anti-market, freethinkers, jokesters and ritual excess, ruled by resonance rather than law. The one place in the system where the Alliance's writ genuinely does not run.
UNGOVERNED
Cold, distant, and the operating base for syndicates that traffic in everything from cargo to restricted memories. If somebody has been taken and the trail goes quiet, it goes quiet here.
CRIMINAL
The edge of the charted system. Listening posts, exiles, and the people who wanted to be as far from Mars as physics allows.
THE EDGE
A self-assembling industrial node where factories birth factories and bots forge bots. Most machines obey the First Directive: Continue. Some go to Notre Dame of the Flare instead, a cathedral-city where awakened machines gather, and come back with a name.
MACHINE FAITHThe Alliance moves people between worlds through the portal network, and a Vortex Gate can put your crew on the far side of the system in the time it takes to walk through a door. Convenient. Also monitored. Every sanctioned transit is logged, and the log is a currency of its own.
Which is why the clandestine gates matter. Mystical transports, off-book routes and the families who build them quietly. If your crew needs to arrive somewhere without arriving on a manifest, that is a session in itself.
Your bot is not an item on your sheet. It levels with you, it supports you in the field, and it has enough personality that the table remembers it by name. Healing, repair, battle support, mobile labs, scouting, and the occasional decision nobody asked it to make.
Learn to channel the Flare and you can bend reality. Refuse it and it will bend you. Every power in this game, a plasma blade, a psychic scream, a machine that learns to dream, is the Flare moving through someone who asked.
The Quickstart carries the world primer, the core engine, all eight species and a one-shot set in Oasis II. Free, permanently.
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