The World

The nation calls itself The Concord — a name chosen deliberately, because a government that has to keep insisting on its own harmony usually isn't feeling much of it.

The three pillars

The Lattice — surveillance

A biometric ID and social-scoring grid layered over every transaction, movement and utterance that touches a network. Officially it fights fraud, terrorism and "misinformation." Unofficially, it means the state always knows where you are, who you talk to, and whether your Score is high enough to keep your job, your travel permit, or your kids. At the table it's the default obstacle: cameras to avoid, a Score to protect, a checkpoint to bluff through.

The Signal Trust — information

A public-private media conglomerate that owns the feeds, the algorithms and most of the entertainment. It doesn't lie, exactly — it curates. Whatever keeps people scared, distracted or divided gets amplified; whatever builds solidarity gets quietly throttled. Its stamp of approval — Verified — is the setting's most contested word.

The Coherence Office — enforcement

Where the other two pillars watch and talk, the Coherence Office acts. Wellness checks that aren't. Doctrine seminars you can't decline. Containment first, understanding never.

The resistance: Static

No headquarters, no manifesto, no single leader — by design. "Static" is what the Trust's algorithms call the noise they can't quite filter out, and the name stuck. Independent cells ("Nodes") of three to six people, connected by couriers and dead drops rather than any central command. Losing one Node doesn't compromise the others.

What holds it together isn't a party line but a deliberately thin set of commitments — starting with: no one is arrested for what they believe, and no one is owned by their Score.

The Fringe

Magic, if you insist on the word — though nobody in the Concord uses it. Fringe exploits are the impossible edge cases the Lattice's models can't account for: kinetic, signal-spoofing, behavioral, pattern-recognition, attrition, adaptation, logistics and hardening effects, wielded by people the system classifies as statistical errors.

The full history, timeline and setting chapters are in the core rulebook →