New Earth, Y22XX. The old world didn't end in a single fire, it bled out over two centuries, one disaster at a time, until nothing was left to call civilization. What survived did not rebuild. It fractured.
POP. REMAINING: 2%
RECORD STATUS: INCOMPLETE
LAST UPDATED: Y22XX
001 / World
World setting
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The old world ended the way it always threatened to, not with one apocalypse, but a slow accumulation of them. Floods, famine, plague, and wars fought over what little remained finally collapsed civilization under its own weight, wiping out ninety-eight percent of humanity within two generations. No single villain caused it. Humanity simply could not stop itself.
What survived did not rebuild a world. It fractured into factions, each clawing together some semblance of order or survival from the wreckage: the sterile, all-seeing dictatorship of Custodia, promising safety in exchange for freedom; the nomadic wasteland clans like the Chrome Vultures, who trust nothing but the road and each other; and countless smaller, nameless groups scattered across the ruins, none of them innocent, all of them simply trying not to be next.
//
There is no version of this world where humanity learned its lesson. There is only the world that's left, and the people hard enough or desperate enough to survive in it.
002 / World
Timeline of the collapse
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The collapse was not a single event but a two-century unraveling. Early disasters like floods, famine, and resource wars crippled the old world's governments and infrastructure over several decades. What followed was a long cycle of attempted rebuilding and renewed collapse, as surviving populations fought over dwindling land, water, and fuel, only to be struck by fresh disasters before recovery ever took hold.
Entire generations were born, lived, and died inside collapsing systems, never once returning to what once existed before. By the time Custodia rose and the wasteland clans formed, the old world was already legend more than memory. By Y22XX, no one alive remembers it firsthand. It simply took two hundred years of dying for the world to finally stop trying to be what it was.
003 / World
Geography
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New Earth is a dead landscape of endless sand, broken only by the skeletal ruins of old-world cities half-buried in dust. The oceans still exist but they are poison now, contaminated by centuries of runoff, chemical fallout, and rot, undrinkable and mostly lifeless, their coastlines avoided except by the desperate or the foolish.
Nothing grows naturally anymore; green is a rumor, not a common sight. The only exceptions are heavily controlled, artificially sustained zones like Custodia's terraced gardens and hydroponic towers where soil, water, and light are all engineered and fiercely guarded. Everywhere else is dune, ruin, and dust, stretching in every direction, with no reliable maps because the land itself keeps shifting and burying what came before.
004 / Survival
Commodities & resources
Survival in the Slow Bleed is measured in what you can hoard, trade, or steal. Nothing is guaranteed, and everything is a target.
Scarce / highly coveted
Female / breeding vesselsNon-augmented, non-cybernetic females are the rarest demographic left in New Earth, full stop. Generations of radiation exposure, contamination, and the wasteland's brutal survival math have skewed what's left of humanity overwhelmingly male, and pushed most surviving women toward heavy augmentation or cybernetic replacement just to survive. Among them, those still capable of carrying a pregnancy to term are the rarest and most fiercely protected commodity left in a dying world. Viable births are so rare that no new child has been confirmed born in over three decades. Factions and warlords alike covet vessels not for labor, but for the desperate, half-mythic hope of a future generation, making them targets for protection, capture, and control, often by the same people who claim to be keeping her safe.
Clean waterNatural sources are contaminated or claimed. Only factions with filtration tech or deep reserves have reliable access.
Antibiotics & medicineInfection kills more people than violence does. A single dose of real medicine can be worth more than a vehicle.
FuelGasoline, oil, and working engines are scavenged relics of the old world, hoarded by anyone who still needs to move.
Cybernetic parts & augmentsFunctioning old-world prosthetics, ocular implants, and biohacked components are worth more than the flesh they replace. With so few people surviving without some form of augmentation, working parts, not just scrap, but parts a mender can actually install and calibrate, are hoarded, stolen, and stripped from the dead before the body's even cold.
Moderately scarce / fought over
Preserved foodCanned, dried, or lab-grown rations act as common currency. Fresh food is rare, mostly restricted to fortified factions like Custodia.
AmmunitionMore valuable than the weapons themselves, since guns outlast bullets.
Working technologyBatteries, solar cells, radios, vehicle parts, scavenged, repaired, and endlessly re-repaired rather than replaced.
Radiation-safe zones / shelter rightsPhysical space free of contamination and raiders is its own currency. Claimed territory, sealed bunkers, or defensible structures are fought over and rented out by whoever controls them, since a "safe" place to sleep is never guaranteed twice.
Intel / informationKnowledge of safe routes, Custodia patrol patterns, upcoming raids, or rival clan movements. The Wire Rats trade almost exclusively in this, and a single accurate tip can be worth more than a full tank of fuel.
Relatively common
Scrap & salvageThe wasteland is full of the old world's bones. Raw material for weapons, armor, shelter, not easy to survive collecting, but easy to find.
LaborWith so few people left, muscle and survival skill are common currency, but never enough on their own to guarantee safety.
Weapons (non-firearm)Blades, clubs, improvised melee weapons are everywhere. Anyone can arm themselves, even if they can't feed themselves.
SaltWith oceans poisoned and food preservation difficult, salt is common enough to find but essential enough to always be worth hauling, mostly scavenged from dried coastal flats or traded down from Salt Choir territory.
Stimulants / rot-numbing drugsCrude, homemade, and widely available, used to push through exhaustion, pain, or the early symptoms of the Rot. Not a cure, just a way to keep functioning a little longer. Everyone's used them, and everyone knows what they cost long-term.
005 / Survival
Currency & trade
Old-world money means nothing now. It exists only as scrap paper or a curiosity traded among Chrome Vultures for its irony. Survival economies run on barter and hard commodities: clean water, preserved food, fuel, ammunition, and medicine function as de facto currency across the wasteland.
Custodia maintains an internal credit system for Wards, tightly controlled and tied to labor output and compliance. A citizen's worth is quite literally tracked and rationed. Outside Custodia's walls, trust is the real currency; a reputation for honest dealing can be worth more than the goods themselves, since a single bad trade in the wasteland can mean starvation, betrayal, or death.
006 / Survival
Technology level
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Technology in New Earth exists on two extremes with almost nothing in between. In the wasteland, survival tech is scavenged, jury-rigged, and endlessly repaired, engines patched with mismatched parts, weapons cobbled from scrap, crude cybernetic augments and biohacked implants installed by wasteland "menders" using pre-collapse tech nobody fully understands anymore.
Custodia, by contrast, hoards true advanced technology behind its walls: clean power, functioning medical science, surveillance systems, and genetic or cybernetic enhancement reserved only for the ruling elite and the Custodian's inner circle. Knowledge itself has become a form of power, those who still understand pre-collapse science, engineering, or medicine are rare, fiercely protected or exploited, because the world lost far more knowledge than it lost people.
007 / Survival
Disease & health
Illness is one of the wasteland's quietest killers. Contaminated water and soil cause a chronic wasting sickness known simply as the Rot lesions, organ failure, and eventual death, common among those without access to filtered water or medicine. Radiation pockets, remnants of old-world conflicts, cause sporadic mutation and cancer clusters in certain ruined zones, avoided by those who know the signs.
Infection from untreated wounds is the single most common cause of death outside direct violence. Custodia, with its controlled environment and hoarded medical technology, is nearly disease-free by comparison. Another quiet, unspoken reason some Wards never question the system, no matter what else it costs them.
008 / Culture
Language & slang
Common speech across New Earth is a rough blend of English and fragments of Mandarin, remnants of pre-collapse trade routes and mixed refugee populations who endured the wasteland together.
méi le (没了)"it's gone / used up" said when supplies run out, or when someone dies.
dry runA scavenging trip that yields nothing; sarcastically, someone's odds of survival.
ghost walkingMoving through Custodia territory undetected.
xiǎoxīn, sha gua (小心，傻瓜)"careful, fool" a half-affectionate warning between companions.
clean airIronic slang for anywhere considered safe, since actual clean air is rare.
the long walkA euphemism for dying, especially from exposure or exile.
009 / Culture
Religion & belief
There is no god in New Earth. Whatever faiths existed before the collapse died with the world that held them. Two centuries of disaster, war, and death stripped away any illusion that something benevolent was watching. No one prays for salvation, because no one has ever seen it answered.
Custodia does not offer religion; it offers order, and demands the same devotion a god once might have, without ever pretending to be one. The Chrome Vultures hold no shared faith either, only superstitions born of survival, small rituals and road-omens passed down without any belief that they matter, just habits people keep because stopping them feels like tempting fate.
//
Nothing is coming to save anyone, and nothing ever will. Whatever meaning exists, people make for themselves, briefly, before the wasteland takes it back.
010 / Culture
Death & burial customs
Death is common enough in New Earth that elaborate mourning is a luxury few can afford. Chrome Vultures practice sand burial, bodies wrapped in salvaged cloth and buried shallow beneath a marked stone or scrap-metal totem, the wasteland believed to "reclaim its own." Some clans burn their dead instead, believing fire prevents a body from being scavenged or displayed as a trophy by rivals.
In Custodia, death is handled with cold bureaucratic efficiency. Bodies are processed, resources reclaimed where possible, the event rarely publicly acknowledged. A near-universal rule holds across every faction: leaving a body unburied and exposed is one of the cruelest things you can do to the dead.
011 / Faction
Custodia
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Custodia is the last true city left in New Earth. A walled, self-contained fortress-state in the northwest, standing in stark contrast to the dead sand stretching beyond its borders. Behind its walls, everything the old world lost has been recreated: clean water, abundant food, disease-free populations, terraced green gardens, and strict, unwavering order.
To the Wards who live inside it, Custodia is presented as humanity's last success, proof that civilization can survive, so long as everyone plays their assigned part. What isn't advertised is the cost: total surveillance, no individual expression, and a rigid hierarchy enforced from the shadows by an authority no one has ever confirmed exists.
MOTTO
"Order is safety. Safety is life."
Rank structure
The Custodian
The singular ruling authority at the head of Custodia. Rarely seen in public; governs through decree, doctrine, and the Eyes network rather than direct contact. No one knows whether the Custodian is a single living individual, a rotating council operating under one shared identity, or a title maintained long after its original holder died. Questioning the Custodian's existence is itself treated as an act of defiance.
"The unseen hand behind every order; no one has seen them, and no one dares ask if they're real."
Eyes
The Custodian's informants, watchers, and record-keepers embedded within everyday society. Eyes are not soldiers, they are neighbors, coworkers, shopkeepers, anyone secretly reporting behavior, conversation, and dissent back through the chain of command. Their identities are unknown to Wards, creating a culture of paranoia and self-censorship.
"They could be anyone, which means they could be everyone."
Enforcers
The visible military/police arm of Custodia: uniformed, armed, and unquestioning. Enforcers carry out arrests, executions, curfews, and public displays of control, conditioned from a young age through indoctrination academies. Identical black regimented attire, faces sometimes obscured, strips them of individual identity.
"The system's fist, trained to act before they think to question."
Wards
The general citizenry, those living "under the protection" of Custodia. Wards follow strict behavioral codes, wear standard-issue uniforms devoid of color or personal expression, and are taught that conformity equals safety. Deviation, even minor, risks demotion to Unregistered status.
"Fed, sheltered, and watched. Safety with a price no one names aloud."
Unregistered
Anyone who exists outside Custodia's system entirely: escaped Wards, exiled dissidents, wasteland nomads (such as the Chrome Vultures), and those born beyond Custodia's borders.
Officially, Unregistered persons are not recognized as citizens or even fully as people within Custodia's records. A bureaucratic erasure that makes violence against them easier to justify. Some Unregistered were cast out as punishment; others fled before ever being processed into the system at all.
Not all Unregistered are the same. Being "outside the system" can mean very different things depending on how someone ended up there.
"Erased from the record, invisible to Custodia in every way except when it wants them dead."
The Cast Out
Former Wards who broke Custodia's rules and were formally stripped of registration as punishment. Often marked in some visible way from a brand, a removed tattoo, a scar so other Unregistered and Custodia patrols know their history.
The Fled
Wards who escaped before they could be caught or processed, often smuggled out through black-market networks or bribed Enforcers. Tend to carry guilt, trauma, or half-formed loyalty to the world they left behind.
The Unclaimed
People born entirely outside Custodia's borders, in the wasteland, who were never registered in the first place. To Custodia's records, they don't exist and never did. Groups like the Chrome Vultures largely fall into this category, generations who have never known anything but the wasteland.
The Reclaimed
Unregistered once captured and briefly registered or processed by Custodia for labor or experimentation, then either discarded or escaped. Carry both wasteland resilience and firsthand knowledge of Custodia's inner workings, incredibly valuable and dangerous to both sides.
Characters
Field dossier. Confirmed sightings only, most identities remain unconfirmed.
NO VISUAL RECORDidentity unconfirmed
The Custodian
RESTRICTED
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J.
Enforcer
Classification: restricted. Full file access denied above field rank.
NPC
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Dr. White
Ward, Custodia scientist
Credited with perfecting the neural transfer protocol, the process that lets a mind be lifted from a failing body and settled into a new one.
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The Eye
One of many. Many of one.
They're here. There. Everywhere. Always seeing, never seen.
NPC
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V.
Enforcer
Runs checkpoint duty at the outer gate. Knows every Ward's routine on sight, and every deviation from it.
NPC
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M.
Enforcer, indoctrination academy
Trains new recruits to stop asking questions before their first field posting. Rarely leaves the academy grounds.
NPC
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Councilor of Continuity
Ward, ruling council
Oversees a department most Wards have never heard of. Decides, quietly, who gets to keep existing.
NPC
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Councilor of Provision
Ward, ruling council
Controls food, water, and ration allotment across every district. The most publicly beloved face in Custodia, and the most feared behind closed doors.
NPC
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Councilor of Registration
Ward, ruling council
Signs the order that turns a Ward into an Unregistered. Has never once attended the stripping ceremony in person.
NPC
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Councilor of Order
Ward, ruling council
Commands the Enforcers and, unofficially, the Eyes. The only Councilor most Wards know to fear by name.
NPC
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Councilor of Records
Ward, ruling council
Keeper of every archive Custodia admits to having. Has spent forty years deciding what history is allowed to remember.
//
No one has ever seen J. give an order, and no one has ever seen an order go uncarried out when he's nearby. Ask what J. actually does, and the answer changes depending on who you ask. Ask enough people, and you'll notice none of them can point to the moment it happened, only that it did, and that he was standing there when it was finished. That's the point.
There are no children in New Earth. Not "few." None. No birth has been confirmed in over three decades, and yet Custodia does not shrink. Its numbers hold in perfect, unnatural balance, generation after generation, as if the city itself were breathing at a fixed and steady rate. No census has ever shown a surplus. None has ever shown a deficit. Population is not sustained. It is maintained.
Deep beneath the city, rows of incubation chambers grow bodies of full-grown adults, vat-built from harvested DNA and old-world genetic templates, aged to maturity in a fraction of a lifetime, blank and waiting. Empty vessels. The technology to do this was never invented by anyone alive. A lost science, salvaged and half-understood from the old world's final years, operated today by people who know how to run the machines but not fully why they work, following procedures memorized like scripture rather than science.
Consciousness can be extracted and stored. A mind lifted from a dying, aging, or simply useful body and held, waiting, until a new one is grown to receive it. Memory. Personality. Self. Poured from one vessel into the next like something decanted, not born. To those who know, death was solved generations ago. It simply isn't offered to everyone.
This is Custodia's true hierarchy. A hierarchy far older and colder underneath all of it: those who transfer, and those who die and stay dead. Continuation is not a right. It is bought, inherited, or granted, though never guaranteed.
A Ward who serves well enough, long enough, quietly enough, might be offered a new body when their old one fails. Most never will be. Most simply age, sicken, and die, believing mortality is universal, natural, unavoidable, the one thing Custodia cannot control. They are never told otherwise. It is easier to mourn a death you believe is inevitable than to resent one that was a choice made for you, by someone else, somewhere beneath your feet.
//
This is the truth behind the Slow Bleed's name in more ways than one. The world is dying slowly, yes, but inside Custodia, a select few were quietly excused from dying at all, generations ago, while everyone else was simply never told the bleeding had a cure. The deepest irony isn't the secret itself. It's who's kept from it, that the wasteland has always known more than the people living inside the walls of Custodia.
012 / Faction
Wasteland nomads
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Beyond Custodia's walls, the wasteland belongs to no one and everyone. A scattered patchwork of nomadic clans who survive by staying in motion, never settling long enough to become a target. Wasteland Nomads are drawn from every branch of the Unregistered: the Unclaimed born in the sand with no memory of any other life, the Fled who escaped Custodia before they could be processed, and the Cast Out who were stripped of citizenship and left to die but didn't.
Life among the nomads runs on different rules than Custodia's rigid order, status is earned through skill, survival, and reputation rather than birthright or decree, and identity is worn openly instead of erased: scars, tattoos, salvaged armor, and personalized machinery all tell a person's story at a glance.
The largest and most organized of these clans is the Chrome Vultures, a far-ranging convoy built around scavenged machinery, fierce independence, and a deep generational distrust of Custodia. What unites nomads across every clan, spoken or not: the wasteland doesn't forgive weakness, and neither does anyone waiting to take what little you have.
013 / Faction
Chrome Vultures
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Origins
The Chrome Vultures descend largely from the Unclaimed generations of wasteland-born survivors who've never been inside Custodia's walls, alongside a smaller number of Fled and Cast Out Wards who were absorbed into the clan over time. This mixture gives the Vultures a complicated internal culture: part ancestral wasteland tradition, part inherited fragments of Custodia's old world, twisted and repurposed.
Naming & identity
"Chrome" refers to their reverence for salvaged technology and machinery. "Vultures" reflects their role as scavengers of the wasteland. They survive by picking over the ruins of the old world and sometimes the remains of Custodia's failed expeditions or discarded Unregistered.
Culture and values
MovementNomadic by necessity and philosophy, settling in one place is seen as an invitation for Custodia to find and destroy you. Movement equals survival and freedom.
Clan structureLeadership organized around the War Leader and his captains, each commanding their own convoy, with looser alliances between convoys during larger conflicts or migrations.
CustodiaDeep hatred and fear, though attitudes vary. Some Vultures see Custodia as an enemy to be raided and resisted; others avoid it entirely, a ghost story told at night, "stray too far and the Eyes will find you."
Leadership
The Vultures' structure is earned through action, reputation, and survival skill rather than birthright or bureaucracy. Ranks are fluid. Someone can rise or fall based on deeds, not paperwork.
Ranks
Rank is earned through deed, not birthright. Anyone can rise; anyone can fall.
War leader
Commands the entire convoy. Leadership is claimed, not inherited and can be challenged and overthrown if seen as weak or reckless with the convoy's lives.
Road captains
Second-in-command, each overseeing a convoy. Often War Leader hopefuls, positioning for succession and constant internal rivalry.
Scouts
Fast, lightly-armored riders who find routes, water, salvage, and signs of danger ahead. Often the youngest full members proving ground.
Raiders
The muscle. Fighters and defenders who lead raids on rival convoys or outposts. They're brutal, they're savage and they're effective.
Scavengers
The backbone of daily survival anything from salvage, repair, and maintain. Just as respected as Raiders, since machinery is survival in the wasteland.
Outcasts
Newcomers with no proven status yet, usually escaped Wards, orphans, lone survivors taken in. Some never rise; others become the fiercest Raiders.
Characters
Field dossier. Confirmed sightings only, most identities remain unconfirmed.
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TBA
War leader
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
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TBA
Road captain
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
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TBA
Road captain
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
NPC
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TBA
Scout
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
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TBA
Scout
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
KOS
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Venn
Raider
Usually sighted with Tolla. Hunts in pairs.
KOS
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Tolla
Raider
Usually sighted with Venn. Hunts in pairs.
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TBA
Raider
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
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TBA
Raider
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
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TBA
Scavenger
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
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TBA
Scavenger
UNKNOWN. Dossier incomplete.
//
If Venn and Tolla are sighted together, abort the route. Do not approach, do not engage, do not assume one is a distraction for the other. They hunt as a single animal wearing two bodies, and every convoy that's tried to outlast them has come back short. Kill-on-sight, if you can. Most can't.
014 / Faction
Other factions
Beyond Custodia and the Chrome Vultures, the wasteland holds smaller, less organized survivor groups, each shaped by whatever scraps of the old world they clung to.
Salt Choir
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A reclusive cult-like community who believe the contaminated oceans are sacred and drink treated seawater as ritual, slowly poisoning themselves in devotion to a sea that no longer sustains life.
The Overseer, Notable NPC
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The Overseer administers the Choir's rite of seawater, deciding who drinks, how much, and when. This is a role that makes them both the community's highest authority and its most poisoned member, having taken the ritual longer and deeper than anyone else in the Choir.
Wire Rats
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An underground scavenger network living in the ruins of old subway and sewer systems beneath dead cities, trading in salvaged tech and information no one else can reach.
The Compact
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A loose alliance of ex-Custodia defectors and disillusioned Enforcers who reject both Custodia's control and the wasteland's lawlessness, attempting (and often failing) to build something resembling a fair settlement in the ruins.
015 / Places
Notable locations
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The Custodia Spire
The towering central monument and administrative heart of Custodia, dominating its skyline. Rarely entered by anyone below Enforcer rank.
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The Bone Flats
A vast stretch of open desert littered with the wreckage of a massive old-world battle. A common raiding and salvaging ground, said to be haunted.
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The Salt Wound
A partially submerged coastal ruin, its skyline jutting from contaminated shallows like broken teeth. The Wire Rats are rumored to operate in its flooded lower levels.
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Last Well
A rare, real freshwater source outside Custodia's control fiercely contested and rotated between factions through uneasy, temporary truces.
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The Rust Choir
An enormous graveyard of old-world aircraft and machinery, half-swallowed by sand. Its hulls groan and "sing" in the wind, a common Chrome Vultures waypoint.
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Glasspoint
Desert fused into black glass by an old-world weapon strike, still faintly warm after two centuries. Scorched pre-collapse tech is sometimes found at its center.
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The Hollow Road
A long-abandoned old-world highway cutting a rare direct path across deadly terrain. Ambushes and vehicle graveyards litter its length.
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Ninefold
A fortified settlement built into the ruins of a former dam. One of the few Unregistered strongholds resembling a permanent town. Neutral ground, uneasily.
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The Marrow Pits
Deep excavation sites from old-world mining operations, now used by several factions as disposal grounds. Spoken of in hushed, uneasy tones.
