Setting: Reconstructed Espionage Action

Introduction 

The suspended tram jerks and shudders as you pass through another junction, centrally-controlled switches clicking in a choreographed handover. All around you the small steel box continues its steady climb, thin steel walls lined with reassuring mahogany handrails and windows framed in neutral cream. If you look closely you can just about see where the driver used to sit, near the front of the car, but now a small emergency stop switch is all that remains of the control panel. In place of a human operator a small telecomputer unit clicks and whirrs, streams of control signals flickering on its dot-matrix display. A small tab under the display accepts tickets and a seriously red bakelite phone allows you to call in case of a sudden emergency.

All around you the passengers are carrying out their expected roles in a morning commute. Someone is reading the newspaper. Someone is drinking coffee. On the velvet cushioned-bench besides you someone is using a pocket cassette player. They are playing the song Whirling-In-Rags, 12 PM. You can hear it leaking out of the terrible headphones. Outside the window you see an interface airship (too vortex is too unstable for jet engines) readying to shift, part of the ever-growing interfaced war effort against his Revealed Excellency, the Eiraene Emperor. The vocator on the radio says that their backwards thaumaturgies will soon be ground to dust, just as they did to the scholars in the hidden isles. Any day now.

The next time the switch handover happens you will be almost three minutes away from the Legislative District. When you feel the bump you allow your hand to fall open slightly. Their hand brushes against yours, as if by accident. Out of the corner of the eye you catch a pair of nervous eyes, a yellow beret, a light green jacket. Then the handover is complete. You don't talk during the last three minutes of the journey, even when they bump into you on the way out.

You only dare look at your hand when you sit down at your bare, single-bulb apartment. As promised, its a vocator tape, the two metal studs indicating that it fits a Series V or later model. The label is left blank, but you pull out a trolley from behind your single bed. On it sits a Rosencrantz-V Vocator-Telecomputer Multiplex, a miracle of engineering---only the height of your hip. A woodgrain control panel with inset plastic keyboard connects an LCD screen, a voicebox, a studio microphone, and a small printer for printout and fax connections. Underneath it all sits a semi-transparent steel-framed glass case where the symbolic operator units and memory racks can be dimly apprehended, tinted a faint gunmetal grey by dust and poor lighting. It takes a few seconds to boot up after you insert the tape.

PACIFIC COORDINATION SIMULATION SERIES VII

1. Global Policy Convergence Under External Drive [Battery A-D]

2. Interface Cohesion (Phase Transition) Initiative [Battery E-G]

3. Political Counterinsurgency and Outlier Detection via Population-scale Statistics

4. [MORE]

... 

Merely possessing this tape would get you sent to the Giftschrank for advanced questioning, or worse. But the data is invaluable for understanding the plans of the Directorate for the next five years, so you sit down and start reading.

What is this?

This is an aesthetic outline for a setting more than anything else, continuing the ideas which started here. It contains elements of Disco Elysium, the computers of the 50s or 60s, Washington DC, WWII Germany, the aesthetic of Metal Gear, the writings of Vaclav Havel, and Critical Mass by Philip Ball. All of this is then blended with quasi-historical fantasy and some level of background magic radiation.

In essence it is simple. There is a world not unlike ours, with nations and factories and war and machines that compute via logical operations. In that world there is a shadowed state, which operates an order with scrabbling viciousness and totalising ambition. You are a tiny figment of animal imagination trying to survive within that order. And, as you pray and fight and hope and love, background forces stir that put the cold and dominated reality you see all around you into question. There is a Gare Polyphonique, and we're tuned into it, until the end of time when all mysteries are revealed. This world does not have a name yet: let us call it OQ, Orbis Quartus.

The Interface

The world of OQ is similar to ours, except that it has an element known as an interface. An interface is something like a direction on a compass, or the hour reported by a clock. It is an objective measure of some form of distance, just as we have measures in space and time. In spatial terms it is a fourth axis after X, Y, and Z.

Thus, to report your position in the world of OQ requires four coordinates: latitude, longitude, date, and interface orientation. To change interface is effectively to move between different possible worlds that coexist at that moment in space and time. OQ is therefore many overlapping planets at once, all of which lay claim to different versions of the same volume in space. 

The original way to travel between interfaces used natural portals: great storms in the sea, caves that cultists thought led into the underworld. They were treated as manifestations of the divine, or a sign from higher powers. Over time the mechanics of interface manipulation became formalised. Portals and interface vortices could be discovered, dispelled, and at last erected, and pocket-watches were created to measure your orientation. It was discovered that four great civilisations had arisen in OQ contemporaneously, each laying claim to the central landmass known (variously) as the Middern Eiraene Markgrund, the Fundament, the Oecumene, and the Taifang. 

Shortly afterwards, these civilisations went to war. 

The Present 

Now there is a tenuous peace between the two higher interfaced civilisation, the Great Pacific Republic (where you live, an industrial empire with votes but no democracy and subjects but no citizens) and the Anthropohegemony (not much different, think the Moralintern but they actually managed to establish their ideal Innocent world). Both wage proxy wars in the lower civilisations for influence and resources, bringing airships and telecomputers to bear against fireballs and bespoke spirit-binding rituals. The Taifang has been splintered by weapons they cannot even understand and rendered a blasted heap, and the Middernlands are headed that way. The dirty secret is that it is very hard to establish a planet-spanning empire unless you have another planet's worth of resources to burn: it just so happens that in this case "you" do.

The players are likely to be discontents in the Pacific Fundament, rebels of various stripes, infiltrators from the "lower" interfaced planes. I intend the setting to provide plenty of ammunition for campaigns of all sorts, even classic dungeon crawling or hexcrawling types. I hope this seems interesting.