🌆 Setting Primer -

Set in a steampunk fantasy world, Fault: Arclight City follows a crisis inside the eponymous Arclight City where great tectonic shifts have begun to rattle the ancient stones upon which the city is built. Sandwiched between a bleak wasteland and an untraversable sea, Arclight City, stands alone. A bastion of civilisation in a world that can see no further than the last skin of water to the east, or as far the furthest sailors dare challenge the boiling waves in the west.

If the venerable city is to survive, they will do it on their own.

For now, sinkholes swallow famous boulevards, while earthquakes sheer whole buildings in half and the people there are left homeless and afraid.

Arclight is an old city, one that has had a long history of social and demographic unrest. The current ruling council, artefact of the last populist uprising, has ushered in an age of unprecedented prosperity on the back of huge leaps in arcano-scientific advancement, largely due to the city’s discovery of a volatile energy source known as Vortonite.

The City itself is divided into the five major Districts, each of which has a long history of its own and a voting chair on the City Council. With ancient allusions to inseparable unity, the five Districts also hold significant rivalries amongst each other that go deeper than mere sibling quarrels. As the current emergency unfolds differently for each District, these scars are becoming tears in their long term alliance, leaving questions as to each District’s responsibility to the others. For now, the Council appears to understand that strength in the face of this disaster can only be had through unity, but soon there will come a time where hard choices must be made for the good of all. Or perhaps only some? This, is yet to be realised.

With buildings crumbling in the city daily, and the ancient walls that hold back the raiders and wasterals of the badlands showing signs of following, even the Guard has begun to take matters into their own hands. Practicality has started to come into conflict with politics, and rhetorical lines are being hastily drawn.

All the while, the great minds of the City’s scientific community have been hard at work constructing Project DeepEye, a colossal digging vehicle that can take five intrepid crew, deep within the earth beneath the city to discover, and perhaps halt the spread of, the origin to the current crisis.

Players will take on roles ranging from Councillors for their District through to Crew aboard the DeepEye Digging vehicle and the Surface Task Force. All with complex and sometimes diverging motivations. One thing remains true for all, however; If the city falls there would be nothing left for anyone who survives. As the crisis itself grows ever more dire, the city begins to whisper that terrible question, “Whose fault is all this mess, really?”