I claim zero ownership of this setting. Do whatever you like with it. This may not necessarily apply to fanworks I reblog; checking with the original creator would probably be a good move.
We have powers undreamt of by our ancestors. Science and nature bow before us, and yet we cannot find salvation. Perhaps it is time for us to bow.
— Recurring monologue from the end of each episode of Follies, a quasi-historical drama documenting the failures of human civilisation
Overview
Civil wars are always destructive, but the Dissolution Wars, the decades-long sequence of conflicts that tore the Terran Commonwealth apart, were a disaster of incalculable proportions. Sparked by a failed revanchist campaign against the newly ascendant Sleepless, simmering discontent with the current administration boiled over into large-scale unrest on hundreds of worlds. The Commonwealth's mismanaged, heavy-handed response escalated the riots into outright revolutions. Untold billions died as the old order fell apart around them and a dozen new ones struggled to be born.
The first Mendicants were victims of this apocalyptic violence, refugees and deserters scattered to the void in motley flotillas. For a bitter, resolute few, this sad repetition of history, magnified on a galactic scale, was final proof that humankind was unfit to chart its own course. A directive force was needed, something higher and wiser than the squabbling masses. Their ancestors had appealed to the gods for guidance, but, with the power of the Fundaments in their hands and talented roboticists and cyberneurologists among their ranks, the Mendicants could build their own gods.
The Mendicants are led by AGIs — not the non-volitional "expert systems" used for automation and professional aid, but true, sapient machine intelligences. Some cults follow a single thinking engine as their immortal god-monarch, while others maintain rotating councils of computers. Human Mendicants' relationships with their machine overlords are a curious mix of worship and caretaking, treating their word as absolute while constantly adjusting their mental parameters to refine and shape their thoughts; it's often hard to say which side is truly setting the agenda.
Structurally, there is nothing new about Mendicant AGIs compared to their Commonwealth predecessors, but the exalted position in which they're held and their followers' upgrading and tweaking tend to have a warping effect on their already-eccentric personalities. They fixate on odd, lateral goals and adopt mutant fringe ideologies, running their societies as grand experiments in the hope of synthesising new insights, as their human followers experiment in turn on them to develop new, superior forms of thought.
All biological Mendicants are cybernetic to some degree, and they wear their mechanical parts with pride. They cut blocky, inorganic silhouettes draped in patchwork clothing, deliberately outfitting themselves with outdated tech and obvious jury-rigs in homage to the power of the machine. Their speech, too, is tinged with machine language, with odd tonal patterns and rhythms that can stir nameless discomfort in less augmented listeners.
Culture
Not all of these will be present in all Mendicant cults. Consider this a diffuse grab bag of snapshots from across the wider faction.
People switch freely between multiple languages in the course of a conversation, including pidgins of human language and computer code. Even largely extinct tongues like Akkadian, Neo-Uralic, and English occasionally come back into fashion for a few years.
The concept of genre is obsolete. Artists in all media freely kitbash artistic idioms based on their own whims, and works are described and filed with clusters of adjectival tags rather than consistent categories.
Cities are uncomfortably cold for outsiders. Overheating and fire are existential threats to Mendicants, so they overcompensate with vast fan arrays and sprawling networks of coolant pipes.
Recreational drugs have been superseded by engineered recreational viruses, both biological and digital. A trip can be long-lasting or even permanent until cured, but regulatory implants can be used to suppress symptoms selectively.
Because society is so strongly networked, politics and culture move extremely quickly. A new ideology could emerge, rise, and become outmoded or problematised in the space of a week; the only limiting factor is the speed of the physical world.
Imperfection is celebrated. To create something flawless is to court the hubris that has led humankind to evil so many times.
Romances and close friendships between humans and AGIs are scandalous and sometimes illegal, due to the vast differential in power and abstract "worthiness". They happen anyway.
Warfare
AGIs are no more belligerent than humans, but a human intoxicated by power and status will naturally be tempted to throw their weight around, and the machine-gods of the Mendicants are no different. Prouder, more grandiose intelligences may not always tell their subjects exactly why they're waging war, but the humans mostly comply, trusting in the invisible logic over whatever irrational biological doubts they might have.
Mendicant infantry often resemble scrappy paramilitary fighters more than trained soldiers, both a nod to their refugee past and a reflection of their battlefield doctrine. Though lightly (if at all) armoured, their bionics allow them to shrug off injuries that might bring down a less upgraded body. Their equipment is starkly functional, and their armoured vehicles are bizarre, mangled-looking lumps of metal and composite, algorithmically designed for effectiveness over looks and augmented by the Mendicants' compulsive tinkering.
The Mendicants rarely have the advantage of training, gear quality, or sheer weight of numbers, but their AGI masters exploit every conceivable angle to even the odds. They are masters of stealth and information warfare, disrupting enemy comms and hiding from targets until they're almost on top of them. They are eerily well-coordinated, and can usually avoid getting pinned down in the kinds of pitched battles where they're much more vulnerable. An ideal Mendicant operation is one in which the enemy doesn't fully understand that they're under attack until their forces lie in ruins.
Every breath a rebellion
Every birth a battlecry
Every dawn a victory
— Refrain from Kalvix's The Epimethean Creed, a poem used as both a manifesto and a meditative mantra
Overview
The 3C-R1 "Odysseus" geneline was initially one of the more successful products of early bioengineering, a stable new subspecies of humanity rather than the individual modded beings of old. Odysseus morphs were envisioned as ideal colonists to break ground on harsh new planets, and engineered for extreme endurance and adaptability. Within a generation, ships loaded with "Oddies" were touching down on hostile worlds, laying the groundwork for future terraforming.
Within a couple of centuries, the endeavour was abandoned. A few high-profile biotech scandals and a galactic credit crisis left the Odysseus programme politically and financially untenable. But its creations were still out there, scattered across dozens of hellish landscapes, bereft of their purpose and, in some cases, cut off from vital supplies.
Rebellion was inevitable.
As the abandoned enclaves declared independence one by one and reached out to their fellows, a strange new philosophy began to develop among them, skewed by isolation and by the psychological quirks instilled in them. All they had known, as a people, was hostility from every quarter. It was as though the very universe was set against them. Perhaps, they began to believe, it was. Perhaps the universe itself was a violent, oppressive force set against anything that dared exist in it. Cosmic entropy was not merely a natural law, but an enemy of all living beings everywhere. And anyone who complied with its tyrannical reign, even through inaction, was a traitor to life itself.
The descendants of these forsaken colonists, the Epimetheans, are named for their conceptual deity Epimetheus (not the same character featured in ancient Terran mythology, but named in his honour). Epimetheus is an avatar of raw creativity, imagined as an exuberant trickster-god laughing in the face of the callous Nil, the avatar of the unliving universe. Epimetheans worship through creation, but they define creation extremely broadly — it can mean anything from siring and raising a child to sculpting an airless moon into a vast devotional sculpture.
Early in their existence, Epimethean agents stole the Odysseus genographs from Earth's archives, and they gained mastery over their own forms. Even moreso than their peers, they can look like almost anything they please. Many Epimetheans follow the original Odysseus blueprint as a baseline, with sturdy frames and rugged, bony countenances, but you'll almost never see one without a few additions or tweaks; extra eyes are always popular, and many have horns, fangs, and other stereotypically demonic features, leaning into their blasphemous reputation among bioconservatives. Older, more radical Epimetheans are often completely unrecognisable as humans.
Epimetheans live loudly and without compromise, driven by both religious fervour and their innate, engineered drive to work and build; they are theoretically capable of purging themselves of the latter, but most cannot envision ever wanting to. They organise themselves along loose clan lines based on creative approaches and artistic trends. Each of these clades is typically led by a "maestro", an informal leader whose powers combine elements of a cultural influencer, a tribal chieftain, and a union boss. Quarrels between clades are frequent and lively, but they can usually set aside their differences in the face of some greater-scope threat, or to work on collaborative projects.
Culture
Not all of these will be present in all Epimethean clades. Consider this a diffuse grab bag of snapshots from across the wider faction.
Epimetheans are not outright technophobes, but they tend to distrust and disfavour inorganic tech. AGIs are usually not illegal, but they're almost unheard of anyway, as nobody really sees the point in them.
Teenagers observe a coming-of-age ceremony called the Reforging, at which they receive their first elective augments and choose their first adult name.
Most reproduction is handled by exowombs, with zygotes synthesised from a slurry of genetic material from dozens of donors. Having children the old-fashioned way is a valid but slightly unusual choice.
Live music and theatre are popular, but heavy improvisation is the norm, and it's expected that no two performances will be the same. Prerecorded music, movies, and the like are rare curiosities.
Society as a whole is incredibly wasteful, and there's no cultural drive to consume mindfully or respect the environment. Well-established Epimethean planets often have artificial islands or even satellites made from rubbish.
Trends are serious business. Matters of artistic taste and critical interpretation are settled through ritual combat.
Settlements are extremely vertical, teetering skyscrapers intertwined with vast sculpted trees that form the superstructures of whole city blocks. Navigation is a nightmare for outsiders.
Massive parties, commemorating great civic or military successes or randomly celebrating existence, break out unpredictably and spread like riots. Sometimes they are indistinguishable from riots.
Warfare
The Epimetheans fight for two basic reasons: to sate their bottomless hunger for resources, grist for their infinite mills of creation, and to punish and defeat "Nilians", which, to them, encompasses anyone who gets in their way or allows stagnation and decay to reign. They don't pursue either lightly, for the benefits must be weighed against the inherent destructiveness of violence, which itself abets Nil. Epimetheans at war see themselves not as righteous, but as the lesser of two evils, and this fuels their merciless pragmatism on the battlefield.
Epimethean armies are loose, motley affairs. Warriors' bodies and minds are tweaked to interface perfectly with any hardware that hasn't simply been grafted onto them. These infantry are supported by a vast menagerie of beasts, though to call them this is slightly inaccurate, as most are in fact human consciousnesses translated into ferocious war-forms. Some spew venom and corrosive gases, others bristle with horrific bioweapons, and others still are simply furious bundles of fangs, pincers, probosces, and raw primordial strength.
Epimetheans have few permanent military officers, and most of their strike forces have loose hierarchies and broad, direct objectives. They are capable of strategic ploys and ruses of war, but these are rarely pre-planned; individual cadres and beasts behave more like cunning predators than trained, directed soldiers. Their ideal end result, though, is always the same: a brutal, no-holds-barred direct assault, where the Epimetheans' zeal and augmentations give them the edge over almost any foe. Enemies who can keep them at a distance or prevent them from bringing their full strength to bear may trouble them, but, if you're close enough to see the fire in a beast's eyes, it's likely too late for that.
BOSCO: How, then, are we to find our salvation? One cannot grasp what one cannot name or describe.
LEUNG: One cannot. But, honoured Chancellor, we are far more than one, are we not? A million million hands, stretching out across a thousand thousand frontiers... it can only be a matter of time.
— Chancellor Bosco and his advisor Leung discuss the Apex in Citizen Schama's To Reach Beyond, Cycle II, Act III, Scene VII
Overview
Somewhere in the mists of the Deep Past, the philosopher-poet Francis of Chicago wrote of an End of History, the final state of human existence, from which advancement was neither possible nor necessary. He is remembered now as a complacent fool, but the visionary founders of the Apicist Tendency, which would evolve over centuries into the modern Sleepless, believed that Francis was right in one key respect. Society had not reached its perfect, unassailable pinnacle, but that pinnacle did exist, and drawing closer to it, whether through science, art, politics, or violence, was the sacred duty of every sapient being.
Sleepless political dogma refers to this end state of humanity as the Apex. The questions of how close we are to this point and how long we will take to reach it are considered unanswerable, but all Sleepless agree that it is attainable within the lifespan of the species. It's currently fashionable to imagine the Apex as primarily a scientific endeavour, though it will of course encompass, and bring to perfection, every aspect of thought and being.
The pursuit of perfection naturally includes the pursuit of a perfect form, and the Sleepless are among the galaxy's most enthusiastic transhumanists. Citizens are physically and mentally augmented to file away the quirks and weaknesses of their baseline forms, and further modified to suit their roles. These modifications can be hot-swapped with minimal surgical aid, and some Sleepless change professional modules as readily as outfits. Their appearances vary wildly, but they are unified by a smooth, ethereal grace which many outsiders find faintly unsettling, their flawless poise evoking ancient legends of changelings and fairies.
By the standards of ancient humans or even their galactic contemporaries, the Sleepless are impossibly hardworking. Their name is more than metaphorical — their foundries and laboratories are constantly active, driven by constantly evolving predictive models, and almost all citizens have had their need for dedicated rest periods modified away. Vast fractal bureaucracies run society, each position hyper-optimised to an extremely narrow brief. Executive power is so widely distributed that it's impossible to identify a leader or even a central governing body. Each Sleepless polity (and there are several, divided by esoteric disagreements on strategy and ethics) is an administrative perpetual motion machine, spinning faster and faster as its reach grows and its collective ideology develops.
Contrary to popular depictions, though, the Sleepless are not all joyless drones, toiling away their lives in the endless pursuit of advancement. They understand that progress demands innovation and creativity, and that these things cannot flourish without freedom and pleasure. Public happiness is neither an innate good nor a frivolous distraction; it is an investment, carefully cultivated and assessed as just one more dimension of the grand societal drive towards the Apex.
Culture
Not all of these will be present in all Sleepless polities. Consider this a diffuse grab bag of snapshots from across the wider faction.
All art is expected to be functional to some degree. Sculpture and architecture are favoured over "flat" visual art. Music is laced with subliminals to alleviate stress and tiredness.
Complete, self-contained stories are almost unheard of. To give a definitive ending is considered gauche when humankind has yet to find its own conclusion. Serial fiction is much more common. To Reach Beyond, an epic play celebrated as an early Sleepless masterpiece, deliberately leaves its last cycle unfinished, and there have been several competing follow-ups by different authors.
There is a surprisingly vibrant comedy scene. Comedians enjoy something akin to jester's privilege and can critique the establishment openly, though going too far may lead to algorithmic suppression.
Due to long, wildly varying shift patterns, most socialisation is asynchronous. Augmented reality allows any object to become a virtual bulletin board.
All citizens are expected to continue their education throughout their lives. Most workplaces permit regular learning breaks, and some encourage workers to use knowledge-instilling neural feeds on the dormant parts of their brains while on the job.
Social tribalism develops around minor personal preferences — people treat their favourite colours or letters of the alphabet like sports teams. Governments encourage this, as low-stakes rivalries are thought to improve motivation.
Some Sleepless suffer from a culture-bound phobia: kamatophobia, fear of becoming obsolete. Kamatophobia is treatable but systemically underaddressed, as it often manifests in unhealthy but highly productive work patterns.
Warfare
Like all warmongers, the Sleepless justify their military actions with ideology, and they have an endlessly adaptable ready-made excuse: sometimes, violence is a vital part of the journey towards perfection. They fight with equal zeal whether they're defending their work against doubters, bringing down a hostile authority that's deceiving its subjects into opposing the Apex, or appropriating an industrial sector to feed their boundless hunger for resources. Their reasoning, couched in Apicist philosophy, often seems obtuse or downright alien to their opponents, reinforcing their image as fearsome, unpredictable Fair Folk.
The Sleepless military is a hybrid force of short-term levies and professional specialists. Infantry are given temporary training neuroprints, sometimes only minutes before being thrown into battle, and given orders through Fundamental telepathy by officer-analysts based far from the combat zone. They mostly serve as support and screening for the Sleepless' most iconic weapons, the wardolls. These spindly yet elegant frames of composite-reinforced bone and synthetic muscle are controlled by expert pilots with a direct neural link, acting as extensions of the body and equipped with ferociously powerful energy weapons.
Sleepless combat doctrine is focused on tight, coordinated, clearly defined operations. Their hardware sacrifices operational lifespan for raw power, because, if all goes well, they won't need to be active for more than an hour or two. Their armies are highly mobile, and need to be to succeed, as their relatively light armour means they will quickly wither if pinned in place. With good coordination, however, a couple of squadrons of wardolls with modest infantry support can give the impression of a boundless, many-limbed legion, seemingly striking from every angle at once and leaving their enemies no hope of escape.
Fundament (or FUNDAMENT if you're feeling fancy and self-important) is a space fantasy setting. While it was originally envisioned as a setting for wargaming, it could support all sorts of creative works.
A very quick summary: Fundament is about idealistic factions of humans and transhumans arguing and fighting over a chaotic, supernaturally tinged galaxy. The setting is intentionally loose and mutable - there is no one true canon.
A slightly longer summary may be found below.
Setting Principles
These are the big foundational ideas behind Fundament. You'll note that even these are pretty loose - that's deliberate.
The setting is our galaxy in the distant future. The exact year is largely irrelevant, but it's probably on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years from now. Almost nothing is left of the nations and cultural touchstones we'd recognise. The history of the setting is deliberately blurry both in and out of universe, and even defined elements can be vague, unreliable, or contradictory.
All known sapient beings are human or of human origin. Some might be divergent enough to seem like aliens, but everyone is either a human, an offshoot of humanity, or created by humans (not necessarily on purpose).
Technology is highly advanced and loosely defined. This is space fantasy, not hard sci-fi. A few things that definitely exist:
FTL travel is possible through space-folding drives and static portals. All forms of FTL rely on navigational beacons; it's possible to travel without a guiding beacon, but this is slow and unreliable.
Transhuman technology is ubiquitous. Almost everyone has some biological and/or mechanical augmentations, though some are more obvious and radical than others.
Artificial general intelligences - free-willed sapient machines - are possible but somewhat rare, as they consume a lot of resources and don't solve many problems that don't have more conventional solutions. Most extant AGIs are passion projects or religious endeavours. They are usually eccentric, larger than life characters, and can process information with a computer's flawless speed and precision, but they're no more murderous or megalomaniacal than humans (which isn't saying much).
The galaxy is split among many diverse factions, each driven by a broad guiding philosophy. Ideally, these philosophies should make internal sense and never be uncomplicatedly good or evil, though great acts of good or evil (ideally both) may be committed in their names.
No one faction is strong enough to claim galactic dominance. The Commonwealth, the last of several attempts at a galaxy-spanning empire, held that position for a while, but it's long gone now. Factions are not united fronts - they have subdivisions and splinter groups that can quarrel with each other as much as they do with other factions.
Magic is real... kind of. In parallel with the generally understood laws of reality, there exist a number of lesser cosmic forces called Fundaments, which embody abstract, almost narrative forces like Conquest, Fortitude, and Speed. The Fundaments are mostly overruled by conventional physics, but they are slightly alive, and spacetime distortions can give them windows to bleed through into the material realm. These distortions can be targeted and shaped with advanced technology; this is generally called magic, but it’s treated as a branch of science.
People understand the Fundaments well enough to squeeze useful effects out of them, but nobody knows, definitively, how they work. All models, including the "parallel physics" one outlined above, are, at best, "wrong but useful".
The setting should feel volatile, absurd, and at least somewhat hopeful. There is space for darkness and tragedy in Fundament, but humankind and the galaxy should never feel completely, inevitably doomed - though there's no guarantee that they'll survive in a recognisable shape.
The inhabitants of the setting don't have to believe all of this.
Faction Outlines
These seven factions are just the ones I've come up with. You can and should invent your own if you like. I'm planning on some writeups with more detail on each of these down the line, so these are just quick capsule summaries.
Sleepless: A splinter faction that seceded from the Commonwealth, grew to outmatch it, and pushed it into a self-annihilating civil war. Arrogant, driven believers in the Apex, a hypothetical future inflection point at which humankind will have reached its maximum potential.
Praxidists: A loose coalition of independent-ish worlds and polities, drawn closer together by the rise of the Sleepless. Proud, free-spirited individualists who believe that personal liberty and excellence naturally lead to collective harmony.
Vigilites: The rough successors to the Commonwealth, risen from the ashes after its collapse. Paranoid, diligent survivalists preparing for a Dark Forest scenario, the inevitable fate (or so they believe) of any society that grows too large and powerful.
Epimetheans: Descended from an abandoned pre-Commonwealth bio-engineering project to create a hardier spacefaring subspecies of human. Belligerent, fearless cultists of pure creativity, fighting a forever war against the implacable evils of entropy and the cruelty of a cold, inert universe.
Mendicants: A new religious movement created and spread by refugees, defectors, and hapless neutrals caught up in the Commonwealth civil war. Zealous, ingenious worshippers of AGIs, believing that they will find the best path for humankind, as humans themselves have resolutely failed to do.
Blueshifters: Ragtag coteries of exiles, criminals, and malcontents, bound by their shared faith in faithlessness. Wanton, joyous libertine nihilists, denouncing "greater good" ideologies as distractions from the raw pleasure of existence.
Voidlorn: The warped, half-dead husks of very early space colonists, both destroyed and preserved by primitive Fundament use. Cold, steadfast guardians of humankind locked in a complicated collective love affair with the void, which they believe is alive and utterly infatuated with those that defy it.
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