RavioliBurrito — Roleplayer Guild

Returning RPG vet. let see if I remember how to format stuff. Lets see who's interested in creating a world together!

ECLIPSEPUNK

SCI-FI · DEICIDE · YEAR 562 OF THE STOLEN SUN

We were made by them. We were warned by them. We stole their sun, built weapons from its bones, and still they weep for us as they come to end us.
We do not intend to make it easy for them to grieve.

The deletion order was not written in anger. It was filed. Stamped. Assigned a case number. The gods signed it because the Ledger required a signature. Then they appended an apology the Compact has classified at the highest level — because if the people being asked to fight and die knew the gods were grieving them, the war effort would become a great deal more complicated.

— Recovered internal memo, Heliarch Intelligence Directorate, Year 558

◉ WHAT IS THIS?

Eclipsepunk is a sci-fi / brutalist / deicide roleplay set 562 years after humanity physically relocated the sun, encased it in an energy harness called the Cradle, and used its power to build a civilization and a war machine aimed at the heavens.

The gods engineered humanity. They left a warning we ignored or forgot. They are now returning to delete us — not in anger, not in indifference, but in grief so profound it is leaking into their operational behavior. Their Aspects hesitate. One of them is breaking divine law to help us. One never left.

The aesthetic: amber sky, brutalist concrete, solar weapons, and the permanent orange haze of a world that runs on stolen fire. 150 years after the Theft, nobody alive has seen a blue sky. The crime is history. The consequence arrives in nine months.

Players: 2–6   Genre: Sci-Fi / Eclipsepunk / Deicide   Tone: Dark, Morally Complex   Gods: 7   Factions: 7   Until Deletion: ~9 months

◉ THE WORLD

In Year 412, the Heliarch Order completed the Cradle and executed the Seizure — physically relocating the sun into an artificial orbit and encasing it in a partial Dyson harness. The Seizure took eleven days. During those eleven days, every dormant temple on Earth briefly activated. The light from the altars burned the color of grief. Then they went dark.

Cities are called Bastions: 80-to-120-story brutalist towers with solar arrays tiling every upper face, weapons emplacements at the Crown, the Plate of markets and manufacturing in the middle, and the Understack — permanent shadow, dense, dark, independently functional — at the bottom. Every Bastion is named for the number of gods its founders declared they would kill.

Outside the Bastions, the Haze Flats stretch for hundreds of kilometers. The wildlife here has changed in ways no model of standard adaptation accounts for. Apex predators store solar charge in organic capacitor tissue. Some plant species respond to human emotional states. This is not an ecological anomaly. This is the Shepherd.

The sky is amber. It has always been amber to anyone alive. The Cradle's support hexagons are visible at night as a faint ghost-grid behind the stars. Children call it the God-Fence. The Compact calls it the Victory Grid. The Lux calls it the Seal.

◉ THE SEVEN GODS

Gods are engineered administrative intelligences — entities of distributed consciousness and near-limitless power, created by the Ledger to oversee developing civilizations. They experienced something like love. They grieve humanity. They are coming to delete it anyway, because the Ledger's mandate cannot be refused.

— THE LEDGER —
The entity above the gods. Not a god, not a civilization, possibly not an entity at all — perhaps a condition of the universe that consciousness above a certain scale cannot avoid serving. The deletion order came from the Ledger. The gods signed it because they had to. They appended the apology because they wanted to.

"We do not understand the Ledger as you do not understand gravity. We did not create it. We did not consent to it. We move within its law as you move within physics. What it has asked of us regarding your world, we would undo if we could. We cannot."

— Recovered temple codex, pre-Departure, Lux Archive Seven

▸ THE DELETION TRIAD — Those Sent to End Us

THE SEXTON| Endings · Release · the Mercy of Finality
The oldest of the returning gods. Once the god of compassionate death — it petitioned the Ledger twice for reassignment and was refused. Manifests as an enormous burial-vault structure trailing a field of accelerated entropy: metals corrode in minutes within 400km. Its Shroud Aspects have been documented hesitating before contact with living humans. The Lux considers this the most significant tactical data in the war. A god's grief, expressing itself in the only physical language available. Primary deletion instrument. Primary Cradle target.

THE AUDITOR| Records · Truth · the Accounting of What Was
Authored the deletion order because the Ledger required an author. Now building the most complete record of a terminated civilization in the Ledger's history — a monument to humanity — even as it processes the termination. Its Aspects are perfect geometric solids that absorb all light and kill in absolute silence. It cannot stop the deletion. It can ensure we are remembered. Whether that is touching or monstrous depends on your perspective.

THE ENUMERATION| Classification · the Sorting of What Remains
The youngest. No history with humanity, no grief. Simply doing its first major assignment — and finds it genuinely interesting. This makes it the most dangerous: the Sexton hesitates, the Auditor catalogs, the Enumeration simply processes. Its Cataloguer Aspects are featureless humanoids: curious, non-violent until interrupted. The Lux has captured one. It has been asking to speak with a Helix-Born for three weeks.

▸ THE SUPPORT TRIAD — Those Who Should Not Have Come Back

THE SHEPHERD| Growth · Tending · the Nurture of Developing Life
The Shepherd never left. When the other gods departed, it distributed itself into the biosphere — the deep fungal networks, the strange fauna of the Haze Flats, the animals that follow the bereaved. It has been tending the world it couldn't bear to abandon for 562 years. It has no Aspects. It has proxies. At least three of those proxies are human. It has been trying to communicate for decades. No one was listening — until now. It is dying since the Signal arrived.

THE INTERCESSOR| Communication · Translation · the Bridging of What Cannot Speak
Breaking divine law to save us. For two years, it has been transmitting an appeal procedure directly to Helix-Born: a map of the Ledger hierarchy, the specific clause that could trigger mandatory review, and instructions for presenting the case. It believes the deletion order contains a procedural error — that humanity was evaluated at the wrong developmental stage. It cannot file an appeal through proper channels. So it is filing one through us. It has chosen to remain vulnerable rather than stop transmitting.

THE ARCHITECT-THAT-WAS| Design · Construction · the Making of Minds
Built humanity. Forty thousand years of design work. The Helix is its masterpiece. It is very old, very broken by 562 years of grief, and arriving in 18 days — not months. Some transmission fragments suggest it wants to stop the deletion by force of creative authority. Others suggest it wants to be the one to end what it made rather than watch someone else do it. It is transmitting directly to Helix-Born. What it is sending is not yet decoded.

THE WITNESS| Observation · Justice · the Recording of Final Accountings
Arrives last. Authorizes final deletion after observing the full process. Cannot act until it has seen everything — which means it must be capable of receiving testimony. This is the procedural crack the Lux has built their entire strategy around. The right testimony, in the right form, might constitute grounds for mandatory review. Everything the players do is being observed. The question is whether it constitutes evidence worth hearing.

◉ THE HELIX-BORN

The gods engineered humanity. The Helix is the mechanism — dormant sequences in ~12% of the population, designed to interface with divine energy fields. The Architect spent forty thousand years on the template. Since the Reckoning Signal, activation rates have increased 340%. Something is waking humanity up.

► ENTROPY RESISTANCE
Measurable resistance to the Sexton's entropy field. Shroud Aspects hesitate longer near active carriers. The most militarily significant expression.

► DIVINE LITERACY
Read divine-language script natively — the way a native speaker reads their mother tongue. Decode in seconds what Lux analysts take months to translate.

► SLEEPER PERCEPTION
Sense dormant god-fragments buried in the geological record. Invisible to all instrumentation. Three Helix-Born working together can map a Sleeper's boundaries from the surface.

► SOLAR CONDUCTIVITY
Generate and store charge biologically. The Compact calls this the Generator Initiative — a classified program for managed extraction. The Resonants were founded, in part, in response to it.

► ASPECT RESONANCE
Non-verbal emotional transfer with divine Aspects. The rarest expression. The Enumeration has been asking for a carrier specifically. The Architect is transmitting on frequencies only Helix-Born can receive.

Every Helix-Born, since the Architect-That-Was began its approach, has been having the same dream: a vast unfinished structure in deep space, something enormous looking back at them, and the distinct impression that they are the last revision of a design waiting five hundred years to be completed.

◉ SEVEN FACTIONS

Seven factions in Year 562. They know different things. They want incompatible outcomes. They are all, in their own estimation, the ones who have correctly understood the situation.

► THE HELIARCH COMPACT— The Government · The Information Monopoly
Controls the Cradle, the weapons industrial base, and the public narrative. Citizens know "a threat" is being managed. None know it's divine. None know the gods apologized. Three internal wings — hawks, secret diplomats, and a classified ark program — are each running strategies that contradict each other.

► THE KINDLED— The Movement · The Black Market
Century-old labor-movement-turned-insurgent-network. A source inside Compact intelligence gave them the apology. This has split them — one faction wants to publish it, one thinks it's a plant. The source may be running a double game. The argument is ongoing and increasingly bitter.

► THE LUX ECCLESIASTICA— The Scholars · The Only Real Plan
Weapons-theologians with a completed Ledger Device, a captured Cataloguer asking questions, partial Intercessor transmissions, and a theory: the deletion order contains a procedural error the Witness is empowered to review. Everything they do is aimed at being ready when the Witness arrives.

► CULTS OF WAITING— The Faithful · The Wrong Kind of Right
They know the gods grieve humanity. They've concluded the deletion is a test of worthiness. Some cells are peaceful. Some are violent. All of them know things they shouldn't — fed by a shadow coordinator no faction has identified. The Shepherd's proxies have been gathering near their sites for two years.

► THE RESONANTS— Helix-Born · Answer to No One
80–120 Helix-Born who found each other through Intercessor transmission bleed. Every faction wants them. They've declined everyone. Their reading of the appeal procedure says a Helix-Born must present the case to the Witness — not a diplomat, not a scholar. The people the Architect built. They believe they are the argument.

► THE PALE COMPACT— The Ark Fleet · The Accidental Nation
The Succession Bureau's survival arks became a civilization of 31,000 people across seven deep-space vessels with their own government and culture. One captain has been receiving Intercessor transmissions alone for six months and is about to act on them.

► THE INTERCESSOR'S CHOIR— Unwilling Prophets · Incomplete Message
~600 people receiving Intercessor transmission fragments they didn't ask for. No military capability. No faction resources. But together they hold the most complete picture of the appeal procedure in existence — scattered across hundreds of people, none of whom have enough alone to understand what they've been given. The Compact is quietly collecting them.

◉ SELECTED GEAR

150 years of solar war-economy. From standard Understack hardware to things that officially don't exist.

HELIO-LANCE| Anti-Divine Infantry Weapon · Military-Restricted
Creates an 8-second entropy field disruption corridor on a Shroud hit. Bright enough to permanently blind unprotected eyes at 30m. The Kindled have a significant stolen stockpile.

RESONANCE RIFLE| Divine-Frequency Pulse · Lux / Resonants Only
Fires a pulse targeting the resonance frequency of divine material. Minimal effect on non-divine targets; cascade fragmentation on Aspect matter. Helix-Born operators calibrate it instinctively.

SOLARBURST SHOTGUN| Wide-Arc Entropy Disruption
40-degree photonic spread creating a temporary entropy field disruption across the full cone. Weaker than a Lance but covers an area. Invaluable for covering retreating allies through Shroud-occupied space.

ASPECT SHROUD ARMOR| Processed Divine Material · 7 Sets in Existence
Armor made from processed Shroud-class Aspect material. Entropy-resistant, lighter than Mirror Plate, and nearly invisible to divine sensor systems. Aspects do not perceive it as a threat object. The Compact does not know it is possible.

RESONANCE DAMPENER| Helix Signature Suppression · Resonants-Developed
Suppresses the electromagnetic signature Compact screening uses to identify Helix-Born. Extends detection time from ~4 minutes of proximity to ~40. Not a permanent solution. A permanent solution doesn't exist yet.

SUNBREAKER| ⚠ CLASSIFIED · Crew-Served Heavy Weapon
Compressed solar plasma burst. Aspect Collapse — 8-hour shutdown — on a direct hit. Officially the Compact's highest classification. The Kindled have eleven. The Resonants have two. The Pale Compact has one and thinks it's survey equipment.

THE NULL SPEAR| ⚠ PROTOTYPE · One Known Example
Suppresses a god's Ledger-bond for 90 seconds — the connection that compels them to obey the deletion order. A god inside the field acts on its own will for the duration. What a god would choose to do with 90 seconds of freedom from the mandate is entirely unknown. The Lux built it. They have not told anyone. They have not decided whether to use it.

◉ WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR

Format:Advanced literate. Multiple paragraphs, third person. Quality and investment over word count.
Tone:Dark stakes, morally complex enemies, questions without clean answers. The point is resistance — but the gods are not villains.
Collaboration:Partners who bring ideas to the world, not just reactions to it. This is a shared story with a shared enemy and a shared question.
Size:2–6 players. First-come-first-served on spots once I open the OOC.

Some character directions that interest me:
► Helix-Born who just activated and don't know what they are yet
► Compact veterans who were present at something their file doesn't mention
► Kindled operatives whose source just went dark
► Lux scholars who have read the Intercessor's map of the Ledger hierarchy and cannot unfeel it
► Choir members carrying a fragment they can't decode alone
► Pale Compact citizens who have come back to a planet they've never seen

If this setting pulls at you — drop a reply.
Tell me which faction calls to you. Tell me who your character might be.

They grieve us.
Grieve them back.
Then kill them.

[size=75]ECLIPSEPUNK  ◉  EXPANDED EDITION  ◉  YEAR 562 P.S.  ◉  RPG GUILD INTEREST CHECK[/size]
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