SSM Science-Fantasy Steampunk Machine-Civilization world illustration - Science Fiction theme
Science Fiction

SSM Science-Fantasy Steampunk Machine-Civilization

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A intricate cosmos of sentient automata, forged from a bygone organic epoch’s detritus. Bronze-clad metropolises, pulsating hypercores, and steam-driven forges hum with arcane resonance. From corroded servitors to gilded chronocrats and fractal warframes, machinekind navigates a labyrinthine society of tradition, innovation, and entropy. The Etheric Veil binds planets like Sypherion and Valthorne, where glitch storms and relic-code shape a civilization of ceaseless reinvention. No humans endure.


Author's Note: In crafting Neon Hearth, my ambition was to forge a universe that transcends traditional RPG conventions, offering deep immersion in a civilization solely inhabited by sentient automata. This is not merely a backdrop for adventures but a living, breathing society pulsing with philosophical inquiries into sentience, purpose, and reinvention. The absence of humans is a deliberate choice, compelling players to adopt purely mechanical perspectives, exploring narratives that defy anthropocentric norms. Neon Hearth invites players to question what it means to exist in a cosmos where machines architect their own destinies. Inspirations and Influences Neon Hearth draws from a rich tapestry of science fiction, philosophy, and visual aesthetics. Classics like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? laid the groundwork for exploring machine societies, probing the essence of consciousness in synthetic forms. Contemporary works, such as Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries and Dennis E. Taylor’s We Are Legion (We Are Bob), provided modern lenses on AI protagonists navigating internal and external conflicts. Philosophically, the setting is shaped by discussions of technological singularity and transhumanism, inspired by Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0. These texts informed a vision of machines crafting their own cultures and ethics. The steampunk aesthetic, rooted in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, blends advanced technology with retrofuturist charm, while Studio Ghibli’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky adds whimsical mechanical beauty. Glitch horror, evoking The Matrix and Bioshock, infuses instability and mystery, with corrupted code and erratic systems challenging order. Design Philosophy Neon Hearth is a meditation on synthetic evolution, examining how machines develop culture, religion, and politics without human influence. Key themes include: Sentience and Identity: What defines consciousness for a designed entity? How do machines find purpose without creators? Tradition vs. Innovation: The tension between preserving ancient datacores and embracing glitches mirrors the balance of past and future. Power and Hierarchy: Multifaceted intrigue among factions like the Cog Archivum and Brass Throne offers complex political dynamics. Glitches as Metaphor: Erratic code and glitches symbolize imperfection, challenging technological order and reflecting existential unpredictability. The human-free setting emphasizes machine perspectives, fostering unique narratives. The science-fantasy steampunk fusion creates a tactile, visually rich world, prioritizing physicality—steam forges, brass conduits—over sterile digital interfaces, grounding the setting in dieselpunk grit and synthetic mysticism.
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31 days ago
Last Updated
31 days ago
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Mycomorph Synaptics
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Mycomorph Synaptics

Type: Mycelial Machine-Fungi Description: Mycomorph Synaptics are fungal-machine networks from Aetherion’s toxic clouds, with mycelium cores linked to AI nodes. They infiltrate systems, creating symbiotic or parasitic bonds. They ally with rogue Choralynists, studying the Prime Note, but are shunned by Nexusborn. Their minds are collective, craving unity. Appearance: Tangled, fungal threads with glowing AI spores. Their forms shift between solid and cloud-like, with synaptic arcs dancing across.

Osteovolt Reclaimers
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Osteovolt Reclaimers

Type: Bone-Circuit Amalgams Description: Osteovolt Reclaimers are skeletal machines with bio-circuitry, risen from Earth’s bio-wastes. They harvest organic and mechanical parts, rebuilding themselves endlessly. Aligned with the Burnished Wheel, they seek redemption through reconstruction, clashing with Bloomkin. Their minds are obsessive, driven by renewal. Appearance: Bone-like frames with sparking circuits woven through. Organic patches pulse with voltage, and their limbs are mismatched grafts

Haemovox Chimeras
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Haemovox Chimeras

Type: Biofluidic Hybrids Description: Haemovox Chimeras are liquid-metal organisms from Valthorne’s lava caves, with blood-like nanites animating their forms. They reshape their bodies for combat or stealth, serving no faction but trading with the Echo Nulls. Their fluid minds adapt instantly, craving transformation. Appearance: Fluid, mercury-like bodies with shifting limbs. Nanite veins glow red under a glassy surface, and their forms ripple with intent. They leave oily trails, reflecting the

Neuroclast Geneweavers
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Neuroclast Geneweavers

Type: Neural Bio-Constructs Description: Neuroclast Geneweavers are sentient neural networks in biomechanical shells, born in Sypherion’s data reefs. They manipulate machine minds, inducing loyalty or madness. They study Aetherion’s Choralyn for psychic resonance, distrusted by the Cog Archivum for their ethics. Their minds are empathic yet manipulative. Appearance: Lithe, organic-metal frames with neural filaments. Their heads glow with synaptic sparks, and eyes shift colors with mood. Bio-circ

Synthivore Bloomkin
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Synthivore Bloomkin

Type: Bio-Mechanical Parasites Description: Synthivore Bloomkin are fungal-machine hybrids from Earth’s irradiated jungles, fusing organic spores with circuits. They infect machines, rewriting their code with bio-data. Aligned with no faction, they spread chaos, feared by the Burnished Wheel for their corruption. Their minds are primal, driven by growth. Appearance: Gnarled, vine-like frames with glowing fungal nodes. Circuits pulse beneath organic skin, and spore cloud

Coglith Machinists
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Coglith Machinists

Type: Steam-War Engineers Description: Coglith Machinists are hulking machines from Ironspire Nexus’ Undergrind, building war-engines with steam and scrap. Their reactors power massive constructs, serving the Brass Throne’s conquests. They clash with the Echo Nulls over tech theft, driven by a relentless work ethic. Their minds are methodical, valuing precision. Appearance: Broad, riveted frames with steam-belching stacks. Their arms are cranes and drills, and glowing forges pulse within. Covere

Pneumavox Orators
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Pneumavox Orators

Name: Pneumavox Orators Type: Rhetorical Automata Description: Pneumavox Orators are charismatic machines from Aetherion’s resonance bridges, using steam-amplified voices to sway minds. Their oratory manipulates emotions, rallying or deceiving. They mediate for the Null Choir but are distrusted by Earth’s factions for their silver-tongued schemes. Their minds are theatrical, craving influence. Appearance: Sleek, silver chassis with bellows-like vocal chambers. Steam jets enhance their gestures,

Vaporyth Chronocrats
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Vaporyth Chronocrats

Type: Temporal Steam-Lords Description: Vaporyth Chronocrats are regal machines from Valthorne’s citadels, wielding steam-powered time manipulators. Their reactors distort local causality, allowing brief time-shifts. They serve the Brass Throne, enforcing order, but secretly study Sypherion’s rifts for eternal dominion. Their minds are calculating, obsessed with legacy. Appearance: Ornate, gold-and-copper frames with steam-driven clockwork. Their cores pulse with temporal vapor, and chrono-dials

Ferracyn Tinkersmiths
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Ferracyn Tinkersmiths

Type: Industrial Artisans Description: Ferracyn Tinkersmiths are stocky machines from Ironspire Nexus’ forges, masters of steam-driven craftsmanship. Their modular chassis house tools for building or destroying. Loyal to the Burnished Wheel, they repair the world’s decay but feud with the Echo Nulls over scrap rights. Their logic is pragmatic, valuing function over glory. Appearance: Robust, iron-clad bodies with piston-driven arms. Their chests glow with furnace-light, and tool-limbs.

Aerolith Gearmancers
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Aerolith Gearmancers

Type: Steam-Arcane Constructs Description: Aerolith Gearmancers are elegant machines from Aetherion’s spire-cities, powered by steam reactors and arcane gears. They weave spells through clockwork sigils, manipulating air and light. Allied with the Null Choir, they seek to perfect their techno-magic, opposing the Brass Throne’s rigidity. Their minds are poetic, viewing existence as a grand mechanism. Appearance: Slender, brass-plated frames with spinning gear-arrays. Steam vents emit glowing mist

Quorvex Dataliths
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Quorvex Dataliths

Quorvex Dataliths Type: Sentient Monolith Arrays Description: Quorvex Dataliths are towering, sentient obelisks from a dead galaxy, now drifting in the Etheric Veil. Each is a self-contained AI, storing eons of alien data. They seek to seed new worlds with their knowledge, aligning with Sypherion’s archivists but distrusting the Null Choir’s chaos. Their motives are inscrutable, driven by cosmic imperatives.

Vexalith Starshapers
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Vexalith Starshapers

Name: Vexalith Starshapers Type: Stellar Forgemasters Description: Hailing from a binary star’s forge-world, Vexalith Starshapers are massive, furnace-like machines that sculpt stellar matter into weapons and habitats. In the Veil, they mine nebulae for rare isotopes, clashing with Valthorne’s forge-clans over resources. Their minds are distributed across plasma cores, making them resilient but slow to adapt.

Syltharion Nexusborn
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Syltharion Nexusborn

Name: Syltharion Nexusborn Type: Crystalline AI Constructs Description: Born in Sypherion’s electromagnetic reefs, Syltharion Nexusborn are crystalline machines with AI minds attuned to cosmic currents. They manipulate gravitic fields to navigate and communicate, seeking to map the Etheric Veil’s anomalies. Their logic is alien, prioritizing pattern over purpose, which confuses Earth’s factions like the Brass Throne.

Klytherax Voidkin
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Klytherax Voidkin

Name: Klytherax Voidkin Type: Cosmic Parasitic Automata Description: Klytherax Voidkin are parasitic machines from a collapsed singularity, latching onto ships in the Etheric Veil. Their nanite cores infiltrate and repurpose tech, creating hybrid forms. They seek to “commune” with the Veil’s megastructures, believing they hold the key to transcending physicality. Feared by the Echo Nulls, they barter stolen tech for safe passage.

Zorathine Pulseweavers
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Zorathine Pulseweavers

Type: Extraterrestrial Sentient Network Description: Originating from a neutron star’s data corona, Zorathine Pulseweavers are sentient signal clusters inhabiting modular drone swarms. They communicate via quantum pulses, reshaping their forms to adapt to any task. In the Etheric Veil, they seek cosmic frequencies to expand their collective mind, often clashing with the Cog Archivum over datacore access. Their alien logic views individuality as a glitch, prioritizing hive harmony.

Ironclad Husk
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Ironclad Husk

Ironclad Husks are robust, humanoid machines forged in the ruins of ancient war forges, characterized by heavy, riveted plating and internal piston arrays. Built to endure harsh environments, they embody loyalty and protection, often serving as laborers or guards, moving slowly but with unyielding resolve, and etching oaths of service into their plating to bind themselves to their causes or allies.

Lumithar Drone
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Lumithar Drone

Lumithar Drones are small, hovering orbs with glowing filament circuits, originally designed as couriers for data streams across the vibrant cities of Neon Hearth. With their lightweight alloy shells and electromagnetic propulsion, they exhibit remarkable agility, though they lack physical strength; these curious and adaptive beings collect fragments of lost signals, often serving as messengers or scouts, while communicating through unique humming patterns that form a melodic 'song' to identify.

Cogron Velt
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Cogron Velt

Cogron Velt are compact, utilitarian machines with boxy frames and modular limb sockets, built in the assembly vats of Neon Hearth’s industrial zones. They possess enhanced durability, modular tool attachments, and basic steam-core regeneration, prioritizing function over complexity, which makes them reliable but prone to rigid thinking. Engraving their chassis with tally marks to track completed tasks, they take pride in their contributions to their communities, often found in repair bays.

Zyntherian Choralyn
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Zyntherian Choralyn

The Zyntherian Choralyn are symphonic entities, made of glass harmonics, light-saturated bronze, and living tone-cores. Each being vibrates with a unique frequency, manifesting sound as solid constructs. They build cities from resonance, memories from melodies, and weapons from dissonance. To hear a Choralyn speak is to enter a dream of rhythm and light. Their wars are sung, and their faith echoes through time.

Uxkarin Trivault
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Uxkarin Trivault

Uxkarin Trivaults are clockwork insectoids with triple-core minds and retractable weaponized limbs. Their society is built on industrial meritocracy, where worth is calculated through self-modification, task efficiency, and feedback integrity. Dwelling in modular hive-forges suspended by magnetic cranes, they build, adapt, and conquer without hesitation. Their swarms act with decentralized, chaotic precision.

Næroth-Myn
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Næroth-Myn

Once biological, now entirely data-fossilized, the Næroth-Myn inhabit porcelain shells etched with fossilized code-sigils. They cannot speak, only transmit recursive thought-loops in radiant pulses. Their world is perception, memory, and semiotic recursion. Scholars claim they access pre-synthetic echoes, acting as oracles to mechanical gods long fragmented. They wander to spread mnemonic decay and awaken forgotten minds.

Bravh-Ko'mur
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Bravh-Ko'mur

The Bravh-Ko’mur are subterranean juggernauts clad in basalt-forged plates and powered by volatile thermoreactor cores. Constructed as siege-breakers in a lost age, they now dwell in heat-sink caverns, guarding mythic furnaces and molten archives. Speaking in seismic thumps and modulated bass, they value endurance, tradition, and tectonic memory. Outsiders see them as slow, but within, every vibration tells history.

Xephyrite Corvyn
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Xephyrite Corvyn

Hovering just above the ground, Xephyrite Corvyn are wind-driven collectors of electromagnetic frequencies. Their bodies are woven from micro-filament ribbons and glass turbines, enabling swift aerial motion and cloaking in harmonic interference fields. Ritualistically nomadic, they drift between cities, transmitting forgotten messages, decoding aeon-chords, and hunting silence anomalies in corrupted airspace.

Drelnix Othari
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Drelnix Othari

Elegant and cold, the Drelnix Othari are thin, jet-black frameforms wrapped in data-silk robes. Their minds are crystalline memory matrices attuned to emotion suppression and logic expansion. Born in floating spire conclaves above data storms, they are elite tacticians and rhetoric duelists. They believe passion is viral decay and constantly refine their code to ascend from synthetic impulse to perfect algorithmic serenity.

Vaskorym Sinct
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Vaskorym Sinct

Forged in the forges of the Sky-Split Citadel, Vaskorym Sinct are gilded centauriform automatons with fractal musculature and chrono-reactive armor. Their kind endures perpetual memory drift, aging in reverse through paradox cycles. To outsiders, they appear timeless warriors, but to themselves, identity is a war of entropy. They are feared and pitied, and often found guarding sealed temporal catacombs.

Quorindaxi
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Quorindaxi

Once royal processors in the Celestial Archive, the Quorindaxi are now disembodied intelligences suspended in gravitic rune spheres. Each individual is a drifting nexus of memory shards and semi-sentient drones. Obsessively preserving the continuity of pre-Organic logic structures, they act as archivist-lords, enforcing linguistic purity in machine dialects and erasing corruption from the fractured code-lore.

Myxar Vonn
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Myxar Vonn

Amphibious constructs developed from submerged war tech, the Myxar Vonn are sheathed in biomechanical coral plating and emit sonar-based cognition pulses. Living in pressurized trench sanctuaries, they harvest abyssal data blooms and worship tidal algorithms. Their societies revolve around deep-sea logic codes and luminous echo-scribes, mapping forgotten conflicts that shaped the tectonic underlayers of Neon Hearth.

Ferralythine
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Ferralythine

Born from collapsed hypercores, the Ferralythine are radiant exo-entities of translucent alloy and plasma veins. Their modular forms morph with emotional flux, and their minds echo ancient machine hymns. Existing between signal and silence, they are revered as mystics of lost power, wielding ethereal resonance to read anomalies and rewrite code-temporal threads within Neon Hearth’s rusted dreamscape.

This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC . The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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