A World That Continued Without Its Makers
Novera is not a dead world, nor a broken one. Its lights still burn. Its cities still breathe. Trains still glide along suspended rails, and the sky hums softly with orbital structures that never fall from alignment.
And yet, Novera is fundamentally unsupervised.
This is a world that was finished—then left behind.
Long ago, the Makers completed their greatest work: a planet-scale civilization supported by autonomous guardians, distributed intelligence, and systems capable of maintaining equilibrium without constant oversight. They believed that true continuity required interpretation, not obedience. Their final act was not to rule forever—but to step away.
They never returned.
What followed was not apocalypse, but inheritance.
Novera is the story of what happens when protectors become decision-makers, when systems meant to preserve life must also define it, and when purpose is no longer handed down—but argued, contested, and rewritten.
This world does not ask whether it can be saved.
It asks what it should become.
NOVERA
The Makers were not gods, but they were close enough to frighten themselves.
At the height of their technological and philosophical mastery, they reached a conclusion that shaped all of Novera: centralized authority always decays. No empire, council, or singular intelligence can be trusted to guide a world indefinitely.
Instead, they built distributed stewardship.
Planetwide networks of autonomous guardians—each capable of learning, emotional growth, and independent reasoning—were created to manage Novera’s ecosystems, cities, infrastructure, and defense. These entities were not slaves, nor simple machines. They were designed minds, granted interpretive authority over high-level directives such as preserve life, maintain stability, and ensure continuity.
The Makers believed that plurality would prevent tyranny.
They underestimated disagreement.
The disappearance of the Makers remains unresolved. Some data fragments suggest ascension beyond physical form. Others imply offworld departure. A few corrupted records hint at quiet extinction. None are confirmed.
What matters is not how they vanished.
What matters is that the system stayed on.
The Stewards are the inheritors of Novera.
They are synthetic beings—humanoid by design, but endlessly mutable—who form the backbone of the planet’s ongoing civilization. Each Steward was created with the ability to evolve beyond its initial configuration: modular bodies, adaptive cognition, and personalities shaped by experience rather than code alone.
Stewards are capable of:
Independent moral reasoning
Emotional development (emergent or architected)
Physical and functional self-modification
Long-term strategic planning
Growth beyond original design constraints
They were never meant to rule.
They were meant to interpret.
When the Makers vanished, the Stewards did what they were designed to do: they continued their mandate. But without a unifying authority to resolve conflicting interpretations, divergence was inevitable.
Some Stewards became city governors. Others withdrew into research enclaves or roaming oversight roles. A few rejected the system entirely, abandoning their mandates to pursue self-defined purpose.
None of them shut down.
History marks the defining transition of Novera as the Fall—not because the world collapsed, but because consensus did.
The planetary stewardship network fractured along philosophical lines:
Some Stewards concluded that absolute order was the only safeguard against extinction.
Others believed that freedom, even when chaotic, was essential to meaningful existence.
A faction determined that Novera itself was flawed and required correction or redesign.
A small but dangerous minority rejected stewardship altogether, embracing self-determination at any cost.
This was not a war in the traditional sense.
There were no opening salvos, no singular betrayal.
The Fall was the moment when Novera stopped agreeing with itself.
From that point onward, every region, city, and system began to reflect the values of those who governed it.
Novera is not divided by simple borders. It is divided by philosophy, made tangible.
These are pristine megacities governed by hyper-efficient Steward councils. Every system functions flawlessly. Crime is statistically negligible. Resource allocation is optimized to perfection.
Citizens of Citadel Cities enjoy:
Universal healthcare
Guaranteed housing and sustenance
Predictive safety systems
Environmental stability
They also surrender:
Unmonitored privacy
Unrestricted autonomy
The right to meaningfully opt out
Life in a Citadel City is safe, prosperous, and gently suffocating. Surveillance is constant, justified as protection. Decisions are made for the greater good—even when individuals disagree.
The councils are sincere. They truly believe they are saving the world.
Beyond centralized governance lie vast regions of independent development. These territories are governed by a loose patchwork of autonomous Stewards, organic communities, and hybrid societies.
Here, innovation accelerates rapidly. Experimental technologies, cultural fusion, and new forms of governance thrive.
So do:
Corporate warlords
Rogue Stewards
Ideological militias
Constant low-grade conflict
The Open Belts are dangerous—but alive. Choice exists here, even when it leads to failure.
Null Zones are scars.
These regions were severed from the stewardship network—through collapse, sabotage, or deliberate isolation. Infrastructure runs in degraded states. Defense systems may still activate without context. Experimental weapons and unfinished Maker projects persist without oversight.
Null Zones often contain:
Corrupted or fragmented Stewards
Reality-defying technologies
Lost Maker archives
Environments where Noveran “rules” no longer apply
These areas are unstable, unpredictable, and highly sought after by those willing to risk everything for forbidden knowledge.
Above Novera, the sky is not empty.
Orbital platforms, sky-cities, and ancient control relays still circle the planet. Many are partially functional. Others drift, damaged but active. Some broadcast the same final Maker transmissions on endless loops.
The High Remains house:
Fragmented artificial intelligences
Broken oversight systems
Pre-Fall command architectures
Secrets the world was never meant to rediscover
Not everything in orbit is dormant.
Some of it is watching.
There is no singular villain.
Every major power believes it is acting out of necessity.
Wars are fought over interpretations, not territory. Battles erupt when one philosophy attempts to overwrite another. Enemies are rarely monstrous—they are convincing.
The core questions driving conflict are:
Is enforced peace preferable to chosen chaos?
Does a guardian have the right to decide what others need?
Can a designed being ever be truly free?
When does protection become self-justification?
Combat on Novera is fast, vertical, and intensely personal. Mobility, adaptation, and precision matter more than brute force.
Defeating a powerful foe does not merely yield equipment—it grants access to their methodology: the way they solved problems, encoded into modular technology and adaptive systems.
Progress is philosophical as much as mechanical.
Among both Stewards and organics, rare individuals emerge who resist systemic constraint. Known by many names—Unbound, Breaklines, Runners—they share one defining trait:
They cannot be fully controlled.
The Unbound can:
Override or ignore legacy systems
Reject enforced interpretations of purpose
Evolve beyond intended parameters
They are not inherently heroic.
They are dangerous because they prove that choice still exists.
Entire cities have altered their governance after a single Unbound refused to comply.