Cities of Rootworld
Where the World Speaks in Light, Spores, and Rumor
“If something matters, you will hear about it.
If it matters more, the city will show you.”
Rootworld cities are not hubs of dominance or expansion.
They are concentrations of awareness.
Built where ecological flow naturally converges—trade paths, migration corridors, energy wells—these cities act as organs within the living planet. They do not govern the world. They listen to it.
The Pulse
How Information Travels
Rootworld has no broadcast towers, no satellites, no centralized news authority.
Instead, it has the Pulse—a layered system of communication that emerges organically from the interaction of spore-light holograms, fauna behavior, and word of mouth.
If an event matters, it propagates.
If it threatens balance, it accelerates.
Spore-Light Holograms
Living Information Displays
In major cities, clusters of bioluminescent fungal growth known as Spore-Lanterns bloom at crossroads, plazas, and transit roots. These fungi project volumetric light-forms—holograms made of refracted spores and aetheric resonance.
They do not display everything.
They display what the world considers urgent.
Spore-light projections commonly show:
Active bounties on corrective fauna or rogue entities
Surface-Kin movements and conflicts
Environmental instability warnings
Requests for skilled intervention
Notices of sealed zones or forbidden strata
The images are symbolic, not literal.
Understanding them requires context, not literacy.
How Updates Change
Spore-light displays are not manually edited.
They shift based on:
Fauna migration data
Resonance spikes
Collective attention
Recent violence or imbalance
A city that grows quiet will show fewer projections.
A city on the brink will glow relentlessly.
Word of Mouth
The Human Layer
Spore-light tells what matters.
People explain why.
Markets, bath-houses, communal kitchens, and transit bridges function as interpretation nodes, where travelers exchange updates, rumors, and firsthand accounts.
Information mutates here:
Bounties gain reputations
Monsters gain personalities
Surface-Kin actions are reframed as intent
This is not misinformation.
It is contextual compression.
Truth survives not by accuracy—but by usefulness.
Bounties & Work
Jobs in Rootworld are not posted by governments.
They appear.
When a corrective action is needed, spore-light manifests a symbol:
A fractured sigil for structural collapse
A hunting spiral for predatory intervention
A dimming leaf for ecological decline
Payment is rarely currency alone.
Often it is:
Access
Passage
Forgiveness
Or silence
Those who can read the signs know when a job is meant for them.
Surface-Kin Conflicts
Surface-Kin movements are tracked indirectly.
Spore-light will not show their faces—only shadows, fractures, or foreign geometries intruding into Rootworld’s visual language.
Word of mouth fills the gaps:
Where they landed
What they extracted
Who disappeared
Surface-Kin hate this system.
It cannot be hacked.
Monster Jobs
Correction, Not Extermination
Rootworld does not issue bounties lightly.
When a monster job appears, it means:
The ecosystem attempted softer corrections
Those failed
Escalation is now required
Hunters are expected to:
Observe before acting
Avoid collateral damage
Understand why the creature exists
Killing the wrong thing worsens the imbalance.
Spore-light remembers who makes that mistake.
City-to-City Variation
No two cities pulse the same way.
Faun-dominant cities emphasize negotiation and warning
Drow-adjacent cities show sparse, precise alerts
Trade cities pulse constantly, layered and chaotic
Border cities glow dimly, then flare suddenly
Travelers learn to read a city’s light before stepping inside.
Why This Works
Rootworld’s cities do not rely on control.
They rely on responsiveness.
Information spreads because it is needed, not because it is pushed.
There is no censorship—only relevance.
One-Paragraph Lore Summary
Rootworld cities communicate through the Pulse: living spore-light holograms and relentless word of mouth that broadcast what the world considers urgent. Bounties, conflicts, and monster jobs appear not by decree, but by ecological necessity—and those who learn to read the light know when the city is calling for them.