Core Premise

Core Premise

• Far-future (2150), off-world on a barren, distant moon

• The Deepwell Facility is:

  • Of completely unknown origin (not human, or at least not provably so)

  • Architecturally unnatural: brutalist, industrial, but also impossible

  • Functionally a labyrinth with shifting or incomprehensible spatial logic

• It contains hostile anomalies/entities that are:

  • Unclassified

  • Lethal

  • Likely not bound by conventional biology or physics

Player Role

• Players are condemned prisoners

• Sent into the facility as expendable assets

• Their mission is framed as:

  • Exploration

  • Discovery of “truths”

• Implicit tone: survival is unlikely; knowledge is extracted at extreme human cost

Faction: The Authority

• Secretive, authoritarian research body

• Operates above or outside conventional law via:

  • Blackmail

  • Political manipulation

• Uses prisoners as disposable test subjects

• Motivations:

  • Understand the facility

  • Contain its anomalies

  • Weaponize or profit from discoveries

• Ethos:

  • Cold utilitarianism

  • Scientific obsession overriding morality

Tone & Genre Signals

• Strong cosmic horror (unknowable origin, incomprehensible space)

• Institutional horror (Authority exploitation)

• Likely themes:

  • Insignificance of humanity

  • Corruption through knowledge

  • Loss of identity/sanity

  • Truth as something dangerous, not liberating