A clandestine experiment, designed to test the age-old debate of nature versus nurture, spiraled into the cosmic unknown. Researchers at the Miskatonic Development Annex attempted to control human behavior through environmental factors. What they discovered was not the key to morality, but a signal — a voice — older than humanity. Now, in a city veiled in smoke, jazz, and secrets, echoes of that signal resonate through speakeasies, asylums, and bloodstained alleyways. The experiment is no longer confined to laboratories. It continues in whispers, behind eyes, within dreams.
The struggle is no longer Nature vs. Nurture.
It's Us vs. It.
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### Thematic Overview
* Cosmic Indifference: Not all evil comes with malice. Some is simply the result of mechanisms far beyond human morality.
* False Control: The belief that behavior can be engineered is a hubris punished not by failure, but by attention.
* Urban Paranoia: Surveillance, identity, and memory are all uncertain. What is seen cannot always be trusted.
* Faith as Function: Belief isn't a shield, it's a channel. Nurture doesn't shield from the signal — it teaches it how to speak.
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### Setting: 1940s Chicago — A City on the Edge
Chicago is both a living city and a dying dream. Beneath the smoke-filled jazz clubs and the glint of trench coat buttons lies a pulsing silence. Some neighborhoods seem stuck in a time loop. Others hum with invisible energies. The lake smells like rust and ozone. The air is thick with fog and fear.
Cosmic Entities & Mythos
"The God" (name unknown)
Does not speak. It is recognized.*
* Manifestations occur through synchronized thought, persistent sigils, altered language.
* Revered by some. Obeyed by others. Understood by none.
The Signal
* A cognitive virus encoded in heredity.
* Not a message, but a resonance.
* Expresses itself through dream, art, and trauma.
Votive Children
* The true purpose of the experiment.
* Identical individuals shaped by opposing nurture paths.
Not priests or prophets — interfaces.*
Tone & Atmosphere
* Psychological horror with cosmic dread and noir stylings.
Themes of *identity erosion**, false autonomy, and epistemological collapse.
* The campaign rewards curiosity — and punishes it.
"Some monsters are born. Others are raised. But the worst ones... they’re tuned."