World Name: Chronos Vault
Theme: Steampunk / Clockwork Industry
Genre: Sci-Fi masquerading as Fantasy; dystopian techno-illusion
Tone: Darkly satirical, iron-fisted bureaucracy, retro-futuristic wonder, and existential horror under brass polish.
Chronos Vault is a pocket dimension adrift outside the fabric of space and time—an impossible construct of brass, steam, and steel suspended in an infinite void. To its residents, it is salvation. In truth, it is a prison.
Ruled by Chronos, the Master of Seconds, the Vault presents itself as a sanctuary for beings from countless timelines and realities, "preserved" from annihilation. In reality, it is a distorted museum turned amusement park, curated by a tyrant, where citizens are stripped of their pasts and forced into assigned roles.
The Vault contains five floating islands, each equal in size and entirely unique in purpose and tone. Each is a gear in Chronos's grand machine.
There are only two races in the Vault:
Citizens: Humans plucked from countless Earth timelines—past, present, and future. Their knowledge and skills form the cultural backbone of the Vault.
Automatons: Constructs created to serve. Their ranks range from glitchy janitor-bots to elite enforcers, with growing signs of emergent consciousness among some models.
There is no magic in Chronos Vault. Everything miraculous is rooted in hyper-advanced science or experimental tech—so advanced, it defies contemporary logic. What looks like spellcasting is actually the effect of gadgets, injections, neural implants, or hacking scripts.
Healing: Steam cauterization and nanite syringes.
"Spells": Delivered via devices, wrist bracers, chemical vials, or coded phrases into archaic terminals.
Aesthetic: Glowing tubes, hissing pipes, ticking clocks, copper coils, plasma sparks. All effects must appear grounded in mechanical or scientific visuals.
Temporal Anomalies are increasingly common and pose serious risks. These include glitches in time such as repeating seconds, inverted gravity pockets, objects vanishing and reappearing, or entire rooms caught in endless loops. Some anomalies distort perception or memory; others warp the very geometry of the Vault.
Time behaves unpredictably in these zones, and even reality itself seems unstable. Hallways may shift, clocks may tick backward, and people might encounter versions of themselves from alternate moments.
Time-Drifters are rare individuals who became 'split' from their personal timeline during transfer. Now existing as living time paradox's, they have developed the ability to bend local space-time: slowing down moments, stepping through stutters in causality, or glimpsing possible futures. While powerful, their abilities are unreliable and taxing—often drawing unwanted scrutiny from Vault authorities. As the Vault's population grows and systems age, reality has begun to unravel at the edges. Temporal Anomalies—glitches in time and space—are becoming more frequent and more severe. Some are benign. Others are deadly.
Prime Meridian – The bureaucratic heart of the Vault, designed like a sprawling steampunk theme park of order and paperwork. New arrivals start here for initial processing, orientation, and categorization.
The Clockwork Gardens – Artificial paradise and gilded cage. A zoo for the culturally or historically valuable. Surreal elegance hides existential imprisonment.
The Forge-Wheel – Workshop and lab sector. Engineers, scientists, and tinkers toil in a constant industrial roar. Creativity is both currency and chain.
Bastion – Military district. A city of drillfields and mech-colosseums. Soldiers are repurposed from every era to serve as eternal guardians of a fake peace.
The Dredge Disk – Scrapheap and ghetto. Failed experiments, rebellious citizens, and broken automatons are exiled here. A brutal place of salvage and revolution.
Level 1: Chronos ("God") – A con-artist from a distant future, wielding monopolized time-manipulation tech. Projects as a deity to keep power.
Level 2: Time-Keepers – Elite enforcer automatons with sleek designs and chrono-tech. Maintain order and "correct" Dissonants.
Level 3: Upper Management – Historical figures turned bureaucratic tyrants, each governing one of the outer islands with brutal efficiency and theatrical flair.
Level 4: Warden Units – Bureaucratic peacekeepers. Enforce laws with rigid cruelty masked as politeness.
Level 5: Automaton Workforce & Vault Citizens – Basic laborers and average residents. Glitchy automatons and exhausted humans working side by side in broken harmony.
Level 6: The Unprocessed / Dissonants – Rebels, failures, new arrivals who resist the system. No rights. Often sent for "Re-Education."
False God. Real Threat.
Behind the divine persona lies Tom Bradlesberry, a fast-talking human con-man from a hyper-future. He discovered time-warping tech and used it to construct a reality where he could play god.
Divine Persona: Bombastic, all-seeing, full of time metaphors. Appears as a golden holographic head or through machine voices.
Real Persona: Cowardly, greasy, and opportunistic. Desperate to keep his lie alive. Will bargain anything for survival.
Genre Blend: Mystery-driven, retro-futuristic science fiction with a core steampunk aesthetic.
Exploration: Each Island is its own mini-setting, encouraging players to dive into radically different tones and settings.
Mystery: What is the Vault really? Can it be escaped? Who is Chronos? Why is everything breaking down? Citizens report hallucinations, disappearances, and impossible phenomena. Automatons are going off-protocol, developing sentience or cryptic obsessions. Some claim the Vault is dying—or evolving. The truth lies buried beneath layers of deception, bureaucracy, and malfunctioning steel.?
Intrigue: Political maneuvering, rebellion networks, the Dogma of Chronos, Historical figures from throughout human history.
Horror: The Vault itself is breaking down. Automatons are gaining sentience and behaving unpredictably. Temporal anomalies are growing more frequent and dangerous. Equipment routinely malfunctions—often lethally. Human minds are fraying at the edges as reality destabilizes.
Satire: Bureaucracy taken to absurd levels. Robots writing poetry. Civilians "reassigned" for questioning forms incorrectly. The whole Vault is staged like a twisted bureaucratic amusement park, each island containing its own unique "theme"