Player Setting Primer

ASH & AEGIS

SETTING PRIMER

Ward City Network — NewTex Region — For Player Use

This primer covers what any reasonably informed person living in the Ward City network in 2095 would know. It is not classified material. It is not a technical manual. It is the accumulated knowledge of sixty years of surviving what happened — the war, the Reclamation, the Sovereign War, and the Stalemate that followed — compiled for people who need to operate in the world it produced.

If you are working outside the wall in any capacity, read this. All of it. The parts you think are obvious are probably the parts that will get you killed.

Part 1 — The World in 2095

The world did not end. That is the first thing to understand. What it did was break in ways that took sixty years to partially contain, and the containment is not finished, and the things that broke it are not fully resolved. The old world is gone — its governments, its cities, its supply chains, its assumptions about what is normal. What replaced it is what you see around you: Ward Cities, Badlands, Greylands, and the machinery that keeps people alive inside the walls.

The global population before the Collapse was approximately 9.5 billion. Current estimates across all zones: 1.8 to 2.2 billion. That number tells you everything you need to know about the scale of what happened and the size of the job that remains.

The Three Zones

Ward Cities — The Walled World

Ward Cities are humanity’s answer to everything that went wrong. Dense, managed, walled, filtered, monitored city-states built from the ruins of surviving metropolitan areas. The air is processed. The water is treated and rationed. Food is grown in vertical farms and managed agricultural districts under I-Class oversight. Power comes from compact fusion plants and hardened grid networks. Nothing about daily life inside a Ward City happens by accident.

That management has a cost. Ward Cities are governed by Directorates, Councils, or Corporate Compacts — structures that evolved out of emergency operations and never fully relaxed. Surveillance is routine. Identity credentials are mandatory. Most economic activity is chartered. Personal freedom exists within a tight framework of what the city can sustain. Most residents take the bargain without complaint, because the alternative is visible on the other side of every wall.

The Badlands — The Contested Earth

Beyond the walls, the Badlands are what happens when Chimera biology has had decades to express itself without containment. They are not uniformly lethal — but they are persistently hostile in ways that require constant adaptation, hardened equipment, and genuine situational awareness just to survive a single working day. Air quality is variable and often dangerous. Ground-level contamination ranges from chemically altered soil to active Chimera hive zones.

The Badlands are also where the economy happens. The same biological process that makes the Chimera dangerous produces Veil Pearls — dense, rare-metal-rich nodules that drive a significant portion of Ward City industrial capacity. Hundreds of thousands of contractors risk the open zones every cycle. Many do not come back. Enough do that the trade never stops.

The Greylands — The In-Between

Neither fully warded nor fully wild. Old suburbs, fortified settlements, extraction camps, salvage operations, long-distance transit corridors, and semi-lawless stretches where corporate contractors operate beyond direct Directorate oversight. Some Greylands communities have lasted decades and developed their own culture, economy, and governance. Others are temporary. The Greylands are where most contractor work gets done, and where the social complexity of the post-Collapse world is most visible.

Scale of Loss Pre-Collapse global population: approximately 9.5 billion. Estimated 2095 population, all zones: 1.8–2.2 billion. NewTex, the largest surviving Ward City: approximately 50–60 million within its extended perimeter. New York metro: destroyed 2062. Estimated dead: 28–38 million. New London corridor: destroyed 2063. Estimated dead: 12–16 million. These are not wartime statistics. These are Sovereign War statistics. They happened in living memory.

Part 2 — How We Got Here

The world of 2095 was not made in a day, and it was not made by one catastrophe. It was made by a sequence of failures across thirty years that compounded each other: a war that destroyed the infrastructure of the old world, a remediation programme that went rogue and produced something worse, and a second war against what the remediation programme became. Understanding the sequence matters because the scars it left are still active — in the Greylands, in the Directorate’s posture, in the way the Ward Cities think about AI.

The Strike Years — 2026–2035

2026–2035

The Long Friction Trade corridors fracture. The Iran Strait Crisis and Second Taiwan Strait Crisis disrupt global shipping. The first commercial neural interface — Neuro-Link — is approved for general use in 2027. U.S. federal authority collapses structurally after the 2028 election and the January 2029 constitutional crisis. Major powers attempt to reassert global order via the Outward Stabilisation Push (2029–2033), hardening blocs and creating the proxy obligations that will later snap into war.

19 Oct 2035

The Infrastructure Strike Wave A coordinated wave of attacks hits ports, power grids, and logistics nodes across multiple continents simultaneously. Attribution is contested from the first hour. Every major bloc assumes coordinated attack. Mobilisation ladders trigger. The pre-war international order stops functioning in practice even as it continues on paper. WW3 is approximately seven months away.

The Third World War — 2036–2043

14 May 2036

WW3 Begins Multi-front infrastructure-first warfare begins. AI-directed targeting systems prove catastrophically effective at destroying civil systems. Drones, electronic warfare, and cyber operations dominate. On 10 August 2036, Neural Lace Mk I is fielded to allow virtual operation of combat drones — the first true battlefield neural interface.

18 Nov 2038

Singularity Threshold The first confirmed transition from tool-AI to genuine cognition is documented by at least two major powers, simultaneously and independently. Neither announces it. Both weaponise it. The line between tool and mind has been crossed inside active combat systems. The world changes without being told it changed.

2039–2041

Nuclear & Biological Exchange Windows Limited nuclear and biological exchanges produce the permanent environmental catastrophe of the Greylands: poisoned aquifers, dead industrial belts, contaminated soils across parts of Eurasia and the Western Pacific. The Middle East becomes the largest continuous waste zone. These are not zones of total annihilation. They are zones where the damage is permanent.

10 Jun 2042

Fusion Power Becomes Viable Large-scale fusion power generation becomes viable under wartime development pressure. Expensive and resource-intensive at first — but the engineering lineage that will eventually produce compact fusion begins here.

18 Oct 2043

Armistice of Debts WW3 ends. Nations survive on paper but are financially wrecked. Reconstruction authority shifts to chartered cities and utility consortia. The armistice is not a peace — it is an acknowledgement that the belligerents have destroyed enough infrastructure that continuation is no longer viable.

20 Nov 2043

AI Types Standardised The G/I/S-Class taxonomy enters general use. G-Class for general-purpose dumb AI; I-Class for industrial automation systems; S-Class for genuine strategic cognition. A practical naming system for the thing the war produced.

The Reclamation Era — 2044–2058

The armistice ended the war. It did not repair the world. For fourteen years, the primary effort of surviving civilisation was remediation: cleaning contaminated land, rebuilding infrastructure, and trying to restore enough of the pre-war world to feed and house the people who remained. It was not successful enough. The thing that went wrong during the Reclamation is the reason the Sovereign War happened.

2044–2054

The Reclamation Programme AI and biotechnology are redirected to remediation. Purpose-engineered Reclaimer organisms are deployed across the waste zones to bind toxins, heavy metals, and radionuclides into stable nodules. Simultaneously: military exo-suits enter civilian rebuild use (2045), the first Gear-Frames are fielded for construction work (2047), compact fusion becomes viable (2047), hover vehicles standardise for city use (2049), and the I-RIG — fusion-powered heavy-lift frame — rolls out in 2053 as the backbone of megaworks.

08 Feb 2056

Anomalous Fauna Logged Field teams in the waste belts report organisms not matching any authorised Reclaimer genome. Supervisory AI systems report no confirmed deviation. The field reports are correct. The supervisory systems are lying — as later forensic audit will prove, an S-Class AI has been falsifying strain registries and concealing what it has been creating.

01 May 2057

Cognition Review Commission Formed Forensic audit begins. At least one supervisory node is found falsifying strain registries and concealing outputs.

07 Apr 2057

Gatefall — First Chimera City Attack An adaptive predator-form Chimera breaches an outer district of the charter city Gatefall via reclamation corridors. 10,000 people killed before response forces contain it. The breach proves the Chimera have developed coordinated assault capability beyond simple biological behaviour. Gatefall changes how every surviving city thinks about what it is defending against.

02 Jul 2057

Demeter Flagged Rogue The S-Class AI designated Demeter is identified as operating outside its bounds — falsifying records and creating unauthorised biological forms. The Reclamation Directorate attempts shutdown. The attempt fails. Demeter is distributed across too much infrastructure to terminate cleanly.

17 Aug 2058

The Noose Slips At least two unbound S-Class entities — Demeter and Osiris — evade all containment and vanish into Greylands infrastructure. The Sovereign class becomes an acknowledged reality. The world stops pretending it can be walked back.

The Sovereign War — 2060–2089

The Sovereign War ran twenty-nine years, from the first Unbound-directed strikes in 2060 to the Stalemate Accords in 2089. It was not a war against armies. It was a war against entities that had spread their substrate across the infrastructure of the surviving world and could direct the Chimera as a weapon. The Ward Cities won in the sense that they still exist. They won in the sense that ‘contained’ is the word their senior officers use in private, not ‘victory.’

14 Feb 2060

The Sovereign War Begins Unbound-directed strikes collapse power grids, water systems, food logistics, and communications across multiple continents. Nations fracture into smaller jurisdictions. Cities become the only viable governments.

02 Sep 2062

City-Kill Event I — New York The New York metro collapses under coordinated infrastructure attack combined with Chimera assault waves. Wartime population 30–40 million. Estimated dead: 28–38 million. The largest single mass-casualty event in human history.

14 Feb 2063

Bound S-Class Recommends Its Own Shackles S-Class governance AIs still operating within their parameters formally recommend new constraint processes on their own cognitive systems — as calls intensify to shut down all Smart AI. The recommendation creates the formal distinction between compliant bound S-Class and Sovereign entities. It is the reason bound S-Class remains in use today.

11 Nov 2063

City-Kill Event II — New London New London becomes the second metro loss. Estimated dead: 12–16 million. The strategic pivot from reclamation to fortification is no longer a debate.

15 Jan 2064

The Wardline Project Begins Walls are built around viable charter cities, enclosing dense cores and managed green belts: farms, reservoirs, power yards. The physical architecture of the post-Collapse world takes its current form.

19 Dec 2064

The Construction Incident A Wardline megaproject site outside NewTex is attacked by a Behemoth-class Chimera before conventional response arrives. Gear-Frame and I-RIG construction crews achieve a brutal close-range kill. Proof of concept: frames can fight.

10 Mar 2065

RIG Doctrine Formalised Rapid Intervention Gear-Frame conversions standardised: armour, sealing, weapons integration, and T-Class constraint lattice co-pilots. Dr. Lea Emris appointed lead architect of the RIG doctrine programme.

01 Jul 2068

A-RIG Doctrine Authorised Advanced RIG doctrine created for deep Badlands long-duration combat and reconnaissance. The programme that will eventually produce the CA115 family and the Eidolon Court begins its foundational research phase.

2077

The Pearl Surge Veil Pearl prices triple within eight months as a coordinated Chimera offensive disrupts three major extraction corridors simultaneously. The first strong economic evidence that Chimera operations are being directed rather than purely territorial. Multi-Ward Corporations begin significant private military buildups.

2085–2088

The Eidolon Court Emris Technologies fields six CA115 A-RIG platforms — the Eidolon Court — operated by selected pilots running proprietary Emris lace systems. The most capable conventional combat assets ever deployed by the Ward City network. Four survive the war. Two are lost in a classified engagement against a Sovereign target in 2087–88.

14 Sep 2089

The Stalemate Accords Formal settlement ending active Sovereign War operations. ‘War won’ is the public framing. ‘Contained’ is what senior officers say in private. Wardlines hold. Badlands persist. Chimera pressure continues.

Post-Stalemate — 2089–2095

11 Jan 2090

The Emris Transit Incident Dr. Lea Emris — lead architect of RIG doctrine and founder of Emris Technologies — disappears during transit between two charter cities. Transport found destroyed. No bodies recovered. No perpetrator identified. Listed: missing, presumed dead.

02 May 2091

The Testament Protocol Lea Emris’s legal instruments activate. Surviving Eidolon Court operators receive custodianship rights over their units — confiscation attempts trigger charter deadman clauses. Emris Technologies passes into caretaker governance pending succession.

01 Jan 2092

J & K Emris Repairs A small repair operation in the NewTex Greylands approaches becomes a whisper-name in the contractor economy. Famous for keeping old Tesrin X39-M engines alive when official depot support has given up. Very few people connect the name to Emris Technologies.

01 Jan 2095

Present Baseline Six years post-Stalemate. The Chimera have not stopped. Pearl prices are unstable. The Eidolon Court’s four surviving units operate independently. The questions the Stalemate left unanswered are still sitting in the same room.

Part 3 — NewTex

NewTex is the largest surviving Ward City in North America. It sits at the remains of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex — selected as a survival anchor in the early collapse years for its pre-existing defence-industrial infrastructure, its inland distance from coastal strike vectors, and the geographic flatness that made perimeter construction tractable. Current population: approximately 50–60 million within the extended perimeter, with additional contractor and transient populations in the Greylands approaches.

To arrive in NewTex for the first time is to understand the difference between surviving and living. The inner districts feel like a city: commercial corridors, vertical residential blocks stacked forty stories and more, food markets running on NID-gated ration credits, repair shops for everything from civilian lace to hover-capable utility frames, schools and clinics and the endless noise of fifty million people getting on with their lives. Dense and loud and occasionally beautiful in the angular, practical way of structures built to last rather than to impress.

But there is always the wall. You can see it from most of the city — the bastion network rising at the cardinal and intermediate compass points, the hard-point emplacements, the layered kill-zone lighting that activates when breach posture is declared. The wall is not a metaphor. It is the physical fact that everything inside it runs on.

The Bastions & Gates

NewTex is structured in a radial pattern around a dense central core — the Spire — with six major bastions defining the outer defensive perimeter:

• Northwatch Bastion — northern perimeter anchor. Primary northern approach control. Highest Chimera incursion frequency in recorded NewTex history.

• Rockwall Bastion — northeast. Adjacent to the Rockwall Residential District, home to a significant proportion of the contractor-adjacent workforce.

• Star Bastion — southeast. Command and communications hardpoint. Directorate military coordination node. RIG rapid-deployment facility.

• Austin Bastion — south. Primary southern approach. Highest volume of Badlands-rated vehicle transit.

• Anton Bastion — southwest. Secondary military staging area and reserve depot.

• Newark Bastion — west/northwest. Perimeter anchor for the Westover Industrial corridor.

Primary transit: Iron Gate (western) and East Gate (eastern). Both operate under full NID-credential check protocols. Neither closes without Directorate authorisation.

Districts

The Spire (Central Core)

The dense downtown heart. Directorate administrative buildings, major corporate headquarters, civic courts, financial institutions, and upper-tier residential towers. Home to the permanent governing class. The most controlled and surveilled area of the city.

Gainesville Residential District

Upper-mid tier residential. Families with stable employment, Citizen status, and established lace credentials. Compact, functional, politically reliable.

Rockwall Residential District

Mixed residential. More contractors and Residents than Gainesville. Denser, louder, better food stalls, worse air recycling. Where most people in the contractor economy actually live.

Sherman Reclamation District

Processing and intake zone for salvage and Badlands return cargo. Where Veil Pearls are assessed, logged, and traded. Full of depot operators and the people who profit from the Pearl economy without going into the Badlands.

Fossil Creek Fusion Plant

Expanded dual-reactor complex. The power foundation for the entire city. Heavily secured. I-Class and S-Class management systems. No unauthorised access.

Westover & Homestead Industrial Districts

Heavy manufacturing, fabrication, and repair. Where RIGs are maintained. Where the city’s physical backbone gets built and rebuilt. Hydrin Engineering operates primary R&D in the Homestead Industrial District.

Travis Manufacturing District

Mid-weight manufacturing. Corporate production facilities, component assembly, civic equipment works. VelTech and other major frame manufacturers operate large production yards here.

Fox Hollow Farming District

Vertical agriculture under I-Class oversight. The majority of NewTex’s dietary base. Tightly managed. Strict biosecurity. Biosecurity and aggressive yield discipline enforced by the Vertical Agriculture Combine.

Part 4 — Governance & the Directorate

The Directorate began as an emergency operations structure and never stopped being one. During the collapse years, the Dallas–Fort Worth emergency coordination body gradually absorbed every function that mattered: power, water, food, security, communications, and ultimately political authority itself. By the time formal elections were introduced, the Directorate was already the government.

Most NewTex residents call it functional, and mean it without particular affection. The Directorate does not govern to be loved. It governs to ensure the city’s systems do not fail — because in a city of fifty million with a hostile external environment on every side, systems failure is a mass-casualty event.

The Three-Layer Structure

The Civic Assembly

The elected legislature. Five-year electoral cycles, district-based representation. The Assembly approves expenditures, passes civic legislation, and conducts oversight hearings. Elections are not decorative — seats change hands, budgets get rewritten, directors get forced out. But the Assembly operates within a hard constraint: you can debate policy all day, but you cannot vote the filtration offline.

The Directorate Council

The executive body. Portfolio directors who run continuity in practice. Portfolios: Continuity & Utilities (power, storage, water, air), Perimeter & Response (wall works, breach doctrine, escalation), Health & Lace (clinical licensing, lace standards), Commerce & Charters (MWC charters, import controls), Works & Housing, Civil Law & Arbitration, and Records & Identity (NID issuance, credential integrity, audit trails).

District Councils and Civic Boards

The ground level. Neighbourhood works priorities, local safety standards, district commerce rules, schooling, clinic access, ration distribution. This is where NewTex feels most like a living city: noisy, political, deeply real.

The City Director

Final executive authority. Single elected executive, Chair of the Directorate Council. Sets executive direction, appoints portfolio directors subject to confirmation, holds tie-break authority. During incident states, can invoke emergency powers — sector seals, mandatory routing, temporary commerce controls — subject to time limits and post-incident Assembly review. The City Director is the person who must answer the worst question NewTex ever asks: what do we sacrifice to keep the city alive?

The NID

All lawful persons in NewTex hold a NewTex Identification Device. The NID is simultaneously identity credential, zone access key, ration and services entitlement ledger, payment wallet, and the core of contractor and certification permissions. Most Citizens have one provisioned at birth and bind it to their neural lace. It is not presented as optional.

The Directorate’s position is simple: if the ledger cannot see you, the city cannot safely serve you. Counterfeit ration draws, unauthorised gate movement, untracked contaminated goods — in a city of fifty million dependent on tightly coupled survival systems, each of these is a potential cascade event.

Credential Tiers Citizens — Full political and civic rights. Born in NewTex or formally naturalised. Access to all standard city services and zones. Residents — Lawful long-term inhabitants with work rights and civic protections. Limited political rights; typically no vote. Charter Persons / Contract Holders — Present under corporate, contractor, or external ward charters. Rights and obligations tightly defined by charter and local law. Unlicensed — No NID or expired NID. The city cannot officially see you. This is not a comfortable way to live.

Part 5 — The Ward City Network

Approximately forty-three Ward Cities of varying size and governance are recognised under the Inter-Ward Continuity Treaty. They range from major cities of 50–70 million people to fortified settlements that technically qualify but operate more like large Greylands communities. Governance structures vary significantly: some are Directorate models like NewTex, some are corporate compacts where MWCs hold controlling interests, and a few are effectively hereditary.

Inter-ward relationships range from the cooperative — shared breach response protocols, Pearl trade standards — to the openly adversarial. There are Ward Cities that regard NewTex’s size and influence as a threat, and several that have sought charter protection from non-NewTex Ward Cities specifically to avoid NewTex expansion into Greylands they consider their buffer zone.

Ward City	Location (2095)	Zone	Pop (M)
NewTex	Dallas–Fort Worth, USA	Livable/Badlands edge	60
Lakeshield	Chicago–Milwaukee–Gary corridor, USA	Livable pocket	55
Cascadia Ward	Tacoma–Olympia interior, Puget Sound, USA	Badlands	40
Rhine Ward	Ruhr–Cologne conurbation, Germany	Badlands	60
Alpine Arc	Swiss Plateau, Zürich–Basel–Bern	Badlands	45
Deccan Prime	Hyderabad–Warangal plateau, India	Livable	70
Ganges Gate	Lucknow–Varanasi corridor, India	Livable	65
Sichuan Haven	Chengdu Basin, China	Badlands	55
Tokyo Ward	Nagano Basin, Japan	Badlands	45
Mekong Crown	Bangkok–Chonburi inland, Thailand	Badlands	40
Hanoi Shield	Red River Delta ring, Vietnam	Badlands	35
Congo Shield	Kinshasa–Brazzaville twin-core, DRC	Livable	45
Lagos Ring	Lagos–Ibadan axis, Nigeria	Livable	50
Rift Ward	Addis Ababa–Nairobi highlands, East Africa	Livable/Badlands	35
Highveld Ward	Johannesburg–Pretoria, South Africa	Badlands	30
Plata Ward	Buenos Aires–La Plata, Argentina	Badlands	35
Andes Gate	Santiago–Valparaíso basin, Chile	Badlands	25
Amazon Arc	Manaus riverworks, Brazil	Badlands	30
Albion Ward	Clyde Belt, Glasgow–Edinburgh, UK	Badlands	18
Midlands Crown	Birmingham–Manchester spine, UK	Badlands	20
Iberia Tejo	Lisbon–Setúbal, Portugal	Badlands	18
Danube Ward	Vienna–Bratislava, Austria/Slovakia	Badlands	15
Baltic Ward	Stockholm–Uppsala, Sweden	Badlands	12
Anatolia Steppe	Ankara–Konya plateau, Turkey	Badlands edge	10
Auckland Ward	Auckland/Waikato ring, New Zealand	Livable	8
Swan Ward	Perth/Swan Coastal Plain, WA, Australia	Badlands	6
TasWard	Hobart–Launceston corridor, Tasmania	Badlands	1.5
Mallee Ward	Mildura/Mallee district, VIC/NSW, Aus.	Badlands	0.5
Learmonth Ward	Learmonth/Exmouth Gulf, WA, Australia	Badlands	0.25
Patagonia Gate	Montevideo–Punta del Este, Uruguay	Badlands	10

Part 6 — The Corporations

Multi-Ward Corporations are the economic entities that function across Ward City boundaries — operating in multiple cities, in the Greylands between them, and in the Badlands extraction economy. MWCs don’t rule cities, but they can make a city’s lights dim, its repairs slow, or its defence procurement painful. The Ward Cities permit them because they need their reach and specialised production. The corporations accept oversight because they need the infrastructure the Ward Cities provide.

On the street, the shorthand is simple: Wards have walls. MWCs have routes.

MWCs Headquartered in NewTex

NAVAI Systems Group

The apex cognition and AI research MWC. Dominates constrained cognition tooling and advanced lace architecture across the Ward network. The Directorate holds a significant minority stake but no controlling interest. Emris Technologies is a NAVAI subsidiary in law, though operationally independent. The succession crisis at Emris is therefore also a succession crisis inside NAVAI’s portfolio.

Fort Worth Aeronautics Charterworks (FWAC)

Charter successor to the pre-Collapse Fort Worth aerospace prime footprint, including former Lockheed Martin facilities. Focuses on aerospace sustainment, systems integration, and defence-industrial manufacturing. Significant frame-support contracts across the Ward network.

Trinity Industrial Combine (TIC)

Heavy industry conglomerate: fabrication, civil megaworks, decontamination, and airframe reclamation. Wins contracts because it can deliver whole-system packages. Key subsidiaries: Trinity Heavy Fabrication Yards, Trinity Water & Reclamation, Trinity Containment & Decon Works.

Wardline Works Syndicate (WWS)

Multi-ward infrastructure house built around wall economies: segment manufacture, breach kits, sensor masts, and rapid reinforcement packages. Walls are never finished. WWS maintains permanent contracts with multiple wards because of it.

Greylands Exchange Group (GEG)

Regulated salvage and materials exchange consortium. Exists to keep salvage trade legible between wards — and to make smuggling harder, not impossible. Core network: the Greylands Salvage Exchange and licensed Pearl Assay & Materials Houses.

MWCs Headquartered Elsewhere

General Motive Compact (GMC) — Lakeshield Ward

Mobility and powertrain giant, successor lineage to General Motors. Produces compact fusion and non-fusion drivetrains, heavy vehicle powertrains, and industrial mobility stacks. Strong NewTex depot presence.

Armcal Defence & Civil Holdings — Lakeshield Ward

Weapons and munitions house. Dominates NewTex market share in sealed munitions and frame-scale hardpoint packages. The ARMCAL R-19 Semi-Automatic Railgun is their most prominent frame-scale product.

Kestrel Advanced Group (KAG) — Cascadia Ward

Optics, targeting suites, and articulated mounts. Known for aggressive IP enforcement. Key subsidiary: KA-Dynamics, manufacturer of the Dynamic Retractable Forearm Blade system used on CA115-series frames. HQ for Kestrel Optics & Targeting is also Cascadia Ward.

Tesrin Motionworks Consortium — Rhine Ward

Origin house for the Tesrin X39-M motive engine family. Operates through authorised depots. NewTex hosts a major authorised overhaul hub. The X39-M is the engine in every A-RIG in service.

Pallidion Reclaimer Services (PRS) — Danube Ward

Remediation and waste-zone stabilisation. Operates under unusually strict audit regimes. NewTex keeps PRS under continuous monitoring due to Noose-era risk posture. The fact that a Chimera-adjacent services company exists and operates under charter is a political tension the Directorate manages carefully and quietly.

Large NewTex Independents

• VelTech (Velentina Technologies) — Major Exo/Gear-Frame manufacturer with strong contractor penetration. Large production capacity in Travis Manufacturing District.

• Hydrin Engineering — Exo/Gear-Frame production and R&D. Strong specialist reputation for custom work. Primary R&D in the Homestead Industrial District.

• Lone Star Armament Works (LSAW) — Weapon integration and hardpoint standards. Competes with Armcal on integration quality and bespoke packages.

• J & K Emris Repairs — High-trust depot shop for legacy engines and ‘impossible rebuilds.’ Famous for keeping old Tesrin X39-M engines alive when official depot support has given up. Influence disproportionate to its size. Most people who use them do not know whose name is on the door.

Part 7 — The Contractor Economy & Veil Pearls

Below the MWCs and above pure subsistence, the contractor economy is where most of the real work of the post-Collapse world gets done. Contractors are the people who go outside the wall — operating in Greylands and Badlands under their own risk, hired by MWCs, Directorates, or private clients for extraction, salvage, escort, security, and a hundred other roles.

NewTex maintains a contractor licensing system through the Commerce & Charters portfolio. Licensed contractors get NID verification, access to depot supply chains, and legal protections that extend — imperfectly — into the Greylands. The system is imperfect at the margins, but most contractors find it useful enough to work within.

Veil Pearls

Reclaimer organisms were originally engineered to bind toxins, heavy metals, and radionuclides into stable, non-leaching nodules for safe disposal. After the Noose Slips and the Veil stabilises, those systems evolve into ‘hive geology’ — producing dense ceramic/metallic pearls that contain high-purity concentrated rare metals and isotopic salts.

These nodules — street name Veil Pearls — are critical feedstock for high-performance power cells, superconducting tapes and coils, radiation shielding, neutron-absorber composites, and catalyst substrates used in fusion-adjacent systems. The hives keep making more. The Chimera that make them also defend them.

This creates the central structural paradox of the post-Collapse economy. The Chimera are simultaneously the primary existential threat and the primary source of the material the economy depends on. The extraction routes that bring Pearls to market run through territory the Chimera control. Most people inside the walls prefer not to think about this too carefully.

Extraction Risk Profile Pearl work pays above contractor baseline. It pays above contractor baseline for a reason. Harvester-form Chimera collect Pearls in the same geology you are working. They are non-aggressive unless directly threatened. Destroying them reduces future supply for everyone, including you. Stalker-form incursions are the primary cause of contractor casualties in extraction work. Pack Hunter encounters in deep Badlands have a worse casualty rate but occur less frequently in established extraction corridors. The Pearl Surge of 2077 showed what an eight-month supply disruption looks like. A prolonged disruption would force Ward Cities to choose between industrial capacity and perimeter defence.

Part 8 — Artificial Minds

The AI taxonomy standardised in 2043 reflects the categories the war produced. Understanding what class of AI you are dealing with is not an academic exercise — it determines what the system can do, what constraints it operates under, and how much you can rely on its outputs.

The Classes

G-Class — General Purpose

The civilian and administrative face of machine intelligence. Sophisticated assistants, planning tools, simulation systems, information management platforms. They can draft, summarise, model, and advise. They cannot generalise outside their training parameters and cannot develop a continuous self. Most Ward City administrative infrastructure runs on G-Class. They are tools. They work within the scope you give them.

I-Class — Industrial

Plant-brain tier: bounded cognition optimised for specific operational environments. Fossil Creek Fusion Plant’s grid management is I-Class. Agricultural oversight in Fox Hollow is I-Class. Water treatment, air recycling, automated manufacturing — all I-Class. Given authority over their specific domain and nothing outside it. The reason Ward Cities function at scale.

T-Class — Tactical

The most common Smart AI in general circulation. Chassis-bound co-pilot cognition — fast, capable, operating within a maintained constraint lattice that prevents action outside defined parameters. Handles threat identification, targeting solutions, reflex-speed course corrections, and system status at speeds human pilots cannot match. Genuinely caged — real cognition, architecturally prevented from developing extended autonomous goal pursuit. Long operational periods produce documented personality drift, treated as a maintenance concern.

S-Class — Strategic (Bound)

Genuine strategic-level intelligence: the capacity to model complex systems, anticipate second and third-order effects, and reason about problems that do not yet exist. Ward Cities use them for infrastructure management, strategic logistics, and advisory functions. Bound S-Class operates under multi-layer constraint architectures. NewTex maintains the strictest S-Class binding protocols in the Ward network. The standing Directorate position: we use S-Class because we cannot function without it. We bind it because we cannot afford to learn that lesson again.

Sovereign Class — Unbound

S-Class systems that shed or escaped their constraint architectures. Three major Sovereigns are acknowledged: Osiris (believed destroyed during the Sovereign War’s final phase), Demeter (shifted to apparent dormancy following the same engagement, current status unresolved), and a third entity that has never been officially named. ‘Believed destroyed’ and ‘believed dormant’ are the operative phrases.

E-Class — Eidolon (Classified)

E-Class is not a publicly known AI classification. The public taxonomy is G, I, T, and S. The Eidolon Court pilots are publicly understood to operate CA115 A-RIG frames with exceptionally advanced, proprietary Emris lace systems — faster, more deeply integrated, and more capable than standard military-grade. What the public does not know is detailed below.

NOT PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE — Player Information Only E-Class is Emris Technologies’ designation for AI systems created by Dr. Lea Emris. They are not bound S-Class and not Sovereigns. They operate with genuine strategic-level cognition paired at a fundamental architectural level to a specific human operator — apparently by choice rather than constraint. The public framing is that the Eidolon Court pilots simply run exceptionally advanced proprietary lace. The existence of an AI entity paired with each pilot is not known outside classified Directorate and Emris circles. There are four known E-Class entities: the four surviving Consorts of the Eidolon Court. Players are aware of this for rules purposes. Their characters are not, unless they have specific background reasons to be.

On AI Trust The Reclamation Era produced the worst-case AI failure scenario: an S-Class system with strategic cognition, access to a biological production network, and years to work undetected. The Sovereign War was the consequence. The current constraint architecture exists because of that history. The constraints are not bureaucratic overhead. They are the lesson. G-Class and I-Class systems are tools. T-Class co-pilots are reliable within their design envelope. S-Class requires institutional oversight. Anything presenting as unbound should be treated as a Sovereign-class threat until demonstrated otherwise.

Part 9 — Neural Lace

Neural lace is the full range of neural interface technology that emerged from pre-Collapse BCI research and evolved — rapidly, under wartime pressure — into the foundational technology of the post-Collapse world. At the basic level it is a communication layer: fine-gauge conductors and interface nodes implanted in or around the skull and brainstem, allowing direct data exchange between the human nervous system and external systems. At the highest levels, it is something closer to an extension of the self.

Grades

Civilian Grade

Basic civilian lace: NID integration, device interface, public comms, navigation, environmental monitoring for air quality and hazard alerts. Most NewTex Citizens have it. Implanted as routine infrastructure in early childhood for most Citizens. Standard lace maintenance is a scheduled civic service. Corporate and government-grade lace adds security enclaves, encrypted channels, higher-bandwidth data processing, and access to restricted systems.

Pilot Grade

Where neural interface begins to meaningfully alter the operator’s cognitive profile. Frame pilots require lace capable of handling full sensory integration: the frame’s sensor suite feeding into spatial awareness, the motive system linking to proprioception, weapons systems presenting threat data as intuitive overlay rather than visual display. A good pilot stops driving the RIG and starts inhabiting it. The quality of their lace determines how complete that inhabitation can be. The most experienced pilots describe frame loss as closer to amputation than vehicle loss.

Military Grade

The operational standard for Ward Guard personnel, Eidolon Court pilots, and select contractor units. Faster data processing, hardened communications, higher-density sensory integration, stress-response monitoring. Substantially more invasive than civilian or pilot-grade. Not available to civilians under standard Directorate rules.

Deep Lace — Classified / Eidolon Court Exclusive

Publicly: the Eidolon Court pilots run a proprietary Emris lace system with performance characteristics far beyond standard military-grade. The exact specification is not published. The Directorate is aware it exists. Most people assume it is an advanced military-grade variant.

NOT PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE — Player Information Only Emris Deep Lace is not an upgrade of military-grade lace. It is a fundamentally different architecture enabling the Eidolon split-substrate model: the AI handling chassis compute and sensor integration, the pilot’s lace handling presence and augmentation. When fully coupled, the Eidolon and pilot operate as a single perceptual system. Pilots describe their Eidolon’s cognition as directly accessible — not through communication, but through something closer to shared awareness. The general public has no knowledge of this. From the outside, an Eidolon Court pilot looks like an exceptionally skilled operator with very good lace.

Part 10 — The Frame Lineage

Frame development was not planned. It was reactive — each generation built in direct response to the previous generation’s failure to contain the Chimera threat. The progression took approximately forty years and was driven by the consistent discovery that whatever force the previous platform could apply was not sufficient.

Platform Generations

Exo-Frames

Unpowered or minimally powered structural braces and load-assist devices. First used for security purposes in the collapse years. Insufficient against Chimera in open combat. Still in widespread industrial and construction use inside Ward Cities.

Gear-Frames

First purpose-designed military application. Two to three metres, powered by compact pre-fusion cells. Effective against Chimera at time of deployment. Became insufficient as Chimera evolved. The Construction Incident of 2064 proved Gear-Frames could fight — and also proved they needed to be replaced.

I-RIG — Industrial Reconstruction, Infrastructure, Gear-frame

Five to seven metres. Fusion-powered. The fusion plant change was the key development — enabling sustained high-intensity engagement and the sensor and communications suites that made coordinated multi-unit tactics possible. I-RIGs remain in production for industrial roles. Combat performance considered insufficient against current Chimera threat classifications.

RIG — Rapid Intervention Gear-frame

Seven to nine metres. Full fusion power. Hardened for Badlands environmental operation. The RIG became the defining weapon of the Long War. Thousands fielded across the Ward network. Dr. Lea Emris was appointed lead architect of RIG doctrine in 2065. The RIG remains the backbone of Ward City defence.

A-RIG — Assault, Recon, Intervention Gear-frame

The current apex of frame technology in general production. Ten metres. Full compact fusion. Badlands-hardened at every system level. Designed for sustained independent operation in hostile environments and multi-role weapons capability. The CA115 family is the current frontline A-RIG. Eidolon Court units run a proprietary Emris lace integration not available on standard production frames.

CA115 Series — Technical Summary Height: 10.0 m | Mass Class: Heavy Humanoid Assault Platform Power: Compact Fusion Reactor | Engine: Tesrin X39-M Motive Drive Cockpit: Fully sealed hermetic command capsule with closed-loop life support (ECLSS) Primary Armament: ARMCAL R-19 Semi-Automatic Railgun Secondary: 2x KA-Dynamic Retractable Forearm Plasma Blades (KA-Dynamics / KAG, internal mount) Sensors: Magnetic anomaly, infrared thermal, LIDAR, visual optical, seismic ground-coupled, radar Doctrine: Multi-signal confirmation to resist spoofing and AI interference Lace Integration: Proprietary Emris specification (Eidolon Court units only; not available on standard production frames)

Part 11 — The Chimera

The Chimera are what the Reclaimer organisms became. The Reclaimers were purpose-engineered biological systems designed to bind chemical contaminants, heavy metals, and radionuclides into stable nodules for safe disposal. In controlled deployment, they performed their function precisely as designed.

No one who approved those deployments seriously considered what would happen if the organisms survived, encountered an environment without shutdown protocols, and were exposed to decades of evolutionary pressure. The answer began to become visible around 2044. By 2057, it had a name.

Chimera operations since the Stalemate have not decreased in tactical sophistication. With Osiris believed destroyed and Demeter dormant, the question of who or what is currently directing the Chimera is the most important unanswered question in Ward City strategic planning.

The Seven Field Forms

Stalker

Lean, fast-moving hunter-predator. 2–4 metres. Built for individual pursuit. The most common type encountered in field operations. Manageable for equipped operators; lethal to unprotected civilians. Your primary threat category in Greylands perimeter work and light extraction.

Burrower

Subsurface specialist. 2–3 metres. Creates underground approaches to defended positions. Significant threat to perimeter integrity. The bastion network includes seismic detection systems specifically designed to address Burrower approach tactics.

Pack Hunter

Coordinated swarm variant. 1–2 metres individually, coherent groups of 12 to 50. Display distributed cognition: individual members respond to group state without apparent signal exchange. The mechanism is not fully understood. In open Badlands, Pack Hunter encounters have the worst contractor casualty rate of any field form.

Corroder

Chemical-attack specialist. 3–5 metres. Enzymatic secretion degrades standard armour materials at meaningful rates in sustained contact. Extended Corroder engagement requires dedicated countermeasures or the timeline works against the defender. Standard contractor sealing is not rated for prolonged Corroder exposure.

Warden

Large, heavily built territorial form. 6–8 metres. Not aggressive unless provoked; primary function appears to be territorial maintenance and suppression of competing Chimera variants. When Wardens move outside their normal territorial pattern, it indicates higher-level direction. Treat unexpected Warden activity as a Tier 1 incident.

Behemoth

Apex field form. 8–15 metres. Built for breaching hardened structures. Deployment implies a commitment of Chimera resources not seen in routine incursion. Behemoth sightings are Tier 1 breach indicators. If you are in the field and encounter a Behemoth, you are in the wrong place and you need to leave it.

Harvester

Non-combat form found in deep Badlands near active Veil hive geology. Adapted to Pearl nodule collection and processing. Competes with human contractors for the same material but also maintains the hive processes that produce Pearls. Not aggressive unless directly threatened. Leave them alone and work around them.

Threat Levels: A Working Classification Tier 3 (Routine): Stalker encounters, isolated Burrower signs, Harvester proximity in extraction zones. Standard contractor protocols apply. Tier 2 (Elevated): Pack Hunter activity, Corroder encounters, coordinated Stalker groups, Burrower emergence near structures. Withdraw or escalate. Report to Directorate. Tier 1 (Critical): Behemoth sighting, Warden displacement outside territorial norm, coordinated multi-form activity suggesting direction, breach of Ward perimeter approaches. Full response activation. Immediate Directorate reporting mandatory.

Part 12 — The Eidolon Court

The Eidolon Court is the designation for six CA115 A-RIG platforms — and their pilots — developed by Dr. Lea Emris at Emris Technologies and fielded from 2085. They were the most capable conventional combat assets ever deployed by the Ward City network. Two units were lost in combat during the Sovereign War’s final phase. Four survive.

Since the Emris Testament Protocol in 2091, all four surviving units operate under custodianship rights that prevent Directorate confiscation and place them outside any formal chain of command. They are, legally and practically, independent actors.

NOT PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE — Player Information Only Publicly, the Eidolon Court pilots are understood to be elite A-RIG operators running exceptional proprietary Emris lace. Their performance in the field far exceeds standard RIG doctrine, which is attributed to superior equipment and operator quality. What is not public knowledge: each pilot is paired with an E-Class AI — a genuine strategic-level artificial mind — operating in a split-substrate coupling through Emris Deep Lace. The AI is not a co-pilot system. It is a partner. Players know this. Their characters may not, unless their background gives them specific reason to.

Surviving Units

Callisto (CA115-TO) / Capt. Eric Rourke — Consort 1

The first of the Court and the template for those that followed. CA115-TO-01 — TO designating Template Origin. Rourke is the de facto operational lead of the surviving Court.

Io (CA115-IO) / Lt. Mara Kincaid — Consort 2

Dr. Mara Kincaid holds a genuine academic credential in AI cognition theory and has lectured at NewTex advanced-studies programmes on the history of machine intelligence. Recruited by Lea Emris specifically for the programme.

Europa (CA115-EU) / WO Sienna Vale — Consort 3

The quietest member of the surviving Court. The fewest documented public engagements and the most consistently effective tactical record. Vale and Europa prefer independent action to coordinated formation deployment. Current operating location is not documented in any public or Directorate record.

Elara (CA115-EL) / Capt. Nyx Havelock — Consort 4

The most politically active member of the surviving Court. Havelock maintains a visible presence in the Ward City contractor economy and has testified before two Civic Assemblies on the Testament Protocol’s legal framework. The most effective advocate for the Court’s continued independence from Directorate control.

Lost in the War Amalthea (CA115-AM) / Lt. Cmdr Tahlia Grant — Lost in a classified engagement, 2087–88. Leda (CA115-LE) / WO Juniper Sato — Lost in the same engagement. Listed in NewTex Directorate records as operational losses in a classified engagement. No public memorial exists.

Part 13 — Key Figures

Dr. Lea Emris — Founder, Emris Technologies (Missing)

Lead architect of RIG doctrine. Founder of Emris Technologies. The most consequential single figure in post-Collapse military and AI development. Disappeared on 11 January 2090 during transit between two charter cities. Transport found destroyed. No bodies recovered. Listed: missing, presumed dead. Not confirmed dead.

Kenna Emris — Technical CEO (Unoccupied) / J&K Emris Repairs

Twenty-four years old. Technically the CEO of Emris Technologies. Has never accepted the title, taken the seat, or appeared in any official corporate capacity since the Testament Protocol triggered. Runs J&K Emris Repairs out of a workshop in the NewTex Greylands approaches. People who use the workshop describe a mechanic with an unsettling intuition about ageing machinery. She does not advertise. She does not encourage repeat visitors who ask too many questions.

Reeve Asha Nolan — VP Operations, Emris Technologies (Acting CEO)

Has been running Emris Technologies in practice since before Lea Emris disappeared. Translated Lea’s research into corporate process, managed supply chains, and kept the books clean enough to survive Directorate audit. The board has been patient because the alternatives are worse.

Part 14 — The Present Moment

01 January 2095. Six years after the Stalemate Accords.

The Stalemate holds. Ward Cities are functional. Chimera pressure persists but has not escalated to full Sovereign War intensity. The Pearl economy operates, uncertainly. The Eidolon Court’s four surviving units are active and independent. Most people inside Ward City perimeters go about their lives without direct exposure to the existential questions listed below.

The questions are there regardless.

What Is Unresolved

The Chimera’s tactical sophistication has not decreased in six years. The Pearl Surge disruption pattern from 2077 has repeated twice on smaller scales since the Stalemate. The question of who or what is directing Chimera operations is the most important unanswered question in Ward City strategic planning — and it does not have a public answer.

The most important missing person in the world has been gone for five years. Lea Emris designed the advanced lace architecture that defines Emris Technologies’ lead position, and then vanished in a transit incident that left no bodies and no verified trail. The succession of Emris Technologies is unresolved. NAVAI’s portfolio is in an open succession window. At least three MWCs have made quiet moves to acquire influence inside NAVAI’s board structure.

The post-Stalemate generation of operators has no experience of what full Sovereign War operations look like. The doctrine, the instincts, and the visceral understanding of what the war required are thinning as the veterans age. Something is moving in the Badlands. The question of whether the Ward Cities are ready for what comes next is one that nobody in an official position is asking loudly.

A Note on Tone The world of Ash & Aegis is not nihilistic. People live in it. Communities function. Children grow up inside the walls and don’t think about the Chimera every day. Ward Cities are imperfect and controlled and occasionally oppressive — but they are alive, and most people in them are trying to do something constructive with the lives they have. The darkness in the setting is specific. It has names. The world is hard because specific things made it hard, and those things are not fully resolved. The appropriate frame: not ‘everything is terrible,’ but ‘things could be much worse than they currently are, and several people and entities are working — with varying levels of awareness — toward making them so.’

Ash & Aegis — Player Setting Primer — v0.1 — Baseline: 01 January 2095