Welcome to Afterlight
Overview
"Legend is what history doesn't record, but still remembers."
It’s 2050, and the world is blossoming into a full-blown cyberpunk dystopia: arcologies scrape the smog-choked sky, neural implants jack billions into a shared digital dream, and corporate security outguns any remnant of public law. Life here is told in adventure issues, comic-book chapters that start with a street-level hook (a missing kid, a corporate data-heist gone bloody) and escalate across a handful of linked scenes. You’ll trade punches with waves of corporate bots or cult enforcers, outmaneuver a lieutenant who’s nursing a grudge, and crash a villain’s multi-phase scheme before the final page. Every stunt carries a cost, every mercy or mistake returns in the next issue, and the city itself is a character that remembers.
The Future is Now
“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
The world of 2050 drowns in corruption, pollution, and opportunity across dystopian megacities like Neo-Boston, built atop ruins of older urban centers. Arcologies tower as self-contained hives stacking apartments, factories, and corp offices into polluted vertical kingdoms. Corps function as sovereigns, eclipsing puppet city governments. Life grinds under relentless poverty, violence, and inequality; streets teem with fixers, gangers, mercs, and edgerunners chasing gigs: hijackings, extractions, procurements, security sweeps. Black-market deals thrive in undercity sprawls, while upper arcology levels guard relics and high-value targets. Factions clash, from MacroTech's cybernetics to NovaGen's aurorium power, Oni-Kai Yakuza vice syndicates, and Moon Dawgz werewolf packs.
Due to the incessant Noise of technology and postmodern life, humanity has become numb and apathetic, allowing mythoi, spirits of myth and legend once constrained to the shadows, to roam freely. Bound to Sources like relics, sacred places, or esoteric knowledge, these entities join the war for humanity's future, throwing the world into a bewitched arms race. Megacorporations wasted no time turning cities into tiered dystopias: executive arcologies towering above flooded under-warrens, corporate security replacing public law, and neural implants jacking the masses into a shared hallucination of progress.
Normies see only the curated feed: flashy augmented types on billboards, prototype accidents on the news, and the occasional feedback glitch. Beneath the spin, reality is fraying. The relentless Noise (viral obsessions, global neural networks) has worn ancient barriers thin, and the cracks are spreading.
Technology & Noise
NuTek represents the bleeding-edge of cyberware and bio-augmentations: neural Linx jacks for seamless digital immersion, reflex boosters that turn reflexes into blurs, and Aurorium-infused gauntlets that punch through steel. Corporations brand it all as “performance enhancement” for the elite, but street runners know the truth. Every implant carries a glitch risk, a hidden corporate kill-switch, or a slow-burn dependency that can flatline your nervous system. It’s the shiny face of augmentation, but the chrome always comes with strings.
Cyberspace & AR
Cyberspace spans global interconnected networks, jacked via virtual overlays or AR sensory layers from implants, smart glasses. AR overlays virtual on reality, vital for megacity navigation: traffic, ads, spectral intel. Hackers harness ops support; drones swarm; hype feeds viral personas. But unattached AIs replicate wildly; intrusions spawn digital horrors tied to Otherscape, the mysterious plane of legendary entities.
The Noise
"The world is covered in masks, but the greatest trick is making you believe there is only one."
The Noise is the endless, suffocating flood of modern existence: ads that scream inside your skull, neural pings from a thousand apps, dopamine loops engineered by algorithms, memories overwritten by curated feeds, and the low constant thrum of eight billion human minds linked through Linx implants. It is the pollution you can’t filter, the static that drowns thought itself.
People don’t just consume the Noise; they drown in it. Attention spans collapse. Empathy erodes. Reality becomes negotiable because everything feels equally unreal when your optic feed is layered with twenty overlapping AR skins and your heartbeat syncs to a corporate jingle. The more humanity surrenders to this barrage, the more numb it grows, and the thinner the ancient barriers become. The Noise is why mythoi can now walk the streets unnoticed: to the average citizen, a dragon in human skin is just another weird glitch in the overlay, another piece of the endless scroll.
Mythos & Magic
Magic is Nether energy channeled through ritual, inherited bloodline, or raw personal will. A street shaman might scrawl sigils in alley grime to summon protective wards, while a corporate occultist binds the same force into a chrome-plated talisman for boardroom leverage. Regardless of the method, every use bites back hard, inviting possession by unseen entities, triggering spirals of madness, or leaving permanent marks on the user’s body and soul. It’s unpredictable, powerful, and always demands a price.
Nether: The Shadow World
"It’s like something pushing on a screen door, trying to get in."
The Nether encompasses the mythic planes, raw magic, dreamlands, upside-down realms, that were once sealed away from everyday reality. Most Normies have never heard the word and would dismiss it as conspiracy nonsense if they did. Insiders, however, whisper it in hushed tones when frost glyphs suddenly etch themselves on summer glass or when an abandoned warehouse begins echoing with screams from centuries long past. It’s the source of the world’s resurgent weirdness, leaking influences that twist both people and places.
The Ministry
The Ministry is a shadowy coalition of gatekeepers blending government remnants, corporate interests, and far older influences. They classify every unexplained event or powered individual as an Anomaly and dedicate vast resources to keeping Normies calm and oblivious. Teams stitch Scars with experimental tech, erase viral footage before it spreads, and spin disasters as mundane “industrial incidents” or “prototype failures.” When the Veil tears too wide for quiet fixes, they deploy retrieval squads to contain, capture, or eliminate the problem before the public catches on.
Who Are You?
You’re street-level anomalies (freak, edge, glitch, whatever the street calls you today) juggling day jobs and midnight call-outs. Your origin is open: lab serum that won’t wear off, a family dagger that drinks secrets, a Linx overload that rewired your reflexes, or a bloodline that finally woke up. What matters is the cost (chrome overheats, spells invite hunger, boosts glitch into phantom pain) and the crew you run with.
You operate from a backroom bar, a retrofitted van, or a derelict rooftop. By day you pour coffee, courier packages, or debug black-market code; by night you trace missing persons to ritual sub-basements and punch the cultist before the chant finishes. You won’t topple the arcologies in one issue, but you’ll peel back their schemes one scene at a time, leaving scars on the city (and maybe on yourself) that will return in the next chapter.
What You Can Expect as a Player
Afterlight is a game of mysteries, conspiracies, and consequences. The world reacts to what you uncover, and your actions shape the future.
1. A World That Changes Based on Your Actions
- This is a living world, where every choice has a cost.
- Uncovering certain truths might awaken forces best left undisturbed.
- Your decisions, or your silence, will alter the world around you.
2. Investigation, Discovery, and Paranoia
- You will investigate cases, track down leads, and unravel the hidden layers of the world.
- Everything has a price. Some truths will leave you questioning whether you should have ever sought them.
- Trust is dangerous. Everyone has an agenda.
3. The Occult Meets Cyberpunk
- Technology and the supernatural are intertwined.
- Corporate AI speak in dead languages.
- Scientists vanish after unlocking forgotten knowledge.
Final Words: Why Play Afterlight?
Afterlight is a game of unraveling mysteries, uncovering forbidden knowledge, and surviving the consequences of your own curiosity. The world is full of things humanity was never meant to understand, will you be the one to uncover them?
If you enjoy:
✅ Investigating the unknown and piecing together occult conspiracies
✅ Unraveling mysteries where nothing is as it seems
✅ A cyberpunk world where horror and technology blend seamlessly
✅ A setting that reacts to player choices, with lasting consequences
✅ The thrill of seeking the truth, even if the truth is hunting you
Then Afterlight is the setting for you.
The answers are out there. The real question is:
Can you survive knowing them?
This setting is a near-future cyberpunk world where much folklore and legend turn out to be real, hidden from the Regulars by layers of secrecy. In Afterlight, monsters and Magic exist in the shadows, while conspiracies and cabals vie for control over every corner of society.
Roleplaying Game Systems
Initially created for the Fate RPG system, we have changed to :Otherscape as it closely matches our original concept.
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