The Prosperity Engine

Every year, the Engine pushes its border further out in its never-ending hunger to consume the world.

  The relic of the war that birthed it still harry explorers. Lakes of molten metal, turned incandescent by nuclear fire, or sections haunted by automatons once meant to destroy what they now guard. The War of Plenty unleashed every kind of nightmare, and they've all found a home within the blessed Engine, from engineered plagues to warrior-cults.   The Worm Wheel, a grand cog at the center of the Engine, pierce the clouds and scrapes low orbit with every titanic turn. Whatever it is made of has long been obscured by a layer of bio-mechanical filth, parasites, and the nest of opportunistic beasts. The eight spokes are connected by a tangled mess of vines and web, in places so thick as to completely cover the space between spokes. Only at the peaks of the cog does the shining metal benath appear beneath a thick cover of frost and crowned by stars. All is scraped loose when the worm turns and descends into the cavernous realm below, leaving heaping piles of rot at the sides for scavengers to feast on. Below, the slow and inexorable turn of the worm shakes the world for thousands of miles around when they slam into place. Entire sections of the Engine's city-scape collapse beneath the terrible earthquakes, becoming the next site of frenzied reconstruction. The noise of the Wheel can break bone and pulp flesh caught too close.   There's an entire world beneath the surface of the engine, endless tunnels, corridors, bunkers and silos, carved apart by biomechanical chasms and incomplete projects. Those who worship the engine insist the Engine lives and thinks - if so, many would say it has gone mad. Ancient machines drill ever downward, until they are crushed by pressure and heat, corpses left in the wake of the Engine's hunger.   The Prosperity Engine appeared at the end of the War of Plenty, the joyous death of the old world. It blossomed like a cancer at the height of the frenzied war, and opened the way for mortals to become more then what they were. With its blessing, the old order was consumed and a new world dawned, transformed just like its inhabitants might be. It may one day consume the world, but isn't that its right? The Engine brought peace and prosperity; the world belongs to it, now. We are parasites on the surface of a god, and we rejoice at its beneficience. If it devours the world, something new will be born, whether or not we go with it. Transformation is the only truth.    

In the Shadow of the Engine

The borderlands of the Engine and mortal lands are boiling with change. The wild of the world struggle to contain the creeping cancer, while mortalkind exploit it for their own kind while wrapped in worship. Where the Engine has devoured, deserts are changed into rolling hills of gleaming solar-panels, oceans are infected with drifting structures and terrible creatures. At the Steps of the Engine, adventurers, cultists, and ascendants all gather to be in the shadow of the Engine, and to sup from its plenty... Or each other. For the Engine brings Prosperity; everything mortalkind could need exists there, waiting to be claimed under the danger of death. Pilgrim roads streak towards both the Steps and the Engine from every direction, trodden by cults and supplicants, merchants and murderers.   To those who survived the War of Plenty, the Prosperity Engine is the place of their birth. From its hallowed and twisted halls, mortalkind learned to shed and mould their weak flesh, turn themselves into weapons, and were reborn as something greater.  

The old world has been consumed, and it is the Age of the Engine now.