Aetheria is a galaxy of megacorporate frontier myth, cockpit action, corporate logistics, alien civilizations, and humanity repeatedly discovering new ways to make impossible technology somebody else's problem. It is also an open setting built to hold radically different stories—from black-magic hard SF and noir to cultivation epics and giant mecha—inside one causal world where technologies have histories, institutions have incentives, and consequences survive the stories that create them.
Writers can claim a place, an era, and a cast without asking custody of the whole universe. Contributions are authoritative where they live; the wider setting carries their consequences forward. The lore, fiction, design work, and writing process are open for inspection, discussion, and contribution.
`AetheriaLore` is the source vault for [aetheria.gamecult.org](https://aetheria.gamecult.org): lore, design notes, stories, and the sort of worldbuilding that thrives when nobody forces it into a CMS shaped like office software.
The site now builds against the shared `GameCult-Quartz` engine instead of carrying its own private Quartz clone. This repo owns the vault content and the Aetheria-specific overlay; the engine lives next door.
Some vault paths remain intentionally unpublished, including internal brainstorming and inspiration dumps. They can stay messy in private instead of oozing onto the public site.
