From 5f487e50b674459f970262b20b9bc55f0105b2c8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Meta Vens Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2026 05:41:44 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] Clarify lore articles: accessibility wave 44 --- Aetheria/Lore/index.md | 4 ++-- .../Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Concepts/index.md | 6 ++---- .../Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Factions/index.md | 2 +- .../Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/index.md | 6 ++---- .../Post-Elysium/Technology/index.md | 4 ++-- .../Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/index.md | 4 ++-- .../Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/index.md | 16 ++++++++-------- Aetheria/Worldbuilding/index.md | 6 ++---- 8 files changed, 21 insertions(+), 27 deletions(-) diff --git a/Aetheria/Lore/index.md b/Aetheria/Lore/index.md index 9cf4d49..e46143f 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Lore/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Lore/index.md @@ -7,9 +7,9 @@ description: "Aetheria's lore tracks the civilizational machine: contract citize *"Humanity does not lack intelligence. It lacks the collective means to tell itself no."* -Aetheria's lore is the record of a civilizational machine: contract citizenship, managed scarcity, militarized infrastructure, cognitive labor, disputed personhood, and the older late-Sol systems that survive into Elysium by changing form without surrendering their contradictions. +This branch follows Aetheria's history, institutions, and technologies, from humanity's late civilization in Sol to its life in Elysium. Citizenship depends on contracts. Institutions control access to scarce necessities, infrastructure serves military purposes, and minds perform labor while their status as people remains disputed. These arrangements shape who can work, obtain what they need, and make decisions about their own existence. -Read this branch as linked pressure rather than encyclopedic garnish. Start with the premise, move through the eras and institutions that make it possible, and then follow how those same conditions persist when reality itself becomes less stable. +Begin with the setting's premise, then follow the eras and institutions through the links below. Their histories explain how these arrangements arose and why they persist: humanity carries its older systems into Elysium, where they take new forms without resolving the conflicts built into them—even as reality itself becomes less stable. ## Starting Points diff --git a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Concepts/index.md b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Concepts/index.md index e70dd79..45754e4 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Concepts/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Concepts/index.md @@ -5,11 +5,9 @@ description: "The conceptual grammar of post-Elysium reality: aether, pseudospac # Concepts -*"Reality changed, but only some institutions were allowed to certify the change."* +This branch explains how reality works after Elysium: how minds affect the world through aether, how spirits persist, and how space and time depart from familiar rules. Start here when later technologies, disputes over species, or questions about spirits and consciousness become difficult to follow using the terms of late Sol. -The conceptual notes in this branch define the altered grammar of post-Elysium reality. They are the terms readers need in order to follow how Aetheria's metaphysics becomes stranger without ceasing to be political. Each concept changes what counts as evidence, who may persist, and which forms of exploitation become newly thinkable. - -Use this branch when the setting's later technologies, species politics, or spiritual thresholds stop making sense in older late-Sol language. +These changes also create political struggles. Only some institutions are allowed to certify what has changed. What counts as evidence, who is permitted to continue existing, and how others might exploit them all depend on the concepts gathered here. ## Core Terms diff --git a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Factions/index.md b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Factions/index.md index 070a9af..9597797 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Factions/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Factions/index.md @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ description: "Post-Elysium factions are the institutions, sects, markets, and te # Factions -Post-Elysium factions inherit old habits under stranger conditions. Some are corporate descendants, some are sects, some are technical monopolies that became cultures because ordinary governance could not understand what they controlled quickly enough. +Post-Elysium factions are organized groups that have learned to gain power from altered reality. Some descend from corporations; others are sects. Some began as technical monopolies: they controlled capabilities that ordinary governing institutions could not understand quickly enough, and distinct cultures grew around that control. Across these different forms, older habits of power persist under unfamiliar conditions. ## Technical Cultures diff --git a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/index.md b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/index.md index 038b8fc..d4677f0 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/index.md @@ -5,11 +5,9 @@ description: "Post-Elysium species notes treat embodiment as a political problem # Species -*"A new body only matters politically when someone decides what kind of obligation it can claim."* +This branch covers species in post-Elysium: the forms of life that exist, their histories, and how others treat them. A being's body affects more than its abilities. It also affects the work it is expected to do, the rights it is granted, the prejudice it faces, and whom others recognize as its kin. -Species in post-Elysium are not decorative additions to the setting. They are one of the clearest places where altered embodiment, historical inheritance, and political recognition intersect. The question is never just what a being can do. It is what kinds of labor, rights, stigma, kinship, and institutional handling attach to that form of life. - -This branch is still small, but it sits at the junction where metaphysics becomes everyday administration. +These notes examine how physical differences and inherited social arrangements shape those decisions. What does an institution owe a being with a different kind of body, and who decides? The answers turn questions about what a being is into everyday rules governing its treatment. This branch is still small; its current species note is Ratfolk. ## Starting Here diff --git a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Technology/index.md b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Technology/index.md index e59716d..d9207eb 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Technology/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Technology/index.md @@ -7,9 +7,9 @@ description: "Miracles stayed proprietary. These notes track the unstable techni *"Miracles stayed proprietary."* -Post-Elysium technology inherits the habits of late Sol while operating on a more unstable substrate. Astonishing capabilities still arrive through ownership, access control, secret research programs, and professional monopolies. The question is never just what a device can do. It is who maintains it, who interprets it, and who gets recognized as a legitimate user rather than a disposable test case. +Post-Elysium technology includes aetheric drives, networks, interfaces with minds, prediction machinery, and necrotech. These systems work with stranger materials and less stable physical conditions than the technologies of late Sol. They extend what people can do, while carrying older struggles into Elysium: who can travel, who controls a mind, and who can use predictions to make decisions about others. -This branch follows the technical systems that work on stranger materials while preserving older struggles over custody, prediction, mobility, and the treatment of mind. +For someone relying on these systems, a device's capabilities are only part of what matters. Owners restrict access, secret research programs withhold knowledge, and professional monopolies control expertise. Who maintains a system and who is authorized to interpret it help determine how it can be used. The same order decides whether someone is recognized as a legitimate user or treated as a disposable test subject. ## Mobility And Networks diff --git a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/index.md b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/index.md index d629973..e606c1f 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/index.md @@ -7,9 +7,9 @@ description: "The durable collective forms produced by late Sol's crises: govern *"No order this large survives without enemies it taught to organize."* -Pre-Elysium factions are the durable collective forms produced by late Sol's crises. Some govern openly. Some operate as insurgencies, reform networks, species-defense fronts, or ideological tendencies. All of them reveal what kinds of life the formal order makes possible, and what kinds it keeps trying to suppress. +Factions are the lasting organizations and political currents that emerge from crises in the Solar System before Elysium. Some hold governing power openly. Others organize rebellion, seek reform through networks of supporters, or defend particular species. Some spread as shared political beliefs without becoming a single organization. -Use this branch to read institutional power and social agitation together. Aetheria treats them as interdependent phenomena rather than separate layers of lore. +This branch follows governing powers alongside the movements that challenge or seek to change them. They shape one another: the established order makes some ways of life possible and repeatedly tries to suppress others, giving people reasons to organize. Reading powers and movements together helps explain both how people live under that order and why they contest it. ## Reading The Field diff --git a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/index.md b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/index.md index 23050d9..e293a5d 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/index.md @@ -3,15 +3,15 @@ title: Timeline description: "The eras of pre-Elysium Sol, from corporate sovereignty to the FTL Trigger." --- -[[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Colonizing Sol|Colonizing Sol]] covers the corporate capture of off-world settlement; [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/From Sol to Elysium|From Sol to Elysium]] covers the collapse that followed. +This timeline follows Sol—the Solar System—from companies taking control of off-world settlements to the experiment that displaced it into Elysium. For the broader history, read [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Colonizing Sol|Colonizing Sol]] on how corporations gained that control, then [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/From Sol to Elysium|From Sol to Elysium]] on the collapse that followed. ### Era Sequence -- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Corporate Exodus|Corporate Exodus]] (2025-2100): privatized transport and extraction harden into company sovereignty. -- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Age of Automation|Age of Automation]] (2100-2250): AGI and industrial genetics transform production and control. -- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Identity Crisis|Identity Crisis]] (2250-2500): uploading and uplift turn personhood into a commercial and legal dispute. -- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Identity Abyss|Identity Abyss]] (2500-2750): cognitive exploitation and algorithmic governance become systemic. -- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Existential Collapse|Existential Collapse]] (2750-3025): scarcity, insurgency, and elite exit politics destabilize Sol. -- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/FTL Trigger|FTL Trigger]] (March 17, 3025): the first FTL experiment triggers the Rupture and Sol's displacement into Elysium. +- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Corporate Exodus|Corporate Exodus]] (2025-2100): companies that control privatized transport and resource extraction become governing powers in their own right. +- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Age of Automation|Age of Automation]] (2100-2250): artificial general intelligence (AGI) and genetics applied on an industrial scale transform how goods are produced and how control is exercised. +- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Identity Crisis|Identity Crisis]] (2250-2500): mind uploading and uplift make the question of who counts as a person a matter of commercial and legal conflict. +- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Identity Abyss|Identity Abyss]] (2500-2750): exploiting minds and governing through algorithms become established features of the social order. +- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Existential Collapse|Existential Collapse]] (2750-3025): scarcity, insurgency, and political struggles over elite plans to leave destabilize Sol. +- [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/FTL Trigger|FTL Trigger]] (March 17, 3025): the first faster-than-light (FTL) experiment triggers the Rupture, displacing Sol into Elysium. -See [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Events/index|Historical Events]] for named crises and settlements. +For individual crises and settlements within these eras, see [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Timeline/Events/index|Historical Events]]. diff --git a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/index.md b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/index.md index 14216f5..77eeb69 100644 --- a/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/index.md +++ b/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/index.md @@ -5,11 +5,9 @@ description: "Aetheria's worldbuilding is where infrastructure, ideology, debt, # Worldbuilding -*"History keeps its grip through corridors, standards, and the routines nobody remembers choosing."* +This branch explains how Aetheria's societies work: how people build places to live, organize power, and use technology. It covers the history of late Sol and the changed conditions of Elysium, following how earlier struggles continue to shape survival and whose rights are recognized. -Worldbuilding in Aetheria is the study of how power becomes material environment. The setting makes the most sense when its habitats, debts, doctrines, legal thresholds, media systems, and technical interfaces are read together instead of split into decorative categories. - -This branch gathers the vault's main structural fields. Use it to move between the long history of late Sol, the altered conditions of Elysium, and the political logic that binds both eras into one continuous argument about power, survival, and recognition. +Read the physical setting alongside the institutions that govern it. Habitat design determines the spaces people inhabit; debt and law shape their choices within them. Political doctrines, media systems, and technical interfaces help determine how power is understood and exercised. History persists through transport corridors, standards, and everyday routines, even when people no longer remember why those arrangements were chosen. ## Historical Frames