The world

The setting is the mid-Atlantic of the United States, 2070. Climate has broken. The corps have consolidated. Resleeving exists, but only for those who can afford it. Three geographies layer onto each other: the captured megacity, the drowned bay below it, and the foreign Atlantic coast beyond. Each carries a different politics, a different danger, and a different kind of hope.

The Two-Stage Collapse

The current state of the mid-Atlantic is defined by two era-defining catastrophes:

The Solar Void (2033): A massive solar storm destroyed global satellite and fiber networks, effectively killing the old internet. This allowed corporations to consolidate power through regional infrastructure, leading to the rise of the Mesh.
The Drowning (2058): The failure of the Chesapeake Aegis—a corp-built seawall sold as both tidal-energy generation and flood defense—resulted in a catastrophic flood that reclaimed much of the region for the ocean. This event turned the mid-Atlantic into the stratified, drowned landscape seen today.

The Beltway

The Capital Metro Authority — locally the Beltway — is a single corporate-administrative jurisdiction stretching from Annapolis to Bethesda to Baltimore, with DC at its political center and Patapsco-side industry at its hardware heart. Functionally it is one megacity. The old line between DC and Baltimore is gone.

The Beltway is stratified by altitude. The upper levels — corp towers, sky-bridges, executive zones — are bright, branded, sterile, ARM-secured. The lower levels — street, drowned street, tunnels, salt-stained sub-basements — are dim, scavenged, mesh-graffitied. Going down visually equals going underground politically.

Locals call the lower levels the Roots or the 'Zone. Five corps brand everything visible there. CHEG and Argus are omnipresent: utility and surveillance touch every street, every kiosk, every camera housing. PMG, ARM, and Hopkins are visible at specific sites — fabs, patrol vehicles, clinics, sleeve dealerships.

The drowned Chesapeake

Beyond the seawalls — in the flooded neighborhoods of old Norfolk, old Annapolis, the harbor edge of Baltimore — corporate control thins. The bay is the campaign's third pole: not city, not corp, not wholly free either. It's the third option, and most people in the Beltway forget it exists.

The bay is where the watermen still work — multigenerational families, Vietnamese mariculture refugees, displaced Hampton Roads survivors, queer arts mutual aid networks running supply lines through salt-rotted boats. The bay is dangerous: storms, salt rot, corp patrol boats, the desperate. The bay is also where liberation work lands — where a freed solar design or an open hardware fab can take root and stay rooted.

The bay is the third pole because the first two — Beltway corp authority and federal puppet politics — can't reach it cleanly. They send Carrion boats and Tracer divers when they have to. The Old Bay Council is older than the Drowning and has every intention of outlasting Hopkins.

The Tidelands

East of the bay, across the Eastern Shore, lies a region the bay calls the Tidelands — the drowned Atlantic coast from Maryland north through Delaware and into New Jersey. New Atlantic city, the Marsh Habitats, salvage-built stilt towns, underwater luxury bunkers off the Jersey coast. The Tidelands are foreign. People cross. Goods cross. Trouble crosses.

A bay crew traveling to the Tidelands is venturing into someone else's politics — different communities, different alliances, different rules. It happens. It costs more than crews expect.

Beyond the Reach

Past the Beltway and past the bay is the rest of America, mostly broken, mostly unknown. People call it the Reach. The campaign foregrounds the Chesapeake; the Reach is whatever the world's edge needs to be, when it needs to be.

The Drowning

In 2058 the Chesapeake Aegis — a corp-built seawall sold as both tidal-energy generation and flood defense — failed catastrophically. CHEG built it. CHEG walked away with the contracts intact. Today CHEG owns the regional grid and most of the "restoration" subsidiaries that dredge, desalinate, and re-engineer the bay for profit. No inquiry ever reached a finding.

The Drowning is the campaign's animating injustice. Everyone older than fifteen remembers where they were.

The mesh

The global internet is gone. It died two generations ago and is not coming back. What replaced it is the mesh — a fragmented, node-based network confined to the region. Instead of a single ocean of data, the world is an archipelago of connectivity.

The architecture of the mesh is defined by how nodes are connected:

The Backbone: A high-bandwidth, ultra-stable, and heavily surveilled monolith that runs through the corporate towers and major transit corridors of the Beltway. If you are on the Backbone, you are visible to Argus.
The Bay Mesh (The Tide): A separate, decentralized network residing on salvaged Aegis hardware (sensors, transponders, bay-floor infrastructure). It provides the medium for The Tide. Connectivity here is achieved via Kelp, which acts as a catalyst for nanites to act as microscopic antennas resonating with the mesh's frequency.
Dark Nodes (Voids/Shadows): Completely isolated networks with no physical or wireless connection to the Backbone. They exist in the signal shadows—the deepest parts of the Roots, the drowned streets, or at the bay floor. Communication here requires physical presence or high-risk "bridging" tech.

Connectivity is a landscape of risk and reward. Bridging—the act of stitching two nodes together or creating a temporary tunnel through the Backbone—is a high-stakes tactical necessity for Glitches.

In the mesh, topology is politics: the more disconnected you are from the Backbone, the freer you are, but the harder it is to reach out. "We have to go deeper" is both a literal and a political move.

Sentinel Nanites

Sentinel nanites are an inescapable part of human biology in the Beltway. They are embedded into the nervous system and bloodstream at birth, creating a permanent link between the individual and the Argus Backbone.

Passive Biometric Harvesting: The nanites act as an internal sensor array that constantly broadcasts a person's physiological state to the Argus network. This includes location, vital signs (heart rate, blood pressure), and neuro-chemical markers (adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine).
The Panopticon Effect: This data creates a "biological digital twin" for every citizen. The corps don't just know where you are; they can sense the collective tension in a crowd, detect a lie via heart-rate spikes, or predict civil unrest by monitoring shifts in local stress levels. It is a world of total physiological transparency.

Becoming a Glitch means having successfully severed this link, reclaiming your biological privacy. There are two primary ways to achieve this:

The Surgical Path (Permanent & Violent): The physical extraction of the nanite clusters through specialized medical procedures. It is high-risk and can lead to permanent neurological damage or "glitching", but it provides total, irreversible autonomy.
The Digital/Cloaking Path (Tactical & Technical): Using advanced hardware—like modified Obscures or localized Mesh-jamming tools—to effectively "blind" the nanites. The particles remain in your body, but they are being jammed or spoofed so they cannot transmit to the Backbone. This is the primary method for active Glitches, providing a layer of tactical invisibility that requires constant maintenance and specialized gear.

Resleeving

Resleeving is the direct transfer of a consciousness from one body into another. For the wealthy it is investment and fashion — utility, appearance, durability. For everyone else it is rare, grim, and usually unavailable. Most people live and die in one sleeve.

A direct procedure

Consciousness transfer is direct and local. Both bodies are physically present, bridged hardware-to-hardware. A mind is not a file: it cannot be copied, backed up, stored, or transmitted across the mesh — and so it cannot be intercepted, routed, or stolen off the wire. The procedure either takes or it kills you. There is no second attempt and no backup waiting if it fails.

This is the floor under Truth #7: your mind is the one thing the corps cannot move, copy, or own. Everything around it — the body, the contract, the clinic — is theirs.

Who resleeves

The wealthy swap morphs freely: a luxury market of custom vessels engineered for speed, strength, or beauty, with a second-hand trade in decommissioned premium chassis beneath it.
The working class resleeve at most once — after a fatal injury, and only if a Hopkins subscription contract was current at the moment of death. The subscription is the closest thing the poor have to life insurance, and the sleeve reverts to Hopkins when they die for good.
Most people never resleeve at all. One body, one life.

On the record, or off it

Every resleeve happens somewhere, and where decides who knows:

Clinic resleeving leaves a corp record. Hopkins logs it, Argus reads the biometrics, the contract updates. Legal, surveilled, and owned.
Off-grid resleeving — at a community hub like The Lucky Star, in a Lazarus back room, in a private residence — leaves no corp trail. It is illegal, riskier, and the only kind a Glitch can survive. Dubious resleeving channels are part of what makes a crew dangerous.

When it goes wrong

A failed transfer usually kills outright — the ordinary risk. The rarer, worse outcome is the one that takes when it shouldn't have:

Bit-rot — the mind integrates imperfectly with unfamiliar neural architecture. Memory returns wrong, personality scars, emotional range narrows. Not a copy gone stale: this mind, damaged in the crossing. The wealthy who resleeve carelessly accumulate it and call it character.
Glitching — physical and neurological instability when consciousness and chassis never fully agree to be one thing.

Screen

Everyone uses Screen, the UV drug that protects against an unrecoverable atmosphere. Screen sweats out as a faint purple tint on the skin. Premium Screen is colorless; cheap Screen is visible. Visible class marker on every face. The corps issue branded Screen as a perk. The resistance distributes generic.

Obscures

The eye-and-upper-face masks that Glitches wear. Obscures break facial recognition and hide the iris from Tracers. Pure cyberpunk fashion, but functional. The crew's everyday gear.

Smart-paper

The substrate for all interface — tablet-sized, billboard-sized, touch-manipulated, weather-resistant. Replaces screens, paper, signage. The mesh is delivered through smart-paper. The Mirrored use it to leak.

EWDs

Early Warning Devices. Everyone in the Beltway and the bay carries one. They tell you where the nearest Act-of-God-safe structure is when a storm, surge, or heat wave hits. In the bay, EWDs link to the bay mesh via fishing transponders.

Joules

The campaign's currency and fuel. Joules are hyper-efficient kinetic energy housed in sheaths molded to any device that needs power. Slingers make them. Everything runs on Joules. Energy-as-currency is the captured commons the crew is trying to free.

Acts of God

Climate antagonists, faction-tier-scaled. Storms, surges, algae blooms, hurricane remnants, heat waves, salt incursion, sinkholes opening under whole blocks of the lower Beltway. Acts of God are not random — they're the world's clock, ticking. The Drowning was the biggest one. Smaller ones are routine. The campaign is set in a world where weather is plot.