After a solar catastrophe scorched the surface, the world went underground to survive. That was a long time ago. Nobody really remembers exactly how long or what the world before was like. What remains of humanity lives in Deshret, a megastructure of a city built downward into the earth. The have-nots live near the top, while the elite live far beneath them. The social hierarchy is completely turned upside down: in Deshret, if you want to rise in society, you have to descend.
The city is held by a regime that governs through scarcity. Not just scarcity of resources, though there’s that too, but scarcity of knowledge. It decides which technologies exist and which are forgotten, which histories are taught and which never happened. The truth is a controlled substance in Deshret.
The regime is governed by the Pagus, a council of Houses. These Houses are dynastic families who have spent generations amassing their powerbase: each with their own unique culture and theme that you can be descended from, or work for. While Houses Major are pre-defined in lore (although this may change with IC plotlines and player actions), Houses Minor are completely left to player agency: we’re looking forward to the Houses that players create and come up with themselves.
Running parallel to the Houses are the Guilds, collectivelly called the Six, which are the economical and industrial powerhouse of Deshret. Much like corporations, each one controls their own district within the megastructure and has its own trade: from a guild that deals in biological experimentation to one that controls the entertainment industry through music, shows, vices and even gladiatorial fighting bouts.
Meanwhile, the upper floors of the city represent the chaotic freedom that’s a hallmark of life there: from the farmer’s agricultural collective that runs the production floor with its fungal fields, protein vats, aquaculture tanks and hydroponic racks to the tech bazaar with the entire floor composed of stalls packed so tight you navigate by squeezing sideways betweeen them where bootleg guild tech is traded, we’ve built the have-nots to try and represent what it is like to be an underserved, marginalized community that has managed to achieve some form of independence and developed their own way of life from the state while technically being underneath that authority.
It is up to you whether you wish to be guilded or not. To be guilded comes with its perks: the core dilemma of a cyberpunk narrative in which you have to decide whether selling your soul and individuality is worth it for a better material life. What once may have mattered in the old world does not matter in Deshret: your ethnicity, sex, where you are from. Those are all concepts of a dead world. In Deshret a person is defined by their loyalties: the House they are part of or serve, the Guild that owns you, the favours they’re owed and the ones they owe back.