De Novo

Blood Amalgam

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A blood amalgam is an undead being created through ritual use of blood — specifically, large quantities drawn from living sources. The result is an entity of extraordinary power, substantially exceeding ordinary undead in capability and stability.

Blood amalgams are distinct from other powerful undead (vampires, liches) in their origin. They are constructed rather than transformed — assembled through ritual accumulation rather than infection or death-and-return. The ritual demands significant raw material.

C³ — Capture, Contain, Control

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

C³ — Capture, Contain, Control — is a government bureau in the Combined States responsible for managing supernatural threats to public safety. Its agents investigate, capture, and contain entities and artifacts that pose dangers to the population.

Operations

C³ operates as a law enforcement and containment agency, with agents ranked from 1 to 20. Rank determines access level and seniority but not chain-of-command authority — agents follow their assigned supervisor’s orders unless those orders violate standing bureau policy or endanger secrecy and personnel.

Cult of Material Metaphysics

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Cult of Material Metaphysics is a secretive organization founded by Aliel, the chief disciple of Van. While Van was imprisoned in the Realm of Nightmares for millennia, he gathered followers through his physical access to people’s dreams. Aliel, the most devoted of these dream-recruited followers, founded the cult in the material world to advance Van’s ideology and work toward his eventual release.

Purpose

The cult serves as the ideological and operational foundation for Van’s influence on Wiege. Its relationship to Arc Industries — Aliel’s corporate empire — is intimate: the cult provides the philosophical framework while Arc provides the material infrastructure.

Fiona

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fiona is the town healer and priestess of Ronahiya in the settlement surrounding the ruins of Noureddine. She is one of two living witnesses to the War of Dominion — the other being Leo, the Kex veteran.

Where Leo carries guilt, Fiona carries righteous indignation and pride in a tradition that was destroyed. She can identify Ronahiya-aligned artifacts and scrolls, and she holds the perspective of the defenders — the people whose holy city was desecrated, whose goddess’s greatest temple was cursed.

Kex

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kex is a nation built on the theological premise that hierarchy is the foundational truth of the universe. Its citizens believe that all beings have a natural place relative to one another, determined by worth and power, and that this order reflects divine will. The nation venerates Malabolous, god of order and hierarchy, and is culturally aligned with devil worship — specifically the Nine Hells model of absolute hierarchical order.

Kex is expansionist in ambition, constantly eyeing neighboring Teorainn for conquest, and is heavily involved in technology, manufacturing, and finance. Despite its nominally democratic government, it functions as a theocratic hierarchy in practice.

Leo

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Leo is extremely old, covered in scars — battle scars, torture scars, and self-inflicted ones. He is the only Kex national living in the settlement surrounding the ruins of Noureddine. He runs a general goods store and serves as an appraiser of artifacts recovered from the megadungeon, specializing in items of Kex origin. He is affiliated with the Arch Art Factum Guild.

He speaks sourly of the Kex Empire and holds the Kex faith in visible contempt. He is not grateful to be alive. He is not certain he should be.

Malabolous

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Malabolous is the god of order and hierarchy. He believes — and his theology holds as axiomatic — that everything has a place, and that place is determined relative to worth and power. The Nine Hells are his model: a universe of perfect, absolute, unassailable hierarchical order. His ultimate goal is to make the entire universe function according to this principle.

Malabolous is not a god of cruelty for cruelty’s sake. He is a god of structure. In his cosmology, cruelty is not the point — proper placement is. Suffering that results from hierarchy is not a flaw in the system; it is the system correctly identifying who belongs where.

Nochnick

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nochnick is an orcish nation situated in the Overdark Forest, governed by a highly horizontal and egalitarian council-of-councils system. There is no single head of state — authority flows through nested councils, each representing communities within the broader network.

Nochnick spends most of its time and energy on a singular, unending task: fighting creatures from the Mouth. The Mouth refers to large openings in the Overdark Forest that connect to the Abyssal Vaults — subterranean spaces from which dangerous creatures continuously emerge. The orcs of Nochnick are not warriors by ambition but by necessity; their entire social structure is organized around the perpetual defense of the surface world from what lives beneath it.

Noureddine

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Noureddine was the holy city of Ronahiya, goddess of the sun — the seat of the Coronal, the most powerful centralized church dedicated to her worship. Even at its height, the city was nearly overshadowed by the Great Zenith Manara of Ronahiya, a massive stepped platform structure designed to ensure no one would be denied sunlight by the shadow of mortal works. The Manara once housed a flame-powered mirror beacon that cast daylight into the night sky.

Teorainn

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Teorainn is a halfling-majority nation built on strong democratic principles, though those principles are constantly under pressure from regional conflict and the necessity of maintaining a high-security footing. Positioned between Hexalt and Kex on opposing sides, Teorainn has survived not through military power but through asymmetric warfare and deep intelligence networks.

It is known as the Nation of Spies.

Teorainn’s sovereignty has been maintained through espionage, covert operations, and the cultivation of information networks that extend far beyond its borders. Where larger nations project power through armies and economies, Teorainn projects power through knowing things — and through making sure its neighbors know that it knows.

The Assistant

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

She has no recorded name. She was the personal assistant to the Coronal Jebrot, the supreme religious leader of Ronahiya’s faith, and she was profoundly devoted to her.

She survived the War of Dominion and the Ritual of Sundered Day as undead. The Coronal did not — or rather, the Coronal’s connection to Ronahiya was so total that she passed into divine grace instead of undeath, and now resides in Ronahiya’s afterlife, unreachable.

The Coronal Jebrot

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Coronal Jebrot was the supreme religious leader of the faith of Ronahiya, goddess of the sun. She held the highest seat in the most powerful centralized church dedicated to Ronahiya, based in Noureddine at the height of its splendor.

She was lost during the War of Dominion and the Ritual of Sundered Day.

Why She Is Not Undead

The Ritual of Sundered Day killed combatants on both sides and resurrected them as undead. The Coronal was not among the risen.

The Dark Tapestry

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Dark Tapestry is the name given to the existential threat that presses against reality from beyond the stars. It encompasses the Great Old Ones, their servants and heralds, and the corrupting influence they exert on civilizations and individuals.

The Dark Tapestry is not an army in any conventional sense. It is more like an environmental pressure — a force that exploits cracks, corrupts from within, and turns strength into vulnerability. Its true weapon is not direct force but the ability to make civilizations destroy themselves.

The Realm of Nightmares

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Realm of Nightmares is a dimensional prison — a space connected to the dreams of mortals and filled with nightmare creatures tied to the Dark Tapestry.

Van, the Terran exile, was banished here after proving such a threat to Shubnigoroth (the Great Old One whose brood planet Wiege was) that she empowered her herald to remove him from the material world. Magical intervention was impossible against him due to his Terran magic immunity; without the specific tools used to banish him, there was no magical means to contain him.

The Shattered

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Shattered were formerly Ellan — psychically inclined people who were permanently altered by the breaking of the cycle that was Black Star’s last rewind. When Black Star’s final resurrection attempt failed, it sent a psychic backlash that warped the Shattered into what they are now: beings who survived the event without becoming abominations or psycho beasts, but who did not come through unchanged.

The Shattered occupy an uneasy position in the world — marked by an event they did not choose, carrying abilities and afflictions that set them apart from the people they used to be.

The Terrans

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Terrans are the oldest known spacefaring civilization in De Novo. They operate across the Laniakea Supercluster and have existed for millennia — long enough to have survived their own near-extinction, built a stable interstellar society, and engaged in a permanent military campaign against existential threats from beyond reality.

Most worlds in De Novo have been touched by the Terrans in some way, though the inhabitants of those worlds may not understand what they encountered.

The Vanguard

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Vanguard is the Terran military campaign against the Dark Tapestry and the Great Old Ones. It operates outside the Laniakea Supercluster in the wider universe — most Terrans that outsiders encounter are Vanguard, whether Coro or Machina.

Purpose

The Vanguard exists to contain and combat existential threats from the Dark Tapestry. This includes direct military operations, intelligence gathering, containment protocols, and the development of operatives capable of handling Great Old One-level threats.

The War of Dominion

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The War of Dominion was a military campaign prosecuted by the Kingdom of Kex approximately fifty years before the present day of the 4th Era. Its primary target was Noureddine, the holy city of Ronahiya, goddess of the sun.

The war culminated in the Ritual of Sundered Day — a mass ritual performed by Kex forces during the siege that killed a substantial number of combatants on both sides and resurrected them as undead. The ritual permanently cursed the city, transforming it into a megadungeon inhabited by two factions of undead who continue fighting each other decades later.

Van

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Van is a Terran Coro — the most extreme product of the Vanguard’s artificial evolution programs. He was created from the template of Arch Hunter Anacrite, the most accomplished operative the Vanguard had ever produced, with parameters pushed far beyond safe tolerances. He represents both the pinnacle and the catastrophe of Terran enhancement.

Origin

Van was created by the Homo Machina from Anacrite’s template. Anacrite was already at the extreme edge of safe parameters for Terran neurobiology. The Machina, in desperation to advance the campaign against the Dark Tapestry, created a batch of Coro based on her template with many parameters pushed further. Van was the most extreme result.

Search

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mattie Brandolini is a biologist turned high school teacher. She builds worlds, writes when time allows, and thinks about what it means to make something from nothing.

This site is called De Novo — Latin for “from the beginning” — because everything here starts from scratch.

Accessibility

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Commitment

This site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA standards. Accessibility is not an afterthought here — it’s built into the foundation.

What’s Built In

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All accessibility settings persist across pages and visits.

Licenses & Attribution

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Original Content

All essays, fiction, worldbuilding, and other original writing on this site is by Mattie Brandolini unless otherwise noted. Original content is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. You are free to share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the same terms.

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