Worlds

De Novo is a campaign setting spanning multiple worlds connected by a shared cosmology. The gods are real. Magic is common but unevenly distributed. Ancient civilizations have left marks that the present struggles to understand. And somewhere beyond the stars, something vast and hostile presses against the boundaries of reality.

The Cosmology

The universe of De Novo operates on several interlocking layers. Material worlds — planets with their own cultures, gods, and histories — exist within a broader cosmos that includes divine realms, planar boundaries, and the vast darkness between stars.

The gods of De Novo are real but limited. They have worshippers on countless worlds and cannot pay close attention to any single one. Divine intervention is real but rare, and prayers are answered on timescales that feel glacial to mortals. A goddess may hold a soul in her afterlife and have no idea what is being done in her name on the ground.

The Terrans

The oldest and most powerful civilization in the setting are the Terrans — a spacefaring people who have existed for millennia and operate across the Laniakea Supercluster. Terran civilization is divided into two complementary branches: the Coro (organic Terrans) and the Homo Machina (their machine descendants, who largely govern Terran society).

The Terrans are engaged in a permanent war against the Dark Tapestry — the Great Old Ones and their servants who press against reality from outside. This war is managed by the Vanguard, the Terran military campaign, and it has been ongoing for longer than most civilizations have existed.

Most worlds in De Novo have been touched by this conflict in some way, whether they know it or not.

The Worlds

Wiege

A world of nations, gods, and mortal politics — something like a modern-era Earth if devils ran the banks, hags ruled an oligarchy, and an orcish nation spent most of its energy fighting abominations crawling out of subterranean vaults. Wiege has its own rich history spanning multiple eras, from medieval holy wars to a modern era of corporations, intelligence agencies, and shadowy power structures.

Wiege is also, unknown to most of its inhabitants, one of the worlds touched by the Terran war. A Great Old One once claimed it as a brood planet. Terran exiles walk its surface. The consequences are still unfolding.

The Shallow Sea

A mega-archipelago continent formed by catastrophic impact — the death of a Great Old One called Black Star. The Shallow Sea exists at a colonial-to-Enlightenment technological level, surrounded by deep abyssal waters, and shaped by the psychic fallout of an apocalyptic event that shattered a previous civilization and warped its survivors.

The Shallow Sea is bleaker and more contained than Wiege — an isolated world dealing with the immediate aftermath of cosmic violence.

Themes

De Novo returns to certain questions across its settings:

What happens when an ideology succeeds and the consequences are the proof it was wrong? What does love justify, and when does the methodology consume the goal? How do civilizations hold together when the threats are both external and internal? What do you owe the past, and what does the past owe you?

The settings don’t answer these questions. They put characters in positions where the questions become unavoidable.