The Setting

“THE COLD WAR NEVER ENDED. IT JUST GOT COLDER.”

It’s the year 2025 – but not the one you know.

The Soviet Union never fell. The world split between East and West in a new kind of Cold War. Oil made the Soviets kings of the 1990s… until the Commonwealth led by the UK and Australia cracked clean, abundant energy. That breakthrough changed everything.

Now, the West is sleek, smart, and shining. Cities are powered by quiet satellites and governed by AI.

Life is clean. Controlled. Convenient.

The East is old, hard, and watching. The Soviet bloc rules through fear, surveillance, and strength.

Proxy wars rage in forgotten corners of the world. Information is a battlefield. Trust is currency.

The United States remains the largest military power on Earth but its strength is stretched thin.

Locked in brushfire conflicts across South America and even on Mars, American meta-humans are often deployed as living weapons in endless proxy wars some volunteer, others vanish into black-budget programs. The battles are far away, but the fallout always finds its way home.

Emerald City is a showcase of the Western future under your feet… just in case. drones in the sky, AI in your home, bunkers

What Came Before

The Soviet Union held strong into the 1990s, buoyed by oil dominance and ruthless efficiency. But the world’s descent into shadow started much earlier. In 1941, deep in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, occult scientists tried to weaponise a total solar eclipse. The experiment backfired catastrophically. Everyone present was incinerated… except for one. A blood-drenched entity emerged from the ritual’s ashes The Hexenblut (The Blood Witch). The Allies buried the incident, but the age of meta-humans had begun.

After World War II, powers across the globe scrambled to harness or contain these anomalies. Psychic warfare, super-soldier experiments, and covert meta-human units escalated the original Cold War.

Then, in 1990, everything ignited: India and Pakistan exchanged nuclear fire, devastating the subcontinent and sparking the Oil Wars. The USSR, flush with control over the Middle East, seemed poised for global supremacy. But four years later, the Commonwealth led by the UK and Australia cracked the code for clean, limitless energy, launching the Kestrel Initiative and re-transforming the global balance overnight.

America remained the world’s military giant, but bogged down in brutal proxy wars, its attention stretched thin.

Meanwhile, the Second Cold War began in earnest. Soviet AI networks (like the elusive Rednet) clashed with Western surveillance states. Subterranean bunkers were reopened. Orbital weapons activated. And in the gleaming cities of tomorrow like Emerald City people began to forget how close the world once came to ending.