What is the Lovely Dark?

Welcome to the Lovely Dark


The Lovely Dark is a world parallel to our own, at the intersection of Death and Dream. It sits in a vast chemical sea, opalescent as an oil slick. The sky is a haze of dingy rainbow smog that blocks out the sun and showers acid rain and neon lightning on the streets below. It is a madhouse of industrial progress, scientific hubris, and obsessive artistry, on the brink of a great scientific revolution. It has colonized every viable inch of its surface, and still strains for more space. Even the underworld has long overflowed: the dead squeeze into overpacked train cars alongside the living. It has not seen war in a very long time, but the threat is slowly rising over the horizon.

The Lovely Dark is about how people deal with death. Every culture has their own practices, developed and challenged and changed over a long period of history, and with an imminent technological transformation of society, it seems like everything is going to be challenged again, more strongly than ever before, and a lot of new ways of thinking about death have started to spring up. It has an 1890s-meets-1990s vibe, about fin-de-siecle anxiety, about the last light, the waning glory days of massive untouchable civilizations at the verge of an imminent uprooting and overturning of the status quo. It’s both an exciting, optimistic time, full of immature super-science and exploration and amazing parties, and an elegiac one, full of disintegrating cultural identity and the transformation or dissolution of old traditions.

The Lovely Dark is a world of complex, ruthless social politics, where luxuries are easier to find than necessities and information is the most valuable currency of all, where your connections, reputations, and investments are often more valuable than your equipment or personal skills, and where the paths to power are in joining, advancing in, and manipulating the powers that be. It’s a world that is geared to produce preposterous supervillains, and it produces a lot of them. This includes, ideally, the player characters.






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