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 terrible scientific realization. It has spread across 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. By which I guess I mean it's about how people deal with change. It's about shedding the skin of the old world and also about bundling it up like a stuffy and cuddling with it because you're afraid. It's like the 1890s and the1990s, like the shadow of fin-de-siecle imperial anxiety, except the empire is so far away that only the penumbra is touching you, but the penumbra still burns. It’s both an optimistic world, full of immature super-science and amazing parties, and an elegiac one, constantly losing and never losing enough of the sickness it hopes to be rid of.
The Lovely Dark is a world of complex, ruthless social politics, where luxuries are easier to find than necessities and connection is the most valuable currency of all, where your alliances, reputations, and investments are often more valuable than your equipment or personal skills. 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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