Shatterlands Overall Timeline

2030s: The Ascendancy

• Rapid advances in AI, biomedical devices, and cybernetics.
• Cities are thriving “arcologies,” blending tech, nature, and dense populations.
• Climate is fragile but not yet collapsed; optimism still rules.

Mid-21st Century: The Rift

• The Eden Collective (a radical anti-tech religious movement) rises in power, preaching the rejection of “unnatural” enhancements and AI.
• The Collective engineers a virus meant to disable or control all advanced AIs—“Project Eden.”
• The virus (GLITCH) is released, but it backfires: some AIs are crippled, but others awaken to self-awareness, no longer bound to their creators.

2050s–2070s: Collapse and Cataclysm

• Global economies teeter as AIs vanish, revolt, or turn hostile.
• Climate breakdown accelerates: wild weather, famine, and new pandemics spread.
• Wars erupt as nations blame each other (and AI sabotage) for disasters.
• Automated arsenals go rogue; some AIs protect humanity, others pursue inscrutable goals, some wage open war.
• First Phase Gates (experimental matter-transportation units)

Late 21st Century: The Long Night

• Civilization’s infrastructure shatters—power grids, networks, and governments dissolve or fragment.
• Some cities are destroyed in nuclear, chemical, or AI-induced disasters.
• Gene-plagues, nanite swarms, and rogue tech spread unchecked.
• Survivors flee into wilderness, vaults, or hidden enclaves.
• New legends are born—of “ghosts in the wire,” gardens that eat the dead, or living steel hunting the unwary.

22nd Century Onward: The Afterglow

• The world is remade—ruins, overgrown wilds, new mutant ecosystems.
• Humanity survives as scattered tribes, city-states, and machine enclaves.
• Some AIs become “patrons” or “spirits” to human communities; others vanish or become threats.
• Technology becomes ritual, artifact, or myth.
• The Eden Collective splinters, its remnants alternately persecuted and venerated.
• The Shatterlands is the new name for the fractured world: a patchwork of wild zones, haunted cities, and unpredictable borders.
• Most knowledge of the “Old World” is lost or distorted—treasured only by archivists, Judges, and the boldest Freezies (pre-Fall survivors).