In the century's opening decades, a full-blown nuclear conflict gutted the planet's major economies in a matter of weeks. Famine and disease finished what the bombs started, and national governments simply stopped functioning — what authority survived splintered down to individual cities, private armies, and whoever controlled the local supply lines.
Nowhere felt this more than the old United States. Domestic militants, some say bankrolled by rival powers and by the very monopolies that stood to gain, gutted what remained of the military in the years after the first strikes. Once the legislature was machine-gunned and the executive branch wiped out by a fusion device, there was no federal government left to fill the vacuum — only corporate boardrooms and the outlaws they didn't bother to suppress. Order, such as it is, now radiates outward from a handful of fortified cities and installations: Houston chief among the ground-based enclaves, and the sprawling orbital platform Midways holding down humanity's foothold above the atmosphere. Whoever commands the biggest security force calls the shots, and everyone else works around it.
Out of the wreckage came a boom in fields nobody had funding for before: gene therapy, cell manipulation, robotics. Unmanned probes reached Mercury and Pluto running on near-autonomous systems, and the labs behind that success quietly folded genetic engineering into their robotics work, giving rise to modern cybernetics. Much of that research never saw daylight — it surfaced first in the armored enforcement squads corporations kept on retainer, long before ordinary citizens ever heard the word "cybercorps."
Off-world, a lunar outpost founded before the war struck deals with the surviving corporations once the dust settled, and Midways grew from a modest gateway into an armed frontier post watching over humanity's reach into deep space. Somebody — nobody's sure exactly who, though everyone suspects a corporation with money to burn — has already started terraforming Mars, and the first contact with something not from Earth followed not long after.
That's the world as it stands: strongholds instead of states, contracts instead of laws, and a frontier both on the ground and in orbit for anyone willing to carry a corporate badge — or dodge one.
Signature areas
3Scapes runs 736 areas across its three realms, and the science realm sprawls well beyond what's listed here. The picks below are a curated selection — built for 3Scapes and found on this side of the collapse nowhere else.
- Megacity — a single neon-lit skyscraper turned vertical maze of rival gangs; throw in with the Wiremouths, the Neon Serpents, or go it alone floor by floor.
- GalaxCorp — a corporation whose reach extends exactly as far as its name suggests.
- Street Fighter 2 — an arcade cabinet appeared overnight, its dimensional rift stable but unexplained, opening straight into a tournament against the World Warriors.
- Tech Goblins — goblins tore open an unstable rift into demon territory, and the machinery grinding somewhere below has the resident demon lord rattled; recommended for seasoned groups around level 80.
- Tech Zombies — the undead, rewired into something considerably more dangerous.
- StaySafe Airbag Testing Facility — a fully automated crash-test facility in Detroit offering human subjects guided tours of the process, and the higher-speed runs make for a considerably more thrilling visit; suited to levels 30 through 90-plus.
- StaySafe Material Science Lab — a tax-incentivized StaySafe expansion next to the Airbag facility, staffed by human scientists doing work the droids were supposed to handle, and lately one of those scientists has vanished near a sealed door nobody can get through, best left to a high-level party.
- Aegis Global — a corporate tower promising more protection than it likely delivers.
- Sunflower Power — a nuclear plant that appeared out of nowhere after a blinding flash, its radiation readings spiking in patterns nobody can explain, hazardous enough that only qualified volunteers should get close.
- Outpost Helios — a remote outpost gone silent, with mercenaries now sent in to find out why; recommended around level 70.