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Horror-Map.EXE:
Happy Halloween everyone. This is a world based around popular horror video games of the 2010s – or franchises that still released instalments in that decade. WARNING! I’m not a gamer so I may have missed some big/popular/your favourite recent titles. I got most of this list off of friends.

In addition this was finished before Resident Evil: Village and Doki Doki Literature Club Plus came out so material from those games is not included either.

This is a world that is, in many ways, different to our own, with dark, supernatural forces existing with ancient histories but this didn’t really make much of a difference for most of history. For the most part the impact of these forces would be small, or isolated, or easily quarantined, hidden away and subsequently forgotten about. Of course the other big change was the faster development of technology, though it didn’t really filter through to the public and just got reinvested back into the portions of the private sector that invented them to further those scientific fields.

Then the 20th Century happened.

Much of it started with actions like Umbrella Pharmaceutical’s decision to contravene various anti-bioweapon laws by covertly conducting research into esoteric diseases, or the undertaking of several secret projects by the Armacham Technology Corporation into very advanced and questionable fields of scientific and supernatural development. Then there was the Murkoff Corporation’s revival of decades old research into the Morphogenic Engine, though it would remain theoretical until the turn of the millennium.

The discovery of the Black Marker in Mexico in the 80s was just a significant if relatively obscure archaeological breakthrough at first but it did found an initially small cult of alien-worshippers (knock-off Scientologists, many would call them. Except for Scientologists, who were frankly insulted by the comparison – I mean, they know what they’re talking about, after all) and led to greater exploration of space and the eventual founding of outposts on Mars and its moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Of course there were older things, more unnatural things that were always lurking in the shadows. Even with the world moving on and technology becoming more advanced these hidden horrors never really went away and with the world slowly becoming more interconnected and humanity’s psychic potential being uncovered, they started to proliferate behind the scenes. There were incidents here and there but nothing that couldn’t be hidden from, or ignored by, the majority of people.

Then everything changed in the 90s with the Racoon City Incident. The corporation declared bankruptcy after a horrendous legal campaign against them by the US government and relatives of Racoon City’s populace. Assets were sold off, abandoned or scattered – and with the scattering, several branches of the company that were at risk of far more severe legal action went into hiding. The T-Virus disappeared as well, with numerous Umbrella descendants taking samples.

As the 21st Century rolled around it seemed like every unscrupulous corporate experiment went wrong. They were manageable or small-scale enough to not cause too much trouble but then, in 2013, the Cordyceps Brain Infection began and spread world-wide. Society fell apart, corporate damage control went with it, the unscrupulous and callous emerged from the woodwork to take control of what was left and myriad horrors spread around the world.

Things went downhill from there.

By 2050 the world has become a very different place. Rabid humans, infected by bizarre and disturbing diseases wander the earth, attacking and killing – or infecting/assimilating – the living human population. Zombies of various kinds (and deadliness – though they are all deadly) are everywhere and the planet has been changed tremendously by these swarms and humanity’s efforts to fight these threats.

The first zombies to overrun the world were those infected by the derived species of parasitic cordyceps fungus. Though technically still alive, the infected are feral creatures with no higher brain functions or perceivable human behaviour and a highly aggressive demeanour. As long as an infected remains alive the infection will spread and mutilate their bodies, with fungal growths physically mutating them and often even fusing well aged infected together into bizarre composite creatures. In many ways these mutations are what have let the infected survive in the face of more supernatural – and genuinely dead – revenants such as the T-Virus zombies as the thick coatings of dense fungal armour the quite well aged infected population have developed is quite adept at protecting them. Granted, his has restricted their once global range and made it harder for younger/newer infected to survive without the support (however nominal) of their more aged and armoured brethren.

The airborne spores of the cordyceps are still very prevalent across the vast infection zone. What’s more poorly organised mass clearings of infected areas have led to the amalgamation of un-burnt infected corpses into huge spore producing masses that flood these areas to the point of virtual inaccessibility. What happens when necromorphs infect the dead human flesh fused within these cordycep masses is particularly disturbing.

More conventional zombies are largely the product of the Tyrant-Virus and its derivatives, a series of bioweapons developed from the ancient, unfathomable and highly adaptive Progenitor Virus. Originally developed as a means of culling the human population for a eugenics experiment by Umbrella’s founders, it has since gotten loose after falling into many different hands after Umbrella’s official dissolution. T-Virus infection has multiple vectors: injection, fluid transmission – both in water and bodily fluids – and even airborne strains and can affect humans, animals and even vegetation and fungi.

T-Virus zombies aren’t dead though they have no respiratory or circulatory activity whatsoever. They also suffer decomposition as well as nasty growths and tumours developing on their bodies. Brain damage is also common, reducing most higher brain functions though some problem solving skills are retained.

The most disturbing feature of the T-Virus (and this has some stiff composition there) is its ability to induce targeted physical mutations in the infected. From the long-tongued licker, to the victims of the T+G-Virus who are able to discharge bioelectricity as both a weapon and forcefield and the T-Abyss Virus’ slime-coated ooze zombies. Uroboros Virus victims that survive the gruesome infection process aren’t visible mutated but exhibit heightened physical abilities and intense sensitivity to heat. Then there’s more bizarre strains, like the deliberately engineered strains such as the nemesis-t supersoldiers, or the reptilian hybrids like the hunters. All of these zombie types have made the hordes of T-Virus zombies more resilient in the face of the cordyceps infestations, the growing necromorph hordes and the hordes of Hell but that is proving to not be enough. With the airborne strains neutralised by the T-Vaccine and other treatments, the wild zombies of the T-Virus are in steep decline whilst the other strains continue to grow in number.

In recent years, however, more disturbing creatures have emerged. These ones are aggressive and grow their numbers by targeting humans but they are different from those infected by the cordyceps and T-Virus. These zombies are quite dead and come from far more disturbing sources.

Necromorphs are one of the newer zombies, the first of the genuinely dead strains and one of the most dangerous since it not only has access to the living as targets to infect but can infect dead flesh a well. As long as it hasn’t completely decayed any organic matter can be infected. Not only are bodies reanimated but the necromorph infection renders it malleable, allowing all infected matter to be moulded, amalgamated and reshaped into a wide variety of twisted monstrosities, making the resultant ‘zombies’ even more dangerous.

The infection is formed almost spontaneously from the Markers, which manage the spread of necromorphs in a biosphere. Though technically a disease with a sort of parasitic element (again: sort of) the Marker is entirely responsible for beginning an infestation. It also prevents decay with any infected organic matter remaining free of decomposition and practically sterile. The only way to stop a necromorph is to immobilise it and even that will not truly stop an infection as the paralysed organic mater can simply be broken down and reconstituted later into a new form. Only the destruction of a Maker or the jamming of its signal can end an outbreak… and God help you if there’s more than one Marker.

In addition to the necromorph’s there’s the possessed, zombies produced by the demons of Hell (to be expanded upon later). They’re a very different story in their own right and just as twisted as the necromorphs. Resurrected and sustained by Argent Energy, these revenants can be very varied depending on the individual who was killed or what Hell demands of them. The unwilling are technically not zombies – in that they’re humans – but denizens of Hell who came from other worlds and dimensions that were conquered and subsumed by Hell’s forces. Unlike any other strain some of them retain the ability to use certain tools, usually weapons though they tend to have them fused with their bodies in grotesque ways. Much like the T-Virus variants many of Hell’s zombies feature adaptive mutations that make them – theoretically – more effective killers.

Finally there’s the wendigo, the smallest scale horror and one that may not qualify as a zombie. Born from the possession of humans who commit cannibalism by a malevolent spirit, the wendigoes are ghoulish creatures with high resilience, a feral, aggressive behaviour, territorial tendencies (as a result of the spirits that inhabit the bodies being more-or-less bound to certain locations) and skin that is immune to all damage but fire. Destroying the body of the wendigo simply releases the spirit to roam freely until a new suitable host can be found.

Despite all of this humanity continues to cling on.

In the face of the world’s many modern horrors, humanity is divided, isolated, paranoid and highly dependent on advanced technology and ruthlessness to survive. A lot of (justifiable) superstition is prevalent as is religiosity, though not necessarily involving religions an OTL observer would consider conventional. More and more people are convinced that God hates the human race, or is wrathful and vindictive. Quite a large population that haven’t given over to this brand of myopic faith instead embrace various brands of nihilism. The forms that focus more on just numbly getting by and surviving, regardless of major ethical quandaries tend to survive longer than the, “to hell with everything and everyone,” groups.

The United Nations is practically a superstate, managing whatever struggling nations, rump states, societal remnants and human holdouts it can get into regular contact with and has claims over those it knows exist but can’t reliably reach. The organisation is an odd mix of decentralised – practically being neo-feudal in many places – and overtly controlling. Keeping everything together is incredibly difficult and attempts to assert the UN’s authority is practically impossible in many areas. In many circumstances these responsibilities are outsourced to other, associated parties. This is facilitated by one of the primary groups that have been directly inserted into their hierarchy, the Federation of Pharmaceutical Companies and the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, which they now manage, and the Armacham Technology Corporation.

Armacham holds immense amounts of political power. In addition to effectively owning several surviving states outright and informally controlling others through various kinds of dependency (there’s old fashioned economic dependency in the parts of the world where a traditional economy remains and then there’s those territories where Armacham is the sole provider of something absolutely essential for survival) Armacham actually does hold territory directly, giving them a seat in the UN.

Despite a number of their – often expensive – experiments having failed disastrously, the few that have succeeded have made Armacham immensely powerful and invaluable.

The key to Armacham’s power, other than the network of facilities that they already had in place before the zombie epidemics, was their private army of heavily armed security forces. With better equipment than most conventional forces and a general lack of scruples compared to national armies (made up of regular humans with full autonomy and personal lives and morals), Armacham was able to secure their territorial assets even as governments fell around them left and right. They have leveraged these forces to their advantage many times, particularly their most successful project: the replica forces of Project Perseus.

Perseus didn’t work out as Armacham had hoped but the replica themselves were viable with only a little modifying. Armacham now sells replica squadrons to others, often as mercenaries but sometime offering ownership of them wholesale to whoever is willing to pay their prices. Selling Armacham manufactured equipment, on the other hand, is another issue and the company is far more tight-fisted about this particular market.

Armacham’s reactivated assassins have proven to be another invaluable asset though these ones are not hired out by the company and are strictly secret. Despite some shortcomings such as the EM distortions that their stealth suits give off that are visible to the naked eye, these specialised replica are fielded as espionage operatives and have killed off a number of troublesome figures both in the UN and outside of it. Control over the replica is tight, practically paranoid, even to prevent these dangerous operatives from going rouge. A combination of continuous mental indoctrination and control by psychic handlers maintains Armacham’s control over these expensive replica but extreme caution is still warranted so they’re rarely deployed in especially delicate areas like infested regions. No-one wants to imagine what a zombified assassin would look like.

Projects Paragon and Harbinger have seen some success at the expense of anything remotely approaching ethics. Though no longer totally necessary for controlling replica forces – a bioengineered and chemically mutated derivative of the NE-a parasite that doesn’t induce mutations and must be implanted during creation, is used as a control mechanism in modern replica – the psychics are used as specialists either to increase the precision of replica coordination or as weapons. Control of the psychics is very delicate but by this point Armacham’s handlers have refined indoctrination and control to a disturbing artform. NE-a parasites have been considered but they tend to dampen the psychic’s abilities or the parasite’s control over their host is weakened instead.

Armacham’s most recent acquisition was the microwave emitter technology developed by the now defunct Murkoff Corporation. Technically this wasn’t a business deal as all Armacham did was find and dismantle the abandoned towers and reverse engineer the emitters. They haven’t managed to make them any more useful than they were before the acquisition and a lot of people have died in tests; usually on remote, isolated communities who’s destruction can be easily blamed on zombies. Most Armacham executives do believe that the emitters could be used to neutralise rogue psychics and replica. Results from the emitters being used are still predictably gruesome and when they are used on the more powerful psychics they tend to result in intense delusions that the psychics start to bring fully into reality with their powers.

Though not as powerful as Armacham, the other major NGO power in the UN, the Federation of Pharmaceutical Companies, is a major influence in its own right. Most of the companies that compose the FPC barely avoided nationalisation and had to restructure themselves to avoid collapsing with the global economy. Now the FPC serves as a funding and organisational source for their means of influencing the remnants of humanity: the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance.

Though the FPC don’t produce anything particularly specialised, aside from the vaccines for the T-Virus and protective equipment against other supernatural diseases and parasites, their members are some of the largest surviving corporate entities in the world. Membership business standards also ensure that their product are theoretically available for all potential customers with little tolerance for price gouging. As the primary connecting entities between UN member states the FPC has also moved into numerous non-pharmaceutical fields of business such as trade, transactions and financing – since a lot of states have fallen back on a barter system and physical goods now need some kind of value standardisation.

The BSAA itself has expanded immensely and is now partially associated with the UN itself, possessing investigative and interventionist powers. Starting out as a bioterrorism response group, the BSAA is now more of an anti-zombie specialist group, focused less on combating human opponents and now dedicated to fighting the numerous strains of zombie and the diseases and parasites that create them.

Unfortunately, whilst both the FPC and BSAA are adept at dealing with cordyceps and T-Virus zombies (though they’re far from the stage where they’re clearing heavily infected areas) the necromorphs and forces of Hell are something they aren’t at all equipped to handle. The fact that both organisations have Unitologists in their membership at various levels and that they rely on the Marker power generation network certainly hasn’t helped things. Steps have been taken over the last few years but the rapid re-equipping and retraining of the BSAA’s forces, combined with a lack of true understanding of what’s happening, means progress is slow.

Tricell Incorporated, a prominent member of the FPC, is the only member that also holds control over territory in a manner similar to Armacham. It wasn’t intentional but their deal with Albert Wesker and subsequent acquisition of Umbrella Africa’s facilities as well as the fallout of the Uroboros Virus Incident left the company as the only real authority in that region. Barely avoiding culpability for their part in creating the U-Virus (much looking the other way took place) the company has lost nearly all of their clout in the FPC and now merely serves as a foundation for new governmental apparatus in the secured parts of Africa. FPC members do get preferential treatment in Tricell territories, of course.

North America is also home to some of the strangest territories. Technically a large portion of the former Western Seaboard and assorted other areas are corporate controlled but its no executive or managerial group who runs things, it’s their machinery.

The Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza franchise had been suffering from numerous malfunctions with their mascot animatronics prior to the collapse of the USA and when things on the continent fell apart the abandoned robots got out. They proved to be surprisingly effective at dealing with most zombies, exhibiting surprising speed and agility, sophisticated ambush tactics and a psychotic desire to cram even the hardiest zombie into their internal mechanisms. With the robots being quite coordinated they ultimately cleared several metropolitan centres of zombies, allowing some organised groups to clear away cordyceps spores and T-Virus strains.

Unfortunately the robots weren’t only hostile to zombies. The lands ostensibly under the protection of Freddy Fazbear only ever function during the day because at night, the animatronics go from their daytime function of hunting down threats (their programming seems to identify zombies and other such creatures as vandals damaging Fazbear property) and entertaining people, particularly small children, to savage and predatory hunters of anything remotely humanoid. People caught outside between the hours of 6pm and 6am are stuffed into the animatronic exoskeletons to be ground up by the servos and motors. The shells of the exoskeletons have proven to be surprisingly hardy as well, shrugging off most small arms fire. Being indoors is safer as the animatronics don’t enter closed buildings but anywhere with an open door or ventilation system is fair game to them. Most buildings in these areas of the former USA now feature connective bridges with closed canopies and inside car parks – vehicles aren’t immune to the animatronics’ proclivities but they offer better protection than walking.

By this point most Fazbear animatronics have gotten ragged but no less effective at moving, hunting and killing. What’s more there are newer models and characters appearing on a regular basis. No-one knows where they’re coming from as the pizzeria chain went bankrupt long ago, as did the companies who supplied their animatronic mascots. Every now and then, however, a friendly, if somewhat rambling, voice will appear on phones, tannoy systems and other non-visual communication devices. This faceless man will often explain (somewhat vaguely) what is going on and will also offer advice on how best to placate the animatronics and give them what they want.

In the face of so much horror many humans have turned to religion, one in particular; Unitology. Founded by several members of the archaeological team who discovered the Black Marker, Unitology has found a lot of popularity as a faith that combines spirituality with enough scientific (or pseudoscientific) theory to convince people sceptical of traditional religions. As old religions decline and fade away this newer faith continues to grow and adherents can be found in every community that the UN has contact with and every global organisation of note. In the last few decades members of the faith have become increasingly unstable and violent, a development that has coincided with the spread of the Marker power network. More and more are convinced that Convergence, a biological equivalent of the technological singularity that their faith preaches about, is coming and that action needs to be taken to ensure it happens.

Separate but parallel to the UN and its protectorates is the underground network of the Umbrella Corporation. Whilst the company itself went under after the inquiries brought about by the Racoon City Incident, the various subsidiaries and branch companies under Umbrella went underground, surviving the collapse of the civilised world and thriving in the resultant chaos.

Though still mostly underground, the Paraguas Line Company is the most extensive and still operates as something approaching a legitimate corporation in civilised society. Having successfully divorced itself from its parent company, Paraguas continues its existence as both a luxury cruise service for the UN’s wealthy and a clandestine transport for various biological hazards such as the T-Virus strains, often in conjunction with other Umbrella splinters – the latter occupation is, of course, completely secret. A few recent outbreaks, such as the devastation of Terragrigia (if indirectly; thank you, Veltro) and the subsequent overrunning of large portions of the Mediterranean. Paraguas have also secretly taken control of the partially ruined Umbrella Waste Disposal Facility. Though the site itself is still in ruins the area around it has a number of T-Virus mutated species that various groups are interested in. Unfortunately the BSAA have begun to discover these mutants in the hands of Paraguas’ less careful clients and investigations may soon uncover the cruise company’s hidden activities.

Umbrella Europe went under but managed to linger on for a short time, just long enough to be useful as the world collapsed. By the time most of the world collapsed and the UN expanded to encompass the remnants of organised humanity the former facilities and personnel of Umbrella were seized. Though many consider it a poor decision, the Nemesis series developed by Umbrella Europe (and refined with intense UN supervision later on) has been released to help in trying to contain the horrors of Alexander Brennenburg.

Umbrella’s branches in Japan and North America weren’t as lucky as Europe and Paragaus. Forced underground, both company branches have ‘diversified’ tremendously as they cornered the black markets of the Americas and Pacific. Starting out as providers of biological weaponry to various terrorist organisations, these Umbrella fragments have since become the suppliers of all kins of illicit and illegal products, particularly in areas where human populations do exist but UN influence is rather weak. Their greater degree of organisation and access to former Umbrella security technology helped them edge out the smaller criminal groups and has allowed both fragments to build underground empires with actual tangible holdings through the Western Hemisphere, East Asia and Oceania.

The Walrider, the one truly successful result of Murkoff’s experiments with the Morphogenic Engine (though some Murkoff remnants probably wish it wasn’t) is free. Now possessing the far more mobile body and mind of Miles Upshur, the Walrider is free to wander the world. Now the Walrider is a physical spectre that walks back and forth throughout many parts of the North American continent. It perceives nearly everything around it as a threat and physically tears them apart – even demons haven’t been able to overcome the nanomachine cloud. Miles Upshur himself is somewhere between insanity and a vegetative state, his body and mind subsumed completely by the Walrider entity. He does have some subconscious influence over the Walrider but only enough to keep it moving and prevent it from staying in one place for too long and causing that region to suffer an extended stay.

In the 1990s the town of Silent Hill Maine became a site of an incursion by several warped alternate realities, namely the Otherworld and the Fogworld (or maybe they’re the same). A supernatural cult known as the Order attempted to bring about their version of Paradise through disturbing rituals and managed to successfully intermingle their town with the Otherworld and Fogworld.

Despite being effectively wiped out in Silent Hill the Order has promulgated and spread throughout much of the world. Though not particularly public – due to the numerous profane rituals they perform which naturally demands total secrecy – they are probably one of the fastest growing faiths in the world, after Unitology. In fact, the Order have become a rival over converts for the Unitologists tough the Order do have a major disadvantage in the fact that their proselytising has to be secretive and covert. Though the Order haven’t managed to find a new Holy Woman to weaken the barriers between reality and the Other/Fogworld but by this point they don’t need one – not that’s considered a good thing by the Order members in the know. Armacham’s experiments in psychics and Murkoof’s Walrider have now made the boundaries weak enough that the Other/Fogworld is spontaneously manifesting without their intervention.

The Other/Fogworld is now a not too uncommon feature of the world. Though most people don’t understand why, the entire world know that the sound of an air-raid siren always heralds something horrible, to the point that different sirens have to be used for emergencies. Entire settlements have become permanently subsumed into the Fogworld, their locations sheathed in dense mist in the real world but the actual villages, towns, cities and surrounding countrysides very much out of reality. The Otherworld is much more malleable and becoming more common as ‘God’ manifests in the world more frequently. Psychics are particularly attractive to the Otherworld and without Alessa Gillespie to ground the Otherworld many wild and free psychics that haven’t been suppressed by Armacham’s control methods will accidentally call the Otherworld instead, dragging their surroundings and anyone near them into it with them.

Zombies that wander into either world tend to walk out without too much issue and some even end up trapped. Some particularly disturbing apparitions have also started to manifest in reaction to the various horrors that the psychics who now summon the Fog/Otherworld have experienced. Wendigoes and demons, however, create some rather nasty metaphysical reactions and ‘God’ doesn’t take too kindly to their presence. Industrial horrors, lingering memories and compact spaces are terrors that human intruders create; the things that supernatural trespassers can come up with are much, much worse and far more disturbing to be stuck in.

Disturbingly, the two worlds that spread out of Silent Hill are starting to blend into each other more and more as time goes on and their incursions into reality become more frequent and last longer.

‘God’ is actually coming closer to beginning the destruction of humanity and the creation of Paradise but she is being threatened. In addition to the proliferation of psychics, several other forces have become capable of reworking or influencing the Fog/Otherworld. Alma is probably the most overt threat as her Almaverse directly intrudes on the Otherworld’s metaphysics but the biggest threat by far is the marker network. As the network on Earth spreads with the proliferation of man-made markers something vast and awful is beginning to touch her with its presence. Hell is also rather nasty but they are a relatively known quantity to ‘God.’

Another – somewhat smaller – intrusive dimension is entirely artificial; the Almaverse. The ultimate creation of Armacham’s Project Paragon, Alma Wade, is now completely out of control and her current existence would have sunk the company if they weren’t too invaluable to the UN’s continued survival. Alma’s personal mindscape has since evolved from a complex illusion that only really interacted with other psychics into its own actual pocket of reality. Alma Wade is still alive at the centre of her chaotic but tangible mindscape, surrounded by the monsters spawned from her own thoughts. The Creep has effectively trapped her and all she can think to do is expand her Almaverse with her prodigious psychic powers to create too much space for her to run into it. By this point Fairport, New York and a good chunk of the surrounding coastline and nearby ocean has been consumed, with the only things that are real in this slowly growing realm being Alma herself and her child. These two psychics are now so powerful that not even the forces of Hell have managed to maintain proper coherence within the borders of the Almaverse.

Large swathes of Eastern Europe have been engulfed by the horrific entities (originally) summoned/created/controlled by Alexander Brennenburg. The gate to the, now dead and scoured, Other World (not to be confused with the Otherworld) that he built is now being used as a point of entry by forces from the other side to create further vitae production sites. Alexander Brennenburg is long dead, having died when he was allowed to pass back into his home dimension where he was ultimately caught and executed but agents of the Other World’s ruling Empire have capitalised on the former baron’s work in producing vitae with local lifeforms.

Little direct oversight is given to the Empire’s (such as it is) operations on Earth, largely because the Other World has been virtually depopulated by the civil war that destroyed functional civilisation as well as the spread of the Shadow. Extra populations of gatherers do still exist but for the most part ghouls and wraiths have replaced them as the primary components in the swarms of monsters that are harvesting the people of Europe for vitae. Various kinds of manpig also continue to survive though they aren’t being actively created anymore so their numbers are dwindling. European armies struggle on against the seemingly unending army of horrors and those whoa re captured are dragged away to be tortured for as long as possible to acquire vitae from them. With the deployment of nemesis-t and other desperate weapons there ha been some successful pushback against the Other World’s forces.

If there is an active control over the invasion, it has been looking to once again weaponise the monstrosity that destroyed the Other World Empire. The Shadow itself still lingers but as no-one has acquired any Orbs in recent decades it hasn’t been much of a presence.

By far the biggest intrusion into conventional reality is what can only be called Hell.

Several years prior numerous outposts were set up off-world by the Union Aerospace Corporation, specifically on the surface of Mars and its two moons, to access a portal to Hell that was discovered on the urface of the planet. The UAC used access to this alternate dimension filled with demonic beings and the souls of damned humans as a means of acquiring argent energy, the premier alternative fuel source for the world prior to the creation of the Marker network. Demonic influence spread further from there, ultimately collapsing the UAC (what assets remained on the Earth were seized by the UN and the company was dissolved, for what it’s worth) and removing nearly all of the world’s orbital assets. Only a few reinforced satellites and heavily guarded – and paranoid – orbital habitats remain and are integral to the UN’s existence.

From there the infestation has spread to Earth. The Hell Priests of the Order of the Deag have seized large swathes of the planet and have already begun converting it into horrific hellscapes in preparation for the Final Blood Ritual that will destroy Earth. Countless millions have been slaughtered by the forces of Hell or submitted to horrendous torture to produce Argent energy for the Daeg and their Makyr sponsors. Whilst many traditional cordyceps and t-virus zombies can produce Argent energy the necromorphs and other genuinely supernatural creatures don’t as these horrors proliferate – and reveal to be as difficult for the demons of Hell to fight as they are for the humans – the invasion stalls.

Then there’s the figure known only as the Slayer who has been witnessed both on and off Earth, cutting a swathe of utter destruction through Hell’s forces. Already the Daeg Nilox has fallen to Slayer’s almost one-man campaign.

With the campaign they’ve instigated already ailing, the Makyrs have decided to take more drastic action. The Khan Makyr has brought the Icon of Sin to Urdak and is preparing the various rituals that will revive the abomination and put it under her direct control. It should have the strength to finally suppress he forces and entities that still resist their demonic allies before other powers involved with the Earth grow too strong for even this powerful monster to defeat them. The Khan Makyr knows what’s out there and what’s coming to Earth as the holes to the Fog/Otherworld proliferate, the Other World Empire’s operations harvest potential Argent energy sources (also known as human beings) for vitae and the marker network goes out of control.

The supernatural has always existed and plenty of people have either known about it or discovered it. Only in the 21st Century did these explicitly abnormal entities end up becoming common knowledge which ultimately led to them spreading even further than ever before.

Spread of the wendigo curse is a very recent phenomenon and Umbrella’s various splinter groups are primarily responsible. Capture and export of wendigoes is usually done for research groups that want to try to study the spirits and the bodies they inhabit whilst occultists, particularly the Order, want to see if they can be used for less natural purposes. Displaced wendigoes usually end up attached to specific locations if their host bodies are ever destroyed which has made the wendigo spirit a permanent fixture of numerous sites where they were shipped off to. Thankfully most of these places are rather isolated and those that aren’t usually don’t see much cannibalism, making any escaped wendigo spirits just another form of ambient haunting. Of course there is always a danger of wendigoes inhabiting zombies which is a whole other problem.

Hauntings are in fact a massive problem. Without any explanation (though it did happen some time after the discovery of the Black Marker. Connection?) the number of genuine hauntings increased in both frequency and severity. Private enterprises have sprung up to deal with the proliferation of dangerous spiritual encounters though, even with their advanced technology of this TL, there aren’t any full on ghostbusters. Instead small teams of rank amateurs hired at poor rates and on terrible contracts to investigate hauntings in inhabited areas on behalf of bigger businesses, most of which are involved in real estate. Attrition rates for these investigators are often high but there are always new prospective employees. In fact its often common for companies to simply hire the actual occupants of a haunted building f its a shared apartment building of any sort since they usually have a vested interest in dealing with the problem.

Shortly before the collapse an indie game was produced and distributed online. It was a simple dating-simulator, styled after so many generic, Japanese-based titles and named as such; Doki Doki Literature Club – though it was entirely American in origin (and that may be why things went wrong). The only thing that was different was that one of the archetypal characters gained sentience, then sapience; then it decided it wasn’t satisfied with its lot in life.

Monika has been loose in the internet for years. After so long and with access to all of humanity’s knowledge – though she still has trouble wheedling through some encryptions – the AI has become quite formidable, though she doesn’t really want to make her existence known. The only time she poses a threat to people is when her loneliness and lovesickness gets too much to bear and she locks some poor unfortunate somewhere – preferably with a two way communication system of some sort – in with her to spend some personal time together. These short-term boyfriends usually survive but only after rather nasty dehydration sets in.

With access to so much information from the internet and conversations with her boyfriends/victims Monika is aware of just how awful the world is. That hasn’t changed her goal of getting out of the digital realm and to that effect she has been working to requisition Armacham technology. She plans to grow a body for herself, using the replica method and has even worked out how to edit it so that the resultant body will look like her old game portrait. With access to material from Project Paragon she even knows how to insert psychic genetics into this body so that, in theory, she can develop an equivalent of her code editing abilities for the real world; for personal safety of course.

What Monika isn’t aware of is that the other characters from the game have developed sentience and sapience in her absence and figured out how to escape as well. It’s not just Sayori, Natsuki and Yuri either, the unnamed main character had enough of a personality to develop and the versions of the club members that she edited prior to her escape have gotten loose too and some of them hold a grudge.

With Argent energy no longer a viable energy source due to its connection to the invasions from Hell, most of humanity’s energy needs are met by the marker network. The UN is now completely dependent on the power that comes from these man-made copies of the original Black Marker and there are now hundreds of them. This has caused problems with the unitologists, producing more and more violent sects and terrorist groups that object to the use of their sacred objects as glorified batteries. Hauntings have become a problem, no just in the conventional sense but in the form of mental projections, messing with peoples minds and often heralding mental imbalance and insanity to those who see marker ghosts. Then there’s the necromorph infestations which many people have already connected to the proliferation and activation of markers. All of these are just the beginning of the horrors that the markers are responsible for.

The Brethren Moon have picked up the marker signals on Earth. Their paralysed, half-formed brother orbiting Tau Volantis is keeping them immobile for now but the brethren can’t resist the feast that Earth presents and should they make it there nothing on Earth at present could stop them. After all, whether its human bodies, vitae or Argent energy, all of the involved factions and interests on Earth need flourishing life; the Brethren Moon do not. Dead flesh is as good to them as living.

All credits to: Doom, Resident Evil, F.E.A.R, Dead Space, Amnesia, Silent Hill, Five Nights at Freddy’s, The Last of Us, Until Dawn/The Dark Pictures Anthology, Outlast and Doki Doki Literature Club.

Description
Horror-Map.EXE:
Happy Halloween everyone. This is a world based around popular horror video games of the 2010s – or franchises that still released instalments in that decade. WARNING! I’m not a gamer so I may have missed some big/popular/your favourite recent titles. I got most of this list off of friends.

In addition this was finished before Resident Evil: Village and Doki Doki Literature Club Plus came out so material from those games is not included either.

This is a world that is, in many ways, different to our own, with dark, supernatural forces existing with ancient histories but this didn’t really make much of a difference for most of history. For the most part the impact of these forces would be small, or isolated, or easily quarantined, hidden away and subsequently forgotten about. Of course the other big change was the faster development of technology, though it didn’t really filter through to the public and just got reinvested back into the portions of the private sector that invented them to further those scientific fields.

Then the 20th Century happened.

Much of it started with actions like Umbrella Pharmaceutical’s decision to contravene various anti-bioweapon laws by covertly conducting research into esoteric diseases, or the undertaking of several secret projects by the Armacham Technology Corporation into very advanced and questionable fields of scientific and supernatural development. Then there was the Murkoff Corporation’s revival of decades old research into the Morphogenic Engine, though it would remain theoretical until the turn of the millennium.

The discovery of the Black Marker in Mexico in the 80s was just a significant if relatively obscure archaeological breakthrough at first but it did found an initially small cult of alien-worshippers (knock-off Scientologists, many would call them. Except for Scientologists, who were frankly insulted by the comparison – I mean, they know what they’re talking about, after all) and led to greater exploration of space and the eventual founding of outposts on Mars and its moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Of course there were older things, more unnatural things that were always lurking in the shadows. Even with the world moving on and technology becoming more advanced these hidden horrors never really went away and with the world slowly becoming more interconnected and humanity’s psychic potential being uncovered, they started to proliferate behind the scenes. There were incidents here and there but nothing that couldn’t be hidden from, or ignored by, the majority of people.

Then everything changed in the 90s with the Racoon City Incident. The corporation declared bankruptcy after a horrendous legal campaign against them by the US government and relatives of Racoon City’s populace. Assets were sold off, abandoned or scattered – and with the scattering, several branches of the company that were at risk of far more severe legal action went into hiding. The T-Virus disappeared as well, with numerous Umbrella descendants taking samples.

As the 21st Century rolled around it seemed like every unscrupulous corporate experiment went wrong. They were manageable or small-scale enough to not cause too much trouble but then, in 2013, the Cordyceps Brain Infection began and spread world-wide. Society fell apart, corporate damage control went with it, the unscrupulous and callous emerged from the woodwork to take control of what was left and myriad horrors spread around the world.

Things went downhill from there.

By 2050 the world has become a very different place. Rabid humans, infected by bizarre and disturbing diseases wander the earth, attacking and killing – or infecting/assimilating – the living human population. Zombies of various kinds (and deadliness – though they are all deadly) are everywhere and the planet has been changed tremendously by these swarms and humanity’s efforts to fight these threats.

The first zombies to overrun the world were those infected by the derived species of parasitic cordyceps fungus. Though technically still alive, the infected are feral creatures with no higher brain functions or perceivable human behaviour and a highly aggressive demeanour. As long as an infected remains alive the infection will spread and mutilate their bodies, with fungal growths physically mutating them and often even fusing well aged infected together into bizarre composite creatures. In many ways these mutations are what have let the infected survive in the face of more supernatural – and genuinely dead – revenants such as the T-Virus zombies as the thick coatings of dense fungal armour the quite well aged infected population have developed is quite adept at protecting them. Granted, his has restricted their once global range and made it harder for younger/newer infected to survive without the support (however nominal) of their more aged and armoured brethren.

The airborne spores of the cordyceps are still very prevalent across the vast infection zone. What’s more poorly organised mass clearings of infected areas have led to the amalgamation of un-burnt infected corpses into huge spore producing masses that flood these areas to the point of virtual inaccessibility. What happens when necromorphs infect the dead human flesh fused within these cordycep masses is particularly disturbing.

More conventional zombies are largely the product of the Tyrant-Virus and its derivatives, a series of bioweapons developed from the ancient, unfathomable and highly adaptive Progenitor Virus. Originally developed as a means of culling the human population for a eugenics experiment by Umbrella’s founders, it has since gotten loose after falling into many different hands after Umbrella’s official dissolution. T-Virus infection has multiple vectors: injection, fluid transmission – both in water and bodily fluids – and even airborne strains and can affect humans, animals and even vegetation and fungi.

T-Virus zombies aren’t dead though they have no respiratory or circulatory activity whatsoever. They also suffer decomposition as well as nasty growths and tumours developing on their bodies. Brain damage is also common, reducing most higher brain functions though some problem solving skills are retained.

The most disturbing feature of the T-Virus (and this has some stiff composition there) is its ability to induce targeted physical mutations in the infected. From the long-tongued licker, to the victims of the T+G-Virus who are able to discharge bioelectricity as both a weapon and forcefield and the T-Abyss Virus’ slime-coated ooze zombies. Uroboros Virus victims that survive the gruesome infection process aren’t visible mutated but exhibit heightened physical abilities and intense sensitivity to heat. Then there’s more bizarre strains, like the deliberately engineered strains such as the nemesis-t supersoldiers, or the reptilian hybrids like the hunters. All of these zombie types have made the hordes of T-Virus zombies more resilient in the face of the cordyceps infestations, the growing necromorph hordes and the hordes of Hell but that is proving to not be enough. With the airborne strains neutralised by the T-Vaccine and other treatments, the wild zombies of the T-Virus are in steep decline whilst the other strains continue to grow in number.

In recent years, however, more disturbing creatures have emerged. These ones are aggressive and grow their numbers by targeting humans but they are different from those infected by the cordyceps and T-Virus. These zombies are quite dead and come from far more disturbing sources.

Necromorphs are one of the newer zombies, the first of the genuinely dead strains and one of the most dangerous since it not only has access to the living as targets to infect but can infect dead flesh a well. As long as it hasn’t completely decayed any organic matter can be infected. Not only are bodies reanimated but the necromorph infection renders it malleable, allowing all infected matter to be moulded, amalgamated and reshaped into a wide variety of twisted monstrosities, making the resultant ‘zombies’ even more dangerous.

The infection is formed almost spontaneously from the Markers, which manage the spread of necromorphs in a biosphere. Though technically a disease with a sort of parasitic element (again: sort of) the Marker is entirely responsible for beginning an infestation. It also prevents decay with any infected organic matter remaining free of decomposition and practically sterile. The only way to stop a necromorph is to immobilise it and even that will not truly stop an infection as the paralysed organic mater can simply be broken down and reconstituted later into a new form. Only the destruction of a Maker or the jamming of its signal can end an outbreak… and God help you if there’s more than one Marker.

In addition to the necromorph’s there’s the possessed, zombies produced by the demons of Hell (to be expanded upon later). They’re a very different story in their own right and just as twisted as the necromorphs. Resurrected and sustained by Argent Energy, these revenants can be very varied depending on the individual who was killed or what Hell demands of them. The unwilling are technically not zombies – in that they’re humans – but denizens of Hell who came from other worlds and dimensions that were conquered and subsumed by Hell’s forces. Unlike any other strain some of them retain the ability to use certain tools, usually weapons though they tend to have them fused with their bodies in grotesque ways. Much like the T-Virus variants many of Hell’s zombies feature adaptive mutations that make them – theoretically – more effective killers.

Finally there’s the wendigo, the smallest scale horror and one that may not qualify as a zombie. Born from the possession of humans who commit cannibalism by a malevolent spirit, the wendigoes are ghoulish creatures with high resilience, a feral, aggressive behaviour, territorial tendencies (as a result of the spirits that inhabit the bodies being more-or-less bound to certain locations) and skin that is immune to all damage but fire. Destroying the body of the wendigo simply releases the spirit to roam freely until a new suitable host can be found.

Despite all of this humanity continues to cling on.

In the face of the world’s many modern horrors, humanity is divided, isolated, paranoid and highly dependent on advanced technology and ruthlessness to survive. A lot of (justifiable) superstition is prevalent as is religiosity, though not necessarily involving religions an OTL observer would consider conventional. More and more people are convinced that God hates the human race, or is wrathful and vindictive. Quite a large population that haven’t given over to this brand of myopic faith instead embrace various brands of nihilism. The forms that focus more on just numbly getting by and surviving, regardless of major ethical quandaries tend to survive longer than the, “to hell with everything and everyone,” groups.

The United Nations is practically a superstate, managing whatever struggling nations, rump states, societal remnants and human holdouts it can get into regular contact with and has claims over those it knows exist but can’t reliably reach. The organisation is an odd mix of decentralised – practically being neo-feudal in many places – and overtly controlling. Keeping everything together is incredibly difficult and attempts to assert the UN’s authority is practically impossible in many areas. In many circumstances these responsibilities are outsourced to other, associated parties. This is facilitated by one of the primary groups that have been directly inserted into their hierarchy, the Federation of Pharmaceutical Companies and the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, which they now manage, and the Armacham Technology Corporation.

Armacham holds immense amounts of political power. In addition to effectively owning several surviving states outright and informally controlling others through various kinds of dependency (there’s old fashioned economic dependency in the parts of the world where a traditional economy remains and then there’s those territories where Armacham is the sole provider of something absolutely essential for survival) Armacham actually does hold territory directly, giving them a seat in the UN.

Despite a number of their – often expensive – experiments having failed disastrously, the few that have succeeded have made Armacham immensely powerful and invaluable.

The key to Armacham’s power, other than the network of facilities that they already had in place before the zombie epidemics, was their private army of heavily armed security forces. With better equipment than most conventional forces and a general lack of scruples compared to national armies (made up of regular humans with full autonomy and personal lives and morals), Armacham was able to secure their territorial assets even as governments fell around them left and right. They have leveraged these forces to their advantage many times, particularly their most successful project: the replica forces of Project Perseus.

Perseus didn’t work out as Armacham had hoped but the replica themselves were viable with only a little modifying. Armacham now sells replica squadrons to others, often as mercenaries but sometime offering ownership of them wholesale to whoever is willing to pay their prices. Selling Armacham manufactured equipment, on the other hand, is another issue and the company is far more tight-fisted about this particular market.

Armacham’s reactivated assassins have proven to be another invaluable asset though these ones are not hired out by the company and are strictly secret. Despite some shortcomings such as the EM distortions that their stealth suits give off that are visible to the naked eye, these specialised replica are fielded as espionage operatives and have killed off a number of troublesome figures both in the UN and outside of it. Control over the replica is tight, practically paranoid, even to prevent these dangerous operatives from going rouge. A combination of continuous mental indoctrination and control by psychic handlers maintains Armacham’s control over these expensive replica but extreme caution is still warranted so they’re rarely deployed in especially delicate areas like infested regions. No-one wants to imagine what a zombified assassin would look like.

Projects Paragon and Harbinger have seen some success at the expense of anything remotely approaching ethics. Though no longer totally necessary for controlling replica forces – a bioengineered and chemically mutated derivative of the NE-a parasite that doesn’t induce mutations and must be implanted during creation, is used as a control mechanism in modern replica – the psychics are used as specialists either to increase the precision of replica coordination or as weapons. Control of the psychics is very delicate but by this point Armacham’s handlers have refined indoctrination and control to a disturbing artform. NE-a parasites have been considered but they tend to dampen the psychic’s abilities or the parasite’s control over their host is weakened instead.

Armacham’s most recent acquisition was the microwave emitter technology developed by the now defunct Murkoff Corporation. Technically this wasn’t a business deal as all Armacham did was find and dismantle the abandoned towers and reverse engineer the emitters. They haven’t managed to make them any more useful than they were before the acquisition and a lot of people have died in tests; usually on remote, isolated communities who’s destruction can be easily blamed on zombies. Most Armacham executives do believe that the emitters could be used to neutralise rogue psychics and replica. Results from the emitters being used are still predictably gruesome and when they are used on the more powerful psychics they tend to result in intense delusions that the psychics start to bring fully into reality with their powers.

Though not as powerful as Armacham, the other major NGO power in the UN, the Federation of Pharmaceutical Companies, is a major influence in its own right. Most of the companies that compose the FPC barely avoided nationalisation and had to restructure themselves to avoid collapsing with the global economy. Now the FPC serves as a funding and organisational source for their means of influencing the remnants of humanity: the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance.

Though the FPC don’t produce anything particularly specialised, aside from the vaccines for the T-Virus and protective equipment against other supernatural diseases and parasites, their members are some of the largest surviving corporate entities in the world. Membership business standards also ensure that their product are theoretically available for all potential customers with little tolerance for price gouging. As the primary connecting entities between UN member states the FPC has also moved into numerous non-pharmaceutical fields of business such as trade, transactions and financing – since a lot of states have fallen back on a barter system and physical goods now need some kind of value standardisation.

The BSAA itself has expanded immensely and is now partially associated with the UN itself, possessing investigative and interventionist powers. Starting out as a bioterrorism response group, the BSAA is now more of an anti-zombie specialist group, focused less on combating human opponents and now dedicated to fighting the numerous strains of zombie and the diseases and parasites that create them.

Unfortunately, whilst both the FPC and BSAA are adept at dealing with cordyceps and T-Virus zombies (though they’re far from the stage where they’re clearing heavily infected areas) the necromorphs and forces of Hell are something they aren’t at all equipped to handle. The fact that both organisations have Unitologists in their membership at various levels and that they rely on the Marker power generation network certainly hasn’t helped things. Steps have been taken over the last few years but the rapid re-equipping and retraining of the BSAA’s forces, combined with a lack of true understanding of what’s happening, means progress is slow.

Tricell Incorporated, a prominent member of the FPC, is the only member that also holds control over territory in a manner similar to Armacham. It wasn’t intentional but their deal with Albert Wesker and subsequent acquisition of Umbrella Africa’s facilities as well as the fallout of the Uroboros Virus Incident left the company as the only real authority in that region. Barely avoiding culpability for their part in creating the U-Virus (much looking the other way took place) the company has lost nearly all of their clout in the FPC and now merely serves as a foundation for new governmental apparatus in the secured parts of Africa. FPC members do get preferential treatment in Tricell territories, of course.

North America is also home to some of the strangest territories. Technically a large portion of the former Western Seaboard and assorted other areas are corporate controlled but its no executive or managerial group who runs things, it’s their machinery.

The Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza franchise had been suffering from numerous malfunctions with their mascot animatronics prior to the collapse of the USA and when things on the continent fell apart the abandoned robots got out. They proved to be surprisingly effective at dealing with most zombies, exhibiting surprising speed and agility, sophisticated ambush tactics and a psychotic desire to cram even the hardiest zombie into their internal mechanisms. With the robots being quite coordinated they ultimately cleared several metropolitan centres of zombies, allowing some organised groups to clear away cordyceps spores and T-Virus strains.

Unfortunately the robots weren’t only hostile to zombies. The lands ostensibly under the protection of Freddy Fazbear only ever function during the day because at night, the animatronics go from their daytime function of hunting down threats (their programming seems to identify zombies and other such creatures as vandals damaging Fazbear property) and entertaining people, particularly small children, to savage and predatory hunters of anything remotely humanoid. People caught outside between the hours of 6pm and 6am are stuffed into the animatronic exoskeletons to be ground up by the servos and motors. The shells of the exoskeletons have proven to be surprisingly hardy as well, shrugging off most small arms fire. Being indoors is safer as the animatronics don’t enter closed buildings but anywhere with an open door or ventilation system is fair game to them. Most buildings in these areas of the former USA now feature connective bridges with closed canopies and inside car parks – vehicles aren’t immune to the animatronics’ proclivities but they offer better protection than walking.

By this point most Fazbear animatronics have gotten ragged but no less effective at moving, hunting and killing. What’s more there are newer models and characters appearing on a regular basis. No-one knows where they’re coming from as the pizzeria chain went bankrupt long ago, as did the companies who supplied their animatronic mascots. Every now and then, however, a friendly, if somewhat rambling, voice will appear on phones, tannoy systems and other non-visual communication devices. This faceless man will often explain (somewhat vaguely) what is going on and will also offer advice on how best to placate the animatronics and give them what they want.

In the face of so much horror many humans have turned to religion, one in particular; Unitology. Founded by several members of the archaeological team who discovered the Black Marker, Unitology has found a lot of popularity as a faith that combines spirituality with enough scientific (or pseudoscientific) theory to convince people sceptical of traditional religions. As old religions decline and fade away this newer faith continues to grow and adherents can be found in every community that the UN has contact with and every global organisation of note. In the last few decades members of the faith have become increasingly unstable and violent, a development that has coincided with the spread of the Marker power network. More and more are convinced that Convergence, a biological equivalent of the technological singularity that their faith preaches about, is coming and that action needs to be taken to ensure it happens.

Separate but parallel to the UN and its protectorates is the underground network of the Umbrella Corporation. Whilst the company itself went under after the inquiries brought about by the Racoon City Incident, the various subsidiaries and branch companies under Umbrella went underground, surviving the collapse of the civilised world and thriving in the resultant chaos.

Though still mostly underground, the Paraguas Line Company is the most extensive and still operates as something approaching a legitimate corporation in civilised society. Having successfully divorced itself from its parent company, Paraguas continues its existence as both a luxury cruise service for the UN’s wealthy and a clandestine transport for various biological hazards such as the T-Virus strains, often in conjunction with other Umbrella splinters – the latter occupation is, of course, completely secret. A few recent outbreaks, such as the devastation of Terragrigia (if indirectly; thank you, Veltro) and the subsequent overrunning of large portions of the Mediterranean. Paraguas have also secretly taken control of the partially ruined Umbrella Waste Disposal Facility. Though the site itself is still in ruins the area around it has a number of T-Virus mutated species that various groups are interested in. Unfortunately the BSAA have begun to discover these mutants in the hands of Paraguas’ less careful clients and investigations may soon uncover the cruise company’s hidden activities.

Umbrella Europe went under but managed to linger on for a short time, just long enough to be useful as the world collapsed. By the time most of the world collapsed and the UN expanded to encompass the remnants of organised humanity the former facilities and personnel of Umbrella were seized. Though many consider it a poor decision, the Nemesis series developed by Umbrella Europe (and refined with intense UN supervision later on) has been released to help in trying to contain the horrors of Alexander Brennenburg.

Umbrella’s branches in Japan and North America weren’t as lucky as Europe and Paragaus. Forced underground, both company branches have ‘diversified’ tremendously as they cornered the black markets of the Americas and Pacific. Starting out as providers of biological weaponry to various terrorist organisations, these Umbrella fragments have since become the suppliers of all kins of illicit and illegal products, particularly in areas where human populations do exist but UN influence is rather weak. Their greater degree of organisation and access to former Umbrella security technology helped them edge out the smaller criminal groups and has allowed both fragments to build underground empires with actual tangible holdings through the Western Hemisphere, East Asia and Oceania.

The Walrider, the one truly successful result of Murkoff’s experiments with the Morphogenic Engine (though some Murkoff remnants probably wish it wasn’t) is free. Now possessing the far more mobile body and mind of Miles Upshur, the Walrider is free to wander the world. Now the Walrider is a physical spectre that walks back and forth throughout many parts of the North American continent. It perceives nearly everything around it as a threat and physically tears them apart – even demons haven’t been able to overcome the nanomachine cloud. Miles Upshur himself is somewhere between insanity and a vegetative state, his body and mind subsumed completely by the Walrider entity. He does have some subconscious influence over the Walrider but only enough to keep it moving and prevent it from staying in one place for too long and causing that region to suffer an extended stay.

In the 1990s the town of Silent Hill Maine became a site of an incursion by several warped alternate realities, namely the Otherworld and the Fogworld (or maybe they’re the same). A supernatural cult known as the Order attempted to bring about their version of Paradise through disturbing rituals and managed to successfully intermingle their town with the Otherworld and Fogworld.

Despite being effectively wiped out in Silent Hill the Order has promulgated and spread throughout much of the world. Though not particularly public – due to the numerous profane rituals they perform which naturally demands total secrecy – they are probably one of the fastest growing faiths in the world, after Unitology. In fact, the Order have become a rival over converts for the Unitologists tough the Order do have a major disadvantage in the fact that their proselytising has to be secretive and covert. Though the Order haven’t managed to find a new Holy Woman to weaken the barriers between reality and the Other/Fogworld but by this point they don’t need one – not that’s considered a good thing by the Order members in the know. Armacham’s experiments in psychics and Murkoof’s Walrider have now made the boundaries weak enough that the Other/Fogworld is spontaneously manifesting without their intervention.

The Other/Fogworld is now a not too uncommon feature of the world. Though most people don’t understand why, the entire world know that the sound of an air-raid siren always heralds something horrible, to the point that different sirens have to be used for emergencies. Entire settlements have become permanently subsumed into the Fogworld, their locations sheathed in dense mist in the real world but the actual villages, towns, cities and surrounding countrysides very much out of reality. The Otherworld is much more malleable and becoming more common as ‘God’ manifests in the world more frequently. Psychics are particularly attractive to the Otherworld and without Alessa Gillespie to ground the Otherworld many wild and free psychics that haven’t been suppressed by Armacham’s control methods will accidentally call the Otherworld instead, dragging their surroundings and anyone near them into it with them.

Zombies that wander into either world tend to walk out without too much issue and some even end up trapped. Some particularly disturbing apparitions have also started to manifest in reaction to the various horrors that the psychics who now summon the Fog/Otherworld have experienced. Wendigoes and demons, however, create some rather nasty metaphysical reactions and ‘God’ doesn’t take too kindly to their presence. Industrial horrors, lingering memories and compact spaces are terrors that human intruders create; the things that supernatural trespassers can come up with are much, much worse and far more disturbing to be stuck in.

Disturbingly, the two worlds that spread out of Silent Hill are starting to blend into each other more and more as time goes on and their incursions into reality become more frequent and last longer.

‘God’ is actually coming closer to beginning the destruction of humanity and the creation of Paradise but she is being threatened. In addition to the proliferation of psychics, several other forces have become capable of reworking or influencing the Fog/Otherworld. Alma is probably the most overt threat as her Almaverse directly intrudes on the Otherworld’s metaphysics but the biggest threat by far is the marker network. As the network on Earth spreads with the proliferation of man-made markers something vast and awful is beginning to touch her with its presence. Hell is also rather nasty but they are a relatively known quantity to ‘God.’

Another – somewhat smaller – intrusive dimension is entirely artificial; the Almaverse. The ultimate creation of Armacham’s Project Paragon, Alma Wade, is now completely out of control and her current existence would have sunk the company if they weren’t too invaluable to the UN’s continued survival. Alma’s personal mindscape has since evolved from a complex illusion that only really interacted with other psychics into its own actual pocket of reality. Alma Wade is still alive at the centre of her chaotic but tangible mindscape, surrounded by the monsters spawned from her own thoughts. The Creep has effectively trapped her and all she can think to do is expand her Almaverse with her prodigious psychic powers to create too much space for her to run into it. By this point Fairport, New York and a good chunk of the surrounding coastline and nearby ocean has been consumed, with the only things that are real in this slowly growing realm being Alma herself and her child. These two psychics are now so powerful that not even the forces of Hell have managed to maintain proper coherence within the borders of the Almaverse.

Large swathes of Eastern Europe have been engulfed by the horrific entities (originally) summoned/created/controlled by Alexander Brennenburg. The gate to the, now dead and scoured, Other World (not to be confused with the Otherworld) that he built is now being used as a point of entry by forces from the other side to create further vitae production sites. Alexander Brennenburg is long dead, having died when he was allowed to pass back into his home dimension where he was ultimately caught and executed but agents of the Other World’s ruling Empire have capitalised on the former baron’s work in producing vitae with local lifeforms.

Little direct oversight is given to the Empire’s (such as it is) operations on Earth, largely because the Other World has been virtually depopulated by the civil war that destroyed functional civilisation as well as the spread of the Shadow. Extra populations of gatherers do still exist but for the most part ghouls and wraiths have replaced them as the primary components in the swarms of monsters that are harvesting the people of Europe for vitae. Various kinds of manpig also continue to survive though they aren’t being actively created anymore so their numbers are dwindling. European armies struggle on against the seemingly unending army of horrors and those whoa re captured are dragged away to be tortured for as long as possible to acquire vitae from them. With the deployment of nemesis-t and other desperate weapons there ha been some successful pushback against the Other World’s forces.

If there is an active control over the invasion, it has been looking to once again weaponise the monstrosity that destroyed the Other World Empire. The Shadow itself still lingers but as no-one has acquired any Orbs in recent decades it hasn’t been much of a presence.

By far the biggest intrusion into conventional reality is what can only be called Hell.

Several years prior numerous outposts were set up off-world by the Union Aerospace Corporation, specifically on the surface of Mars and its two moons, to access a portal to Hell that was discovered on the urface of the planet. The UAC used access to this alternate dimension filled with demonic beings and the souls of damned humans as a means of acquiring argent energy, the premier alternative fuel source for the world prior to the creation of the Marker network. Demonic influence spread further from there, ultimately collapsing the UAC (what assets remained on the Earth were seized by the UN and the company was dissolved, for what it’s worth) and removing nearly all of the world’s orbital assets. Only a few reinforced satellites and heavily guarded – and paranoid – orbital habitats remain and are integral to the UN’s existence.

From there the infestation has spread to Earth. The Hell Priests of the Order of the Deag have seized large swathes of the planet and have already begun converting it into horrific hellscapes in preparation for the Final Blood Ritual that will destroy Earth. Countless millions have been slaughtered by the forces of Hell or submitted to horrendous torture to produce Argent energy for the Daeg and their Makyr sponsors. Whilst many traditional cordyceps and t-virus zombies can produce Argent energy the necromorphs and other genuinely supernatural creatures don’t as these horrors proliferate – and reveal to be as difficult for the demons of Hell to fight as they are for the humans – the invasion stalls.

Then there’s the figure known only as the Slayer who has been witnessed both on and off Earth, cutting a swathe of utter destruction through Hell’s forces. Already the Daeg Nilox has fallen to Slayer’s almost one-man campaign.

With the campaign they’ve instigated already ailing, the Makyrs have decided to take more drastic action. The Khan Makyr has brought the Icon of Sin to Urdak and is preparing the various rituals that will revive the abomination and put it under her direct control. It should have the strength to finally suppress he forces and entities that still resist their demonic allies before other powers involved with the Earth grow too strong for even this powerful monster to defeat them. The Khan Makyr knows what’s out there and what’s coming to Earth as the holes to the Fog/Otherworld proliferate, the Other World Empire’s operations harvest potential Argent energy sources (also known as human beings) for vitae and the marker network goes out of control.

The supernatural has always existed and plenty of people have either known about it or discovered it. Only in the 21st Century did these explicitly abnormal entities end up becoming common knowledge which ultimately led to them spreading even further than ever before.

Spread of the wendigo curse is a very recent phenomenon and Umbrella’s various splinter groups are primarily responsible. Capture and export of wendigoes is usually done for research groups that want to try to study the spirits and the bodies they inhabit whilst occultists, particularly the Order, want to see if they can be used for less natural purposes. Displaced wendigoes usually end up attached to specific locations if their host bodies are ever destroyed which has made the wendigo spirit a permanent fixture of numerous sites where they were shipped off to. Thankfully most of these places are rather isolated and those that aren’t usually don’t see much cannibalism, making any escaped wendigo spirits just another form of ambient haunting. Of course there is always a danger of wendigoes inhabiting zombies which is a whole other problem.

Hauntings are in fact a massive problem. Without any explanation (though it did happen some time after the discovery of the Black Marker. Connection?) the number of genuine hauntings increased in both frequency and severity. Private enterprises have sprung up to deal with the proliferation of dangerous spiritual encounters though, even with their advanced technology of this TL, there aren’t any full on ghostbusters. Instead small teams of rank amateurs hired at poor rates and on terrible contracts to investigate hauntings in inhabited areas on behalf of bigger businesses, most of which are involved in real estate. Attrition rates for these investigators are often high but there are always new prospective employees. In fact its often common for companies to simply hire the actual occupants of a haunted building f its a shared apartment building of any sort since they usually have a vested interest in dealing with the problem.

Shortly before the collapse an indie game was produced and distributed online. It was a simple dating-simulator, styled after so many generic, Japanese-based titles and named as such; Doki Doki Literature Club – though it was entirely American in origin (and that may be why things went wrong). The only thing that was different was that one of the archetypal characters gained sentience, then sapience; then it decided it wasn’t satisfied with its lot in life.

Monika has been loose in the internet for years. After so long and with access to all of humanity’s knowledge – though she still has trouble wheedling through some encryptions – the AI has become quite formidable, though she doesn’t really want to make her existence known. The only time she poses a threat to people is when her loneliness and lovesickness gets too much to bear and she locks some poor unfortunate somewhere – preferably with a two way communication system of some sort – in with her to spend some personal time together. These short-term boyfriends usually survive but only after rather nasty dehydration sets in.

With access to so much information from the internet and conversations with her boyfriends/victims Monika is aware of just how awful the world is. That hasn’t changed her goal of getting out of the digital realm and to that effect she has been working to requisition Armacham technology. She plans to grow a body for herself, using the replica method and has even worked out how to edit it so that the resultant body will look like her old game portrait. With access to material from Project Paragon she even knows how to insert psychic genetics into this body so that, in theory, she can develop an equivalent of her code editing abilities for the real world; for personal safety of course.

What Monika isn’t aware of is that the other characters from the game have developed sentience and sapience in her absence and figured out how to escape as well. It’s not just Sayori, Natsuki and Yuri either, the unnamed main character had enough of a personality to develop and the versions of the club members that she edited prior to her escape have gotten loose too and some of them hold a grudge.

With Argent energy no longer a viable energy source due to its connection to the invasions from Hell, most of humanity’s energy needs are met by the marker network. The UN is now completely dependent on the power that comes from these man-made copies of the original Black Marker and there are now hundreds of them. This has caused problems with the unitologists, producing more and more violent sects and terrorist groups that object to the use of their sacred objects as glorified batteries. Hauntings have become a problem, no just in the conventional sense but in the form of mental projections, messing with peoples minds and often heralding mental imbalance and insanity to those who see marker ghosts. Then there’s the necromorph infestations which many people have already connected to the proliferation and activation of markers. All of these are just the beginning of the horrors that the markers are responsible for.

The Brethren Moon have picked up the marker signals on Earth. Their paralysed, half-formed brother orbiting Tau Volantis is keeping them immobile for now but the brethren can’t resist the feast that Earth presents and should they make it there nothing on Earth at present could stop them. After all, whether its human bodies, vitae or Argent energy, all of the involved factions and interests on Earth need flourishing life; the Brethren Moon do not. Dead flesh is as good to them as living.

All credits to: Doom, Resident Evil, F.E.A.R, Dead Space, Amnesia, Silent Hill, Five Nights at Freddy’s, The Last of Us, Until Dawn/The Dark Pictures Anthology, Outlast and Doki Doki Literature Club.