Lore

WARNING: This page may contain spoilers and ruin the joy of adventure.

This page is not complete enough; please help if you can. The topic needs: A lot of this information is outdated. Just a warning, this lore might not be canon.

Lore is often used to refer to the backstory of games and other settings. It is the collective history and events that create the setting for the world you play in.

History

Cataclysm: DDA takes place in the New England region of the USA sometime during the present day, in an alternate reality. The game begins by default five days after an event called the Cataclysm, changing the mundane routine of a civilized world to that of individual survival in a world without civilization. As it surged forth in a mist of government conspiracies and cover-ups, the few who saw the coming dangers prepared themselves for the end of the world.

See also:

• Timeline
• Newspaper page
• Flyer

Setting

The future government of America is sensationalist, reckless, and in many ways quite dystopian. However, the average person's life is pretty good, aside from the constant threat (or at least claims of a threat) of military attacks by some foreign power (usually China or Russia) that may or may not actually be plotting major military actions. The government has encouraged disaster preparedness among the population, and firearm restrictions are distinctly different than they are now. While not everyone can purchase and own a firearm, and firearm ownership is very closely tracked, it is also actively encouraged by the government to fight off any potential invaders, and higher caliber firearms and explosives are actually available on the civilian market.

The evac shelters were built as part of a government program to help improve both the morale of the populace at large (by convincing them the government was looking out for them) while also increasing the general sense of fear and danger (by convincing the populace such shelters were needed). They approved effective at these goals. The shelters were not, however, ever actually stocked - the funding fell out when the military realized both goals had been effectively accomplished, and no more money needed to be wasted on them. After all, in the event that the shelters would ever actually be needed, it is unlikely they would end up very useful - any major military attack was unlikely to leave many survivors. Standing as empty unstocked, relatively insecure buildings on the outskirts of the city reminding people of what could happen was the only service they were ever actually expected to provide.

Fungals actually play a vital role in the triffid's ecosystem, and are carried in small amounts on most triffids. It is sometimes used by triffids to prepare an area with rich fungal remains before the triffids move in. However, when it gets out of hand, the triffid's respond with variants specifically tailored to controlling and eliminating the fungus. The fungus also has an inhibitory effect on the ooze, fighting it for dominance - this is how it can take control of infected organisms, creating giant fungal bugs and fungal zombies. The fungus is mostly unthinking, but quite effective at converting both enemies and the landscape into allies.

The Netherum - whether zombies, flaming eyes, kreks or Mi-go - can best be seen as individual specialized cells in a larger organism, like a human being, sponge or (perhaps the best analogy) a slime mold. The ooze that infects zombies is akin to a kind of netherum stem cell, and can eventually take many forms. Like with stem cells turning into specialized cells, though, more advanced netherum creatures like the Mi-go no longer have the versatility of the basic slime and are locked into their form.

Every basic component of Netherum contains the information for every possible Netherum creature, but, just like with DNA, the information expressed depends on a variety of environmental stimulus - including the proximity of a sufficient amount of nearby Netherum creatures of different types.

This is not the first time the triffid's and the Netherum have encountered each other.

The Netherum can't survive exposure to our hostile environment. Larger nether creatures die quite quickly in our world if they stray far from the energies of a portal or other subprime access point. However, the more distributed version of the netherum has found it's niche living within the bodies of large native organisms, improving their odds of success in multiple passive ways, and taking full control if the organisms life ceases to restart the organism's basic functions under the Netherum's control. With a protective fleshy or carapacian shield between it and the environment, the Netherum is able to persist in our world far from the portals.

There is more than one subprime plane. The Netherum comes from a more distant plane than the triffids and fungals, and is part of why the triffids and fungals can survive in our reality more reliably than the Netherum.

The triffids, on the whole, are by far the most intelligent of the three major monstrous factions. They have more than one system of communication, and several complex languages. They also have a strict hierarchy composed of dozens if not hundreds of disparate and unrelated organisms that exist under the careful control of the triffid hearts. Triffid colonies are carefully managed gardens, with every creature in it's place contributing to the whole under the watchful eye of the gardener. If a triffid heart is killed, triffids will "go feral" and revert to their base instincts.

Factions

There are countless factions patrolling the wastes of the old world, from the relatively benign to the absolutely hostile and from Human to things that were never meant to exist in this world.

Human

Many of the humans that survived the Cataclysm went solo, caring only for them selves, however, many others joined (or were already part of) the major factions that have arisen in this new world. Several of them are:

The Wasteland Scavengers

"Autonomous bands or individuals who make their living raiding the ruins of the old-world for gear and provisions."

The Old Guard

“The remains of the federal government. The extent of their strength is unknown but squads of patrolling soldiers have been seen under their banner.”

Ex-military faction, that still respects it's ties to the chain of command and government of the United States, formed from ex-members of US Coast Guard and US Marines Corps who take refuge in the ocean when Cataclysm struct. It is believed that they are still operating off-shore for safety reasons, while organizing land missions, and establishing links to the remnants of human civilization.

Hell's Raiders

“The largest gang of hooligans and bandits that preys upon other survivors. Even if you have no gear, there is always a need for slaves and fresh meat.”

The Hell’s Raiders are a collection of smaller gangs, some of which existed before the Cataclysm. Much of the membership was already willing to commit armed robbery or more violent crimes, and their attitudes haven’t changed now that law enforcement is defunct and zombies roam the land.

The Free Merchants

“A conglomeration of entrepreneurs and businessmen that stand together to hammer-out an existence through trade and industry.”

The Free Merchants are the remnants of “6 busloads of office workers and soccer moms” after the courageous people died fighting zombies. The survivors want to fortify their evacuee center of a base and survive as a trading hub.

They have a lifeboat mentality at this point, and their lifeboat is full. They are not charitable or nice and they pretty much require that people be able to pull their own weight or be abandoned.

Tacoma Commune

“An outpost started by the Free Merchants to provide a source of food and raw materials.”

Description: The Free Merchants send their idle hands to work at the Tacoma Commune. Hard work as a subsistence farmer at the Commune is unpleasant, but it’s better than starving to death at the Evac Center, and Commune workers get first dibs on any food produced.

Over time, the interests of the Commune and Merchants are going to diverge, and the Commune workers are going to be less and less interested in paying taxes to the Free Merchant.

Hub 01

“The surviving staff of Hub 01, a pre-cataclysm research lab. They rarely leave their lab, if at all, and rely on their robots and advanced technology to survive.”

Marloss Evangelists

"Diverse bands, congregations and organizations with the common goal of preaching human survival through symbiosis with fungaloids."

Micro-factions

Mainly small group of survivors that try to make their own place to live in the Cataclysm. They all have their unique story and goals.

XE037

XE037, or "the blob" as it is also known, is a diffuse, sentient extra-dimensional organism fist discovered by XEDRA researchers.

General Description

The Blob is a dispersed intelligence vastly greater than anything conceivable to a human mind. To it, we are as significant as individual cells of a body. Human researchers obtained samples of the Blob. While XEDRA experimented on it, it passively observed them and then decided Earth was a worthwhile location to add to its dispersed body. So, with less effort than a human takes to scratch its ear, the Blob rolled into our world and made us part of it.

What does it want?

The Blob is vast. It cannot be communicated with nor reasoned with. The most we could possible manage would be to annoy it enough that it would reach out and slap us, and that would be that. Far preferable would be for us to convince it to leave us alone - which really isn’t that hard, since it doesn’t really care about the human survivors whatsoever. It is in many ways analogous to a Lovecraftian elder god, but one that has already woken up, devastated the world, and moved on to other things.

XE037 vs Humanity

There really aren’t many options. You can’t convince Azathoth to go away and leave us alone, it’s not a thing. Zombies cannot be cured; their brains are mush, they are dead. Perhaps sufficient purifier could clear your own XE-037 infestation for a while, but unless you plan to drink treated water the rest of your life, it’s going to come back, and what have you really accomplished? Survivors’ best hope is to get the Blob to leave them alone, which is mostly what it wants to do anyway.

XE037 vs other factions

Being the leading player on the scene, XE037 is in opposition to basically every other faction. XE037 contaminates living and dead organisms, reviving and mutating dead hosts to combat those factions that directly opposes the process, especially those immune to contamination. However it is believed that zombification is not a goal in itself. The reason for that belief is the existence of blobs and shoggoths, which seem to be the pure form of The Blob. Thus, it is also believed that without external threats, zombie mutations would follow a vector towards blobification of contaminated biomass. In other words zombies would transform to blobs, that would then absorb other organic matter. This may still happen in the future. For now the leading mutation vectors in zombified population is aggression, defense and adaptation to the existing conditions, and other mutations are less exposed. This is not even a conscious endeavour by The Blob, but rather a automatic reaction similar to immunology of multi-cellular organisms.

XE037 effects on Earth population

The groundwater is infected with XE-037. Every creature on Earth is contaminated. In larger mammals, this contamination allows XE-037 to reanimate after death, becoming zombies. In insects, it causes mutation to larger forms, without reanimation after death of the enlarged form.

Design document states special effects of blob infection:

• mutation
• increased healing
• cognitive effects

Refer to [1] to learn more.

The XE-037 contaminating all living things is not the Blob, any more than a transistor is a computer processor. This basic Blob biomatter can be coerced into causing mutations in infected targets (i.e. anyone), using mutagen. In their course of investigations, XEDRA scientists found out that the blob can alter the phenotype of individuals who it has parasitized. They used this knowledge to develop a wide range of Mutagens, many of which are no longer in their control.

Note #356-92-XE

Earlier conjecture that revivification occurred only in humans was premature. Thanks to the discover of the substances ability to revivify large canines, the properties of XE-037 in mammalian organisms is now far more clear.

From what we can tell so far, exposure introduces a persistent, low level infection in mammal subjects, regardless of size or nature. The substance seems to multiply within the body until it reaches a certain point, and then enters a form of stasis and ceases to grow. It is, as yet, unknown why this halting process occurs in mammals, but not in insects - further research is needed. The body does not seem to attempt to combat the invader, and in fact no defenses have been noted - the body simply ignores the presence of the substance.

The spread seems to halt at roughly 1% of body mass, though exact numbers are difficult to determine thanks to the risk of mid-autopsy revivification.

The reason why earlier reports confined revivification to humans was that the process requires a critical amount of XE-037 within the body, not as a percent but as pure weight. Around half a pound seems to be enough to insure a post-mortem takeover. Animals small enough that 1% of body mass falls below this threshold thus fail to revivify, and the infection shrinks and then dies several hours after it's host organism has passed.

In larger animals, expiration seems to serve only to raise the cap on XE-037 within the body - expiration quickly leads to the XE-037 breaking down many of the now inactive bits of it's host until it makes up almost 4% of bodymass by weight. At some point towards the end of this process, the host organism revives in the manner we are all, by now, familiar with, seemingly under the full control of the substance.

Note #376-92-XE

Infected subjects that sustain extreme trauma before death seem to exhibit an accelerated growth level in internal XE-037, which quickly surpasses the expected 4% to reach values as high as 7 or 8%. Revivification of subjects in such cases is more gradual in such subjects - while the initial life signs return almost as quickly, the subject remains immobile and unresponsive for a period of minutes or even hours after termination. After this time has passed, however, revivification does not seem to be notably different than in a normal subject.

Additionally, damage beyond a certain threshold, such as the removal of several internal organs, quartering the corpse, or exposure to high explosive or heat, seems to overwhelm the XE-037 infection, causing the same dwindling and death behaviour seen in smaller organisms.

Note #377-92-XE

Obsevations that high-trauma revivification subjects are not noticeably different from low-trauma subjects have proven to be premature. The 93-XE series of studies has been designated for consolidating existing data and performing additional research after the labs have been repaired and personnel replaced.

Various forms that XE037 takes:

• Zombies
• Insectoids
• Blobs

Mycus

A vast collective fungal intelligence, the Mycus was a species wholly unknown to XEDRA scientists before the Cataclysm. Unlike the blob, the Mycus found Earth to be a relatively habitable planet and has rapidly spread out across the surface, sending its spores high into the atmosphere, determined to colonize and "terraform" the planet before it falls into the hands of any of its rivals.

• Fungi
• Marloss berry

Triffids

Triffids were another species wholly unknown to XEDRA when the Cataclysm hit. A faction of plant-like creatures, the Triffids are in fact a collection of several species all enthralled by the creatures known as triffid hearts. The Triffids have found Earth to be quite pleasant, just like the Mycus, which they have encountered before. Indeed, even the Mycus have been enslaved by Triffid hearts in the past, though the current "wild" group are considered nothing more than a weed to be exterminated.

While there presence may not be as obvious as the blob or the Mycus, they are no less of a threat. There groves are rapidly spreading throughout the forest, co-opting and enslaving all they encounter. For those who would seek refuge in the wilderness, beware, for the trees are watching you.

• Plants

Nethereum

Not all species coming from the Nether are as successful or widespread. There are many "lesser" Nether creatures who are not as expansionistic or have found Earth to be a hostile environment, though make no mistake, they are anything but harmless.

Coming in all shapes and sizes (many of which don't exist in this dimension) they are powerful, varied and unpredictable. Many having powers and abilities unlike anything humanity has ever witnessed or in some cases, even comprehend.

• Unearthed horrors
• Netherworld inhabitants

Sources

• Official Canon thread on the forum
• C:DDA Design Outline (wiki copy)
• C:DDA Design Outline (google docs document)
• C:DDA Design Outline Forum thread