Lore

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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The topic needs: some updating, as a lot of this information is outdated.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.

Amidst the chaos and misinformation survivors rarely had a chance to even peek the glimpse of true background of the Cataclysm, and are generally clueless about what has realy happend. Publicly known events that led to it can be learned mainly from two sources:

Beside that, to get any kind of insight, you have to piece together information from what you see in the world, and what you manage to uncover from the ruins of civilization. Facilities involved in confidential activities and shady entrepreneurship may be a good place to seek such information.

Setting (synopsis)

There was an arms race to develop transhumans. In the process, the US government discovered alternate dimensions and obtained a sample called “XE-037”, a mysterious black goo that was able to reanimate the dead and cause miraculous targeted phenotype mutations. XE-037 turned out to be intelligent - vastly so - and escaped, contaminating the groundwater and causing an enormous zombie outbreak. As this spiraled out of control, Earth became the target of a multidimensional portal attack through which the Blob, the entity of which XE-037 is just a small part, took over our world. Simultaneously, forces from other dimensions entered opportunistically as our dimensional fabric was destabilized. This was the Cataclysm.

Things are a bit more stable now, but nobody is left alive to appreciate that.

Organisations

See Category:Organizations

Timeline

Learn more about the timeline of events that led to the present state of the world.

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 oppose 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 'Effects of blob infection' in the design doc 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:

Mycus

A vast collective fungal intelligence, the Mycus was a species wholly unknown to XEDRA scientists before the Cataclysm. 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.

General description

Mycus is a dispersed intelligence whose primary interest is growing and encompassing all things. It is strongly opposed to the Blob, but shares a lot of similarities with it. Despite it's obvious alien nature, and apparent sentience, it resembles Earth's fungal forms to an extent, at least for most prominent physical characteristics. It doesn't live in an environment, but creates it's own by aggressively spreading and colonizing wherever it can. It has mobile agents of its own species, and it can infect and take over other living organisms - either willingly or not - and convert them into hosts that become the new vector of the spread.

What does it want?

The Mycus’ goals are actually rather similar to the Blob. It wants our world and our people to become part of it. Its mind, however, seems to be more suited to understanding the individual, at least somewhat. If it can’t make you part of it the easy way - by filling your body with spores and using you as soil - it will try to make you part of it another way. Have you tried this fruit? It’s delicious, and provides all the nutrients you need to live. Try another, go ahead. We can make all you need. Don’t you want to come with us now? Didn’t the fruit work? Hm. Perhaps we’ll need to try something else. I know we can find a way to be together.

The Mycus loves you, and it just wants to be together forever. If the Blob is a mugger in an alley that hits you over the head and takes your stuff, the Mycus is a creepy guy with a candy van that tries to tempt you over to it.

Mycus vs Humanity

It’s dangerous and tempting to think the Mycus can be reasoned with. As interactions with NPCs become increasingly complicated it is likely the Mycus can play a big role there. It’s the sort of intelligence that would send a sleeper agent into your base and try to put spores into the water. It’s the sort of entity that is really tempting to build cults around. After all, if you join us, we will provide for you.

Notes: Philosophically speaking… is joining the Mycus all that bad? I guess it depends how much you value individuality. One could see the Blob and the Mycus representing opposite ends of a transhuman spectrum. The Blob is cold and uncaring, but offers freedom. You can use it to become anything you can imagine. The Mycus will help you, but you must give yourself up to it completely.

Also you must like mushrooms a lot.

Mycus vs other factions

Being an aggressive colonizer, Mycus is a threat to most of the factions. It understands the danger of retaliation from sentient beings, thus it's effort to offer a reward for joining it peacefully. Those not sentient, or those that are not willing to take the offer, are infected with spores and colonized. This converts the living being into it's fungalized version. Unlike zombies that XE037 mutates to adopt to circumstances, fungalized husks are shadows of their former selves. They mindlessly wonder around spreading the spores. Only few offer more use to the Mycus due to their mobility or ability to spread the spores. Sentient participants however retain their intelligence, but are now one mind with the collective, and as such share the same goals as the Mycus, and the semblance of the free will is an illusion.

  • XE037 is still quite susceptible to Mycus fungalization effects, but due to its mutagenic properties this is bound to change.
  • Tryffids have met Mycus before in the Nether and have specialized units to combat the threat.
  • Mi-go's are immune to fungalization as they have fungaloid bodies themselves, and are capable of fighting the Mycus with their technology.

Various forms that Mycus takes

Become One of Us

Triffids

Triffids were another species wholly unknown to XEDRA when the Cataclysm hit. Triffids came to Earth as a result of unstable portal activity during the Cataclysm. They cannot return, not that they would, as nothing stops them from making Earth their new home.

General description

The Triffids are in fact a collection of several species of the plant kingdom, conjoined in a society under the command of triffid hearts, as the highest rank in their hierarchical structure. As befits beings of a plant physiology, they rely only on sun, water and ground nutrients to live, and their nature defines their goals and philosophy. They are however far more developed then any plant of Earth origin, and have the ability to rapidly terraform their environment, by inducing rapid growth of plants. This leads to the conclusion that they are capable of natural bioengeneering, and that some of their subspecies are in fact bio-tools that were made to accomplish certain tasks to the benefit of Triffid society. They do not possess the ability to infect like the other main factions. While there presence may not be as obvious as the blob or the Mycus, they are no less of a threat. Their 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.

What do they want?

The Triffids, just like the Mycus, have found Earth to be quite pleasant. Unlike the Mycus however, Triffids see Earth as an unkempt garden to be claimed, and themselves as it's gardeners. As such, the existence of Earth's flora is not by any means against Triffids will, contrarily, Triffids want to cultivate it, spread it, and assure its safety, as their new home and safe heaven. This however means two things. One, that every animal (perhaps with the exclusion of some species beneficial to plant life), especially herbivores and omnivores, are seen as an enemy of the plant kingdom, which Triffids seek to represent. Second is that Triffids shun any form of technology that is not biological in nature, and will gladly destroy any signs of it in the process of terraforming towards planetary garden. Triffids cultivate their gardens and grooves not as wild nature would, but with a sense of aesthetics and planned effort. However terraforming and conquest comes first and organization comes second, so only Triffid groves, where triffid hearts live, have the semblance of the higher planning.

Triffids vs Humanity

Triffids are perhaps less alien to humans then XE037 and Mycus, but the barier of kingdoms in Triffid philosophy is a something to be reckoned with. Triffids shun humans, seeing them as wild monkeys of lesser intelligence, and it doesn't serve the cause well, that humans are omnivores, living in a technological society that repels nature, to make place for itself. In other words, if there even is a way of communication between the species, Triffids would probably declare us as their sworn enemies, and it would be quite futile to convince them otherwise, not coming from the position of strength. For now we are no more then a fertilizer to be placed under the roots of their newly planted saplings.

Triffids vs other factions

  • The Blob is as alien to Triffids as it is to us, but Triffids do not fall under the influence of XE037 contamination, so when shove comes to push it's a brutal battle between those factions.
  • The Mycus is not Triffid's friend like one might think. Triffids have individual sentience and in their terraforming efforts keeps the biodiversity, thus becoming one with the body and mind of The Mycus is perceived as abominable. Triffids, being susceptible to spore infection, have bioengineered creatures capable of fighting the threat. For now it's a stalemate, as there is still much space to spread to, but when the territories will eventually collide it will be a struggle for both sides.

Various forms that Triffid take

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.

Mi-go

Named after a similar looking monstrosity from a horror novel from the twenties of XX century, the Mi-go is an alien specie from the Nether, that are truly horrifying to look at. It was one of the few species captured and experimented upon by XEDRA before the Cataclysm, but the focus was soon shifted to the more promising mutagen research originating from XE037.

General description

Every mi-go looks like a thing from horror, but despite their appearance The Mi-go are a very inteligent race of alien beings, living in a technologically advanced culture. In fact, they are the first (and up to now the only) other alien race known to mankind, that has established technical civilization. Mi-go are capable of space and interdimensional travel, and may have visited Earth before. What is certain is that The Cataclysm has established conditions for their more prominent presence on Earth. Their unusual appearance and body structure may be the sign, that their homeworld is not as hospitable as our, and that might be also what they think of Earth from their perspective. Mi-go physiology is fungal in nature, but also very far from the Mycus, as each mi-go is a separate sentient organism, unable to infect anything by spores. Their reproduction cycle is unknown.

What do they want?

As established inhabitants of the Nethereum, Mi-go actively explore and research the Universe and beyond, seeking technological prowess and benefits for their superiority. This is no less true to their presence on Earth. Having once established the communication route from their homeland to ours, they seek the opportunities this brings. Mi-go are not interested in the power struggle between the big three factions that try to engulf the Earth, but rather to scavenge and research what's left of Earth's technology, resources, and life (survivors included). They are trying their best to use the window of opportunity, to learn and extract as much as possible, before the ruins of human civilization fall into the hands of the winning power. This requires active scouting and raiding parties, that are not uncommon occurrence. Mi-go don't follow any of the human morality, so luring their prey, enslaving other sentient species, vivid experiment on living creatures, and other horrors one might expect from aliens are not beyond them. Due to environmental differences Earth may not be as hospitable to Mi-go race, as it is to other invaders. Mi-go may be resilient enough to live here, but it may not be their preferable environment long term. This depreciates Earth's value in the eyes of Mi-go.

Mi-go vs Humanity

Mi-go are capable of parotting human speech, so it is believed they may be able to communicate with human race. That would however require prolonged contact in a controlled environment, rather then sporadic encounters among the ruins of civilization. What mi-go perceive as their own language or form of communication is yet unknown. To the Mi-go we are perceived as objects of experiments, which is quite the ironic turn of event, as mi-go were often experimented upon after being brought from Nethereum before the Cataclysm. It's unlikely to convince mi-go otherwise, as they are in a hurry, and would rather "deal" with the living "samples" in their own environment, rather then take the risks on the battleground that is Earth. What more, Mi-go wouldn't even consider communication on the same level, due to their image of their superiority, so all one could achieve is perhaps a life as a slave on some hostile alien world.

Mi-go vs other factions

Mi-go are not susceptible to the contamination of XE037, and as beings of a fungal nature are also immune to Mycus spores. Due to their insight of the cosmic scale of the struggle, this traits are not perceived by the Mi-go as a significant advantage, and they avoid conflict with other main factions on scales larger then individual combat for survival. Mi-go are simply too few to win, and they would gain nothing even if they would. They are willing to make sacrifices in their efforts on Earth, but they are not planning an all-out war for domination. It is uncertain if the Mi-go have all the knowledge of other factions or are they also performing scientific research on them. It is also likely that they don't want the unnecessary attention of the higher powers they are not affiliated with.

Various forms that Mi-go take

Sources

Outdated sources

These sources are outdated, they no longer are canon, and are just kept here for historical purposes at the moment. So people can see how much the world of C:DDA has changed over time. Check the previous link for the current design doc.

See Also

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