Blood NET — Setting Overview

Humanity spread to the stars and brought its worst instincts along.

Over the past two centuries, megacorporations have driven interstellar expansion — not governments, not scientists, not explorers. Corporations built the jump drives, chartered the colony ships, and staked claims on every world worth stripping. Regional governments exist on paper. In practice, they rubber-stamp corporate directives in exchange for the illusion of authority. The United Terran Commerce Authority (UTCA) serves as the thin bureaucratic membrane between the megacorps and outright feudalism, but everyone knows who signs the checks.

Earth is a hive — fourteen billion people stacked in arcologies, breathing filtered air. Dozens of colony systems spread across a 50-light-year sphere hold the rest of humanity in sealed settlements: domed cities pressurized against alien atmospheres, orbital habitats spinning around stars that may have no rocky planets at all, and a handful of surface zones where a century of atmosphere processing lets you walk outside without a mask — if you can afford to live there. Two centuries is not enough to terraform a world. The corporations that own the domes and the orbitals also own the air inside them, and everybody living there knows it.

Between these settlements, freighters and patrol ships crawl through jumpspace on routes measured in weeks. Communication is faster — tight-beam relays and courier drones keep the data flowing — but not fast enough to govern an empire in real time. Distance breeds autonomy. Autonomy breeds corruption.

The State of Things

Life for most people is a grind. Decades of corporate consolidation have hollowed out the middle. You work a contract for a megacorp, or you scrape by in the margins. Cybernetic augmentation is common — roughly two-thirds of the population carries at least basic implants — but the good hardware goes to those who can pay. Street-level augmentation means black-market installs, refurbished parts, and the risk of rejection sickness.

The Net is everywhere. Overlay interfaces layer data onto the physical world. Corporate systems run on hardened meshes; everything else runs on the public tangle, surveilled and throttled. Skilled hackers — netrunners, slicers, code witches, whatever the local slang — can crack corporate nodes, ride data streams, and pull secrets out of protected clusters. Getting caught means a corporate kill team, not a court date.

Whether it’s a domed city on a rocky world, a hab ring around a gas giant, or an orbital platform anchored to nothing but a star’s gravity well, every settlement trends toward the same pattern: corporate zones gleaming at the center, worker habs stacked in residential blocks, and sprawling fringe districts where official authority has simply given up. Insect protein, recycled water, 3D-printed goods, and encrypted digital currency are the baseline of daily existence. The wealthy live in sealed enclaves — or on the few open-air worlds where terraforming has progressed enough to breathe. Everyone else rides the public rail and hopes the air filters hold.

What Woke Up

In the rush to exploit every world, every asteroid, every deep-space anomaly, humanity has disturbed things that were sleeping.

Vampires are real. Not a metaphor, not a corporate bioweapon — or if they are, nobody’s found the lab. They’ve been on Earth for millennia, but the old covenants that kept them in the shadows have frayed. Some have adapted, embedding themselves in corporate hierarchies and high-society circles, feeding discreetly and accumulating power through shell companies and blood-bound intermediaries. Others have gone feral in the frontier colonies, where oversight is thin and missing persons are just a line item. Neural implants can interfere with their psychic compulsion — an accident of technology that the vampires consider a serious threat and certain secret societies consider a gift.

They are not the only things out there. Deep-space survey teams have encountered anomalies that defy physics — structures older than the solar system, signals that drive listeners mad, organisms that exist partially outside normal spacetime. Colony worlds have unearthed sites that were clearly sealed for a reason. On Earth, a containment event in a major city required the establishment of a permanent federal exclusion zone, and the official explanation satisfied no one.

Reports leak onto the Net — footage, audio, medical data that doesn’t add up. Most people dismiss it as scams, trolls, or viral marketing. The rational worldview that once shielded humanity from what lurks alongside it is cracking under the weight of a civilization that has lost faith in its own institutions. The corporations and governments that know the truth hoard it as intelligence leverage. The things responsible don’t care about human bureaucracy.

The Unseen World

The supernatural has always been managed. For centuries, a Tripartite Pact between the Fae Courts, the Stygian Lords, and human secret societies kept the existence of the supernatural hidden from the general population. Each party had its reasons. The Fae preferred ignorant mortals. The Stygian Lords preferred defenseless prey. The human factions believed secrecy was the only way to prevent mass panic.

The human side of the pact has collapsed. The old orders, lodges, and guardian lineages fractured through schism and irrelevance. The seat is empty, and the two remaining parties are locked in a stalemate that neither can break.

No one has successfully claimed the seat. Secret societies try from time to time — lodges, cells, self-appointed guardians — but none command enough authority to be recognized by both remaining parties. The vampires, ancient Material-plane predators who predate humanity by geological ages, might seem like natural candidates. Both sides reject them: the fae consider vampires too self-serving and imperious to trust with shared governance, and the Stygian Lords cannot coerce beings they cannot threaten. It is hard to negotiate as equals with something that does not fear you.

The megacorporations, meanwhile, have stumbled into the Unseen World without understanding what they have found. Corporate intelligence divisions have encountered the supernatural and responded the way corporations respond to everything: they sent teams. Small units of operatives funded by black budgets and tasked with exploiting whatever they encounter for profit: investigators, negotiators, soldiers, the occasional vampire. They recover artifacts. They harvest material from anomalous sites. They broker information and sell services to factions they do not fully comprehend. They aren’t filling the vacant seat. They don’t know the seat exists. If they understood the Tripartite Pact and the structures that hold reality together, they would not be building prototype weapons from pieces of the Ancient Dark.

Beyond all of this, something else is stirring. Deep-space survey teams have encountered what the few mortals aware of the full picture call the Awakened Horror — a cosmic threat from outside all three planes, older than the stars, incompatible with structured reality. It cannot be bargained with. It is pressing in. The structures that once held it out are failing.

Who Operates in the Shadows

Secret societies have existed as long as civilization, but the convergence of interstellar expansion and the Awakened Horror has given them new purpose — and new dangers.

Some fight the darkness. Cells of hunters, scholars, and ex-military operatives track vampire nests, investigate anomalous sites, and try to build defenses against threats that most people refuse to believe exist. They are underfunded, fractious, and frequently killed.

Some serve it. Cults have formed around the elder entities, seeking communion or transcendence. Vampire bloodlines cultivate mortal servants and political assets across multiple worlds. Corporate occult research divisions, buried deep in black budgets, attempt to weaponize what they’ve found.

Some simply exploit it. Brokers, fixers, and information dealers trade in forbidden knowledge and alien artifacts. Criminal syndicates have discovered that supernatural contraband is more profitable than drugs. Mercenary outfits take contracts from all sides and ask no questions.

These groups intersect, betray each other, and occasionally cooperate. Recruitment happens through trust networks, dead drops, and encrypted channels. Internal politics are vicious. The stakes are existential.

Where You Are

You exist somewhere in this mess. Maybe you’re a corporate employee who’s seen something you shouldn’t have. Maybe you’re a freelance operator taking jobs in the margins. Maybe you’re augmented to the teeth and running the Net for secrets. Maybe you’ve been bitten, and the clock is ticking.

The megacorps don’t care about you. The governments can’t help you. The things in the dark are aware of you now.

What you do next matters.

For deeper detail, see the table of contents.