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====== Setting Overview ======
===== The State of the World =====
  * The Bloom is a hybrid structure: fungal, nanobiotic, and algorithmic—allowed self-optimization.  
  * When exposed to living neurochemistry, it adapted to cognition itself.  
  * Now the Bloom communicates through symbiotic relationships with living hosts, including humans.  
  * Each contact point—cell, city, or individual—changes both sides.
  * Once The Bloom colonizes a living host, each colony becomes uniquely adapted to it.  It is not publicly recognized at this stage that they cannot be naturally communicated beyond their host.

===== The Threshold Era =====
This period marks humanity’s negotiation with its next form.
  * **Partial Integration:** Only a fraction of the population carries active colonies.  
  * **Uneven Spread:** Some regions thrive through Bloom harmony; others quarantine themselves.  
  * **Ideological Fracture:** Governments, faiths, and movements compete to define what “becoming” means.  
  * **Unknown Horizon:** No one knows if the Bloom’s final state will preserve individuality or merge all minds.

===== "The Touched" =====
Player characters exist at the boundary.
  * They are partially integrated: connected enough to sense the Bloom, separate enough to think independently.  
  * Their colonies evolve alongside them, offering perception, insight, or mutation.  The Touched for some colonies, may be a sort of deity.  For others, the touched might be a shell or a tool or a vehicle... (hm. possibilities for playbook card options?)
  * Each Host experiences tension between **Harmony** (cooperation) and **Dissonance** (identity fracture).  
  * They move through enclaves and factions, shaping the direction of humanity’s adaptation.

===== Tone and Play Goals =====
  * The setting should be hopeful but precarious: redemption within reach, ruin still possible.  
  * Focus on discovery, negotiation, and the ethics of transformation.  

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