Setting Overview

• 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.

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.

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.

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