World & lore
It broke over three generations, in droughts that didn't end, coastlines that crept inland a little further every year, and harvests that got thinner until they stopped coming back. Nobody agreed on the year it became undeniable, because there wasn't one.
The premise
Governments didn't fall in a single collapse. They thinned out, service by service, region by region, until the word “government” stopped describing anything real outside a few defended cities. What's left of humanity lives in scattered, fortified settlements — holds — separated by land that can no longer support a crop, a well, or a walk longer than a day.
Last Waters is one hold-building conflict among many, at a point where the Waste has stopped spreading and people have started, cautiously, to build again. It's a story about what people do afterward.
The Long Fade
Nobody in the world uses these names. They're how the history holds together behind the map.
The slow part. Rising seas, failed monsoons, migration crises, resource conflicts over water rather than oil. Institutions strained but mostly held. Most people alive today are three or four generations removed from anyone who remembers this as normal.
Services stopped being universal. Grids fragmented into local ones, then failed outright in many places. Millions moved toward whatever land still produced food. This is the era that produced the first fortified holds — emergency shelters that became permanent once it was clear “temporary” wasn't coming back.
The land stopped getting worse — not everywhere, but in enough places that a survivable map became fixed rather than shrinking. This is when Last Waters is set, and when the six factions coalesced out of what had been desperate settlements doing whatever worked.
Geography
Any settlement producing enough water, food and material to sustain itself and defend its walls. They range from a single fortified compound to something approaching a small city, but all share the same existential fact: they are islands. What's between them will kill you if you stay too long.
Land too arid, too flooded, too depleted or too poisoned by old industrial runoff to support settlement. Not empty of people — scavengers, raiders and the desperate cross it constantly — but empty of infrastructure. No reliable water, no law, no help if something goes wrong.
Old highways, cleared rail corridors, river channels still navigable, memorised desert tracks. A route being short doesn't mean it's easy — it means it's established. Someone has already done the work of making that crossing survivable, repeatedly, which is exactly why armies and caravans use it.
Your resources sit in one pool because of the Long Roads: professional caravaners who spent a generation building the trust, routes and relay stations to move goods between a faction's holds continuously. The pool isn't one warehouse — it's what the network can make available, faction-wide, on short notice.
Every match, one telling
There is no persistent world and no lore that accretes between games. The Collapse, the Waste and the six factions are the shared backdrop; the hold names, the conflict and the ending are different every time. Each match is one telling of a story that's been told many times across this world, in many holds, with different endings.
