Commission: Ten Years After the Century War: 2064

It has been a century of warfare, and seven continuous decades of them left the Earth a veritable corpse, its resources exhausted, shot through with a few technological strands of civilization and resource extraction. It no longer matters to the billions dead who started the war, which side of the Black Walls. Mithra's faction died in fighting with the Sethites and with one another by 2020: disconsolate, Mithra sank into a deathlike stasis under the ruins of what were once Rome. Literal Hellfire has scourged the surface, the whole world, it seems, burned to radioactive slag and asteroidal ash from above and below. The survivors are for the most part reduced to the Stone Age, crawling with obscene plagues and torn apart in body and soul by mutations. Select techno-barbarian tribes scavenge the emptied landscape and the incomprehensible and dangerous substances and artifacts left around the many impact craters, to trade to the techno-feudalists who swarm around the real powers.

The area around the glaciers is taiga rather than tundra: the planet's become much wetter than the degree it's become cooler. Originally the plan was to reverse the desertification caused by the Black Walls cutting off ocean circulation: this meant luring mile-long meteorites to strike in select places. The lowered sea levels were a benefit, expanding farmland especially for Australia's Great Reclamation. Deep-sea fish are all that's left, but are nourished by upwelling from the continental margins, and the new lakes and rivers are full of rich. The world was to be resettled, reseeded, new cities planted on the bones of the old. Unsurprisingly the endeavor spun out of control, and the seas are at their lowest in a few million years. North America's full of mustangs, wolves, half-feral or half-domesticated coydogs. Eurasia is beset with rodents of unusual size, which are more aggressive than wolves (but both species are more of a danger in winter).

The planet-cracking wars have ended (well, they didn't deploy the Mantle Bombs and the treaties destroyed them, but the principle's still around). The shelter-cities in India and Siberia are particularly crowded. The planet's divided into little zones and networks of influence rather than ol' space-filling empires. Most live in walled, tented cities with a nice thin sheet that blocks all the iodine, strontium, cesium, plutonium, etc.

By the 1980s the angelic legions and the demonic hosts were gone, ground to dust by war and by intermixing with more-baseline breeds. The Caribbean was a battleground between North and South America until the 2020s, and the Confederation desperately attacked the American Empire as the fighting spread. This left Panamá a series of underground cities, the entrances guarded by bases against the pollution. After the 2030s full-baseline humans tend to stick to the cities or Oceania, with those outside much more mutated. The war ground into a stalemate of the Pacific Empire versus China, Nippon, Annam and the Mideastern vampires. The American Republic was gone, but Empire and Confederation both collapsed before the onslaught of California, Mexico, and Panamá.

By the 2040s the other powers were defeated and only some second-tier Ural, under-Caucasian, Abyssinian, Amazonian, Urartian, Panamanian, and Atreid resistance remained in their underground cities. In 2055 all Earth signed a treaty, recognizing the Solar Imperial Federation as Earth's sole superpower and universally acting as its satellites, trying to compete to recolonize the lands near them before the Empire does. Amazônia was descended from Imperial Brazilian nobility who'd led the revolution against the Southern Cross: it's a demon-ruled slave state. Their drugged forces fight Heteroskia's which are so indoctrinated they can only speak in approved language, both powers fighting from behind 50-meter walls.

The Empire concerns itself with two things—its direct territories (Oceania, Japan, the Russian Pacific) and the Inner System. It's under a puppet Hanoverian at New Etruria in the south. All Australia and New Zealand are under shield generators, a giant city of vactrains, megascrapers, and sprawling palaces and gardens for even middle managers. It's technically one big city, broken up only by factory farms or grasslands in what used to be desert. Blocked by the Black Walls, Derby, Carpentaria, and the Victoria Arbor Plain are great farmlands crisscrossed with fish-rich rivers. Oceania's new Black Walls are of a new type, able to shift with the sea level, programmable.

The real rulers of the System are the three Elders Seth, Dimitry, and Cyrus, who've stayed secret and elevated two quarter-bloods to Elderhood using the arcanest of rituals and the pure white heat of Creation itself. High Admiral Elder Cyrus Yaxley is Director of the Imperial Academy covering what was once Queensland. Savant-Adjutant Elder Seth Dimas runs the third-years. The new Elders are Range Captains Cecil Spencer of the Imperial Mage Force and Sasha Sibirov of Imperial Central Intelligence, giving them key fingers in the pie of all the planets and moons. Sorcerer-in-Chief Col. Dimitry Sibirov heads MageForce: he's been around demons long enough that ambition has started to come before sense: pure power's been coursing through him for so long that he's barely even an immortal Elder.

The first and largest space elevator is Nippon's Nozomi (のぞみ) above Singapore. The Imperial Federation's established domed cities on Copernicus Crater and Olympus Mons offworld, and the planet's wealthy live on the Moon while the middle classes are still in Australia and NZ. Most of the hive cities and even those without skyhooks have a stronger presence on the Moon than Earth, in fact. With Earth's ores and minerals entirely gone--wasted, in fact--the Moon's the main mining area. Earth mostly provides food and hi-tech, while the System provides both minerals and solar-powered industry. By 2100 the Selenitic Republic will have acceded on its own, as a counterweight to all the Earth-based clans and clades recolonizing Earth and taking the Inner System. Venus is more troublesome to visit than Mercury, both the inferior planets backwaters that take forever to get to. The System is guarded by Paladins whose flag quickly symbolized the whole Empire. The new dimension of war and defense has created titles like Planetary Surface Marshal, Supreme Commander, and Fleet Admiral. The further from Earth the stronger the Empire gets, the Moon providing drop marines hardened against the mad leaders of colonies of rival powers (themselves also led by madmen); Mars provides alpinists, bersaglieri, or chasseurs. With spirituality turned into ack-ack and Hellfire available to lieutenants, spirituality shifts. Man's purpose is to build, the Moon's colonel-general-geologists models for how to behave on a planet where flint is the main commodity of half the inhabitants.