Mars

Colonisation and the great catastrophe

The game begins 200 years after the colonisation of Mars. The planet has not been terraformed as such although its air has been rendered breathable. While colons settled on the planet 70 years ago in different enclaves, Mars turned around its axis and changed its orbit. This tumult not only completely shut down communication with Earth, it also spread death and destruction, creating unprecedented chaos in the planet’s colonies.

Many inhabitants were forced to leave the cities in ruins and destroyed agricultural land, exposing themselves to solar radiation. Most of them died, but some survived and mutated, taking shelter as quickly as possible. Other colons managed to stay in more or less undamaged cities, taking shelter from the now deadly sunrays.

Very soon the survivors were confronted with a problem : water, which abounded in the past has suddenly become extremely rare. The companies in charge of this commodity became very powerful, controlling most enclaves and bargaining with the life of the people.

Isolated, at the mercy of solar radiation with no water, the colons quickly deteriorate from a technological standpoint, sinking into decadence. Factories and mines are virtually abandoned. The metal manufactured is now mostly from recovered material. The people living in Mars live in a technologically medieval standard while using highly advanced technological remains they hardly control.

Now

Today, two kinds of people live on Mars : those who never left the security of their city, the so-called True People who are free of mutations, and those who have been exposed to radiation, the Ashes from Mars, who are mostly slaves of the former.

Water circulates from one city to another as far as the cultivated lands via aqueducts which create the so-called shadow paths, covered roads which allow free movement from one place to another.

Various water guilds rule over the planet and fight for supremacy. The political power they exercise is authoritarian : any form of rebellion is punished by death without trial. Water has become a weapon like any other : by simply stopping it from getting to a village life can be destroyed. This is also the case of the sun, since exposing a district to its light is enough to get rid of all its occupants. There is virtually no opposition in place, just a few isolated individuals here and there or a few Ashes from Mars raising objections in breach of the law, living in the worst districts or city slums.