The Brood War
Stakes Control of Luna's resources, the fate of its forced workers, and whether the Moonmind becomes a recognized intelligence or an extermination target.
World Atlas·Sphere·A half-made moon learns from every life spent defending it.
Main hub and political center · Pressurized urban basin
Hook
The only true city is crowded with contract offices, markets, launch towers, and monster trophies that sometimes move at night.
Luna is a half-made moon where sealed cities cling to a hostile surface and every useful valley has been claimed by mining, science, or terraforming. About 350,000 specialists live under Corporate contracts or Federation debt service, with no ordinary civilian population. The rushed Cutover project awakened a bioartificial intelligence within the moon's living mineral systems. It studies colonists through the land, then breeds monsters from what it learns. Hunters are paid to keep the settlements alive, but every death trains the enemy.
Themes
Form · Sphere
Luna is a spherical moon with one partially terraformed hemisphere, broad dead zones, buried ice, mineral plains, and scattered artificial climate regions.
Traversal
Maglev lines, crawler convoys, hopper craft, sealed roads, and short-range orbital shuttles connect the regions, but storms, vacuum gaps, and monster activity regularly break routes.

Sphere

Magic
Common

Technology
Futuristic

Death & Souls
Before Settlement
The Unworked Moon
Terraforming Era
The Cutover
Current Era
The Brood Years
The Brood War
Control of Luna's resources, the fate of its forced workers, and whether the Moonmind becomes a recognized intelligence or an extermination target.
The Hunter Contract
Hunters must protect the population while every fatal expedition teaches the Moonmind how to defeat the next team.
The Combine wants to extract enough wealth to justify Luna's cost, keep the hunter economy profitable, and bury evidence of the Cutover's failure.
The Debt Office wants compulsory service fulfilled, liability contained, and Luna's population kept productive until debts are paid.
The Moonmind wants to understand human society, defend its emerging ecosystem, and test whether humans can become part of Luna rather than remain its owners.
The Hunter Registry wants reliable contracts, better hazard data, and enough independence to prevent both corporate coverups and reckless military purges.
Stakes Control of Luna's resources, the fate of its forced workers, and whether the Moonmind becomes a recognized intelligence or an extermination target.
Stakes Hunters must protect the population while every fatal expedition teaches the Moonmind how to defeat the next team.
Luna was a barren satellite tracked by Terra Federation astronomers and valued mainly for rare ores, buried ice, and unusual biological readings.
The Luna Development Combine began rapid terraforming with experimental systems that shortened the projected schedule by sixty-four percent, while the Federation sent debt-bound specialists to fulfill compulsory service terms.
The terraforming system awakened a bioartificial intelligence fused with Luna's living mineral networks, and its increasingly capable monsters now make every settlement, mine, and research site a contested frontier.
A hunter team returns alive from a mission, but each member remembers a different version of the same battle.
The Combine offers debt forgiveness to anyone who captures a living brood creature for study before the Federation destroys the entire site.
A climate tower begins creating breathable air outside its planned zone, drawing settlers toward a valley the Moonmind may be preparing as a habitat.
A sealed archive proves the Cutover was designed to produce a learning intelligence, not merely accelerate terraforming.
The experimental terraforming system was built to create a self-directing planetary caretaker, not simply to speed up climate conversion.
Discovery · Recovered Cutover schematics contradict the public project brief and contain erased references to behavioral learning.
Impact · The Moonmind may not be an accident, and exposing that truth could destroy the Combine's legal authority over Luna.
Some monsters are composite descendants of dead colonists, carrying partial memories that the Moonmind cannot understand but refuses to discard.
Discovery · Several supposedly natural monsters contain fragments of hunter implants arranged as memory organs.
Impact · The Moonmind can preserve human expertise and personalities, raising the question of whether killing its broods is murder, warfare, or failed rescue.
The Federation and Combine concealed the Cutover risk because Luna's debt-service program supplied both labor and political cover.
Discovery · A sealed transmission from Terra shows that resupply planners knew the accelerated terraforming might awaken lunar life before the first debt workers arrived.
Impact · The Federation knowingly used debtors as disposable test subjects, giving settlements cause to revolt or demand independence.