World & Cosmology
The world wasn't born from a big bang or the word of a god. It was written, and the ink is still wet. They say reality is an unfinished script, a story held together by the tangible substance of memory, a proto-script they call Memorum. What is remembered, exists. What is forgotten, unravels. It’s that simple, and that brutal. The past isn’t a foreign country; it’s the foundation of the house we all live in, and the termites are getting fat.
This is the truth behind the curtain, the secret that makes the Cold War look like a schoolyard shoving match. The great powers, the CIA and the KGB, they aren't just fighting over ideology. They’re fighting over the narrative, the very text of existence. They’ve found tools, artifacts not of this world, that let them cut and paste history. They erase a man, alter an event, and think they’re winning. But every cut, every excised truth, bleeds. This psychic waste doesn’t just vanish. It pools and congeals into a thinking cancer, a creeping, silent Oblivion that eats at the edges of the world.
This Unseen War creates scars you can see, if you know how to look. They call them Ashen Tracts—places like the Tonopah Static in Nevada, where memory has been so thoroughly annihilated that the laws of physics have a nervous breakdown. You see it in the cities, too. A flicker in a shop window, a Judas Pane showing a reflection of a world that no longer is. A neon sign stuttering into a Signalbleed Trace, a momentary broadcast from a place that shouldn't exist. The world is run by ghosts, and the living are just learning the language. The final truth is this: the war isn’t about who controls the future. It’s about whether there will be a future left to control.
Core Systems & Institutions
Technology & Artifice
The tools of this war weren't forged in any earthly fire. They were found, stumbled upon in the ruins of other, older conflicts. They are artifacts of alien origin, cold to the touch and humming with a logic that bends the mind. The great powers hoard them like holy relics. The Janus Engine, a machine that can rewrite global history with the flip of a switch. The Mnemosyne Shiv, a shard of black glass that can sever a single memory from a man’s soul as cleanly as a scalpel. The Eidolon Spectacles, lenses that let you see the ghosts of memory clinging to every object and person. These are not machines of wire and steel; they are instruments of metaphysics, turning the abstract into the brutally concrete. But power has a price, and this technology demands its pound of flesh. Every cut, every alteration, releases a psychic exhaust that feeds the encroaching Oblivion. Worse, it erodes the user. The mind wasn’t meant to play God, and the strain of rewriting what is real leaves a man hollowed out, his own past becoming a landscape of lies and static. A rare few, men like Sineus, can do this work with their bare hands, their minds the only artifact they need. This doesn’t make them blessed. It just means the rot starts from the inside.
Faith & Philosophy
In a world where the past is a commodity, faith is a hard thing to hold onto. The old religions still exist, their pews filled with people praying to gods who seem deaf to the new kind of silence eating the world. But in the shadows, new and more honest faiths have taken root. The most dangerous is the Fifth Directorate, a cult of nihilists who see the coming Oblivion not as a threat, but as a form of salvation. They worship the void. They believe that memory is a sickness, the source of all pain and conflict, and that only in total erasure can true peace be found. They are the enemy who agrees with the diagnosis but prescribes suicide as the cure. On the other side are the pragmatists, the spies and soldiers of the great powers. They don’t have a philosophy; they have a mission. They believe in the primacy of their nation, their ideology. They see memory as the ultimate high ground, and they will sacrifice anything—truth, honor, their own souls—to seize it. And then there are the few caught in the middle, men like Sineus. They don’t fight for a flag or a god. They fight for the principle that a man’s past is his own, that some truths are not for sale. It’s a lonely faith, a belief in a lost cause that just happens to be the whole damn world.
Dominion & Order
There are two wars being fought. The first is the one you read about in the papers, the Cold War. It’s a shadow play of ideologies, a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought with threats, proxy armies, and spies in tailored suits. Washington and Moscow are the two poles of this world, and everyone is forced to pick a side. This war is a lie. It’s the cover story for the real conflict: the Unseen War. This is a fight for the soul of reality itself, waged in back alleys and forgotten labs by the true powers—the CIA, the KGB, and Britain’s MI6. Their goal is not geopolitical dominance, but metaphysical control. They seek to command the past as the ultimate means of commanding the future. But the board is more crowded than they know. Shadowy non-state actors, like the nihilistic Fifth Directorate and the occult Legion, fight their own campaigns, driven by motives that defy the simple logic of East versus West. They are cancers on the body politic, thriving in the chaos. The only order in this war is the unspoken agreement that the existence of the war itself is the greatest secret of all. To acknowledge it is to admit that the world is already broken.
Barter & Obligation
The official economies run on dollars and rubles, but in the Unseen War, the real currency is memory. A secret is worth more than gold. A single, pure memory of a state secret, a moment of betrayal, or the location of a hidden artifact can buy a man a new life or a quick death. This is the Ghost Trade, a black market that operates in the spaces between the great powers. There are no contracts, only promises made in smoky bars and deals sealed with a shared bottle of whiskey. A favor is a debt, and debts are always collected. The market is volatile and treacherous. Information is traded for services: the erasure of a troublesome witness in exchange for the coordinates of an Ashen Tract. A piece of alien technology for a clean identity and a boat out of Rostock. The brokers of this trade are men like Misha Orlov, survivors who navigate the currents of paranoia, their word the only thing backing a transaction. But even this brutal system has rules. The Shadow Compact, an unwritten treaty of mutually assured destruction, keeps the trade from collapsing into open warfare. Betrayal is expected, but breaking the core tenets—like exposing the war itself—invites annihilation from all sides.
Conflict & Doctrine
The doctrine of the Unseen War is simple: he who controls the past, controls the future. The battlefield is not land, but the collective consciousness of humanity. The primary weapon is not the bullet, but the cut—the surgical excision of memory. The CIA and the KGB, the two main belligerents, approach this with the full weight of their ideological certainty. For the KGB, memory is a tool of state security; any memory that contradicts the Party line is a threat to be redacted. For the CIA, memory is a strategic asset to be leveraged for the advancement of freedom, a freedom they define. Both are racing to achieve a "Dictatorship of Memory," a world where their version of the truth is the only one left. Their methods are a dark mirror of each other: infiltration, assassination, and the weaponization of alien artifacts. They turn men into puppets, overwrite history, and risk tearing reality apart in their hunger for dominance. The conflict is absolute. There are no truces, only temporary cessations of hostility when a greater threat emerges, a rogue element like Kestrel who threatens to burn the whole board. For the soldiers of this war, the only victory is survival, and the only peace is the one you find at the bottom of a glass.
Mysteries & Anomalies
The world is bleeding. The Unseen War is not clean; it leaves wounds on the face of reality, anomalies that defy the laws of physics and sanity. The most profound are the Ashen Tracts, dead zones where memory has been so completely scoured that reality has forgotten itself. In these places, compasses spin, engines die, and a man can forget how to breathe. They are permanent scars, victories for the Oblivion. But the symptoms are everywhere, subtler and more frequent. After a rain, you might see Mnemonic Sheen on the wet asphalt, an oily, iridescent slick that shimmers with the ghosts of discarded memories. A neon sign might flicker into a Signalbleed Trace, a brief, impossible image from a secret laboratory miles away. A reflection in a shop window might show a Judas Pane, a glimpse of a timeline that was just erased, a world where the dead man walking beside you is still alive. These are not hauntings; they are glitches in the source code of the world, evidence of the constant, brutal editing of the past. For most, they are unsettling moments of deja vu or a trick of the light. For men like Sineus, they are clues, breadcrumbs in a labyrinth of lies, the tracks of the monsters he hunts.
Peoples, Factions & Cultures
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency is a creature of bright lights and deep shadows. It sells the world a story of freedom and democracy, a story it believes with every fiber of its being. This conviction is what makes it so dangerous. Its operatives, men like Robert Thorne, see the Unseen War as a righteous crusade, a necessary evil to protect the American way of life from the darkness of Soviet communism. They wield memory-altering artifacts with the confidence of surgeons, cutting away the cancers of dissent and historical inconvenience. They see themselves as the good guys, the shepherds protecting the flock, and they will burn any field, sacrifice any lamb, to keep the wolves at bay. Their resources are vast, their reach is global, and their methods are sanitized by layers of bureaucracy and plausible deniability. They are not monsters; they are patriots. And in this war, that is the most terrifying thing a man can be.
Fifth Directorate
Most factions fight for control. The Fifth Directorate fights for the end. They are not a nation or an agency; they are a death cult, a congregation of nihilists who have looked into the void and seen salvation. They believe that memory is the original sin, the source of all suffering, and that individuality is a cage. Their god is Oblivion, and their sacrament is erasure. They don't seek to win the Unseen War; they seek to accelerate it. Their agents are ghosts, men and women who have willingly had their own pasts scoured, leaving them as hollow vessels for the Directorate's single, terrible purpose. They use artifacts not to rewrite history, but to unmake it, creating Ashen Tracts and feeding the static that eats at the world. They are the true believers in a gospel of silence, and they will not stop until the last memory has been extinguished and the universe is returned to the perfect, thoughtless peace of nothingness.
Gladio
Gladio is a ghost in the machine, a stay-behind army that never got the order to stand down. Born from the paranoia of the post-war years, it is a secret coalition of NATO intelligence officers, right-wing industrialists, and Vatican insiders, created to be a bulwark against a Soviet invasion that never came. Now, it operates as a rogue network, a third power in the Unseen War. Gladio is not driven by ideology but by a fanatical devotion to preserving a very specific version of Western civilization, a version that exists only in their minds. They see both the CIA and the KGB as corrupt and decadent, and they fight to impose their own brutal, traditionalist order on the world. They trade in blackmail, stolen artifacts, and political assassination, their actions hidden beneath layers of legitimate business and state power. They are the true believers in a past that never was, and they will kill to make it the future.
KGB
The Committee for State Security is an organization of absolute certainty. For the KGB, the world is a simple equation. There is the State, and there is the enemy. There is the official history, and there is heresy. Their role in the Unseen War is not one of espionage, but of ideological sanitation. Under the command of men like General Gamov, the KGB’s Ninth Directorate treats memory as a potential contaminant. Any personal history that deviates from the Party line is a disease to be cured, and the cure is always surgical. They wield their paranormal assets with the brutal efficiency of a state apparatus, erasing dissenters, reprogramming captured agents, and enforcing a singular, monolithic truth. They are not driven by a lust for power, but by a genuine, terrifying belief in the righteousness of their cause. They are the architects of the perfect prison, a world where every thought is a state-approved thought, and the past is whatever the Kremlin says it was this morning.
Legion
No one knows what Legion is. It is a name whispered in the debriefings of failed missions, a ghost in the intelligence chatter. It is not a state agency or a political cult. The name itself suggests a multitude, a hive. Some believe it is a collective consciousness, a psychic entity born from the trauma of the war. Others think it is a network of individuals whose minds have been linked by some unknown alien technology, their identities subsumed into a greater whole. Its motives are opaque, its actions seemingly random and chaotic. It strikes at both the CIA and the KGB without pattern, stealing artifacts, corrupting memory archives, and leaving behind only madness and confusion. Legion does not seem to want to control the world's memory, but to shatter it into a million incoherent pieces. It is the embodiment of pure chaos, a force that seeks not to win the game, but to smash the board and all the pieces with it.
MI6
The British Secret Intelligence Service plays the long game. While the Americans and Soviets brawl like giants, MI6 moves in the shadows, a stiletto against a pair of sledgehammers. They are old hands at this, the inheritors of a tradition of espionage that predates the atom bomb and the memory-cut. They see the Unseen War not as a crusade, but as a regrettable necessity, a dirty job that must be done to maintain the balance of power. Led by quiet, ruthless men like Cromwell, they are masters of subtlety and misdirection. They rarely use the brute force of a major artifact, preferring to manipulate their rivals into weakening each other. They trade in information, leverage old loyalties, and understand that a well-placed whisper can be more effective than a psychic blast. Their goal is not to win, but to ensure no one else does, to keep the world teetering on a knife's edge, where Britain’s influence still matters.
The Chorus
The Chorus is not a faction; it is a symptom. It is a cult of personality built around the broken psychic, Kestrel. Its members are the casualties of the Unseen War—agents who have been mind-wiped, soldiers whose trauma has been weaponized, spies who have seen too much. They are the broken toys, and Kestrel has given them a new purpose. They believe that individuality is the source of all pain and that memory is a prison. Their gospel is one of shared agony. They follow Kestrel not out of loyalty, but out of a desperate desire for release. They see the Echo Protocol not as a weapon, but as a sacrament that will baptize the world in a unifying wave of trauma, burning away all separate identities and creating a single, silent consciousness of pain. They are not soldiers; they are supplicants, and their only prayer is for the end.
Vessels, Constructs & Locations
Key Locations & Phenomena
Cathedral of Rubble
In the Soviet Sector of Berlin, there is a church where no one prays. It is a skeleton of stone, its roof open to the perpetually grey sky. The floor is a graveyard of shattered pews and fallen masonry, all of it coated in a fine dust of crushed concrete. This is no holy place; it is a prepared killing ground. The air itself is sick, thick with a sixty percent psychic contamination that hums in your bones and puts a grinding pressure behind your eyes. Kestrel chose this place to ambush Sineus, knowing the psychic static would cripple his finer abilities, turning a duel of minds into a brawl. The crumbling walls and loose stones are not just decay; they are weapons waiting to be used. It is a place where the physical world is as broken as the men fighting in it, a perfect arena for a war fought in the ruins of the past.
Haas's Antiquitaten
In Vienna’s Josefstadt district, there is an antique shop where nothing is for sale. The front room is a stage set of decay, a museum of dead clocks and shrouded furniture smelling of dust and old paper. This is the public face of Zoltan Haas, a black-market dealer in the Unseen War. The real business happens in the back, a chaotic hoard of esoteric artifacts, forbidden books, and dismantled alien technology. This is a nexus for the Ghost Trade, a neutral ground where agents from rival powers come to barter for the tools of their trade. The shop is a fortress of secrets, its clutter a form of camouflage. But it is also a trap. The value of the goods within makes it a constant target, a place where a deal can turn into a death sentence in the time it takes to pour a drink.
Hamburg Dock Office
It’s just a small brick building in the Hamburg port, a place forgotten by time and commerce. The windows are boarded, the door hangs crooked on a broken hinge, and the air inside is thick with the smell of damp paper and rot. It’s the kind of anonymous, unsecured shelter that offers a moment’s respite from the rain but no real safety. For Sineus and Petrova, it was a place to catch their breath. For The Chorus, it was a kill box. The flimsy structure became a cage, its rotten floorboards the only desperate means of escape. It is a testament to the nature of this war: there are no safe places, only temporary hiding spots, and even the most insignificant location can become a battlefield, its memory forever stained with the scent of cordite and desperation.
Hamburg Sewer System
Beneath the industrial docks of Hamburg lies a labyrinth of brick-lined tunnels, a world of absolute darkness and cold, fast-moving water. The air is foul with the smell of filth and decay. This is the city’s forgotten underbelly, a place not meant for human passage. For Sineus and Petrova, it was the only way out. Trapped and outgunned, they plunged into this subterranean maze, trading a firefight for the risk of drowning or getting lost forever in the dark. The sewers are the great equalizer. They strip away technology and rank, leaving only the will to survive. It is a place of desperate, primal escape, a reminder that sometimes the only way to evade the high-tech horrors of the Unseen War is to crawl through the filth of the old world.
Kholodny-12
Kholodny-12, or "Cold-12," is a town that officially doesn't exist. It’s a forgotten Soviet mining settlement in a remote, frozen valley, a collection of grim concrete blocks under a perpetually grey sky. This is where Kestrel demonstrated the full, horrific power of the Echo Protocol. He didn't conquer the town; he overwrote it. The fifty souls who lived there are now trapped in loops of screaming, traumatic memories, their bodies puppets for other people's wars. The town itself is a massive psychic wound, a place where the silence is filled with the ghosts of agony. For Sineus, it was not just a mission objective; it was a vision of his own failure, a monument to the world he was trying to save, already lost. It is a place where the war was lost before the first shot was fired.
Kholodny Ravine
Just beyond the overwritten town of Kholodny-12, a deep, narrow ravine cuts through the frozen earth. It’s a place of jagged black rock and deep snow, where the wind carries the faint, psychic echoes of the town’s eternal screams. The cold here is absolute, intensified by a palpable aura of despair bleeding from the nearby psychic catastrophe. This is where Sineus’s resolve shattered, where he faced the totality of his failure. But it was also a crucible. In this desolate landscape, surrounded by the evidence of his enemy's victory, a new, harder resolve was forged. It was here that he and Petrova, stripped of all hope but each other, devised the desperate, two-pronged plan to strike back. The ravine is a place of death and rebirth, a frozen tomb where one mission ended and another, more personal one began.
The Kline Maze
In West Berlin, near the Wall, there are several city blocks where the map is a lie. They call it the Kline Maze. It’s a district of ruined tenements and brutalist concrete where the streets rearrange themselves. A left turn that led to an alley yesterday might lead to a dead end today. The spatial geometry is unstable, a physical tear in reality caused by repeated, intense memory warfare. The air hums with a low, subsonic frequency, the sound of overlapping realities grinding against each other. Factions use the Maze for deniable meetings, its shifting nature the perfect cover. But it’s a dangerous game. Stay too long, and the Maze begins to eat your own memory, your own sense of direction, until you become just another ghost lost in its shifting corridors.
The Rubble Chorus
East Berlin has its own scars. The Rubble Chorus is a district of skeletal, bombed-out apartment buildings, a wound left over from the final battle of the last war. The intense trauma of that battle was cut and manipulated by the factions, but the severed memories didn't die. They now replay in a chaotic, looping broadcast of sound and light. The air is filled with a low hum of overlapping noises—shouted orders, weeping, fragments of song. Walls flicker, showing glimpses of wallpapered rooms that no longer exist. Operatives venture into this zone to hunt for "Echoes," uncut memories that might hold wartime secrets. But the Chorus is a psychic meat grinder. Prolonged exposure overwrites your own history, inflicting a madness called the Palimpsest Condition. It’s a place where you trade your sanity for a glimpse of the truth.
The Switchyard
The Switchyard is a district in post-war Berlin where reality has a stutter. It’s a few blocks of rubble and concrete where the CIA and KGB tested their first memory-cutting artifacts. The severed memories linger here as echoes, fighting to reassert their existence. This conflict causes the physical environment to flicker between different historical states. A street might revert to its bombed-out 1945 condition for a few seconds, then shift to a planned Soviet-era redevelopment. Reflections in puddles show buildings that aren't there. It’s a place of deniable operations, where an agent can lose a tail in a street that suddenly ceases to exist. But it’s a lethal gamble. People get trapped in the flickers, lost in a moment of the past, their own minds unraveling in the unstable reality.
Tonopah Static
In the Nevada desert, there is a circular patch of land, three kilometers across, where the world has a hole in it. They call it the Tonopah Static. Inside the military fence, the ground is flat grey dust. No plants grow, no animals enter. The air shimmers, and a deep, unnatural silence swallows all sound. This is an Ashen Tract, a place where memory was annihilated. It was the result of a failed attempt to erase a crashed alien vessel, and the attempt tore a hole in the fabric of what is. Anything that enters the zone forgets its purpose. A gun becomes inert metal. An engine won't ignite. A man forgets his name, then how to breathe. It is the perfect disposal site, a place where you can un-write a person from the world. The Static is not empty; it is a void, and it may be growing.
Ural Sanatorium
Deep in a remote Ural Mountains valley sits a secret KGB facility disguised as a sanatorium. It is a fortress of brutalist concrete and electrified fences, Kestrel's base of operations and the housing for the Echo Protocol. The entire complex hums with the immense power required to run the reality-bending weapon, a vibration you feel in your teeth from kilometers away. Security is a mix of the mundane and the esoteric: armed guards, watchtowers, and psychically-attuned sentries who cast a net of mental awareness over the perimeter. The interior is a sterile labyrinth of service tunnels and secure labs, a place built to contain a monster. But its greatest defense is its arrogance. Its security systems have flaws, blind spots that a desperate man with inside knowledge can exploit. It is a tomb, but the question is, for whom?
Vessels, Constructs & Machines
Project 183 Patrol Boat
The Project 183 is a greyhound of the sea, a sleek, predatory Soviet patrol boat designed for interception in the cold waters of the Baltic. It’s fast, armed with a heavy machine gun, and crewed by men who follow orders. When it appeared out of the fog, its searchlight cutting through the dark, it was the physical manifestation of the KGB’s reach, a promise that there is no escape. For Sineus and Petrova, fleeing on a rust-bucket trawler, it was an impossible threat. But even the most advanced weapon can be broken. The patrol boat was a modern hunter, but it was not built to withstand the brute, simple physics of a desperate man ramming its hull with a reinforced ice-breaking bow. It ended its hunt at the bottom of the sea, a testament to the fact that sometimes, the old ways are the only ones that work.
St. Elsbeth
The St. Elsbeth is a fishing trawler, not a warship. It’s a rust-bucket that smells of diesel and dead fish, its engine a groaning complaint against the cold Baltic Sea. Captained by Lars, a grizzled Danish idealist, it’s a vessel for smuggling people and hope, not just fish. For Sineus and Anja Petrova, it was their only way out of Europe, a fragile shell against the iron fist of the Soviet state. Its reinforced bow, designed for breaking ice, became an unlikely weapon, a tool of desperation that crippled a modern patrol boat. The St. Elsbeth is a symbol of the resistance in this war: old, worn, and seemingly outmatched, but possessing a stubborn refusal to sink. It carries its scars—a crumpled bow and splintered railings—like medals.
ZIS-151 Military Transport
The ZIS-151 is a workhorse, a six-wheel-drive Soviet military truck built for durability, not comfort. Its drab olive-green paint and simple, functional design make it ubiquitous in the Eastern Bloc, a piece of mobile scenery. For Sineus and Petrova, a stolen ZIS-151 was their key to crossing the vast, empty backcountry of the Soviet Union. It was a loud, rough, and uncomfortable ride, a piece of the enemy's own machinery turned against them. The truck represents the pragmatic nature of their flight; there is no room for elegance, only for what works. It carried them through the snow and silence toward Kholodny-12, its droning engine a constant, unsubtle announcement of their progress into the heart of the enemy's territory, a stolen tool for a desperate, unsanctioned mission.
Notable Characters
Adalbert Scholz
In a Vienna antique shop filled with the ghosts of other people's lives, Adalbert Scholz acts as the Unseen War’s incorruptible ledger. He is an old man in a formal, dark wool suit, his face a collection of sharp angles and deep wrinkles. His mind is a fortress; no known artifact or psychic ability can alter or erase his memories. This makes him the ultimate arbiter. Factions come to him to officiate their most critical pacts, and he records the events with perfect fidelity. If a dispute arises, he recounts the memory, and his word is law. The price for his service is not gold, but a memory of great personal weight from each party. He is a lonely archivist of sins and treaties, a neutral island of absolute truth in a world drowning in lies. His existence is a strange anchor, a man whose very being proves that some things, at least, can be remembered correctly.
Dr. Anja Petrova
Dr. Anja Petrova is a woman running from her own brilliance. A former star physicist for the KGB's Ninth Directorate, she was a principal architect of the Echo Protocol. She built a weapon of elegant, terrible power, and the pride of creation curdled into horror when she saw it used not for control, but to birth a plague of madness. Now a defector, she is hunted by her former masters and haunted by her creation. She is precise, pragmatic, and carries her guilt like a concealed weapon. Her intimate knowledge of the Protocol is her only currency, and her desperate, calculated plan to unmake her life's work is her only penance. She is a woman of science forced to confront the metaphysical, a creator who must become a destroyer, trading her future for a chance to erase a past she wrote herself.
Anton Gerber
Anton Gerber is a craftsman of oblivion, working from a small, quiet workshop in Vienna that smells of ozone and hot glass. He is a slender, precise man in a heavy leather apron, his fingertips covered in faint, silvery scars. He does not erase memories; he extracts them. Using a repurposed dental chair and a strange copper-and-brass headset, he captures the raw psychic energy of a trauma and physically embeds it into a small, abstract glass sculpture. The client is left with a clean, emotionless fact, while the pain itself is trapped in the glass. Spies and soldiers come to him to have the mental toll of their work removed, leaving them shielded from their own horrors. But the process is not clean. Losing the emotional context of one's life subtly warps the soul, and the glass Echo Shards he creates are psychic bombs waiting to be shattered.
Elias Vogt
Elias Vogt is a quiet man in a simple grey suit who offers the most valuable commodity in the shadow world: true forgetting. He is a psychic who consumes memories. From his unassuming office, he places a cool, dry hand on a client's temple and pulls the black, oily thread of a trauma from their mind into his own. The client feels a sudden cold, then only a clean, empty space. Vogt, however, experiences the memory in a flash of secondhand pain and terror. He is a living library of secrets and suffering, a walking archive of the Unseen War's psychological cost. Spies pay him in gold and artifacts to forget interrogations and battlefield horrors. But each memory he consumes adds another ghost to the chorus in his own head, and this collection of stolen agony makes him a priceless, vulnerable target for every agency that wants to read his library.
Erich Mandel
Erich Mandel is a ghost of bureaucracy, a thin man in a cheap, dark suit who specializes in the theft of identity. He calls it "conceptual extraction." He doesn't erase a man's entire past, only the core memory that anchors his sense of self—the memory of his first love, his greatest failure, his defining act of courage. Mandel psychically isolates this "keystone memory" and cuts it out, causing the rest of the subject's personality to collapse like a house of cards. The victim is left a hollow shell, a man with a history but no identity. Mandel then sells these potent, foundational memories on the black market. They are used to build new, more stable identities for deep-cover agents. He is a butcher of souls, carving out the most essential parts of a man and selling them for profit, leaving behind a trail of the walking dead.
Franz Bauer
Franz Bauer is a living archive of transgressions, a tall, stooped man in his late fifties who has turned his mind into a courtroom. He possesses the unique psychic ability to perfectly copy a memory from another person, creating a flawless duplicate within his own consciousness. He does not steal or alter the memory; he simply records it. He focuses exclusively on "sins"—acts of betrayal, murder, and moral compromise committed in the secret war. Factions use him as an unofficial arbiter, consulting him to establish the truth of a past event. His memory can verify a broken treaty or expose a double agent. But the cost is immense. His mind is a gallery of atrocities, and he carries the psychological weight of every sin he has recorded. He is a man slowly being crushed to death by the weight of other people's guilt.
General Arkady Volkov
General Arkady Volkov is the embodiment of the Soviet state's will in the Unseen War. A high-ranking KGB officer, he is a heavy, powerful man who moves with the deliberate confidence of someone accustomed to absolute command. He is a pragmatist, not a fanatic, who understands the strategic realities of the new battlefield. He will broker a temporary truce with his worst enemies if it serves to neutralize a greater, common threat. But his loyalty is absolute and his memory is long. He views defectors like Dr. Petrova not as people, but as stolen state property. He is a patient predator who will honor a pact only as long as it is convenient, waiting for the opportune moment to reclaim what he believes belongs to the Motherland, with brutal and final efficiency.
Harvey Gable
Harvey Gable is a different kind of soldier in the Unseen War. He is a historical investigator, a man who fights lies not with psychic power, but with forensic truth. He hunts for Memory Anchors—physical objects like forged treaties or doctored photographs that are used to ground a false reality. With the meticulous patience of a scholar, he analyzes ink composition, paper origins, and film stock, searching for the one undeniable flaw that will shatter the lie. He is a freelancer, hired by factions to dismantle the narratives of their enemies. His work is slow, dangerous, and requires a network of informants and a life of perpetual vigilance. He has no defense against the artifacts and abilities of his enemies, only his intellect and the stubborn belief that some facts cannot be erased.
Jakob Steiner
Jakob Steiner is a man who photographs ghosts. A chemist and master photographer of Austrian descent, he hunts for the residue of excised memories. He travels to Ashen Tracts and other psychically scarred locations with his Chronos Camera, a unique device that captures the lingering memory fragments on specially treated glass plates. The results are not images, but complex crystalline patterns of silver halides—the raw data of what was forgotten. His collection of these plates, the Echo Library, is an objective record of altered history, a truth that factions would kill to control or destroy. He is a lonely guardian of a decaying archive, a man who trades his safety and sanity to preserve the faint echoes of a world being systematically unwritten.
Julian Helke
Julian Helke is a psychic who works like a poison. A tall, unnervingly thin man with one good eye and one of milky white, he does not erase memories; he corrupts them from within. He finds a potent memory in a person's mind and twists its emotional anchor, turning a cherished moment into one of abuse, a heroic act into one of cowardice. He can poison a room with a looping memory of terror, making it a place of palpable dread. Factions hire him for psychological sabotage, to drive targets to madness or suicide. But his work is unstable, and the false memories he creates can fracture and infect others. The milky eye is the mark of his own psychic decay; each act of corruption erodes his own identity, turning him into a walking wound in reality.
Kestrel
Once, he was Sineus's partner, a good man lost in a lab explosion. But he wasn't killed; he was remade. His identity was shattered and reassembled from the traumatic memories of a dozen dead soldiers, turning him into a psychic scar. Now, he is Kestrel, the messiah of the nihilist cult known as The Chorus. He is a broken mirror of Sineus, a man who also seeks balance but believes it can only be achieved through shared agony. He wields the Echo Protocol not as a weapon, but as a tool of salvation, a baptism of collective trauma that will burn away the sin of individuality. He is a savior who offers peace through pain, a ghost who believes the only way to heal the world is to force everyone to share the same wound.
Klaus Meissner
Klaus Meissner is a weapon of the Fifth Directorate, a tall, thin man with colorless eyes who functions as a psychic void. He possesses the innate ability to consume memories, not altering or stealing them, but annihilating them from existence. He can focus on a person, an object, or a place and slowly unmake the memories that give it meaning, turning it into a hollow shell. He is deployed to create Ashen Tracts, to erase enemy bases from reality, and to feed the Oblivion his masters worship. The process is slow and requires sustained concentration. The cost to Meissner is his own existence. With each act of erasure, he himself becomes less real, his own identity dissolving as he slowly transforms into a pure, walking manifestation of the void.
Lars
Lars is a man of the sea, the grizzled Danish captain of the smuggling trawler St. Elsbeth. His face is a worn sea-chart, his voice a low rumble like stones grinding together. He pretends to be a cynic, a man motivated only by payment, but beneath the gruff exterior is an idealist who risks his life ferrying refugees and fugitives across the iron curtain of the Baltic. He is a man of practical skill and surprising courage, willing to use his reinforced ice-breaking bow as a weapon against a modern Soviet patrol boat. He is a small, stubborn part of the resistance, a man who chose a side not based on flags, but on the simple decency of helping those who have nowhere else to run.
Laszlo Molnar
Laszlo Molnar is the Unseen War's neutral archivist, a meticulous Hungarian refugee operating from a dusty Vienna office. He calls his service the "Stenography of the Soul." Using a custom-built apparatus of bellows and vacuum tubes, he captures the psychic static of a client's recounted memory, etching it as a dense, abstract pattern onto a glass "Ledger-Slate." This creates an incorruptible, emotionless record of events. Intelligence agencies use him to document their secret dealings, but only Molnar can decipher the plates, a fact that serves as his only life insurance. He is a man who holds the objective facts of countless betrayals and loyalties, but his work has left him utterly detached from the human meaning behind them, a lonely clerk in the library of sin.
Lazar Kulagin
Lazar Kulagin is the KGB's master of mnemonic revision, a pale, emotionless man with a complex mechanical prosthetic for a right hand. He does not erase memories; he weaves new, false narratives over the old ones. In sterile, hidden facilities, he uses microscopic filaments extended from his prosthetic fingertips to perform microsurgery on a sedated subject's past. He creates perfect sleeper agents and turns captured enemies into loyal operatives who genuinely believe their implanted histories. His work is a valuable state asset, but it is slow, meticulous, and dangerously imprecise. A single mistake can shatter a subject's sanity. The prosthetic itself requires rare alien components, making Kulagin and his terrible art a very limited and precious resource for the Soviet state.
Lev Gamov
General Lev Gamov is a man made of state-enforced certainty. A high-ranking KGB officer, he is stout, severe, and utterly convinced of the Party's righteousness. He commands a secret department for ideological security, and he treats memory manipulation not as a metaphysical science, but as an advanced form of information control. He has no innate psychic abilities, and he uses captured artifacts and psychics crudely, to erase dissent or implant absolute loyalty. He is blind to the true nature of the Unseen War, dismissing Oblivion as Western propaganda. His dogmatic, brutal methods are effective for control, but the psychic voids he leaves behind are wounds in reality, and his refusal to see the real enemy makes him one of its most effective servants.
Misha Orlov
Misha Orlov was a memory broker in the Viennese underground, a man who traded in secrets but somehow kept his soul. He was Sineus's handler, but more than that, he was a friend, an anchor to a world of simple loyalties. His trust was as solid as the gold he sometimes dealt in, and his belief that some things were not for sale was a rare currency in the Ghost Trade. His mind, overwritten by the Echo Protocol, is not just the inciting incident of a mission; it is the desecration of the last clean thing in Sineus's world. His catatonic state is a constant, silent accusation, a reminder of the stakes and the personal cost of a war that consumes the good and the bad alike.
Otto Radek
Otto Radek is a psychic who works like a corrupt bureaucrat, altering the emotional framework of memory. He calls it Emotional Grafting. Using a device that emits low, modulated audio frequencies, he makes a subject's memory pliable. He then psychically detaches the original emotion—fear, trauma, guilt—and grafts a new, artificial one in its place. He can turn a traumatized agent into a loyal fanatic, a captured spy into a willing martyr. Factions hire him to sanitize their operatives, destroying their moral compass to ensure unwavering obedience. The cost to his victims is their humanity. The cost to Radek is his own emotion; he is a hollow shell, a man who has forgotten how to feel, leaving him with only the cold, precise mechanics of his terrible craft.
Rémy Dubois
Rémy Dubois is a dissident artist fighting the Unseen War with a welding torch and scrap metal. From a hidden workshop in Paris, he salvages debris from Ashen Tracts—materials that hold the ghosts of erased memories. He hammers and welds this scrap into large, abstract sculptures that emit a low, psychic hum. These jagged, unsettling forms act as beacons for forgotten truth, disrupting the conditioned memories of those who view them and triggering flashes of a true past. He has no innate abilities, only his intuition and a small network of supporters. He is hunted by every major agency, a man who uses art to create cracks in the wall of manufactured history, trading his safety for a chance to make the world remember.
Robert Thorne
Robert Thorne is a grandmaster of the Unseen War, a high-ranking CIA officer who views the world as a chessboard. From his clean, polished desk in Langley, he moves his pieces—operatives like Sineus—with pragmatic ruthlessness. He is not evil; his morality is simply subordinate to his mission of ensuring American dominance on the new battlefield of memory. He will sacrifice any pawn to gain a strategic advantage, but he is smart enough to know that destroying the board means the game is over for everyone. He is a man of clean hands and dirty work, a patriot who believes in his cause so completely that he is willing to orchestrate conspiracies within conspiracies, using enemies as cover and allies as bait, all for the greater good as he defines it.
Sineus
Sineus is a man caught between two worlds, a Russian nobleman by birth and an American physicist by trade. He is an unwilling soldier in a secret war, an operative whose mind is his greatest weapon. He can see and erase the memories of others without an artifact, a gift that makes him a priceless asset and, in his own eyes, a monster. He fights to prevent a "Dictatorship of Memory," a world where the past is controlled by the state. But every time he uses his power to save someone, he violates another's soul, stealing a piece of their past. He is a man of unyielding principle, forced to commit terrible acts for a righteous cause. He is haunted by the ghosts of those he has failed and the woman he lost, a man trying to save the world's memory while his own is a minefield of grief and carefully excised trauma.
Valentin Fischer
Valentin Fischer is an old watchmaker in a quiet Vienna alley, but the clocks he truly understands are the mechanisms of reality itself. He is a psychic who perceives memory as physical threads in a great tapestry. He can see where those threads have been cut or rewoven. He does not see the future, but he can feel the strain on reality caused by memory manipulation, predicting where a paradox might cause a collapse into an Ashen Tract. Factions consult him, using him as a barometer for reality's integrity, allowing them to perform their psychic surgery with less risk of catastrophic blowback. But the constant exposure to the "cacophony" of a broken universe is eroding his mind, a slow poison of dissonant realities that is driving him mad.
Viktor Morozov
Viktor Morozov is a human bloodhound, a KGB enforcer from the Ninth Directorate's Asset Recovery unit. He is a blunt instrument in a war of subtleties. He understands pressure, pain, and termination. He is not a spy; he is a hunter, tasked with retrieving high-value assets, both human and technological. To him, the defector Anja Petrova is not a person with ideals, but a piece of stolen state property that must be recovered or liquidated. He is the physical manifestation of the system Sineus and Petrova are running from: direct, brutal, efficient, and utterly devoid of sentiment. He is the iron fist that follows the whispers, the final, violent answer to any act of betrayal.
Zoltan Haas
Zoltan Haas is a creature of the Viennese underworld, a black-market dealer whose antique shop is a front for trading in artifacts and memories. He is volatile and driven by gut feelings, his allegiances tied not to flags but to a complex web of personal debts and loyalties. He is a survivor who thrives in the chaos of the Unseen War, seeing it as a grand, deadly marketplace. His trust is a rare commodity, earned through shared danger and paid for in blood and bourbon. While his motives are often selfish, his instincts about people are uncannily accurate. He is a dangerous and unpredictable player, a man who knows the price of everything, including the cost of saving the world, and he will always demand his cut.
Items, Weapons & Artefacts
The Aegis Conduit
The Aegis Conduit is a piece of the void given form. It is a seamless, solid rectangle of a material that devours light, feeling colder than it should. It has one, terrible function: to absorb and neutralize a catastrophic blast of pure Oblivion. It is the only known defense against the failsafe of a major memory weapon or the collapse of an Ashen Tract. Using it is a death sentence. It requires a living mind to act as a psychic channel, and the process is absolute, consuming the operator as it consumes the blast. It is the ultimate shield, a key that eats the hand that turns it, the final, desperate sacrifice to hold back the end of everything.
The Chairman's Weave
The Chairman's Weave is a three-piece suit of dark charcoal wool, a tool for social espionage. The fabric, interwoven with non-terrestrial micro-filaments, acts as a psychic amplifier. By focusing on a clear social archetype—"low-level bureaucrat," "trusted father figure"—the wearer projects a powerful perceptual bias. It doesn't create an illusion; it compels observers to interpret the wearer through the chosen role, allowing an agent to be ignored in a secure facility or to build instant rapport with a target. The suit demands immense concentration; a moment's distraction shatters the effect. It is a weapon of influence, but long-term use causes paranoia and a lasting dissociation from one's own identity.
The Charon Docket
The Charon Docket is a factory for spies. It appears as an old lawyer's portfolio of black, cracked leather, holding twelve plates of a material like polished obsidian. An operator uses a special stylus to "etch" harvested memories onto the plates—a childhood from an orphan, military service from a dead soldier, a skill from a captured expert. When placed near a "blank slate" subject, the docket broadcasts its contents, weaving a complete, layered identity into the subject's mind. It creates the perfect deep-cover agent, a spy who believes his own legend. But the construct is not flawless. Contradictory memories can cause instability, and the process of harvesting memories damages the donors, feeding the world's decay.
The Cortical Veil
The Cortical Veil is a machine for building cages in the mind. It is a heavy steel chair with a helmet of brass contacts, connected to a console of glowing vacuum tubes. It does not erase a memory; it isolates it. The machine generates a powerful, low-frequency field that wraps a targeted memory in a layer of psychic static. The memory still exists, but the subject can no longer access it, their brain registering it as meaningless noise. Agencies use it to create sleeper agents or to hide vital information inside a courier's mind, making them unable to reveal what they don't know they have. The suppression is not permanent, however. A powerful shock can fracture the static, causing the memory to surface in fragments of paranoia and nightmare.
The Dead Air Reels
The Dead Air Reels are a set of five metal spools wound with a micro-fine, silvery wire. They do not record sound or light; they record the void left by an erased memory. When used with a special playback device, a spool captures the psychic signature of a recent memory cutting within a fifty-meter radius. The playback is not audio, but a silent, flickering, black-and-white negative of the erased event, projected onto a nearby surface. Intelligence agencies use the reels for counter-intelligence, to confirm that a memory has been erased at a location. It is a tool for seeing what is no longer there, a way to watch the ghosts of history.
The Defector's Locket
A simple, oval-shaped silver locket, it is the only physical object left behind by Dr. Anja Petrova after she vanished. It is anomalously warm to the touch, like living skin. Inside, it is empty, but it holds a faint psychic residue. When touched, it imparts a fragment of sensation: the warmth of an unknown sun, the scent of salt and unfamiliar flowers, and a snatch of a simple, haunting melody from a stringed instrument. It is more than a memento of a fallen comrade; for Sineus, it is a tangible clue, a key to the past of the woman who sacrificed her future, and the anchor for a new, personal mission to uncover the truth of what happened to her.
The Eidolon Spectacles
The Eidolon Spectacles look like old reading glasses with a thin, dark metal frame. Their lenses, however, are not glass; they shimmer with an oily, unnatural light. When worn, they allow the user to see the world's scars. They reveal the memory imprints, the psychic residue, that clings to people, places, and objects. A gun might show the face of its last victim; a doorway, a forgotten kiss. They are a powerful tool for finding the truth in a world of lies, a way to read the history that has been papered over. But the truth has a price. The flood of other people's memories can overwhelm the user, shattering their sanity and leaving them lost in a past that is not their own.
The Fugue Coat
The Fugue Coat is a weapon of anonymity. It appears as a standard, high-quality men's overcoat of charcoal-gray wool, but its lining is woven with microscopic alien filaments. These generate a psychic field that disrupts the memory encoding process in observers within a five-meter radius. People see the wearer, they can hold a conversation, but the memory fails to anchor. A witness might recall a man, but not his face, his voice, or the purpose of their meeting. It is the perfect tool for deniable surveillance and covert meetings. The cost is to the wearer; long-term exposure degrades their own short-term memory, turning them into a ghost in their own life.
The Ghostwriter Typewriter
This artifact is a heavy, German-made Adler Universal office typewriter, its black lacquer chipped and its bakelite keys yellowed with age. It does not use ink or paper. It writes new memories directly into a person's mind. An operator connects a subject to the machine via thin copper filaments, places a source document—a report, a photograph—in the paper holder, and begins to type. Each typebar glows with a faint blue light, translating the information into a neural pattern that violently overwrites the subject's existing memories. Agencies use it to fabricate flawless backstories for deep-cover agents, but the process is agonizing and often results in complete psychological collapse for the subject and creeping identity dissociation for the operator.
The Janus Engine
At the heart of the secret war is the Janus Engine, a machine with two faces. It is a heart of polished black stone, cold to the touch, with wires and brass tubes snaking to humming consoles. One of its functions is to save, to hold every memory that has ever existed, a perfect library of the past. Its other function is to destroy. It does not just erase a memory; it erases the thing itself, stripping away its identity and purpose until a man is a stranger in his own skin and a city is a pile of bricks without a name. To control the engine is to control history, to decide what is true and what is forgotten forever. It is the final weapon, a tool with the power to unmake the world.
The Kirlian Anagraph
The Kirlian Anagraph is a brutal tool of interrogation, housed in a heavy green steel case the size of a suitcase. An operator straps a crude steel helmet of wires to a subject's head and sends powerful electrical pulses through their brain, forcibly extracting the psychic echo of a targeted memory. The raw energy is channeled to a projector, which etches a static, fractal pattern resembling frost crystals onto a gelatin-coated glass plate. This is not a picture, but a visual record of pure memory data. The process is dangerous, frequently causing seizures and permanent brain damage, and the resulting plate can only be deciphered by a skilled psychic interpreter. It is a machine that tears information from a mind, often destroying the mind in the process.
The Memorandum Suit
The Memorandum Suit is the uniform of a ghost. It is a generic, two-piece men's suit of coarse, charcoal-gray wool, utterly unremarkable in every way. Its fabric, however, is woven with non-terrestrial filaments that produce a psychic field interfering with short-term memory consolidation in observers. People see the wearer, but the memory never solidifies; the brain dismisses the input as irrelevant background noise. A witness cannot recall a face, a scar, or a conversation. It is the ultimate tool for surveillance and public meetings, a cloak of pure anonymity. The cost is a slow erosion of the wearer's own emotions and ability to form new memories, turning them into a stranger to their own life.
The Mnemosyne Shiv
It is not much to look at, just a shard of dark, glassy rock that feels unnaturally cold. The Mnemosyne Shiv does not cut skin; it cuts memory. Held in the hand, with the thought of a moment you wish to erase, it passes through a body like a ghost, severing a single memory from a target's mind. It leaves a clean, silent wound—a blank space where a memory used to be. It is a kingmaker in the shadow war, a tool that can turn a hero into a blank slate or erase a witness's testimony forever. But they say a piece of every stolen memory sticks to the user, that the wielder carries the ghosts of what they cut. It is a quiet, deadly piece of the great, grinding machine.
The Sleeper's Coat
The Sleeper's Coat is a heavy greatcoat of thick, dark grey wool, a tool of psychic anonymity. Its secret is the lining, a black, silk-like fabric woven with microscopic alien filaments. These generate a passive psychic field that scrambles any attempt to read the wearer's mind or memory signature. To a psychic or a user of an Eidolon Lens, the wearer is a chaotic blur, their identity and intentions unreadable. It allows an agent to infiltrate hostile areas and approach memory-sensitive targets undetected. It is a purely defensive tool, offering no protection from conventional weapons, and its filaments decay over time, making each coat a finite and irreplaceable asset reserved for the most critical of operatives.
The Stolen Keycard
It is a standard-issue KGB keycard, a palm-sized piece of Bakelite with a magnetic strip, slipped to Sineus by Dr. Petrova in a moment of desperation. It is more than an access card. Its strip contains encrypted protocols and coordinates, a map to a secret network of abandoned KGB paranormal research labs scattered across the Soviet Union. It is a tangible breadcrumb trail, a key to a Pandora's box of sleeping projects and forgotten horrors. Possessing it gives Sineus a new, dangerous direction in the Unseen War, but it also paints a target on his back, making him a priority for a KGB that wants its secrets back.
The Tonopah Null
The Tonopah Null is a solid object the size of a human fist, a piece of black, smoky quartz that seems to absorb all light. It is a passive beacon of Oblivion, generating a two-meter field of null-memory. Inside this field, objects and people are temporarily severed from their purpose. A gun becomes a useless piece of metal, a lock forgets its key, and a person forgets their own name and mission. Operatives use it to bypass guards and break a subject's will during interrogation. The effect is temporary, but repeated exposure causes permanent mental damage. It is a portable piece of an Ashen Tract, a wound in reality you can carry in your pocket.
The Zero Mark
The Zero Mark is a small, flat disc of non-reflective black material, like a physical hole in space. It is made from matter harvested from Ashen Tracts and it actively negates memory. Worn as a lapel pin or cufflink, it slowly erases the personal history of its bearer, stripping away attachments and fears to create a more effective nihilist agent. It also acts as a passive psychic beacon, allowing bearers to silently recognize each other through a shared sense of emptiness. It is a tool for resisting memory-based interrogation, but the cost is the user's soul. Long-term users become hollow shells, their pasts sacrificed for operational security.
