Neo York is a city carved into the sheer walls of a massive canyon, where arts, invention, and rebellion animate daily life. The authoritarian Artistry Regulation Network (ARN) dominates the city, hoarding all cultural relics and masterpieces in their impenetrable Art Depots. Creativity is strictly policed and rationed, social mobility is rare, and only those who comply may earn privilege, or so the ARN claims. After the Last Canvas Uprising fractured society, the Network seized control, uniting merchant guilds, technocrats, and former warlords under a single authoritarian banner. Their mantra, "Order Through Unity, Power Through Ascension," drives their relentless efforts to suppress rebellion, centralize creativity, and concentrate wealth in the hands of the elite.

The Network established Art Depots, massive vaults where every relic and artwork of the old world is stored, catalogued, and guarded with fanatical care. Creativity, in their eyes, is a resource to be harnessed or, when necessary, suppressed. Art is repurposed for propaganda, reengineered as tools for control, or left to decay so its spirit cannot fuel revolution. Still, rumors persist of relics that possess a strange energy, hidden away in the deepest vaults that some believe could shift the changing sands.

While the ARN enforces a rigid hierarchy, the city’s real heartbeat belongs to the Resistance: an alliance of countless independent guilds made up of artists, hackers, thieves, storytellers, and dissidents of every kind. Guilds come together to chip away at ARN control, liberate art, and outwit their oppressors.

The Daughters of Orus serve as both church and gatekeeper of spiritual and social mobility. The church reveres Orus, the Golden God and First Man, whose legendary ascent from mortal origins to divine power frames their doctrine. They assert that spiritual ascension is possible for all, but only through gathering wealth, particularly gold, and by demonstrating devotion through ritual and offering.

However, true ascension and advancement through Neo York’s strict social classes are only granted at the discretion of ARN, using the church as their instrument. All who aspire to rise must pass through the Daughters, whose gilded rites and blessings mark the transition from mere citizen to one of the city’s “gilded” elite. The more wealth one amasses and donates, the greater the ascension.

Despite ARN meddling with the church, there are still some in the order that whisper of a prohecy. That in a time of deepest shadow, a hidden relic shall rise from the forgotten stone. When golden light returns to the hands of the worthy, boundaries will fall, and the world’s true spirit shall awaken, ushering the ascendant into an era where creation flows unbound and all things lost are made whole once more.