Greywater

The world is mostly grey — sky, water, and land all in the same spectrum of slate, ash, and pale silt. There is colour, but it's muted, washed-out, like a photograph left in sunlight too long. The civilization that lived here had advanced technology — Greywater was once roughly equivalent to mid-21st-century Earth. Something happened. The cities are still there. The infrastructure is mostly still there. The people are not.

To survive. The few thousand humans remaining on Greywater are scattered survivors and their descendants, scraping a living from the ruins of a civilization that ended seventy years ago. Most communities are small (50–400 people), insular, and deeply distrustful of outsiders. They want food, safe water, working medicine, and not to be the next community to disappear.

Aware and fearful. The Paths exist; the survivors know this; some of them know exactly where the Paths are. They have not used them — partly because they distrust the Paths, partly because they have a cultural sense (probably accurate) that the Paths are connected to whatever caused the Ending. Solace has a small, clandestine outpost — most survivor communities do not know it exists.