Premise

DRAFT — Vincent owns the canon; rewrite freely. The frame: one bloody universe — DOOM’s gore with Blizzard’s cohesion. Every game is an entry, not a one-off.

The Scourge

It came from the void, and our first contact — a battle in the sky — we lost (Zero-Day). Now it punches into the world through breaches — wounds that vomit an endless, mutating horde: the Scourge. A hive mind with no general but with elites and breach-bosses. It is the through-line villain of the whole universe — fought in every title.

Its nature is locked in CANON: a host-dependent parasite with no native form (it wears what it infects — demonic, alien, fungal, machine, all at once), not evil, only driven to survive and spread. It consumes hosts to death, extinguishes a world, and jumps to the next. It spreads like infection along the only paths still connecting the ruins: the lanes. Its one weakness is isolation — the hive signal (“the Choir”) has a limited radius, so sever a node from it and the Scourge goes feral. You can win battles; you never truly kill it.

The two human factions — uneasy allies

Humanity is split by doctrine. The Pyre and the Wardens are rivals, not enemies:

• The-Pyre (offense) — zealots who descend into breaches to burn the source. → Scourge-Survivors (FPS).
• The-Wardens (defense) — engineers who hold the lanes with towers and walls. → Deadlane (tower defense).

The Pact: whatever the feud, humans always stand together the instant a breach opens — the Scourge is the only true enemy. Their rivalry plays out in sanctioned arenas (Pactfall), never as open war while the Scourge still bleeds through.

Scales of one war

• Deadlane — hold the lane: stop the Scourge pouring from a breach. Macro, defensive.
• Scourge-Survivors — survive the swarm: a lone Purger, drowning in the Scourge, pushing deeper room by room. Micro, offensive, DOOM-fast and bloody.
• Starblight — burn the orbital infection: pilots intercept Scourge spores, infected wreckage, and breach-ships before they fall into the surface war. It also carries Zero-Day as the first-contact last stand: the sky battle humanity loses before every Resistance-era front exists.
• Pactfall — test the Pact: sanctioned human rivalry under pressure from the Scourge neutral threat.
• Brawl — survive the pocket: trench-war close combat when soldiers are cut off in dead-air, shell holes, broken causeways, and no-man’s-land. Duel proves the 1v1 lost-fighter fantasy; Arena Brawl widens the same pocket to several fighters and Scourge pressure.
• Redline — outrun the Choir: courier runs keep holdouts talking when the lanes and wires are cut.
• Rothulk — burn it from the inside: Pyre sabotage climbs living breach-ships and ignites the repeater-core.
• Warline — manage the front: the strategy-lite layer where these operations report pressure, resources, and region shifts.

When a lane falls in Deadlane, the Pyre send a Purger into that breach in Scourge-Survivors — the games hand off to each other. Shared horde, rules, Timeline, and the DOOM-like blood, rust, gunmetal, and hellfire gore of the Style-Bible.

The main world can stay unnamed for now: Earth-like enough for ruins, cities, foundries, orbit, moons, and fleets to read instantly, but not locked to real Earth geography.

The horizon

A persistent War-for-the-Lanes server (eventually Dofus-like) where the three factions fight over a living map. See that note.

Open questions for Vincent

(The big keystones are now locked in CANON. Still open:)

• Who exactly are the Pyre and Wardens — corp, remnant military, cult? (flesh the factions)
• Which Scourge host families should dominate the first shipped bestiary?
• A third human stance: can the Choir be understood / steered rather than purged?