OVERFORGE & UNDERVAULT

“Where invention runs hot enough to burn.”

The Reflected Embervault — a city of brilliance above and mutation below.

🏛️ OVERFORGE

The Crown of Ascendant Industry

High atop a jagged canyon of shimmering stone lies Overforge, a metropolis built on ambition, precision, and carefully curated chaos.

Its skyline is a forest of:

• spiraling brass towers

• glass conduits carrying neon arcane current

• elevated rail lines that arc like lightning trapped in metal

• skybridges wrapped in braided crystal fiber

Overforge believes invention is worship, and motion is holiness.

Their guiding philosophy:

“If it hasn’t changed, it’s dying.”

Government & Doctrine: The Council of Fluxwrights

The ruling body is the Council of Fluxwrights, an ever-rotating assembly of technomancers, arcanomechanics, and mathematical theorists.

Seats shift constantly — sometimes weekly — because stagnant leadership is considered a moral failure.

Their laws are brief.

Their inventions are bold.

Their mistakes are catastrophic — and quietly accepted as collateral for “progress.”

Aesthetic & Culture

Overforge glitters:

Elegant exosuits hum with arc-light.

Streets flicker with animated signage.

Statues move, sometimes unintentionally.

Artists, engineers, and theorists blend together, creating a culture where creativity is currency and the boundary between genius and hazard is razor-thin.

☣️ UNDERVAULT

The Labyrinth Beneath the Light

Directly below Overforge’s radiant skyline sprawls Undervault, a churning undercity of furnaces, steam, and alchemical night.

Where Overforge aspires upward, Undervault sinks… and adapts.

Here, factories yaw open like metal maws.

Pipes hiss with luminous vapor.

Makeshift platforms cling to canyon walls.

And innovation rarely asks permission.

Undervault’s people survive by ingenuity, grit, and the ability to negotiate with systems that leak more than they function.

Life in Undervault

It is chaotic, dangerous, and astonishingly alive:

• overcrowded but resourceful

• scalding hot yet brilliantly illuminated

• full of jury-rigged inventions

• perfumed by chemical drift

• populated by those society relies on but refuses to acknowledge

If Overforge is ambition, Undervault is consequence.

Aesthetic

Picture:

• Bioluminescent moss along metal walkways

• Vent shafts glowing with unstable fumes

• Stained-glass heat vents

• Rope bridges above molten runoff

• Handmade devices powered by sparks of “borrowed” arcana

Undervault is beautiful in the way a lightning storm is beautiful.

⚗️ SPARK

The Catalytic Essence of Undervault

Spark is an unstable alchemical essence capable of supercharging biological and magical processes. It heightens instinct, accelerates mutation, and pushes mortal forms beyond their limits — sometimes fatally.

Invented by Dr. Aethryn Voss, Spark began as a tool for enhancing creativity.

It soon became the undercity’s most coveted and dangerous substance.

Spark does not merely transform the body — it overwrites it.

🦎 THE SPARK-SALAMANDERS

Children of Essence

Dr. Voss’s most infamous creation was the forced metamorphosis of fire-dwelling salamanders into fully sentient humanoids. With Spark as the catalyst, the salamanders became:

• flame-resistant workers

• flexible climbers

• bioluminescent in the dark

• deeply instinctive

• able to survive extreme heat and toxin exposure

Overforge labeled this “innovation.”

Undervault calls it indentured evolution.

The Spark-salamanders form the undercity’s labor backbone, assigned to work in volatile environments too dangerous for anyone else.

A growing faction of them is awakening — demanding recognition, rights, and revolution.

🧪 DR. AETHRYN VOSS

“The Architect of Mutable Flesh”

Role: Alchemist • Visionary • Fugitive

Current Status: Missing, presumed transformed.

Voss is revered by some as a prophet of change and reviled by others as a reckless tyrant of flesh. After Spark-related disasters threatened Overforge’s stability, Voss vanished into the caverns beneath Undervault.

Some believe he ascended into something Spark-born.

Others say he is dead.

The truth is much stranger.

🌀 TWIN CITY POLITICS

Overforge’s view of Undervault:

• necessary

• expendable

• a testing ground

• an infrastructural inconvenience

Undervault’s view of Overforge:

• exploiters

• hypocrites

• beautiful tyrants

• the reason everything breaks

Spark-Salamanders’ view of both:

• two halves of the same cage

The friction between the three groups is the beating heart of Reflected Embervault.

🔥 CAMPAIGN VALUE

Overforge & Undervault allow stories centered around:

• body modification and forced evolution

• alchemical addiction

• class division and revolution

• sabotage and espionage

• runaway inventions

• the ethics of innovation

• political conspiracies

• underground resistance networks

• Spark-mutated monstrosities

• the forgotten fate of Dr. Voss

They add moral ambiguity and high-stakes chaos to the Reflected Aescharion setting.

🔗 SUGGESTED WIKI LINKS

To help your players navigate the setting, here are natural cross-links:

Related Cities

• Embervault (Prime) — The forge-city Overforge reflects.

• Calculaton — The corporatized reflection of Harlequin Vale.

• Still Bastion — Reflected Silverwake and its authoritarian order.

Characters & Factions

• Dr. Aethryn Voss — Complete biography of Spark’s creator.

• Spark-Salamander Resistance — Emerging faction details.

• Council of Fluxwrights — Rotating leadership of Overforge.

• The Cleftwright Covenant (Prime) — A parallel philosophy of liberation.

Substances & Technology

• Spark (Alchemical Essence) — Full mechanics & dangers.

• Mirrorstone (Prime) — Soul-current technology Spark imitates.

Thematic Links

• Motion vs. Stillness — Core dualism of the world.

• Reflected Aescharion Cosmology — Why reflections differ so dramatically.