Welcome to the Frontier.

You have likely heard the stories. You have heard of the screaming rails of the Orvain Consortium, carving paths through land that tries to heal over the tracks like a wound. You have heard of the Dust Vultures, men and women who have forgotten how to be human, hunting the mirages of the deep wastes. You have heard of the Redeemers, who would burn a child to save a village, and the Ironbrands, who would save the child only if the coin was good.

But mostly, you have heard of the Veil.

This book is not a history lesson of a civilized world. That world is dead. It died screaming when the drills went too deep and the sky turned the color of a bruised eye. This book is a manual for what comes after. It is a guide to the Rustwater Basin, the Ash Belt, and the thin places where reality has worn through like the knees of a beggar’s trousers.

In The Veil & Lead, you play the survivors. You are the drifters, the lawmen, the mystics, and the damned who walk the line between the cold iron of industry and the maddening chaos of the supernatural. You will wield guns and sorcery, not to save the world—it is too late for that—but to survive it.

The World That Was

The elders speak of the time before the Rupture, but their stories are fragmented, like pages torn from a rain-soaked book. They speak of a nation of laws, of telegraph lines that carried voices without static, of a sun that warmed the skin instead of burning it. They call this the Gilded Age, a time when mankind believed it had tamed the continent.

It was the greed of industry that undid us. The mines dug too deep, chasing veins of ghost-rock and strange, humming silver. The rails stretched too far, piercing the skin of the world in places that were meant to remain whole. They say the Orvain Consortium’s drills breached a layer of metaphysical bedrock, piercing the barrier between Here and There.

The Rupture

It didn’t happen all at once. It started with the “Flickers.” Shadows that moved when no one was walking. Storms that rained salt instead of water. People waking up screaming in languages that dead civilizations hadn’t yet invented.

Then came the Rupture. The geography of the frontier buckled. Mountains rose overnight, jagged and wrong, like broken teeth. Lakes drained into the earth and were replaced by sinkholes of swirling entropy, like Ojo del Diablo. The sky shifted permanently, settling into a twilight hue of bruised purple and sickly orange.

The government in the East, terrified of the contagion, walled itself off. They drew a line on the map—the Quarantine Line—and declared everything west of it to be the “Lost Territories.” To us, it’s just home.

The Long Silence

For twenty years, there was only chaos. The dead rose from their graves, confused and hungry. The animals twisted into multi-limbed horrors. Society collapsed into pockets of desperate survival. This was the era of the Long Silence, where humanity nearly flickered out.

But we are stubborn creatures. We learned to live with the horror. We built walls of iron and lines of salt. We forgot the names of the old gods and made deals with the new powers. We learned that the Current—the chaotic energy flowing from the Veil—could be harnessed, if one was willing to bleed for it.

Now, a fragile order has returned. But it is an order built on bones.

The Nature of the Soul

Why do we fight? Why do we not simply lay down and let the ash bury us?

Because we remember.

In The Veil & Lead, your character is defined not by their strength or their speed, but by their Memories. Your past is the fuel for your power.

When a Psy-Slinger loads a ghost-bullet, they are not using mana or spell slots. They are loading the memory of their mother’s face, or the smell of rain on the day they fell in love. They fire it. The bullet strikes true. And suddenly, they cannot recall the color of their mother’s eyes.

This is the central tragedy of the Frontier. To change the world, you must give up the parts of yourself that live in it. This process is called Erosion.

As you face the horrors of the wastes, your mind will fray. As you use your powers, your memories will burn away. If you lose them all, you become Hollow—a shell of a person, moved only by the Current, stripped of identity and humanity.

The Introduction Continues

The Bleeding Frontier is shaped by the powers that rose from the ashes and the brutal realities of daily survival. Continue reading to learn about the factions that bleed the land dry and the rules that keep the living alive.