The world of Neo-Europa is designed to be rich, immersive, and consistent. This page outlines the core worldbuilding principles that guide contributions to the setting—helping maintain thematic cohesion, narrative depth, and creative flexibility.
These principles ensure that Neo-Europa feels like a living, breathing city: one forged from myth, memory, and machinery.
🧠 1. Technology Is Social, Not Neutral
In Neo-Europa, technology is always tied to control, class, and consciousness. Cybernetic implants, Spinal Gates, ICE, and access to Cypherspace are not just tools—they reflect a citizen's place in the hierarchy.
- Who has access?
- Who is left behind?
- What memories are edited or encrypted?
Worldbuilding should reflect how tech shapes identity, power, and meaning.
🩸 2. Memory Is a Resource
Memory is more than a metaphor—it is a currency, a weapon, and a system of control. Characters may trade memories, lose them, encode them, or store them in vaults. Even the architecture of the city may "remember" past events.
When building lore or factions, consider:
- How do they use memory?
- What do they try to forget?
- What memories are sacred—or forbidden?
🧬 3. Myth and Code Intertwine
Neo-Europa fuses ancient legacies with digital constructs. From the nobility’s ceremonial roles to the Chapel Nodes’ AI gods, the setting embraces a layered aesthetic where myth-tech is real, sacred, and glitched.
This means:
- Council rituals might mirror medieval oaths—backed by biometric seals
- Chapel Nodes channel Norse or Greek archetypes—but run on corrupted code
- A sword might be ceremonial and quantum-synced
Honor the poetic logic behind power.
🕯️ 4. Aesthetic Is World Logic
The look and feel of Neo-Europa isn’t just visual—it reflects how the world operates.
- Corporate towers are cathedrals of influence
- Slum stairwells are vertical battlegrounds
- Cypherspace is both data and dreamscape
When designing environments, factions, or tech, consider not just what they do—but how they appear, sound, and feel. Does their style reinforce their power or obscure it?
🧩 5. Social Structure Is Everything
Neo-Europa is a deeply hierarchical society. From the Seven Families to the Nulls, every layer of the city reflects inequality and legacy.
When worldbuilding:
- Define your faction or group’s place in the Ladder
- Consider how they speak, dress, and access technology
- Think about how they resist, maintain, or exploit their role
Even a back-alley Butcher Shop follows the rules—or rewrites them.
🧿 6. The World Remembers (Even If It’s Wrong)
Neo-Europa has a fractured, curated sense of history. Some records are propaganda. Others are lost. Many are stored in corrupted archives, AI echoes, or privatized vaults.
This principle encourages:
- Contradictory lore entries
- Unreliable narrators
- Forgotten truths resurfacing
Memory and myth are unreliable, but always powerful.
🔀 7. Glitch Is Flavor
This world isn’t clean. Data corrupts. Gods fragment. Architecture repeats, decays, or stutters. Use glitch as a stylistic and thematic tool:
- Visions flicker
- Text corrupts
- ICE whispers broken code
- Emotions loop
Don’t polish away the noise—let it speak.
🧭 In Summary
Neo-Europa is a city of thrones and circuits, myth and memory, elegance and ruin. When worldbuilding:
- Think socially, symbolically, and sensorially
- Anchor ideas in emotion, contradiction, and history
- Embrace beauty, brutality, and mystery
Build not just a world, but a city that remembers you.