Somnos is an urban fantasy setting split between two locations: the City of Nod, a vast supernatural metropolis that predates human civilization, and Midway, a real-world city where the boundary between the mundane and the arcane has worn thin.
The Cosmology
The world as most people experience it is not everything. The Veil is a barrier that suppresses magic and separates the living world from its hostile Shadow. Beyond the Shadow lie the Domains, alien worlds each tied to an Aeon, entities so powerful they have become inseparable from the realities they inhabit.
Magic is ambient on the other side of the Veil. Practitioners interact with it through eldritch language, a structured system of symbols, tones, and intent that can be externalized through ink, voice, music, or sheer will. The capacity is innate in some but the discipline is not. Trained talent falls into a taxonomy of disciplines.
The Aeons who rule the domains are old, powerful, and fallible. Some claim to predate humanity while others claim to have once been human. Many are petty and vindictive, few are wise, and none perceive as much as they pretend to. They are drawn to worship the way an addict is drawn to a fix, because the bond with mortal supplicants gives them access to feelings and abilities they cannot reach alone. The most powerful among them, the Aeon called Elohim, built his dominion by consuming rival gods over centuries: Re, Horus, Quetzalcoatl, Ares, and countless others. Other Aeons call him the Usurper King.
The City of Nod
Nod is an Aeon's Domain that functions as a city. Built by the Ancient known as nemo, it exists under a sunless sky lit by pale moons, dim streetlamps, and arcane lanterns. A black stone tower rises from a bottomless lake at the city's center, stretching into the dark without a visible summit.
The city is a crossroads to every other Domain, neutral ground where the conflicts of gods are forbidden and everyone else's conflicts are merely discouraged. Nemo enforces this neutrality rarely and absolutely.
Seven million residents from seven sapient species share the city. Humans are the most numerous and the most vulnerable, with no innate magic and no biological advantages beyond adaptability and stubbornness. The kaarn are large, constantly growing beings whose biology can stabilize into something functional or spiral into painful, monstrous degradation. theriae are the beast-folk behind every werewolf and kitsune legend, a single species expressing enormous biological variety across canine, avian, serpentine, and stranger lineages. masques project glamour that rewrites how observers perceive them, with true forms that resist comprehension. skulks are small, fast, and resilient enough to thrive in conditions that would kill anything else. The Woven are colonial entities formed by the cooperation of thousands of tiny organisms into singular single sapient entities. And the carceri are living architecture, buildings that are also organisms, some of which predate every other species' arrival and may be the oldest things in Nod.
Nod changes its residents. The city's ambient magic pries at biology, identity, and sanity. Humans grow strange. Kaarn growth uncontrollably. Theriae grow feral. Masques grow thin. Woven grow mindless. Every species has a best case and a worst case, and which one you get is not something anyone can predict.
How Nod Works
A council of seven sorcerers governs the city in the space between Nemo's indifference and the population's tolerance. They agree on almost nothing. One has spent a century trying to seize personal control. Another commands the city's constabulary and uses it as leverage. A third sees the future clearly enough to outmaneuver everyone else. Nod is a city that functions in spite of its government.
Below the Council, power distributes through guilds, factions, and institutions that have accumulated influence over millennia. The city's infrastructure is a corresponding patchwork: arcane streetlamps next to electrical wiring, stone aqueducts feeding into steel plumbing, Carceri load-bearing walls supporting concrete and glass towers. Earth goods flow into Nod constantly through the Merchants Guild, and the material culture reflects it; canned food, mobile phones, generators, vehicles, and building materials sit alongside artifacts and equipment that have no Earthly origin. The technology is modern in pieces and ancient in others, never uniform, and rarely standardized.
Key Organizations
- The Merchants Guild moves goods between Domains and runs a front corporation on Earth.
- The Mercenaries Guild sells violence on contract.
- The Slavers Guild trades in sapient beings under a formal compact with the Council.
- The Order is a human-supremacist militia that patrols the Cardinal Boroughs.
- The pallbearers collect the dead before corpses attract ghasts or start changing.
- The hospitallers treat the wounded of all factions.
- The lamplighters maintain the streetlamps that keep the shadows at bay.
- The chroniclers keep records in a city older than human civilization.
Egress
Every mortal who wants to leave Nod needs a gate-mark, a tattoo etched by a Scribe that grants passage through the Veil. The Scribes set their own prices. There is no regulatory body, no price control, and no alternative except the rare and unreliable Striders. The result is a class system that follows the mark: those who can leave and those who cannot, with wealth, mobility, and political influence concentrated among the former.
The lucky few humans who do escape Nod, back into the real world, often find the details of their time fading like a dream. Those gone for a long time are often startled to find that their family members and friends did not notice their absence, or more disturbingly that they remember seeing or even interacting with them as if they weren't gone. The clouded recall, the doppelganger effect, and the propensity for Noddish traits to be invisible to regular humans, have all served a protective purpose, keeping Nod from ever rising above the level of urban myth.
Midway
Midway is a mortal city built near a thin point in the Veil. Supernatural activity concentrates there in ways the mundane population does not understand. The Germaine Foundation, a private organization founded by an immortal being of uncertain nature, has spent three centuries trying to build a unified theory of the supernatural, a framework that reduces the arcane to something observable, categorizable, and predictable. Their field teams, drawn from civilians with latent abilities, have confronted Domain-level threats in Midway and survived, establishing that mortal organizations can operate in this space with the right preparation.
They are not the only ones interested.
- The Brotherhood of Diocletian, an ancient military order founded by a Roman emperor after a vampiric assassination attempt, has hunted supernatural beings for seventeen centuries.
- Section 4 operates with government authority and minimal public visibility.
- Kuron Inc. pursues corporate interests in the paranormal.
Midway is where the setting's two halves meet. The politics, species, and ancient grudges of Nod press against a mortal city through thin spots in reality, and the people caught in the overlap have to figure out what they're dealing with using a vocabulary of rumors and myth.
Tone
Somnos is dark but not grim. The setting runs on specificity over spectacle: the annual quota negotiations where the numbers being haggled over are people, the transit system that appeared overnight and induces memory loss in its passengers, the tavern that is also a living creature and rearranges its floor plan to break up fights, the pay-per-view bloodsport subscription that funds the city's telecommunications network. The supernatural as infrastructure; complicated, political, and subject to the same petty mortal failures as everything else.