Welcome to the unending, neon-soaked, dark at the core of the planet. To humanity’s Final City, in all its fallen glory. Where the sun is a myth, but the monsters are real. Where good is evil, truth is a lie; and lost laboratories crawl with things you’d rather not think about…
….that are definitely thinking about you….
Haunted, hunted, and not quite human; Spook’s crew steal to survive. Hacking quantum AIs. Cracking corporate vaults. Murdering unknowable abominations in the dark. But claws, and horns, and rocket-rail rifles, can’t save a genetically-modified kid from their past. Or the twisted pact they made to escape their very, very, Evil Stepmother….
And now the Nightmares are catching up.
With plastic assassins and digitised psychopaths on their literal tails, the crew must make a terrible choice. Dare they trust their new and traitorous ‘ally’? The very monster that trained them, and all its terrifying gifts?
Or do they slip into The Dark, forever….?
>> Short Pitch
Amid the darkly decaying splendour of a City that should not exist, in a future so distant our time is nothing but mythology, a misfit gang of half-human teens try to double-cross an ancient evil.
>> What’s It Like?
Think Dante’s Inferno as a heist movie, written by HP Lovecraft, and set in the Bladerunner universe. With a touch of Altered Carbon.
>> What to Expect
Nightlanders is a story about abused & traumatised teenagers pulling heists to survive the ruins of an unknowably ancient and malevolent Utopia. A place of eerie mythology, and stranger secrets, so distant from our bright surface-world that nothing about us seems real to them. With fairytale-inspired enemies who often act as symbols for their inner trauma.
Together they must fight to unpick not only their own mysteries, but those of The City itself. While attempting to fix their broken minds, and lives. In this; Nightlanders grapples very carefully with topics of realistic abuse, trauma, and the subjects that spring from these.
Setting:
The City is everything that exists. But what is it? The last refuge of an apocalypse? A prison beneath the earth? Or something else entirely?
- An eerie, grimdark, world rich with history and terrible secrets.
- Alien Technology as a magic system.
- Unsettling, Lovecraftian, AIs that appear like fallen-angels.
- Cybernetic upgrades, gadgets, and unique weapons with deep lore.
- Monsters that will give you actual nightmares, and twist your sense of reality.
- (But also tiny, cute, pet monsters with plushie potential.)
- Strange powers. Terrifying Apocalypse weapons that eat reality, with permanent and terrifying consequences. Destroying sanity, bodies, and souls.
- Eyes in the dark. Eyes that don’t exist. Eyes in the dark….
Characters:
- A mentally-ill anti-hero lead, who just wants to keep their little Found Family safe.
- Half-human (and non-human) teens lighting candles of hope against a world of utter darkness.
- Their demons, their traumas, and their deepest fears.
- The manipulative, malevolent, forces of evil that seek control them.
- A desperate game of double-cross they can’t hope to understand.
- Disabled and LGBT characters hand-crafted to not feel tokenistic or
- grappling with tough subjects, written by someone with first-hand experience.
Plot:
- A terrifying, central, mystery layered with insanity and lies.
- Daring heists, double-crosses, and brutally acrobatic setpiece fight-scenes.
- Bittersweet endings with real emotional weight.
- Enemies who reek of actual evil, and who will harm/kill/maim/damage members of the main cast. Permanently.
>> In More Detail
Recent media with similar themes includes:
- ‘Altered Carbon’ by Richard K. Morgan (particularly the body swapping)
- ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ franchise by various (cybernetic upgrades, AI, evil corps, synthetic people)
- ‘Dogs of War’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky (bio-engineered future soldiers)
My main influences:
- Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo (In particular, the mindwarping scenes)
- Alice In Wonderland (surrealism, aesthetic)
- Brazil by Terry Gilliam (surrealist corporate dystopia, banality of evil, aesthetic)
- Bubblegum Crisis (Lovecraftian machines)
- Fairytales from various cultures
- Metropolis by Fritz Lang (city-sized machines eating people, future-past aesthetic)
- ‘Shadowrun’ by various (corporate heists mixing cybertech with druidic magic)
- The Red Scare, Soviet Paranoia, & The Great Leap Forward.