Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Faelvur, the dark elven god of fire
Check out the Arcverse's first novel
Role Play Games for Beginners
Discover Worlds. Tell Stories. Create Legends
Welcome to the Arcverse
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Your gateway to tabletop roleplaying games — whether you’re starting with Dungeons & Dragons or exploring new systems and genres.
We offer expert RPG advice for beginners, Game Master tools, and worldbuilding guides to help you create and run unforgettable adventures. Whether you play fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, horror, superheroes, or post-apocalyptic settings, the Arcverse is your home for creativity, storytelling, and game-ready inspiration.
Start your next campaign. Build your world. Shape your legend.
The Time of the Red is the gritty, desperate era in which the world finds itself after the cataclysmic 4th Corporate War. It takes its name from the crimson skies that dominated the globe for years, a direct result of the dust and radioactive debris thrown into the atmosphere by the war's widespread destruction, culminating in the detonation of a tactical nuke in Night City's Corporate Plaza. This is a world of scarcity and fragmentation, where global trade has collapsed, the old Net is a haunted wasteland, and societies are struggling to rebuild from the ashes.Megacorporations, though wounded, are re-emerging as leaner, more ruthless "Neocorps," while Nomads have become the lifeblood of a shattered supply chain. For the people living through it, The Time of the Red is a daily struggle for survival in a world defined by the bloody aftermath of corporate greed, where opportunities are forged in the ruins and legends are born from desperation.
The Time of the Red, spanning roughly from 2023 to the late 2040s, was born from the ashes of the 4th Corporate War, the most devastating conflict in the Cyberpunk saga.The war, primarily a proxy conflict between military mega-corporations Militech and Arasaka, escalated from covert operations to open global warfare, leaving shattered cities and economies in its wake. The conflict's climax was the "Night City Holocaust" on August 20, 2023, when a Militech-funded strike team—allegedly including the legendary Johnny Silverhand—detonated a mini-nuke inside Arasaka Tower. The explosion and resulting firestorms killed half a million people and threw massive amounts of irradiated particulate into the atmosphere.This, combined with orbital strikes and other wartime devastation, stained the skies a hellish red color for two years, with lingering effects for a decade more, giving the era its name.The "blood rains"—a greasy, toxic red slime—became a common and dreaded occurrence.
The war's fallout wasn't just environmental. It shattered the old world's infrastructure. In tandem with the physical destruction, the legendary netrunner Rache Bartmoss unleashed the DataKrash, a digital apocalypse that destroyed the global Net, turning it into a treacherous wasteland haunted by rogue AIs and deadly viruses. In its place, society now relies on fragmented, localized CityNets, with the ruins of the Old Net quarantined behind a massive firewall called the Blackwall. With global shipping lanes destroyed and the Net gone, international trade ceased, leading to an age of scarcity.The old megacorporations either collapsed or were severely weakened, forced to rebrand and operate as smaller, more agile "Neocorps." In the power vacuum, the United States government, already a fragile entity, effectively dissolved, leaving independent city-states like Night City to fend for themselves. This shattered world became the domain of Nomads, whose control of land and sea trade routes made them indispensable, and edgerunners, who found endless opportunities in the chaos of a world desperately trying to rebuild.
Adventure Hook
A Nomad clan matriarch from the Aldecaldos approaches the crew with a strange but lucrative contract. For years, her family has been scavenging a bombed-out pre-war highway on the outskirts of Night City. Recently, they uncovered a sealed military convoy buried under tons of rubble. The convoy dates back to the height of the 4th Corporate War, just before the nuke fell. According to old family records, it was transporting an experimental Militech comms server—a piece of hardware rumored to contain one of the last stable, uncorrupted archives of the Old Net from before the DataKrash.
The job is to crack open the lead-lined transport and extract the server's data core. The matriarch believes the data could contain lost schematics, pre-Collapse financial records, or even the locations of other lost military caches, a treasure trove for her family. However, the convoy's automated defense systems are still active, and the radiation from the nearby Hot Zone makes the work hazardous. Worse, a rival gang of Wraiths has spotted the Aldecaldo's salvage operation and is planning a full-scale assault to seize the prize for themselves. The crew must survive a decaying battlefield, outwit a dead corporation's automated security, and fend off a horde of savage gangers to recover a ghost of the world that was.