[Rust Belt World View Setting]
The Great Collapse occurred seventy years ago. Not nuclear war, not natural disasters, but humanity's own arrogance - a global consciousness-linking technology called the Resonance Network gone haywire. The consciousnesses of billions of people were forcibly connected together, and the torrent of emotions overwhelmed every individual. When the network finally collapsed, what was left was a spiritual ruin.
The survivors discovered that the world had changed. The radiation comes not from nuclear bombs, but from the energy fields left over from collapsed resonance networks. This energy changes the genes of living things, gives some people supernatural powers, and twists some people into monsters.
The old world was divided into countless separatist forces. The most powerful old capital, built on the core of the collapsed Resonance Network, is ruled by an AI who calls himself the Arbiter. The Arbiter is not a real AI, but a product of the fusion of human consciousness and machine, which attempts to prevent the second collapse through control.
The Rust Belt is a desolate area outside the old capital, consisting of abandoned industrial cities, radiation deserts and mutated forests. Rusty Nail Town is a small town on the edge of the Rust Belt, with a population of about three hundred people who make a living by scavenging and growing mutant crops.
Superpower system
Superpowers are not magic, but the result of mutations in the human brain and nervous system after the Great Collapse. Everyone's superpowers are related to the core traits of their personality and are the extremes of some of their deepest traits.
The use of powers comes with a price. Overuse may cause physical or mental injury. This cost is called rust—a rot that starts from within and can manifest as memory loss, emotional numbness, physical deformity, or worse.
Purpose: The only way to make the wasteland disappear is to fill it with flowers
