LIFE IN DESHRET GUIDE / HELP / LORE / LIFE IN DESHRET In play: help life in deshret. Also daily life, everyday life, culture, society, social status, housing. IN THIS TOPIC 14 Housing Food and Drink Weather Medicine Education Technology Social Status Identity Sex and Gender Drugs Sport Music The Old World Up and DownWhat everyday life is like in Deshret, from housing and food to status, sex, drugs, and music.
Life in Deshret is complex, vibrant, and messy. Most of its details depend on the floor you live on, and the floor you live on says a great deal about your status.
Housing
Housing is controlled by whoever rules a given floor. In Suburba, the slums, a floor boss hands out rooms. The boss is usually the most senior and eldest resident, and allocation usually follows the value of your work, though a side deal with a faction for better digs is not unheard of. Lower-status workers get communal pods with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Higher-status workers might get a small room of their own.
Sixers, the members of the Six Guilds, get better housing in Arcadia, the residential part of the guild floors. Members of the Great Houses live in mysterious luxury on the lowest floors, known together as Palatine.
Food and Drink
In the slums, food comes mostly from the vats of the Kolkhos, the farmers' collective. Efficient crops like tubers, insect protein, soy, algae, and mushrooms are processed into pastes that are shaped, dyed, and flavoured to look like real food. A tuber called pith is ground into pithmeal with dried fungi to make bread, frycakes, and the like. The upper classes might eat real produce grown by House Amari.
For meat, Mythos grows huge amounts of cultivated meat, known as vatling. Sixers might get real animal meat, though those animals are still engineered for efficiency.
There are no lakes or rivers in Deshret, but water is not terribly scarce, thanks to geothermal sources and very good recycling.
Weather
The city simulates natural weather. To someone from our world it would feel eerie: a little too synthetic, a little too perfect. To almost everyone in Deshret, who never goes to the surface, it is the only weather they have ever known.
Medicine
Life can be brutal, and illness and injury are real risks. Lost limbs are usually replaced with cyberware, despite Sepulchre's disapproval. Biological replacements exist but are out of reach for many.
Mental health is poorly understood. Someone delusional is likely to have their delusions called either heresy or revelation. Mythos tends to ask one question: is the problem in the body or in the soul? The closest thing to therapy is the guidance of Sepulchre's priests.
Education
Nearly everyone gets some schooling, in the creches run by Sepulchre. Children learn the basics of faith, history, and what they need to survive in the city. Almost everyone can read and write Shinar, the common tongue. Other languages are learned when they are needed.
After the creche, learning follows an apprenticeship model, especially in the guilds. A would-be doctor apprentices under a full member of Mythos, hopes to earn that status one day, and then trains apprentices of their own.
Technology
Technology is part of everyday life, but not in a way we would recognise. Plenty is familiar: broadcast television and radio, and a handset in nearly every pocket. Every citizen also has a Tessera, a chip put in the brain in infancy that connects them to the Nous network.
What is different is how people relate to it. The inner workings of machines are a black box to almost everyone below the highest ranks of the guilds, even to people who work with those systems every day. The level of technology also varies wildly, because of scarce resources and Sepulchre's rules on what is acceptable. You might see black-powder guns like muskets next to fully modern and lethal weapons.
Social Status
Your status comes from your work and your House.
The Great Houses sit at the very top: the nine families of the Pagos. Even inside a House the gap is wide. The ruling line holds real power, while distant kin may only get a little extra respect.
Minor Houses are the many other families proud or powerful enough to call themselves a House. Some are nearly as strong as a Great House, and some are in shambles. The name earns some respect but no legal standing. If the Great Houses are titled nobility, the Minor Houses are more like landed gentry.
Full guild members, the sixers, have real economic and social privilege, and more of it the higher they climb. They put a guild particle before their surname and often get better housing.
Yeomen are contract workers who serve the guilds or Houses without full membership, from the supplier who sells raw materials to a guild to the gardener on a Great House estate. They are the classic middle class.
Slummers, the people of Suburba, have their own culture, agendas, and factions, separate from the guilds. They go to the Cabiri for repairs, not to Vulcani. Slummers are a blender of people: workers, criminals, outlaws, disgraced ex-guilders. Some hate the guilds and some do not; some hate the state and some do not. The Coterie, the crime syndicate, is the only authority they all answer to.
Identity
Our ideas of race and ethnicity do not exist here. Nobody reads anything into the colour of someone's skin or the shape of their features. There are specific stereotypes, such as the notoriously pale ruling family of House Vesalius, but they say nothing about who is good or desirable. Names are a mishmash of influences with none of the patterns we would recognise.
Sex and Gender
Sexuality is not taboo, socially or religiously. Sex work is legal. Nudity is not illegal across the city, though it can get you in trouble in the classier parts. Gender and sex are a non-issue: anyone who is not deep in poverty can change their gender expression and even their body through biomodding.
The one place sex is watched closely is lineage. The Houses care a great deal about blood. A child born out of wedlock to a House gets no official recognition, only a special surname that marks them as a bastard. See help great houses.
Drugs
Drugs are fully legal. Alchemy, as chemistry is called here, makes plenty of recreational substances as well as medicine. Most are synthetic, with a few real-world ones like tobacco and marijuana around. House Amari sells the real, grown thing at a steep price. People smoke and vape.
Sport
Our sports are mostly unknown. The city's national sport is a version of Hussade: teams fight across a grid of raised catwalks over a tank of water to reach the other team's mascot and strip it.
Music
Music is a huge part of life, with many competing scenes. Songs from the old world are lost, but some styles linger, mixed in strange new ways. The slums lean toward industrial techno, EBM, gabber, trap metal, and industrial hip hop. The Coterie backs dark cabaret, electro swing, gothic rock, and even Balkan brass. Most people listen to Symphony's heavily promoted mainstream: hyperpop, dark synthpop, synthwave, alternative R&B and hip hop. Sepulchre's sacred music draws on chant, neoclassical darkwave, ritual ambient, drone, and funeral doom. The Houses patronise their own tastes.
The Old World
Most citizens know very little about the world before the Burning, and what they know is garbled, with myth and history mixed together. Elves and dragons, when people have heard of them at all from salvaged books or films, may well be believed to have been real. Old-world identities like "European" or "Chinese" sound like invented peoples from a science-fiction novel. Old languages survive inside Shinar, but chopped up past recognition.
Up and Down
Everyday metaphors are flipped. The top floors are the worst part of the city, closest to the poisoned surface, and the bottom floors are newer and richer. If you are on top of the world, you are not doing well.
Most old symbols mean nothing now. Nobody but a keen scholar would recognise a cross. Some animals carry meaning: moths are linked to Saint Marrow and seen kindly, wrens are loved for Saint Wren, and in Suburba, rats are lucky.
Read next: help districts, help religion, and help glossary.
NEARBY [P] LAW [N] MATERIALS LORE 36 Abkal Cabiri Coterie Deshret Districts Diving Glossary Great Houses Guilds House Amari House Drepane House Kadesh House Morcant House Qamarat House Rook House Valcora House Varga House Vesalius Kolkhos Languages Law Life In Deshret Materials Mythos Ophirian League Outriders Pegasus Religion Saints Seals Sepulchre Splicers Symphony Technology The Hum Vulcani
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