The World of CorpLore

There are no forests, no houses or cities. The world is Corporate Offices, Hotels, Gas Stations, and the Daily Commute, merged into one architectural geography. Stairwells climb thousands of meters high. Hotel pools form bitter seas. Public restrooms have reverted to stinking swamps. Only infrastructure, stretching endlessly.

Every living soul is a demon. Not fire-and-brimstone, but in the way a middle manager is a demon: shaped by the system, compliant by contract, drifting further from whatever they used to be with every quarterly review. Most carry weapons openly. Murder is commonplace, always called “passing away” or “abrupt termination.” There are no guns: etiquette demands a justification, however nonsensical, for one’s weapon. Weighted canes, serrated butter knives, iron chair legs, well-forged box cutters. Stronger demons carry sledgehammers, rusted rebar, grave-shovels.

Demonkind spans six categories. The Corruption Spectrum is the general population: base demons, Waards (slab-shouldered enforcers), Shaylas (she-demons sharpened by cruelty), Loras (ancient hags fused with infrastructure), AyChar (kakodemons of pure HR evil). Uncorrupted Dans are the setting’s elves: stocky archivists who never signed the full contract. Weave-Born emerge from carpet cosmology: Tuples (doppelgangers) and Enums (immutable beings at cosmic Knots). The Contractually Obligated are dark-nailed undead bound by unfinished paperwork. Systemic Entities accumulate from infrastructure. Named Uniques include Withaazz the great sorcerer and the Auditor, whose corrections rewrite history.

The world was spoken into being by the Double-Senior Vice President of Infrastructure (the DSVPI), whose Words partitioned an original Undivided Room into corridors, lobbies, and crumbling break rooms. Those Words survive shrouded behind the blood-stained glass of motivational posters. Reality is a Textile on a cosmic Loom, layered like hotel carpet: Face, Pile, Warp, Weft, Backing. Where the Weave wears thin, sepulchral geometric patterns bleed through.

Gods are not born. They are stocked like lottery tickets in a smoldering gas station display, dispensed by Intermediaries, periodically expired by the Vendor. Prayer only scratches away the coating to reveal an answer already printed underneath. Souls are placed on the Eternal Roller Grill and turned under the Warming Light until removal grants them individuality.

Death is not an ending but a homecoming. Every demon, from birth, builds a personal Minecraft world one block at a time through nightly ritual. Life is remote access. Death is sitting back down at the keyboard and seeing what you built finally render in full.

Three traditions of magic operate across the setting. Sorcerers, the software engineers, wield crackling electric magic through glyphboard shortcuts. The Conciergerie, warlock-concierges, negotiate pacts recorded in contact-book grimoires. Commuters channel highway hypnosis outward, drawing doctrine from podcast cults and projecting it through road-trance devotion.

Four demon cults divide the fiscal year. January Financials (Q1): gluttonous consumers worshipping a false Archive, spreading hunger through stolen lunches. The Moth and the Flame (Q2): illegal candle-keepers, insane but not evil. Dogmommies (Q3): frenzied dog-worshippers who join their slavering-jawed hounds in violence. Q4H (Q4): every October, they announce the world is ending. January arrives. They are wrong again.