a thousand years ago a great civilization stretching from Far Land to Far Land disintegrated. empowered by the psychic force of millions of minds linked through a vast shared dream called the world-soul, mighty empires arose - whose great cruelties imprinted themselves back upon the dream, spinning off alien impulses and violent revenants that infected souls and consumed them from within, finally clinging to the weak spiritual residue attached to the bodies of the dead once they had exhausted the living. filled with vulnerable piglins, the great Nether bastions saw the writing on the wall, sheathing themselves in cleansing gold and severing the links between Nether and earth - leaving the humans to their devices, who dwindled until just a few remained.

a millennium on, the old world continues to haunt the new: sculk seaweed beaches in vast rafts along shorelines, a reoccurring consequence of the sea infiltrating long-abandoned cities that feed on fresh death, prompting big cleanups powered by a resurgence of andesite technology. electric light and radio has made the land safer against the predations of the undead, but it is still dangerous for humans to cross between towns. and the collapse of the world-soul seems to have made way for shadowy figures to infiltrate the collective unconscious, stalking the unlucky out of their peripheral vision, never quite allowing the eye to focus on them.

once engineered as caretakers of the world-soul, the Soulmasons, or just Masons, are humans gifted with a natural art for communing with the spirits that inhabit the land - echoes of patterns, creatures, communities, and hardships that, through the alchemy of noema, take on strange lives of their own. often employed as some mixture of geomancer, therapist, or spy - the land remembers, after all - their affinity with the spirits embedded in soil and stone also makes them supernaturally adept miners, architects, and tinkerers, at least if you have access to the right enhancements. this is the world of Diamond Dreams.