Deadwake – A World Built from the Ruins of Thought

Over the past several years, my work with Canvas Temple Publishing has moved in a new direction. After decades of publishing historical wargames, I wanted to explore something different. I still wanted to examine conflict and decision-making, but from another axis entirely. Deadwake is the result. It is the aftermath of all wars, a setting where the battlefield is no longer the map but the human mind.

At its core, Deadwake asks a single question: what happens to civilization when cognition becomes unstable? Humanity’s attempt to merge thought and machine, the Cognitive Resonance Interface, was meant to end isolation forever. Instead, it collapsed into the Feedback Cascade, a planetary event that fused billions of minds into one for seventy-two hours before annihilating them. The survivors inherited a world saturated with Cognitive Static, a psychic radiation that distorts memory, emotion, and perception. The old nations are gone. In their place rise factions built around competing ideas of how to endure the new reality: the Wayfinders’ Charter, masters of navigation through the psychic storms; the Helios Foundation, who seek salvation through engineered serenity; the militant Kenshin Industrial; the ascetic Stillwater Compact; the prophetic Choir of the Cascade; and the Null Guard, who believe the only safety lies in erasing the self entirely.

The game is an integrated hybrid that combines a role-playing system and a tactical miniatures engine. Players can run small-scale skirmishes, long-form campaigns, or psychological survival stories where the outcome of a battle and the outcome of a mind often converge. It is built to model scarcity, stress, and adaptation. Success depends not only on tactics, but also on how much of yourself you can afford to lose along the way. In a world where information is toxic, even knowing too much can be lethal.

Deadwake grew from the same intellectual terrain that shaped my novel The Architecture of Unmaking. Both came from an effort to bridge speculative science and human behavior. The background theory, expanded in Appendix A of the Deadwake Introduction Book, draws from real cognitive science, network theory, and memetic studies. The goal was to take modern research on feedback systems, brain–machine coupling, and social contagion, and imagine what happens when those systems scale beyond human comprehension. The result is a playable thought experiment about meaning, perception, and the limits of control.

People who enjoy Deadwake tend to value curiosity, analysis, and the testing of ideas through action. It asks players to make choices under pressure, to navigate uncertainty, and to confront what survival actually costs when the terrain itself is made of information. The factions and scenarios are designed to let groups explore different philosophies of resilience, each one a hypothesis about what it means to remain human after the collapse of the old world.

For anyone interested, the free Introduction Book is available here:
https://canvastemple.com/download/DW-Intro.pdf

It explains the world, the science that underlies it, and the philosophy that guides the system. Over fifteen sourcebooks are already written, covering factions, solo and group play, and full campaign frameworks. This is the foundation of a long-term creative project, a unified world where narrative, design, and theory intersect. It is an experiment in what gaming can be when it is built from real ideas.