This is a page for my personal worldbuilding and art project, New Cycle. Created primarily as a setting to support my creative writing and original art, New Cycle draws on a lot of influences I've picked up over the years. It is best described as a cross of fantasy, steam/dieselpunk, cassette futurism and real robot sci-fi; key inspirations include Mobile Suit Gundam, Venus Wars, Nausicaa, Royal Space Force as well as real-world culture and history, particularly that of Eastern Europe, Central and Northeast Asia.
This will mainly serve as a place to aggregate various pieces of lore, short stories, comics and artwork based in the setting. In essence, an easy thing I can link people if they ask 'where can I find more of this?'.
The 'New Cycle' in-universe is a common name for the current era in the Imperial Liturgical Calendar, a universal standard of timekeeping used by most factions in this world, born from the religion of the Biluvian Empire. In the Imperial Faith, time and the cosmos are conceptualised as a celestial wheel, with each turn of the wheel being a Cycle. Cycles are of indeterminate length, lasting anywhere from a few thousand to potentially millions of years, but are commonly identified in scripture by major historical turning points and cataclysms. The most recent of these Cataclysms was the War of the Bells, a devastating war across land, air and void that nearly wiped humanity from existence entirely.
Yet the Wheel of History always turns, and from the ashes of the old world, a new one has been born. Overseen by the Orbital Guild, a cartel of the ancient void-faring corporations, humanity has bounced back, formed new cultures and civilizations, and returned to the stars. The Guild guides humanity, nominally for its best interests, regulating the conduct of war and diplomacy, and 'protecting' mankind from the most dangerous technologies of the Old Cycle. The Guild sees this as the only route to prolonging the Cycle, and averting a new cataclysm that might eventually break the wheel. But others see this despotism as stagnation, and the Guild's grasp on the Spheres of the Solar System is not as ironclad as it once was.