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The SOL Shogunate
July 22, 2026 at 02:27 AM
Added the confirmed unnamed pirate-adjacent faction, the ruling out of real historical figures as characters, and a Belief and Tone section covering Japanese mythology and the alt-future hard science fiction register
The SOL Shogunate is the ruling power of the alt-future solar system that SOL Shogunate is set in. It governs through a militaristic caste system inspired by feudal Japan and bushido, transplanted across colonized worlds and refitted for life off Earth. The way of the sword is law, and the order that enforces it is a confederation of competing samurai clans rather than a single unified state. For wider context, see the Overview.
The political and economic seat of the Shogunate is on the Moon. From their lunar holdings, the ruling clans project influence across the colonized worlds. The samurai code provides the legal spine of the regime: rank is enforced through martial tradition, disputes settle through the blade as often as through office, and clan honor functions as both contract and currency.
The Shogunate elite live inside the lunar glass cities, where centrifugal engineering and pressurized domes create artificial gravity, simulated day and night cycles, and Earth-like comfort. Inside those domes, the ruling class enjoys conditions that mirror the homeworld they no longer need to live on. Outside them, the lunar surface is still vacuum and radiation. That split is one of the clearest expressions of how the Shogunate orders its world.
Two major samurai clans have been confirmed as part of the current Shogunate landscape. Both have built their power on a specific industry, and their rivalry is central to the plot.
Clan | Domain |
|---|---|
Tennoji | Built power on transportation across the solar system, including the interplanetary travel infrastructure and the bullet-train network linking lunar cities. Targeted and massacred by the Karasuma in the strike that opens the campaign, leaving Yuzuki as the surviving heir. |
Karasuma | Power flows from lunar mining and material processing operations on the Moon. Moved against the Tennoji to remove a rival and consolidate position inside the Shogunate. Pursues Yuzuki through every Shogunate channel available to them. |
Both confirmed clans are tied to the research that lets people live on the Moon at all. Genetic engineering, biological adaptation, and advances in habitat, gravity, and life support sit at the heart of how the Shogunate sustains itself off Earth. Those advances are not distributed evenly. They flow first and most generously to the ruling caste, and they reach the working population on far worse terms. The same science that protects an aristocrat in a glass city is rationed, withheld, or simply unavailable below.
The Shogunate is not a monolith. Its clans compete, and at least one of those rivalries has turned into open massacre. The Karasuma moved against the Tennoji and wiped out the clan. The protagonist, Yuzuki, is the surviving Tennoji heir. She walks the campaign as a ronin: a samurai without a master, marked by the regime that should have protected her, hunting the rival house that destroyed her family. That one major clan can erase another and still operate inside the Shogunate is itself a statement about how the order really works.
The Shogunate landscape is wider than the Tennoji and the Karasuma. The studio has confirmed that at least one further faction exists which fills a pirate-shaped role in the setting without literally being pirates, and has said players will like them. It has not been named or shown, so nothing about its territory, leadership, or relationship to the ruling clans should be assumed.
What the setting will not do is borrow real people. The writers have ruled out real historical figures appearing as characters, so every house, officer, and rival in the Shogunate is original to this game rather than a renamed figure out of history.
The people living under the Shogunate hold distinctive belief systems about the mysteries of the world around them, and Japanese mythology is woven through the setting. It is a texture rather than a frame. The studio has placed the overall register closer to alt-future hard science fiction, describing the world as leaning more toward lasers than toward gods and spirits, with an aerospace consultant on the team keeping the physical layer plausible.
Class inequality is the thematic backbone of the setting. The Shogunate elite are visible: their banners, their cities, their armor, their bullet trains. The colonial worker underclass that keeps the lights on is unseen by design. The miners and laborers on the wrong side of the dome wall are the population whose absence from the surface of Shogunate life is part of the point. The story repeatedly contrasts the gleaming top with the shadow workforce beneath it.
Yuzuki begins as a personal revenge story. As the Tennoji heir, she opposes the Karasuma directly, and the early campaign is built around that vendetta. The arc does not stay there. As she pursues the Karasuma, she pulls on threads that lead deeper into the Shogunate, uncovering wider conspiracies that connect her clan's destruction to the regime's class structure and to whatever the ruling caste is actually protecting. The vendetta becomes the way in.
Several aspects of the Shogunate have not been publicly confirmed and should not be assumed:
Other clan names beyond Tennoji and Karasuma have not been revealed.
The full hierarchical structure of the Shogunate, including how clans rank against each other, is undisclosed.
The identity of the current Shogun has not been confirmed.
Specific military ranks, named officials, and governance bodies inside the regime have not been detailed.
Corporate fronts and other institutions that may operate alongside the clans have not been publicly named.
This page will be updated as more lore is revealed.
