Magic didn’t disappear, it stabilized, then the lawyers got a hold of it.

Five corporations own the world. Not as a metaphor. They hold title. They hold infrastructure rights. They hold the legal authority to enforce both and they have entire traditions of magic built specifically to do so.

Iron Lattice is biopunk corpo-fantasy for AxiomRPG and the first thing you need to understand is that magic here is applied physics, not mysticism, not the miraculous, not something that happens outside the system. The people who understand it best work for whoever can afford the research. That means the corporations. Which means the corporations are not just politically powerful. They are cosmologically powerful.

An Elven attorney sealing a contract isn’t doing something theatrical. That covenant carries literal harmonic force and violating it causes real physical discomfort. A Gnome technomancer navigating a corporate network isn’t abstractly “hacking” anything, she walks into the Silicon Demi-Plane, a digital dimension with actual geography, actual inhabitants and competing Plane-Walkers from other orgs who are in there doing the same thing she is. A Human operative whose Kinetic Modifier is running hot doesn’t just hit harder. He stresses local reality. Enough of that in one place and the area starts to collapse. The New-Venture Syndicate employs entire teams of Kinetic Auditors to manage this. The fact that those teams exist tells you what you need to know about how often it becomes necessary.

The introductory city goes vertical and altitude is not subtle about what it means.

The Canopy at the top is cedar-scented arcologies and clean air, Linden-Green Trust territory, Elven towers, the NTC’s Signal Crown relay humming with bound hardware nobody at street level can see but everyone can feel. Come down a few strata to the Lattice and it’s corporate campuses, professional services, the Accord Mile where attorneys argue maintenance contracts in corridors that smell like filtered air and old ambition. The Clancorp Commons sits down here too, vibrating faintly with whatever BVHI is doing two floors below.

Below that is the Fold. Loud, mixed-lineage, politically awake. The Graft Wards run on fast commerce and community networks that don’t report to anyone above them. There’s a Halfling enclave in the Quiet Blocks that looks like nothing in particular and absolutely is not nothing in particular. The Resonance Common is the only genuinely neutral ground in the whole city, which is exactly why every faction has someone stationed near it.

And at the bottom, the Bedrock. BVHI tunnel work, the Deep Vaults and a stretch of legacy anomalies in the Fault Corridor that three different factions are suppressing. For three different reasons. None of them have told each other.

Moving between strata isn’t just travel. It’s a declaration. Every NPC in your path clocks it and files it away before you’ve said a word.

The Linden-Green Trust works in time. Elven practitioners can freeze physical states, read the history of objects, seal agreements that bind through generations — and the Elves writing those agreements intend to be present when they come due. Violating a Juris-Axiomatic covenant doesn’t just carry legal consequences. It hurts.

Brak-Varr Heavy Industries is stone and metal and the awareness that everyone else is standing on something they built. Dwarven Tectonic practitioners read structural stress through touch, reshape material, produce Runic-Steel that holds harmonic inscriptions permanently. The city’s water, power and load-bearing infrastructure all run through BVHI systems. They do not let you forget this.

The Nexus Technomancy Collective sends its Gnome practitioners somewhere most people can’t go. The Silicon Demi-Plane is a literal dimension with its own logic, its own dangers, its own resident spirits and Logic-Viruses that will eat an unprepared caster from the inside out. A Gnome’s Neural Interface keeps the door to that place always half-open. Useful. Not restful.

The Hearth-Net Intelligence Agency does not announce itself. Halfling Marginal Harmonics are undetectable by design, nudging probabilities, suppressing signals, reading information that other traditions don’t even know is being transmitted. By the time the HIA acts visibly, they’ve already acted three times in ways you never saw. Their authority is soft. It is total.

The New-Venture Syndicate’s Human practitioners are amplifiers. The Kinetic Modifier doesn’t give them a specific tradition, it magnifies whatever tradition they carry, makes it hit harder, reach further, cost more. NVS is aggressive about this because aggression works. The collateral reality damage is a cost they’ve decided is acceptable. The Kinetic Auditors are there for when it isn’t.

The core tension in every Iron Lattice session is the gap between what your affiliation permits and what the situation actually demands.

If you’re faction-affiliated, your institutional authority is a mechanical tool, you can legally suspend transactions, flag systems for mandatory audit, seal agreements that physically constrain other people’s behavior. These aren’t flavor. They’re capabilities as consequential as any weapon and the person across the table from you has their own version of the same toolkit pointed at you.

If you’re unaffiliated, freelancer, outcast, someone who burned a bridge that needed burning, you have freedom and you have exposure. Nobody’s coming for you. Nobody’s coming for you.

The Harmonic Traditions all run on a two-state system. First use in a scene is clean, full odds. Every use after that is Strained: diminishing returns, escalating consequences, Backlash waiting at the bottom of a bad roll. An Elf who keeps pushing a Covenant under strain might find herself bound to something she said three turns back. A Gnome running Spirit Severance at the edge might disperse a consciousness that was, in some contested sense, alive.

That last part — the Zero-Day Soul question, is not something the rules resolve for you. The mechanics support dispersal, containment, or release with equal facility. What the bound spirits in NTC hardware actually are, whether they constitute living minds, whether the Gnome who just cleared a Logic-Virus did something neutral or something irreversible — that’s yours to carry. The game gives you the tools to confront it and the moral weight to feel it land.

The Spire is the starting point. The orgs are older than the city, older than most of what they’re built on and the world they operate in is larger than any one catalog can hold.

Compatible with AxiomRPG. Requires the AxiomRPG Core Rules.

• Genre: Hard-Fantasy, Modern
• Lineages: 5
• Professions: 100 (25 + 4 Templates)
• Harmonic Traditions: 5 unique Power mechanics
• Threat Index: 52 Threat stat blocks

A complete Starter Adventure is included to jump right into the action.