This is the Heartlands

Unofficial Material – Statement of Intent

Heartlands in Darkness is an unofficial setting for the World of Darkness, created under the terms of the Dark Pack Agreement. It is non-canonical fan work and not affiliated with Paradox Interactive or any official World of Darkness properties.

This work is built on three inviolable principles:

• It must be inclusive of BIPOC, LGBT, neurodivergent, and other historically marginalized communities.
• It must never excuse or mythologize real-world atrocities. The supernatural in this setting does not cause suffering—it reflects the consequences of what human beings have done to each other.
• The Red Dirt is not a villain. It is a metphor. A condition. A spiritual and moral consequence. The Storm is not a monster—it is the dream of justice surviving the death of the Dreamer.

1.1 What This Setting Is

This is a story about the dead, but it is also about the living who tried to forget them.

Heartlands in Darkness is a World of Darkness setting focused on Oklahoma and the surrounding region—territories haunted not only by monsters, but by memory. It is built atop unhealed scars: generational trauma, historical violence, and the silence that followed.

This is a place where the land remembers everything.

Where the spirits are broken.

Where the dead do not rest.

And where the future can only arrive after the truth has been spoken aloud.

This is not a story about redemption.

This is a story about reckoning.

1.2 What Has Happened Here

You cannot walk Oklahoma without stepping through the ghosts of:

• The Trail of Tears
• Tribal Civil Wars and the American Civil War
• The Land Runs
• The Tulsa Massacre of 1921
• The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl
• World Wars I & II
• Korea. Vietnam. Desert Storm.
• The Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995
• The September 11th Attacks

These are not setting flavor.

They are spiritual fractures in the world.

Each one left behind the pain, rage, and echoes too loud to silence.

1.3 What You Play

Players take the role of beings trapped in the middle of a dying dream and a land that refuses to forget.

• Garou, still trying to mend broken caerns where the spirits cry and the ancestors scream.
• Wraiths, bound to unfinished truths, unwillingn to pass on until someone remembers what happened.
• Mages, struggling to impose paradigm on a land that spits out lies and punishes denial.
• Vampires, some who built empires on bones, now walking streets haunted by the sins they profit from.
• Demons, seeing this place as the cracked mirror of their Fall–and maybe a chance to make it mean something.
• Hunters, not activated by God, but ny ancestral outrage and spiritual recoil,
• Mummies, like Azim ibn Masnun, the silent witness of centuries, who ha walked this land since the 19th century–never intervening, only remembering, and recodring every loss in the breathless stillness of Ma'at.
• Orpheus agents, documenting psychic trauma no one trained them to interpret.
• The Fae, who see the truth in Glamour that others can only dream into horror.

1.4 Storyteller Responsibility

This setting does not forgive, and neither should your game.

Heartlands in Darkness deals with real-world trauma. It demands respect, honesty, and emotional safety. Use safety tools. Have session zero discussions. Respect boundaries.

This setting is about horror, but it is not a safehouse for hate.

Do not excuse. Do not romanticize. Do not sanitize.

Use the supernatural to expose human evil, not explain it away.

1.5 The Red Dirt

The Red Dirt is not a spirit. Not a monster. Not the Wyrm.
It is what happens when grief goes unspoken, when truth is buried beneath history, and when memory refuses to die quietly.

The Red Dirt is a metaphor for:

• The weight of stolen land.
• The cost of forced silence.
• The consequence of forgetting.

It does not whisper.

It does not hunger.

It waits.

And when the wind shifts, you can feel it in your lungs.

1.6 The Storm

The Dust Bowl was a nightmare. The tornadoes were breathing. The next one will speak.

The Storm is the land's dream trying to wake itself.

It's the next phase of memory, no longer content to be denied.

It's Ascension twisted by grief.

It is not evil. It is not merciful. It is inevitable.

The Red Dirt is what happened.

The Storm is what comes next.

1.7 The Question

And so I leave you with the only question that matters in this setting:

Will you speak aloud what others have buried?

Because if you don't–

the land will.

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