Obernewtyn Chronicles - Setting

Setting

The series is set many years into the future, where the world has been ravaged by a great nuclear holocaust known as the Great White. The few people left have formed a new way of living, led by a body called the Council.

The Council realized that they had not escaped the effects of the Great White completely unscathed, and began burning any humans or animals born with deformities. The Council appointed a fledgling religious order called the Herder Faction to oversee these rituals. The Herders believed that Lud, their name for God, sent the Great White as punishment for a materialistic society. As a result, they destroyed all artifacts of the old world known as the Beforetime.

Those who spoke out against the Herders, or researched the period before the nuclear holocaust or its technology, were declared Seditioners (from the word sedition) and were burnt alive. Council law and the Herder Faction gradually fused, and came to depend on each other. If the two governing bodies did not burn the dissidents, they sent them to work on Councilfarms. Orphan homes were set up to house those children of Seditioners not claimed by relatives.

It later became clear that mutations of the mind could develop which were not visible at birth. The Council and Herder Faction decided that those few people affected by mental mutations, called Misfits, would be sent to the Councilfarms. They sent the more afflicted Misfits to the remote mountain estate of Obernewtyn to be treated, and to be isolated from normal people.