The DecoSoluverse

Verity, Petty’s Pizzeria, Lopscotch, Captiotia, and Vanguard Party were not designed from the outset as a single connected universe, but they have naturally emerged as such, and it is useful to track the connections in one place rather than leaving them scattered across separate bibles and design documents. This page collects those connections, informally referred to as the DecoSoluverse.

The name doubles as an in-universe detail. Decoherent Solutions is the umbrella term referring to all of qclod's projects, and it is also, within Lopscotch’s fiction, the institution that built Symmetry Break: a joint venture between Rabbitkind’s brightest minds and unspecified cosmic forces, whose automated shell still runs the game four thousand years after its makers are gone.

The Broken Branch

The core timeline, or the Broken Branch, serves as the continuity’s backbone.

Lopscotch → Rabbitkind's Symmetry Break → Petty’s Pizzeria & Captiotia on Kepoa/Homeworld → the Scattering → Verity

Lopscotch happens first, thousands of years ago, on Rabbitkind’s world, and its outcome, the Lopscotch 6 completing Symmetry Break, is what makes everything downstream possible. Petty’s Pizzeria and Captiotia both take place on Kepoa, in the real-world years leading up to 2033: the Continental Union and the Captiot Commonwealth are two of the countries sharing that planet. Both polities, and human life on Kepoa in general, end at the Scattering, the event in which Ratkind, having long ago won their own game of Symmetry Break, displaces humanity out into Archipelago in the course of an intergalactic war fought against Rabbitkind over the Milky Way. Verity picks up a thousand years after that, once Archipelago has had centuries to develop its own factions, history, and conflicts, with only the faintest inherited memory of Homeworld underneath it.

Kepoa / Homeworld

Kepoa, called Homeworld in the context of Verity, is the shared Earth-like planet beneath both Petty’s Pizzeria and Captiotia. Petty’s Pizzeria is set in the Continental Union, a fading post-colonial semi-libertarian republic in the planet’s southern hemisphere. Captiotia is a socialist commonwealth in the planet’s northern hemisphere, with its own revolutionary history, its own economy (the Voucher/Commons Economy), and its own culture built around Pokuiot, its distributed planning network.

The Scattering

The Scattering is a hinge event within the continuity. In 2033, Ratkind displaces humanity from Kepoa into the dwarf galaxy of Archipelago in the course of a war against Rabbitkind over the Milky Way, detailed further under Symmetry Break and the Six Values, below.

Neither the Continental Union nor Captiotia survives the Scattering as a polity. Petty’s Pizzeria’s own story ends before 2033, before the event itself takes place. In Captiotia’s present day (2026), the Scattering has not yet happened and is not something its citizens have any way of being aware of. Verity opens generations after the Scattering, inside Archipelago, with only fragments of Homeworld history surviving into its factions and myths, and in God the Rat's guilt.

Symmetry Break and the Six Values

Symmetry Break is the cosmic transformation process at the center of Lopscotch: a species-wide ludic ritual meant to evolve a world by channeling six fundamental Values, Swerve, Bridge, Verity, Design, Shield, and Enigma, through six players, one per Value. Rabbitkind’s first attempt was sabotaged near completion, four thousand years before Lopscotch begins, leaving their world trapped in an unstable state called the Blur and turning every later attempt into a secret, damaged rerun. In the Broken Branch, the primary timeline, Lopscotch 6 finally win, and Rabbitkind becomes Broken, ascended and godlike within the wider cosmology.

Any kind that completes Symmetry Break becomes Broken. Rabbitkind is one example, and Ratkind, the species behind Verity’s God the Rat, is another. Enabled by their godlike abilities, the two species engage in an intergalactic war, leading to Ratkind causing the Scattering as part of stealing the Milky Way as part of the war effort.

The same six Values, under the same names, also govern the world of Vanguard Party, an in-development video game project. Vanguard Party’s world is a world of robots and animals, left behind by vanished “progenitors” whose fate is the game’s central mystery, and its own Blur-equivalent, patchy regions of shifting, superposed reality, is where the game’s procedurally generated mystery dungeons come from. See The Punished Branch and Vanguard Party, below, for how Vanguard Party’s own Symmetry Break connects to the continuity.

In Petty’s Pizzeria, the plaza's arcade, Gamer Galaxy, is the same location as Verity’s God’s Arcade, having been taken and transported by God the Rat to Archipelago upon his guilty defection from his own species upon the Scattering. In Verity, it's roughly a thousand years older and altered by God's long residence there, preserved inside an asteroid by the time Verity takes place. The Petty’s/Gamer Galaxy pass-through window built late in that series still physically exists in Verity’s era, just sealed off by asteroid rock.

The Punished Branch

The alternate timeline, or the Punished Branch, is integral to the existence of the Broken Branch by way of time travel, and has its own implications across multiple projects.

Lopscotch → Rabbitkind's failure → Petty’s Pizzeria & Captiotia on Kepoa/Homeworld → Humankind's Symmetry Break → Vanguard Party

In the Punished Branch, the LS6 fail, Felix and the others die, and a grief-broken Casey travels back roughly four thousand years and sabotages Rabbitkind’s original Symmetry Break at the moment of completion. That act of sabotage is the Anomaly, the bootstrap event that creates the Blur in the first place, and Casey becomes the Scotch. The Scotch’s existence in the main timeline, and the existence of Rabbitkind's life in the Havens and the LS6 themselves, is a direct consequence of this branch. Petty’s Pizzeria’s alternate timeline, in which Felix Ackerman dies alone in a tornado, is a continuation of the same failure state: a world where the Lopscotch 6 do not win, Rabbitkind never Breaks, Ratkind is not present on Homeworld in the early twenty-first century, and humanity itself eventually plays Symmetry Break. The lack of the Scattering means that the future events of Verity in Archipelago never occur.

Vanguard Party takes place on Kepoa, after humanity’s own Symmetry Break. The game’s hub location, the Commune, is built out of an old, abandoned Continental Union town: a farmhouse, a water tower, crop fields, and other Continental Union infrastructure reoccupied by what was left behind. What exactly happened to humanity during and after that Symmetry Break, whether it was a clean win, a partial one, a failure, or something else, and what became of the people who played it, is the deliberate central mystery of Vanguard Party and is not (yet) answered on this site.

Easter-Echoes

A reused name across two projects is not, by itself, a claim that the two characters, places, or organizations are the same. Names echo across the DecoSoluverse the way names echo across unrelated works by the same writer, because qclod is just silly like that. Unless a page states otherwise explicitly, treat the following as coincidence within the fiction, not identity:

Victoria Kowalski, captain of the Verity, and Viktoria Koualskii, the Captiotian theorist whose scientific socialism helped found Summatory Socialist thought.
Julian Goldstone, Verity’s supporting cast member, and Julian Goldstone (Goldeston), the nineteenth-century Captiotian naturalist whose work fed into Captiot materialism.
Galena, the amnesiac AI aboard the Verity, and Galiine Grei, a Captiotian of the Threshold Generation.
Casey, Victoria's ex-partner in Verity; Casey, of the Lopscotch 6; and Casey, the loan officer at Bankside FCU in Petty’s Pizzeria.
Felix, of the Lopscotch 6, and Felix Ackerman, Charlie’s nephew in Petty’s Pizzeria.
Deaton Swelicate, of Verity, and the law firm Swelicate & Sons in Petty’s Pizzeria’s Skyline Plaza.
The Red Archipelago, Verity’s galactic superpower, and the Union of Socialist Archipelagic Republics, also called the Red Archipelago, Captiotia’s real-world international bloc.

Where Each Project Stands

Lopscotch: Rabbitkind’s world, first in the continuity order. Its two timelines and their outcomes, the Lopscotch 6 completing or failing Symmetry Break, is the precondition for everything that follows it.
Petty’s Pizzeria and Captiotia: Both set on Kepoa/Homeworld, sharing a planet: Captiotia in the northern hemisphere, the Continental Union in the southern. In the Broken Branch, both end, as settings, at the Scattering. In the Punished Branch, they persist until the unspecified events of humanity's Symmetry Break.
Verity: Set in Archipelago, generations after the Broken Branch's Scattering, with Gamer Galaxy’s survival into God’s Arcade as a surviving thread back to Homeworld.
Vanguard Party: An in-development game, not yet built out on this site. It shares Lopscotch’s six Values and occurs on Kepoa within the Punished Branch, after humanity’s own Symmetry Break.
The Dossier of Dr. Brink: A shipwreck narrative set in an unknown land, featuring a magic system built around consciously manipulating “the fabric” of reality. Its connection to the DecoSoluverse is, at this time, still a mystery.