A worldbuilding project
The tidally locked world
A strip of land stretched between two kinds of hell.
An original setting built around survival in a failed colonial utopia.
New here? Lumeria is a planet that never rotates: one side is scorched, the other frozen, and everyone lives in the narrow band of twilight between them. Nothing in Lumeria is owned, everything is borrowed, and using it costs you a piece of who you were.
↓ enter the strip
The Geography
The Strip — full cartographic survey
Central Strip
Towering, vine-linked formations where the original Angloo cloning vats stood. The parasite that conditioned them still saturates the network today.
Northern Borderland
A towered city built vertically to catch cooler air, near the Sunward desert's edge. Above ground it functions; below, no one asks questions.
Central Strip
The largest city in the Strip's core, dome-covered with heat-mesh systems trapping warmth. Industry and trade hold it together. Barely.
East Strip
Dense fungal canopy where navigational instruments behave strangely. The name has never once been earned.
West-Central Strip
Bordering Bricks territory - fungal, ethereal, lit by creatures called Whisps that float on the Broken Moon's electrical buoyancy. They smell of cheese and stick to bare skin given the chance, so don't give them the chance.
South Strip
Near the Broken Moon's crossing point. Home to a black market and the Spiters, water-creatures who filtered dried aquifers into the Jellified Mires.
Far East
Colony structures carved into eastern rock by occupants who never overlapped, let alone met.
South Strip
Not water, not a lake. A limy mass that periodically turns itself inside out and throws solidifying spheres into the air. No theory has been confirmed.
South Strip
A parasite that has grown for centuries around the corpses of Walkers it killed in one final, humanity-ending burst from a dying mage. Some say the field is the mage.
Borderlands
The Tamer of Screamers. A shrine deep in Walker territory. Its full history was lost. What remains are the bones of those who came seeking the temple and didn't leave.
Extreme Heat / Cold
Storm-torn, lightless, virtually uninhabitable — home to the Walkers and to ruins. Glyphs can still be scavenged here, at least the "new" ones, so the risk is often worth taking.
South Strip
Dark, tarp-covered stalls lit by pale lamps, thick with dried gel and roasted mushroom smoke. Mages move through the crowd untouched, tattoos flashing warnings the children seem to sense before anyone explains why.
South Strip
Formed where dried aquifer water, filtered through the bodies of stubborn Spiters, accumulated into a horrible, complex ecosystem, crossed by foot just past the Fool's Gold slopes.
Central Strip
Ancient cloning nurseries overtaken by parasitic pillar-filaments, where indoctrinated embryos were dissolved and remade into winged Angloo, fanatical guardians who believed themselves chosen to protect the house of God.
Mining Villages
Semi-organic "plants" built on Harvester biology, capable of running on nearly anything. Unpredictable by nature, some of them stop for no reason, others crawl like a giant snail, smashing any settlement caught in their path.
A Brief History
Arrival
A colony ship is pulled in by the Broken Moon's unstable orbit and crashes onto the Strip — a narrow twilight corridor on a planet tidally locked to a white-dwarf sun.
Early Colony
Catholic colonists, convinced they're living in Purgatory, build Archangels and Cherubs to conquer and "save" the Strip's scattered settlements by force.
The Fall
Native parasites infiltrate the Archangel colossi and the Angloo cloning vats near the Pillars of Vaerys within a single generation. Both creations escape their makers' control for good.
Disarmament
Neural-hijacking parasites turn armed soldiers into mass-murder vectors. Firearms are buried, dismantled, forgotten. Melee weapons and glyph-seeds take their place.
Present Day
Factions have formed around what survived - Mages, Hunters, Schrimps, the scattered Catholic remnant - all navigating a world that no longer remembers how to fix what it built.
The Setting
Lumeria is tidally locked to its white-dwarf sun. One face is a Scorching Hell, the other a Freezing Wasteland. There is no day or night, only twilight. Between the two lies the Strip: a narrow habitable corridor enclosed by mountain walls that soften the convection winds tearing across the surface.
Two moons govern its tides. The Dark Moon drives water through underground and cave systems. The Broken Moon — smaller, distant, and the reason the original colony ship crashed here, most probably the ship itself mashed up with the celestial body it bumped into, tilting at sixty degrees and destabilizing the ground along its orbit.
Heavy firearms were buried generations ago, after parasites with neural hijacking capabilities turned soldiers into vectors for slaughter. What remains are melee weapons, bone-resin armor and glyphs, the only technology this world still remembers how to use.
The Powers
01 — Order
Descendants of colonists who went insane believing they lived in Purgatory and had to save everyone by force if needed. Their Crusade built the Archangels and Cherubs. Both were colonized by native parasites within a generation.
02 — Engineered
Cloned at the Pillars of Vaerys to be angels, raised on psalms and purpose, parasites infiltrated their incubation vats. They "glitch" instead of walking, hate mages, and consider Hunters pests.
03 — Practitioners
Rare individuals bound by pacts with symbiotic colonies. Avoided and feared, yet human enough to crave acceptance. Tradition forces them into Triads: covens of three, bound by parasite affinity, not friendship.
04 — Pursuit
Descendants of ancient colonists, mutated until they only vaguely resemble human. They hunt Screamers for coolant fluid that keeps their suits wet and harvest sentient Angloos for organs during the molt.
05 — Borderland
Nomadic mountain-dwellers, thin and elongated, who curl into compact shapes and let convection winds carry them downslope. No settlements, no buried dead . What they carry is what they own, and the dead are practical resources.
06 — Decayed Creation
Biomechanical colossi born of the Catholic Crusade, meant to be perfect and immortal. Colonized within a generation by native parasites, they survive today only as decayed fragments - Walkers, Cherubs, and Wardens - silent witnesses to a failed Heaven.
Ancient Tech
Colonists learned early that firepower was a liability in a world riddled with neural-hijacking parasites. Entire settlements were razed by their own screaming, hallucinating soldiers. Guns and explosives were buried, dismantled, destroyed. In their place: melee weapons engineered to resist infection, and glyph-seeding capsules grown from the original survival kits. They are filled by symbionts that anchor into nerve endings and grow organic structures beneath the skin, unlocking what's simply called power. The world has long forgotten how to make new ones. Glyphs are inherited, scavenged, or found.
Click a card to flip it around.
Conceals the bearer's presence, rendering them effectively invisible to other colonies and parasitic senses.
Worn in open sheaths against the skin, channels the parasite's biomass to reshape limbs into claws, spikes, or whips on demand.
Worn at the neck or implanted behind the ear, channels parasitic energy into shockwaves, heat bursts, or electric discharge.
Implanted in place of the upper thumb-phalanx after amputation, links its bearers together for perfect coordinated action.
There are no fungi here. Remember to walk carefully because the ground listens to your steps.
— Field notes, courier route 7, unknown author
The Bestiary
Apex Surface Predator
Heat-adapted predators with liquid-filled cooling sacs. Hunters take their fluid for water and suit-coolant. The suits must stay wet to function, which means another Screamer must be found.
Colonial Parasite
Soft, shelled, nearly immobile colonies whose acid dissolved even Colossus-grade armor. Their Queens can be bonded to Shepherd mages through a face-parasite acting as aphrodisiac, a three-way link that can override its host without warning.
Domesticated
Heavy, slow-moving soil-processors that farmers rely on to break down mineral-rich ground and enrich fields for crops and rare fungi. Also a reliable source of meat.
Made-Creature / Herd
Created long ago, their resemblance to the originals is questionable, but their use hasn't changed. They melt anything into organic goo, processed afterward into edible mold. Dumb, herd-living, and harmless until startled into a bashing stampede.
Parasitic Pair-Bond
Born as halves until they find a soulmate to fuse with. The pair leads in turns, restless and constantly moving until the food runs scarce. Once, there is no food left, the female feeds on the male riding her back, leaving him a hollow husk she eventually discards.
Host / Symbiont Pair
The Haysack is too clumsy to feed itself, so it grows a nest of leech-like Needles that drink blood and return to mate and feed it. Mages harvest mature Needle fibers for armor...Carefully, since Haysacks are territorial and recognize their keepers by scent.
Domesticated / Heat Source
Bald, stubborn birds that charge their wings with the Strip's dim light and release stored heat slowly. Kept near camps and fed mineral nutrients. Invaluable for long journeys, but quick to scar anyone who touches them while venting.
Mimetic Predator
Chameleon-skinned descendants of colonist monkeys, feeding on mushrooms lethal to anything else. Hermaphroditic and solitary, usually it kills its parent on the way out.
Co-dependent Herd Animal
The only animal able to eat a flower-shaped parasite, the Stinkfawn vents its larval bubble-cocoons as a stench weapon. The Grizzler, its only predator, disguises itself as a stone and ambushes with a single, clumsy cannonball charge.
Mire Ambusher
Faceless, noseless burrowers in the Jellified Mires, sensing prey through back filaments tuned to scent and pressure. Their bite tears flesh away rather than release. Forests of glowing filaments are the only warning of a colony underfoot.
Scavenger / Glider
A medium-sized scavenger, clumsy in flight and ill-suited to the rarefied atmosphere of the Loomer. Glass-like wings let it glide the Upper Ridge's convection winds. Hard to domesticate, but a bonded Mothhawk carries non-edible supplies on hard-to-reach expeditions — wild ones are a constant warning sign for injured travelers.
Parasite Cluster
The Gloopod grows a glowing larval fruit to lure prey. Swallowed larvae become Nervellin, a spinal parasite that leads its host to safety for years, communicating through pulse-waves Mages have learned to decode, before finally killing it to seed a new generation of Gloopods.
Disguised Predator
Not a plant — the fur of a ruthless predator whose colonies block narrow foothill passages to water. Convection winds turn the surface golden, rigid, and slippery, sliding the unfortunate straight into waiting mouths below. Safe routes are mapped. Nothing here is ever truly safe.
Alien / Unclassified
Tall, hollow, palm-tree-like structures along the Strip's borders, old beyond reckoning and unaffected by convection winds. Possibly singular organisms, possibly fragments of one vast subterranean entity. Border-Mages commune with them in an unknown tongue to glimpse disasters before they happen.
Pack Hunter
Ostrich-like omnivores built to hunt large, tough-skinned animals. A second "neck" is really a spring-like muscle, snapping the head 180° in a flash. They hunt in packs of up to three, bleeding their prey and retreat rather than finish a fight. Mountable, but a serious challenge.
Parasitic Plant
Uses thick fog to conceal itself, projecting a soft, puppet-like doppelgänger to lure prey close. Its true form-thorned vines coated in sedative-emerges once prey approaches, dropping a victim almost instantly before the plant grows over the body, expanding its hunting ground.
Suit Material / Domesticated
Source of the Strip's most common protective suit. Its elastic, near-impregnable skin that resists cuts, venom, toxins, and parasitic melding, is one of the few organic materials parasites refuse to root into. Travelers carry shoulder-worn parasite jars as an early-warning system; when a jar cracks from inside, smart travelers run.
Ambush / Sedative
Flat, camouflaged, and dormant until touched, they release a sedative that feels disturbingly cozy. Victims who sleep are entombed by piling Bricks that harden into shells; centuries of these shells form the ruin-like domes near the Sacrificed Lake.
The Archive
From r/Lumeria_World
Made a creature, a map, or fan art for Lumeria? Post it on r/Lumeria_World — good ones get added here, credited to you.
The Project
Lumeria is an ongoing original worldbuilding project built through illustrated lore documents, creature concept sheets, a novel following a courier named Mayra, and a community at r/Lumeria_World.
The setting explores parasitism, survival at the edge of habitability, the corruption of utopian intent, and what happens to belief systems when the things they created outlive them.
All illustrations, lore, and creature designs are original work.
The novel follows Mayra — a courier with segmented armor, a cargo backpack, and a spear — navigating the Strip between factions, parasites, and the ruins of things that were supposed to save everyone.
Read a Preview Excerpt