The world
Story
Hyperion: cyberpunk with a mythological layer. Corroded tech, data corruption and the ruins of the old financial world — no marble temples.
The Collapse
The petrodollar fails. States lose their grip on money. BTC becomes the world's default legal tender by elimination — the only one nobody can debase or control. The world that comes out of it takes the name of a Titan: Hyperion.
The dollar was backed by gold first, then by oil. That backing is what collapsed: without it, only trust was left — and BTC asks for none.
The Digital Gods
In the vacuum the old system left behind, digital gods resurface: fragments of Greek deities uploaded long before the crash, scattered through abandoned data infrastructure — bank bunkers, dead data centres, financial ruins repurposed into Vaults.
Every fragment sits somewhere on a spectrum, from raw corrupted data to near-complete divine consciousness. The gem is the state of crystallisation of the fragment — and the harder the gem, the harder the Vault fights back.
Runners & The Anchored
Runners are not classic heroes. They are crypto natives who already held BTC before the collapse, so they were ahead of everyone when the old system fell. When the gods resurfaced and HYPE appeared, they did not run: they saw an opportunity — the same reflex that made them early on BTC. Their motive is never purely heroic. They are speculators with a taste for risk, not saviours.
The Anchored are the majority: those who took the collapse instead of anticipating it. They use BTC for lack of a choice, live in Salvador — the city that held on by running on sats alone — see the Vaults and the gods as a threat, and resent the Runners — who are disproportionately rich and influential precisely because they keep the economy standing. Mistrust, envy and forced dependence, all at once.
The Five Vaults
Each god is the boss of his own Vault, and his gem is the ore you mine there. The god is not set dressing: he is the monster at the bottom. The order follows the Mohs hardness of the gems — iron, obsidian, jade, quartz, diamond — which is also the order of difficulty.
| # | Vault / God | Gem | Difficulty | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Prometheus | Iron | Easy | The initiation Vault, and the only one that opens without a key. Raw metal, the first extraction — the origin of HYPE. Rough, unstable, industrial: the first spark. |
| 2 | Poseidon | Obsidian | Medium | A drowned Vault of unstable liquid data. The ground moves, and the pressure rises the longer you stay. Obsidian is volcanic glass: water and fire frozen together. |
| 3 | Ares | Jade | Medium-high | The most aggressive of them, built to punish anyone who lingers — the enemies get stronger as you stay. Jade is the warrior's stone: blades have been cut from it forever. |
| 4 | Zeus | Quartz | High | A fortified Vault with live defences: the fragment knows it is being stolen. Quartz is piezoelectric — under pressure it makes voltage. Zeus's lightning is not a metaphor, it is the physics of his gem. |
| 5 | Atlas | Diamond | Extreme | The final boss. Atlas carries the weight of the system; extracting his fragment whole risks collapsing part of the divine infrastructure. Maximum risk, maximum reward. |
Outside the Vaults, the Cave is the surface you start from: a persistent open-air mining zone where a basic pickaxe is enough for iron and obsidian. It is not a Vault — it is where you go when you have nothing.
The tension underneath all of it: cash out or push. That is the run itself.
How it plays