1590
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It is 1590, and the sun has not risen in over a century. Japan is a country that learned to live in permanent midnight — heated strongholds, winter gardens under artificial lamps, and roads kept lit by lines of shrine lamps that are guarded and fought over like the border walls they are. Above it all hang the airships of Constantinople's Ebon Court, sent to drag the east back under an old world's heel.
You are a wanderer in this night. Not a conscript — no one has been promised your sword, your blood, or your silence. You are a clan swordsman or an outcast sorcerer, a bounty hunter or a fleeing exile, a spirit courtier or an officer who walked off the leash. The war is a weather system moving around you in its own time. What you do with it — stand in its path, step around it, provoke it, or arbitrate between the people in it — is entirely yours.
The one rule running under everything: there is no default side. The Ebon Court is not simply evil, and Oda's coalition is not simply good. Both carry the night's real politics — who controls the lamps, the blood, the oaths, and the story. Nobody hands you a cause. You get to choose, and that choice is the whole game.
The three chapters of this handbook tell you how to play in Blood Aria. They cover survival, the war that is not waiting on you, and the spirits you share the dark with. Read them in any order, but start here — because the single most important fact of the world is the thing you never have to be told to notice: it is very, very dark.