Authority of Ash is a shared universe of books, games, investigations, and hidden histories set in the city of Garza. It is a world where modern infrastructure, institutional power, and unexplained discoveries are beginning to collide. Beneath ordinary life, something has started to change, and the people who notice it first may be the least prepared to explain it.
Garza still functions. Its trains still run. Its bridges still fill with morning traffic. Its districts still expand according to budgets, permits, and political pressure. Most people living there would tell you the city is stable. Most people would be wrong.
Authority of Ash begins with a shared release: the first novel and the first tabletop ruleset arriving in parallel. One world. Two entry points. The story unfolds through narrative and system alike, designed to reward careful attention and deliberate discovery. All public updates remain spoiler-conscious by design, preserving the experience for readers and players alike.
Newsletter
Readers and players who want direct access to the growing archive can subscribe to the Authority of Ash newsletter. Subscribers receive updates on the novel series, game development, world files, artifact records, investigation notes, and other material connected to the expanding universe.
New subscribers also receive a free prequel story, The Archive Incident. This prequel serves as a reader magnet and an entry point into the world before the events of Book I. It introduces one of the earliest investigations tied to the archive and offers a first look at the atmosphere, tension, and concealed instability that define Garza.
Book 1: HAWK
The manuscript for HAWK is currently advancing through structured revision, now in Version 7.5. Each pass refines character alignment, institutional tension, and the underlying mechanics that quietly shape Garza’s unfolding instability.
HAWK — Book I introduces Garza at the precise moment before visible change. Institutions remain disciplined. Systems appear functional. The skyline stands unbroken. Yet beneath the order, subtle distortions begin to accumulate. The novel follows individuals navigating structured authority, competing factions, and phenomena that resist simple explanation. The world does not erupt into chaos; it recalibrates, and those who notice the shift must decide where they stand.
Authority of Ash Book I: HAWK, follows investigators and operatives navigating the early stages of the archive crisis in Garza. What begins as a series of contained discoveries gradually reveals itself to be something far larger, drawing multiple factions into a conflict they do not yet fully understand. The novel is written to introduce readers to the city through investigation, consequence, and secrecy rather than exposition, allowing the world to unfold through events, decisions, and the people forced to respond.
The series is structured so that each book expands the world from a different angle. The first book focuses on containment, tension, and discovery. Later books broaden the scope, deepen the conflicts, and reframe what the earlier events actually meant. Readers do not enter the universe by being handed answers. They enter by following the people trying to survive without them.
Click the Book Button below or visit the Book page to read the official synopsis, explore release information, and enter the series through Book I.
Game 1: Rules Staging
Game I develops alongside the novel, built on the same timeline and internal logic that governs the citizens of Garza. Core systems are being stabilized first, followed by modular expansions that will release in alignment with future books.
Game I translates the same living world into a structured tabletop experience centered on investigation, containment, consequence, and controlled escalation. Players operate within the same civic architecture, faction pressures, and artifact dynamics that shape the novel’s events. Rules will expand in phased releases alongside future books, ensuring the system evolves in tandem with the narrative rather than racing ahead of it.
The Authority of Ash game allows players to enter Garza as investigators, researchers, operatives, and other actors navigating a city where anomalous objects, unstable tools, and institutional conflict are all part of the same unfolding crisis. The system is built around discovery, pressure, consequence, and escalation. Players do not simply collect power. They decide how much risk to accept, what to contain, what to exploit, and what to leave alone.
Artifacts unlock new possibilities. Enhancers complicate them. Every major choice has consequences, and some of those consequences do not appear immediately. This creates a game experience built around investigation and accumulation rather than simple combat progression, while still allowing for direct conflict, dangerous experimentation, and catastrophic mistakes.
Click the Game Button below or visit the Game section to learn how the system works, explore the core mechanics, and follow module development.
Blog Updates
Development notes, production progress, and controlled announcements are documented through the Authority of Ash blog. These dispatches provide insight into creative direction, design philosophy, and structural development without revealing narrative outcomes. Readers who prefer discovery over spoilers can follow progress confidently.
The Blog will help flush out the mechanics of how certain decisions are made within the Authoriy of Ash ecosystem. If you are wondering how something was created, why the decision to write something in a certain tone or direction, or possibly you're looking for a dev map, then this is the place for you. The Blog is also where more time crucial announcements and updates will be relayed.
So be sure to click the Blog button below or visit the Blog link regularly to ensure you do not miss any future updates.
World Primer
Garza
Garza is a modern city built on systems that were meant to make life efficient, predictable, and governable. It is a place of transit lines, civic towers, redevelopment corridors, research campuses, riverside districts, and neighborhoods layered over decades of planning and revision. At street level it presents itself as practical and orderly. The city is designed to function, and most of the time it does.
That surface order matters because it makes the anomalies harder to believe. Strange discoveries do not appear in ruins at the edge of civilization. They appear beneath renovation sites, inside administrative buildings, under transit access corridors, and within structures that should be too ordinary to matter. Garza is not mysterious because it looks ancient. It is mysterious because it looks modern enough to trust.
That contrast is central to the world of Authority of Ash. The city is not collapsing into fantasy. It is discovering, piece by piece, that reality has been less stable than anyone realized. People are not wandering into another world. They are uncovering something that may have been embedded in their own all along.
If you would like to learn more about the city of Garza itself then be sure to click on the World link to discover everything Garza has to offer.
Those who wish to observe the transformation as it unfolds can follow development notes through the blog. Those who prefer deeper signals—world-building insight, structured updates, and early access material—are invited to subscribe to the newsletter.
Artifacts
Artifacts are anomalous objects discovered throughout Garza’s built environment. Some are found during construction, demolition, excavation, or infrastructure repair. They are sometimes embedded where no object should exist at all, sealed inside concrete, hidden within walls, or lodged beneath foundations without any obvious point of entry. The others appear in everyday environments. Shopping centers, libraries, schools, parks and rest areas, or possibly just on the street. Some artifacts may appear mundane at first glance. Others seem slightly wrong in ways that are difficult to explain. Nearly all of them become more troubling the longer they are observed.
What makes artifacts important is not merely that they exist, but that they seem to behave differently depending on who handles them, where they are discovered, and what conditions surround them. Some alter perception. Some influence probability. Some seem to intensify patterns already present in a room, a routine, or a decision. Many are subtle. Very few are harmless. Nearly all carry a cost, whether that cost is cognitive, physical, emotional, or environmental.
Artifacts are not the only anomalous objects being studied in Garza, but they are the oldest and most consistently documented. Because of this, they form the backbone of the growing archive. They are cataloged, compared, contained, and argued over by every faction operating in the city. Some see them as evidence, others see them as tools, but all see them as warnings.
Visit the Artifacts archive to explore known classifications, containment notes, and featured object files. Subscribe to the Newsletter for exclusive artifact records and incident notes that will not be published anywhere else.
Enhancers
Enhancers are a second category of anomalous objects, and they are currently the less stable of the two. Like artifacts, some are discovered in the city rather than made. Unlike artifacts, enhancers are often smaller, harder to classify, and much more unpredictable in application. Certain enhancers appear as powders, threads, oils, coatings, fragments, treated materials, or unstable objects whose behavior changes depending on what they are introduced to. Others are partially engineered by researchers attempting to reproduce or harness a useful effect. This has made the category far messier and far more dangerous.
In controlled settings, enhancers can amplify or suppress unusual effects, stabilize active objects, improve containment, or alter how an artifact behaves. In uncontrolled settings, they can escalate a problem in seconds. The same enhancer that helps contain one object may intensify another. Some can nullify effects temporarily. Some can sharpen them. Some are useful only in narrow conditions. Some should never be used directly on people and yet are anyway. This unpredictability has made enhancers one of the most contested areas of research in Garza.
Enhancers are important because they represent the point at which observation becomes intervention. Once investigators begin applying enhancers, they are no longer simply documenting anomalies. They are changing the conditions under which those anomalies operate. That shift has allowed some breakthroughs, but it has also produced some of the worst incidents in the archive. Like artifacts, enhancers always carry a cost. In many cases, that cost arrives later.
Visit the Enhancers page to learn how discovered and manmade enhancers differ, why they remain so difficult to regulate, and which known cases changed how the factions approach them.
Factions
Garza is not being shaped by a single organization. Multiple groups are now involved, and they disagree not only on what the discoveries mean, but on what should be done next. Some focus on containment. Others pursue adaptation, regulation, or direct experimentation. Their methods overlap just enough to create conflict, and their disagreements have become one of the defining pressures within the city.
HAWK is the most visible containment and research authority currently associated with artifact investigations. HAWK prioritizes documentation, controlled study, and risk mitigation. Their archive is the most extensive, their procedures are the most formalized, and their internal doctrine is built around the belief that escalation is often caused by acting too quickly.
FISH operates more fluidly, placing greater emphasis on movement, adaptation, interpretation, and information control. Where HAWK tries to slow events down, FISH often works by redirecting them. Their researchers and operatives are generally more willing to treat discoveries as signs of change rather than problems to be sealed away.
BEAR has earned a reputation for pushing experiments further than other groups consider safe. BEAR believes that pressure reveals truth, and that controlled exposure to risk is the fastest way to understand what these discoveries are capable of. Their methods have produced valuable results, but also some of the most controversial events in the archive.
The GTFU exists closer to the machinery of governance. It is not yet the fully formed authority it may one day become, but it already influences regulation, access, policy, and the legal boundaries around investigations. While less visible to the public than the operational factions, the GTFU plays an increasingly important role in deciding who is allowed to know what, and under what conditions new discoveries can be studied.
Alongside these organizations are the Independents, a loose category of unaffiliated operatives, researchers, salvagers, informants, and observers who move between official structures. Some are freelancers. Some are ideological outliers. Some are simply too useful to exclude and too difficult to control. The Independents are often treated as a nuisance, a liability, or an afterthought, but their presence in major investigations has been difficult to ignore.
Visit the Factions page to compare the goals, methods, and internal tensions shaping Garza’s response to the archive phenomenon.
The World Archive
The Authority of Ash archive is the connective tissue of the site. It expands the world beyond the novels and supports the game by cataloging discoveries, incidents, factions, and in-world documentation. It is where readers can dig deeper into Garza, where players can find hooks for campaigns, and where new discoveries can be framed as part of a living record rather than a static encyclopedia.
This archive matters because Authority of Ash is not only a story about what people know. It is a story about what gets recorded, what gets hidden, what gets misunderstood, and what gets noticed too late. That makes the archive more than a companion feature. It is part of the experience of the world itself.
Visit the World Archive through the World, Blog, and Community sections to follow ongoing discoveries and unlock deeper layers of Garza.