The Helios Foundation does not want to control humanity. It wants to help humanity become better.

The distinction is comforting right up until Helios decides what “better” means.

The Helios Foundation is the most outwardly humane of the great corporate powers of Deadwake. It builds clinics, stabilizes communities, treats psychic trauma, cultivates food, repairs damaged bodies, and offers sanctuary from the Cognitive Static.

Its residents are healthier, calmer, safer, and, by almost every measurable standard, happier than those living under rival corporate systems.

They are also surrounded by an institution that has spent generations perfecting the ability to alter biology, mood, memory, desire, and identity while describing every intervention as an act of care.

The Doctrine of the Garden

Helios believes humanity is a damaged ecosystem. Trauma, aggression, dissent, instability, and uncontrolled desire are not merely personal problems. They are weeds capable of spreading through the social body.

The Foundation therefore cultivates people as carefully as it cultivates crops, environments, and engineered organisms. A therapeutic intervention that removes destructive impulses is not punishment. Atmospheric mood regulation is not coercion. Genetic alteration is not domination.

It is care, delivered by people who genuinely believe that allowing someone to remain damaged would be the greater cruelty.

The Atriums

Helios arcologies, known as Atriums, are beautiful, warm, cultivated environments designed around human comfort and psychological stability. Light, temperature, scent, sound, nutrition, social contact, and architecture are adjusted to promote health and prosocial behavior.

The pleasantness is real. Residents are not pretending to feel safe, calm, or cared for. The deeper question is whether those feelings remain meaningfully theirs when every surrounding condition has been selected to produce them.

The Flesh Forges

Beneath the language of wellness lies the industrial power that makes Helios possible.

The Flesh Forges produce engineered organisms, replacement tissue, artificial humans, genetic enhancements, biological weapons, adaptive ecosystems, and living technologies whose existence challenges any easy distinction between medicine and manufacture.

Helios does not view the body as sacred or fixed. It views biology as another system that can be repaired, improved, and redesigned.

A House Divided

The Foundation is not a unified conspiracy. Its ruling bloodlines, heirs, researchers, reformers, hardliners, Pruners, and competing ideological movements disagree profoundly about what care requires and how far cultivation should go.

Some believe Helios must persuade humanity to accept improvement. Others believe refusing treatment is itself evidence of impairment. Still others fear that the Foundation has mistaken its ability to alter human beings for the moral authority to define them.

These conflicts extend into the shadow world, the secret struggle surrounding the Silent City, and the radical doctrines threatening to transform the Foundation from within.

Inside This Book

• A detailed history and overview of the Helios Foundation;
• The Doctrine of the Garden and the ideology of therapeutic control;
• The Foundation’s competing internal factions, ruling bloodlines, heirs, and ideological struggles;
• The bio-engineered Atriums and the society that inhabits them;
• The Flesh Forges and the biological industries supporting Helios power;
• Psychological conditioning, chemical pacification, surveillance, genetic engineering, and wellness intervention;
• The Foundation’s relationship with the shadow world and the legend of the Silent City;
• Three Advanced Character Origins: Gen-hanced, Artificial Human, and Defector;
• A Hidden Allegiance system for traitors, infiltrators, and double agents;
• Two complete Ideological Progression Trees;
• Faction and NPC profiles;
• Twelve prepared mission concepts; and
• Material for roleplaying, miniatures, and hybrid Deadwake campaigns.

Helios in Roleplaying Campaigns

Helios characters may be physicians, Caretakers, Psyche-Architects, Gen-hanced operatives, artificial humans, defectors, Pruners, researchers, heirs, or agents whose true loyalties remain hidden from the rest of the group.

Campaigns involving the Foundation naturally explore the boundary between treatment and coercion, consent and conditioning, rescue and abduction, self-improvement and erasure.

The most dangerous Helios antagonist is rarely someone who wants to hurt the characters. It is someone who has correctly identified their suffering and possesses the means to remove it without accepting their refusal.

Helios in Miniatures Play

Helios forces wage war through biological control, psychological pressure, engineered operatives, toxins, pheromonal influence, and surgical violence.

They excel at weakening enemy Cohesion, imposing harmful conditions, controlling movement and behavior, and exploiting targets already placed under physical or psychological strain.

Their battlefield doctrine mirrors their social philosophy: isolate the dysfunction, stabilize the environment, and remove whatever continues to resist treatment.

Using This Sourcebook

This book supports both the Deadwake Role Playing Rules and the Deadwake Miniatures Combat Rules. It contains material for players, Facilitators, miniatures commanders, and readers interested in the corporations and ideological conflicts of the Wake.

The appropriate core rulebook is required to use the included roleplaying or miniatures mechanics.

Book Details

• Author: Jon Compton
• Publisher: Canvas Temple Publishing, LLC
• Format: Paperback
• Length: 80 pages
• Dimensions: Approximately 7.44 × 9.69 inches
• Language: English
• Publication Date: May 9, 2026
• ISBN-10: 1969445130
• ISBN-13: 9781969445132

The digital edition is sold separately through WargameVault. This listing is for the physical paperback edition.