They do not win battles. They unmake the reason to fight.

The Null Guard emerged from the most terrifying lesson of the post-Cascade world: the conscious self is vulnerable.

In regions overwhelmed by the Cognitive Static, entire communities succumbed to Bicameral Regression Syndrome. Memory, identity, and the inner voice dissolved, leaving behind Echoes driven by impulse, command, and psychic residue.

The survivors who became the Null Guard reached a radical conclusion. If memory and emotion gave the Static a path into the mind, survival required eliminating them first.

The Guard does not seek power, territory, wealth, or converts in the ordinary sense. It seeks Nullity: the deliberate dismantling of identity until nothing remains for the Static to seize.

Through Absence, Order

The Null Guard believes emotion is a disease, memory is a weapon, and history is a trap.

A person is a story told continuously to the self. Names, relationships, loyalties, trauma, ambition, and hope all reinforce that story. To the Guard, those things are not sources of meaning. They are openings through which psychic corruption enters.

Initiates undergo the Severance, a process of sensory deprivation, conditioning, meditation, and psychological deconstruction intended to reduce the self to a quiet, functional core.

What replaces identity is purpose. What replaces legacy is function. What replaces pain is silence.

Strategic Erasure

The Null Guard does not conquer communities. It removes the ideas that hold them together.

A Guard operation may assassinate a symbolic leader, neutralize a sacred object, erase a historical archive, dismantle a ritual, or destroy the meaning attached to a place without necessarily destroying the place itself.

Its operatives understand that an enemy is more than troops and equipment. An enemy is a network of beliefs, memories, symbols, relationships, and shared expectations.

Remove those things, and the army may remain standing while forgetting why it was ever assembled.

Imprints and Chambers

The Guard rejects charismatic leadership and personal authority. Its decentralized cells are governed by Imprints, predefined behavioral frameworks embedded into each operative during indoctrination.

These Imprints allow cells to act with consistent purpose without relying upon individual ambition, emotional loyalty, or conventional command.

The Guard is divided into functional Chambers responsible for erasure, preservation of doctrine, investigation, punishment, and other necessary acts. Advancement is reverse-linear. Greater status does not bring greater individuality. It requires the systematic shedding of memory, personality, and identity.

The Ghost Cohort Protocols

The roots of the Null Guard lie in a pre-Guard military program intended to create soldiers resistant to psychic warfare.

The Ghost Cohort Protocols used cortical suppression, sensory deprivation, psychoactive conditioning, and experimental resonance fields to produce minds with no stable self for an enemy to attack.

The project culminated in the catastrophe at Aegis Black, where an entire facility was subjected to mass psychic sterilization. From that ruin emerged the first true Null Guard: controlled, organized, and emptied of nearly everything that had once made them individuals.

Anti-Ritual and Cognitive Warfare

The Null Guard studies the beliefs and rituals of other factions in order to invert them.

Where the Choir uses harmony and shared memory, the Guard creates zones of silence and disconnection. Where the Stillwater Compact draws strength from communal meaning, the Guard projects apathy and absence. Where another faction preserves a symbol, the Guard strips that symbol of identity while leaving its physical form behind.

Its weapons include silence fields, anti-rituals, null-frequency devices, cognitive suppression, symbolic erasure, and tactics designed to collapse Cohesion before physical resistance has been overcome.

The Cracks in the Void

The Null Guard cannot completely eliminate the humanity of its operatives.

Suppressed memories can return. Bodies retain reactions the conscious mind refuses to acknowledge. An operative may become attached to a designation, remember a face, experience an unwanted emotion, or absorb fragments of those they have erased.

This return of identity is known as Bleedback.

At the Null-Cascade Threshold, an operative’s carefully constructed absence can fail catastrophically. Forgotten memories, relationships, beliefs, and emotions may return at once, transforming a perfect instrument of the void into something unstable, violent, or newly human.

Inside This Book

• The origins, history, and doctrine of the Null Guard;
• The creed of Through Absence, Order and the philosophy of Nullity;
• The Ghost Cohort Protocols and the Aegis Black Incident;
• Imprints, functional Chambers, reverse hierarchy, and decentralized cells;
• The Severance, Purge Rites, anti-rituals, and methods of strategic erasure;
• The Remembered, Rogue Emotes, internal heresies, and doctrinal cannibalism;
• Null Guard weapons, equipment, relics, field technology, and psychic suppression systems;
• Rules for Absence Points, Bleedback, Null Contamination, and the Null-Cascade Threshold;
• Character options and guidance for playing Null Guard operatives, defectors, and heretics;
• Faction mechanics, units, doctrines, and tactical options for miniatures play;
• Relationships with the Choir, Stillwater Compact, Wayfinders, corporations, and other powers of the Wake;
• Scenario seeds, psychological-horror encounters, faction conflicts, and campaign frameworks; and
• Guidance for using the Guard as antagonists, inscrutable allies, playable characters, or an environmental cognitive threat.

The Null Guard in Roleplaying Campaigns

Null Guard campaigns explore identity, trauma, suppressed memory, emotional control, and the question of whether a person can destroy the sources of suffering without also destroying everything worth preserving.

Players may portray Guard initiates, infiltrators, Erasers, defectors, Rogue Emotes, or members of the Remembered who have begun to hear the memories hidden inside the void.

Playing a Null operative requires confronting an unusual form of risk. The character’s greatest abilities come from becoming less of a person. Every act of erasure may provide power while bringing the return of the suppressed self closer.

The Null Guard in Miniatures Play

Null Guard forces emphasize stealth, psychic suppression, morale collapse, targeted neutralization, and cognitive warfare.

They excel at weakening enemy Cohesion, disrupting command, suppressing psychic effects, neutralizing objectives, and removing the symbols or operatives upon which an opposing force depends.

The Guard does not need to destroy every enemy model. It needs to ensure that the survivors no longer possess a coherent reason to continue.

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 shadow factions and psychological conflicts of the Wake.

The appropriate Deadwake 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: 162 pages
• Dimensions: Approximately 7.44 × 9.69 inches
• Language: English
• Publication Date: May 27, 2026
• ISBN-10: 1969445270
• ISBN-13: 9781969445279

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