Three families burned the world down. The official record says they were punished for it. The official record is lying.

Seventy-five years after the Feedback Cascade shattered global consciousness, the corporations that inherited the ruins insist that the architects of the disaster are gone. Their institutions were dismantled. Their assets were seized. Their names were erased or transformed into warnings told to children.

Their descendants survived.

The Stained Houses reveals the fallen dynasties whose ancestors built, weaponized, and popularized the technologies that ended the old world. House Walker, the Lin Compact, and the Elysian Remnant no longer command nations or corporate empires. They operate beneath them, maintaining hidden laboratories, fortified enclaves, black-market SimStim dens, forgotten arsenals, secret bloodlines, and networks of influence that reach into nearly every power in the Wake.

They are engineers seeking atonement, soldiers who refuse repentance, and dream merchants determined to replace reality itself. Each possesses knowledge that could save the world, dominate it, or finish what the Cascade began.

This sourcebook introduces their world in full: the factions, the bloodlines, the forbidden technologies, the secret bargains, the tactical operatives, and the invisible political architecture known as the Underlayment.

A World Beneath the World

The visible conflicts of Deadwake are fought over territory, resources, doctrine, and survival. Beneath those struggles lies another war.

The Underlayment is a web of concealed influence, inherited obligations, compromised officials, covert patrons, information brokers, double agents, and favors that have waited generations to be collected. A corporate raid may secretly be a House Walker field test. A humanitarian convoy may conceal a Lin Compact arms shipment. A murdered executive may still be alive inside an Elysian dreamloop.

Missions involving the Stained Houses are rarely what they appear to be. The public objective is only the surface. Beneath it lies the actual struggle for influence, secrets, and control. Beneath that lies the most dangerous conflict of all: what the characters will become when loyalty, identity, and survival can no longer be reconciled.

The Three Stained Houses

House Walker: The Atoning Engineers

Once known as House Fen, House Walker descends from the engineers who created the Cognitive Resonance Interface and the military technology that helped trigger the Feedback Cascade.

Their surviving cells are united by a single doctrine: Atonement Through Correction. They believe their ancestors broke the world and that only they possess the knowledge required to repair it.

Walker Engineers preserve uncorrupted pre-Cascade schematics. Their Keys infiltrate corporate systems and steal the components required for the Great Work. Their secretive Dampers test unstable devices capable of manipulating the Cognitive Static itself.

Their ultimate objective is the reconstruction of the Metacognitive Damper, a device that could silence the Static on a planetary scale. Success might redeem their name and free humanity from the systems that now control it. Failure could unleash another catastrophe.

The Lin Compact: The Unrepentant Generals

The Lin Compact descends from the military command that issued the final catastrophic orders of the old world. Unlike the other Houses, its members did not disappear into anonymity. They carried their weapons, command traditions, and wounded pride into exile.

The Compact believes history condemned its ancestors for making the only decision available to them. Its generals do not seek forgiveness. They seek vindication through strength.

From fortified territories in the deep wastes, the Compact trains disciplined warbands, preserves pre-Cascade military hardware, sponsors proxy forces, and turns desperate communities into dependent allies. Every rifle supplied creates an obligation. Every rescue establishes a debt. Every victory proves that the Compact was right to survive.

Its members offer order in a world that has forgotten how much order can cost.

The Elysian Remnant: The Dream Merchants

The Elysian Remnant descends from the media and SimStim empire whose cognitive networks connected billions of minds before amplifying the Cascade across the planet.

Where House Walker attempts to repair reality and the Lin Compact attempts to master it, the Remnant asks a more seductive question: why remain trapped inside reality at all?

Elysian Curators operate hidden SimStim dens in corporate Down-Sectors, offering manufactured memories, crafted identities, impossible experiences, and temporary refuge from the Wake. Behind those pleasures lies a sophisticated system of addiction, surveillance, psychological manipulation, and consciousness engineering.

The Remnant trades in dreams, but its final ambition is far greater. Its Simulacrum project seeks to preserve, reconstruct, or manufacture human identity inside a reality of its own design.

Rules for the Shadow War

The Stained Houses provides a complete mechanical framework for representing covert power and divided loyalties in an ongoing Deadwake campaign.

• Underlayment Influence: Track the hidden reach of Houses, corporations, Waster powers, and secret societies as they spend influence to manipulate events.
• Shadow Actions: Allow characters to undertake private missions for hidden patrons, sometimes in direct conflict with the crew’s public objective.
• Secret Faction Standing: Record a character’s concealed relationship with a House separately from the reputation known to the rest of the group.
• Exposure: Measure the accumulating risk that covert operations, forbidden technology, or suspicious behavior will reveal a character’s true allegiance.
• Forbidden Bargains: Establish secret agreements between factions whose public doctrines should make cooperation impossible.
• Influence Maps: Show how successful missions, betrayals, discoveries, and political reversals change the balance of the hidden war.
• Complication Triggers: Introduce sudden audits, equipment failures, dream contamination, delayed reinforcements, third-party interventions, and other signs that unseen powers are manipulating the battlefield.

These systems can support a campaign centered entirely on espionage and conspiracy, or they can be placed beneath an existing campaign as a slow-burning second layer. The players may initially see only isolated favors, strange failures, and contradictory orders. Over time, those fragments reveal that their missions have been shaping a war they did not know existed.

Characters of Tainted Blood

To carry the blood of a Stained House is to inherit a crime you did not commit and obligations you may never escape.

The expanded Stained Bloodline advanced origin allows players to create descendants, hidden heirs, cultivated assets, and reluctant scions of the three Houses. A Bloodline character gains access to forbidden knowledge and unique opportunities, but begins the campaign marked by corporate suspicion and tied to a family agenda larger than any individual life.

Player material includes:

• House-specific reputation modifiers and secret allegiances;
• Genetic and psychological triggers capable of activating forgotten technology or ancestral memories;
• Three-tier Agenda Tracks for House Walker, the Lin Compact, and the Elysian Remnant;
• Restricted technologies, patrons, ranks, and permanent House abilities earned through advancement;
• House-specific boons, flaws, motivations, secrets, and internal conflicts;
• Rules for discovery, public revelation, and life after a secret identity is exposed;
• The Phoenix Protocol, which transforms a compromised operative into an overt House asset;
• Legacy Missions built around a character’s ancestry; and
• House-specific Resonance effects representing ancestral memory, inherited trauma, and forbidden talent.

The Blood Ledger

Every Stained bloodline inherits unfinished business.

The Blood Ledger records ancestral favors, vendettas, hidden assets, promises, and betrayals. A debt may remain dormant for years before a stranger produces proof of an agreement made by the character’s grandparents. A forgotten safehouse may contain the only surviving copy of a forbidden design. An old enemy may recognize a name the character has spent a lifetime hiding.

Characters can honor a debt, refuse it, or attempt to turn it against the person collecting. None of those choices is safe.

The Ledger converts family history into a living campaign engine. Its entries create missions, alter relationships, expose secrets, and ensure that the past does not remain safely in the past.

Whispers of the Blood

Stained blood carries more than reputation.

Under severe psychological pressure, a descendant may experience fragments of ancestral memory encoded through trauma, Static exposure, and inherited cognitive patterns. These episodes may reveal forgotten expertise, military instinct, impossible perceptions, or seductive glimpses of another reality.

Every benefit carries a cost.

• Walker heirs experience flashes of technical genius burdened by inherited guilt.
• Lin descendants hear commands delivered with the authority of dead generals.
• Elysian bloodlines perceive possibilities that weaken the distinction between reality and design.

The House-specific Resonance tables allow these events to affect investigation, character development, tactical objectives, and the physical environment of the battlefield.

A Facilitator’s Toolkit for Conspiracy

Intrigue works only when secrets create meaningful choices rather than arbitrary surprises. This book provides practical guidance for managing hidden information while preserving trust among the players.

The Three-Layer Conflict Model structures scenarios around:

• The Surface Conflict: the stated mission and visible victory conditions;
• The Underlayment Conflict: the hidden struggle for influence, secrets, and factional advantage; and
• The Core Conflict: the personal confrontation with identity, loyalty, guilt, ambition, and betrayal.

Additional tools include:

• Guidance for managing player knowledge and character knowledge;
• Private objectives and communications from concealed handlers;
• Flashback Bargains that allow players to reveal previously unknown connections at a cost;
• A Secrets Clock for pacing discoveries and campaign-changing revelations;
• Conspiracy escalation and de-escalation tables;
• Secret motive, complication, and improvisation tables;
• Methods for revealing a House gradually through clues, failures, obligations, and contradictory evidence;
• Player-driven conspiracy rules that allow characters to manipulate the Underlayment themselves; and
• Advice for keeping hidden agendas dramatic without allowing them to overwhelm the shared campaign.

Adventures of Secrets and Betrayal

The book contains ready-to-use narrative hooks, mission frameworks, tactical scenarios, environmental campaigns, and linked campaign structures.

Investigate an impossible murder in which the victim dies more than once. Track a command cipher through a chain of altered copies and manufactured histories. Escort a medical convoy whose cargo could ignite a regional war. Enter a damaged SimStim archive where consciousness has become a hostile landscape. Protect a Walker prototype that distorts memory and causality each time it is struck.

Included scenario and campaign material supports:

• Espionage, infiltration, data theft, and counterintelligence;
• Hidden patrons, compromised allies, and divided mission objectives;
• Extraction missions, field tests, convoy operations, and infected wargear;
• Dreamloops, psychological warfare, memetic contagion, and manufactured identity;
• Intergenerational campaigns in which new characters inherit the consequences of an earlier group’s decisions;
• Counter-conspiracy roles such as the Informant, Saboteur, and Double Agent;
• Linked tactical campaigns for each of the three Houses;
• Resonant environments such as the Whispering Zone, Protocol Black, and the Phantom Market; and
• Resonance Storms that escalate across a battlefield as ancestral trauma becomes a physical hazard.

Roleplaying and Miniatures Integration

The Stained Houses rarely deploy openly beneath their own banners. Their influence appears through altered objectives, prototype devices, hidden operatives, compromised units, sudden reinforcements, equipment failures, and third parties whose true employer is not immediately apparent.

A roleplaying bargain may provide reinforcements in the next skirmish. A debt called in during a conversation may change a battlefield objective. A character’s Resonance event may create a hazardous zone, reveal a concealed target, or cause the victory conditions to change in the middle of a battle.

The book includes rules and guidance for carrying the same secrets, obligations, and factional consequences between narrative scenes and tactical encounters.

Stained House Field Operatives

Dedicated miniatures profiles bring the methods of the three Houses to the battlefield.

• Walker Key Operatives: infiltrators and information specialists who exploit systems and concealed access points;
• Walker Damper Specialists: vulnerable but dangerous prototype handlers capable of creating disruptive Resonance effects;
• Walker Engineers: technical operatives equipped to manipulate devices, objectives, and battlefield infrastructure;
• Lin Compact Veteran Soldiers: hardened troops carrying the discipline and preserved doctrine of the old military order;
• Lin Compact Commanders: forceful leaders who turn obligation, coordination, and authority into tactical advantages;
• Elysian Escapists: elusive operatives who weaponize perception, deception, and SimStim technology; and
• Elysian Philosophers: support specialists capable of destabilizing enemy certainty and reshaping the psychological battlefield.

Inside This Book

• The complete history, culture, organization, doctrine, and secret objectives of House Walker, the Lin Compact, and the Elysian Remnant;
• Major power brokers, handlers, defectors, commanders, engineers, Curators, and other campaign-ready NPCs;
• Faction relationships connecting the Houses to CAD, Kenshin Industrial, the Helios Foundation, the Wayfinders’ Charter, the Stillwater Compact, and other powers;
• The Underlayment Influence system for covert political action;
• Shadow Actions, secret Faction Standing, Exposure, and Forbidden Bargains;
• The expanded Stained Bloodline advanced origin;
• House-specific Agenda Tracks, boons, flaws, secrets, motivations, and advancement options;
• Revelation rules and long-term consequences for exposed characters;
• The Blood Ledger system for inherited debts, vendettas, and hidden assets;
• General and House-specific Resonance tables;
• Legacy Missions and intergenerational campaign structures;
• The Three-Layer Conflict Model for designing conspiracy scenarios;
• Flashback Bargains, the Secrets Clock, and player-driven conspiracy mechanics;
• Numerous narrative hooks, tactical scenarios, linked missions, and campaign frameworks;
• Resonant environments and escalating Resonance Storm rules;
• Field operative profiles for all three Houses;
• Scenario diagrams and tactical play aids;
• A timeline of the Feedback Cascade and the rise of the Underlayment;
• A glossary of forbidden technologies;
• A secrets cross-reference table;
• Design commentary and campaign integration guidance;
• Quick-reference sheets for the principal systems; and
• Atmospheric artwork depicting the hidden world of the Stained Houses.

Using This Sourcebook

The Stained Houses 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 hidden history and political architecture of the Deadwake universe.

The Houses can serve as patrons, antagonists, secret allies, competing conspiracies, or the concealed force behind an existing campaign. A player may belong to one without the rest of the crew knowing. An entire group may work for a House while misunderstanding its real objective. The characters may spend months fighting a visible enemy before discovering that both sides have been manipulated by the same unseen patron.

This is not simply a collection of three new factions. It is a system for transforming the politics of Deadwake into a living network of obligations and betrayals.

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: 140 pages
• Dimensions: Approximately 7.44 × 9.69 inches
• Language: English
• Publication Year: 2026
• ISBN-10: 1969445327
• ISBN-13: 9781969445323

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

The world ended once in public. The struggle over who inherits the blame has always been fought in secret.