In Mothership Safira, kobolds, dragons, and a host of other mythical creatures have long lived together in something like harmony in a universe birthed by the great Dragon Mothers of lore. All that changed with the arrival of the Second Nightmare War, as beings from another universe infected vulnerable minds by contagious memes and imprisoned vast swathes of the galaxy in prisons of surreal phantasmagoria. Galactic civilization crumbled in their wake, leaving only sparse holdouts of inhabited space.
At the frontlines of the struggle to weave the patchwork of surviving worlds into a powerful force for liberation are the draconic Motherships, nomadic city-ships distantly descended from the first civilization established by the Mothers in the early universe. Pushing back the tide with the power of cute sex, cum-based diplomacy, and skimpy mecha, the pint-size dragon queen Lilac and sly kobold princess Lavender adventure across the Tourmaline Reach meeting new friends and new lovers to free the galaxy from struggle once and for all.
A thousand years ago a great civilization stretching from Far Land to Far Land disintegrated. Empowered by the psychic force of millions of minds linked through a vast shared dream called the world-soul, mighty empires arose - whose great cruelties imprinted themselves back upon the dream, spinning off alien impulses and violent revenants that infected souls and consumed them from within, finally clinging to the weak spiritual residue attached to the bodies of the dead once they had exhausted the living. Filled with vulnerable piglins, the great Nether bastions saw the writing on the wall, sheathing themselves in cleansing gold and severing the links between Nether and earth - leaving the humans to their devices, who dwindled until just a few remained.
A millennium on, the old world continues to haunt the new: Sculk seaweed beaches in vast rafts along shorelines, a reoccurring consequence of the sea infiltrating long-abandoned cities that feed on fresh death, prompting big cleanups powered by a resurgence of andesite technology. Electric light and radio has made the land safer against the predations of the undead, but it is still dangerous for humans to cross between towns. And the collapse of the world-soul seems to have made way for shadowy figures to infiltrate the collective unconscious, stalking the unlucky out of their peripheral vision, never quite allowing the eye to focus on them.
Once engineered as caretakers of the world-soul, the Soulmasons, or just Masons, are humans gifted with a natural art for communing with the spirits that inhabit the land - echoes of patterns, creatures, communities, and hardships that, through the alchemy of noema, take on strange lives of their own. Often employed as some mixture of geomancer, therapist, or spy - the land remembers, after all - their affinity with the spirits embedded in soil and stone also makes them supernaturally adept miners, architects, and tinkerers, at least if you have access to the right enhancements. This is the world of Diamond Dreams.
Standard Candles takes place in the infinite multiverse where any story can happen. In it, lost things and beings from across existence tend to become stranded and accumulate, and have to figure out how to get their bearings and scrape by - amid cyber-witch smugglers, magic alien plushie knights from a planet shaped like a cone, and the augmented desk plant who works retail - all against the backdrop of a 3000 year old ultra-magitech civilization constantly sending forth explorers and contractors across the multiverse, trawling the depths of hyperspace and beyond for new items of power and beings of interest.
An enormous spectrum of physical laws (and magic systems) pervade the multiverse, ranging from "normal" cosmoi (universes) not unlike our own, to "weirdspace" worlds with habitable but odd physics like floating islands instead of planets, to even more abstract cosmoi saturated with alien forms and machinery mysterious in function to those who stumble upon them, to spirit worlds shaped by the shadows of the material realm and the after-echoes of the psyche.
Known Space teems with all walks of life from all walks of reality - explorers seeking out strange new worlds, interstellar mining lawyers who also happen to be lizard plushies woven from magic thread in an alternate history, psychic cowgirls who dive into the dreams of cybernetic forests, fluffy alien squid girls who also happen to be war journalists, bird gangsters for the space yakuza, and starship trailer park witches struggling under the dark pact called student debt, among countless other sorts. It's a magical cyberpunk space opera where the lives of ordinary people are shot through with the fantastical even when they're very mundane, and a setting where any crossover is possible.
In the ruins of an occult war that sent the world on a death spiral, the architects of the fading Equestrian empire, led by Star Swirl, launch a plan to restore order once and for all. Traveling into another past, they establish cells of politicians, spies, and magicians in high places to implement a vast magical infrastructure that will bring about a new world order: a softer world where power can always be truly just.
In a thriving Equestria, the god-queens Celestia and Luna preside over a nation deep in the throes of a vast, peaceful social transformation. Not that they necessarily need to lift a hoof - the mundane affairs of the queendom more or less run themselves for the two, as far as they are concerned, leaving them free to pursue occult knowledge and private passions, especially for Luna, the Princess of Dreams. Yet something is amiss...
In a future not far off from our time, where a prion pandemic with a 100% mortality rate has brought the world to its knees, the Earth reels again one day as its surface is cleft by a series of immense portals leading to an endless expanse alien expanse linked by further networks of portals. Beset by wonders, wastelands, and new political conflicts which explode on all sides of the lands and seas divided by the portals, the great powers totter over what to do, before several fearful, tentative official exploration programs are established to forge into the breach.
Decades later, delegates of NATO arrange a meeting with Equestrian officials to discuss the possibility of a unique kind of technology transfer: to bring Harmony to Earth, and seal a new Pax Americana forever.
A ramshackle space station city that travels the multiverse, picking up all manner of voyagers both accidental and intentional. Home to tens of millions, it is a hub of adventures.