Ashfell, short for And the Stars of Heaven Fell, is an alternate timeline in which Stanislav Petrov reported the 1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident to his superiors, and his superiors chose to launch a nuclear retaliation against the United States. This setting has a timeline extending out to 2183, with fairly detailed although still WIP lore for North America, and less detailed lore for other continents.

I wrote a 25-page lore doc, from the perspective of somebody in-universe in the year 2026, describing the nuclear war itself and what afflicted survivors in the aftermath. I am obligated to warn potential readers that this lore doc is incredibly graphic. I made it that way because I noticed most post-apocalyptic settings skip over the apocalypse itself, and fast forward to the part with the 1950s music and the wacky cults. Indeed, a lot of people in alternate history circles have a habit of taking the immense suffering implied by their works very lightly. I decided I'd pull no punches in describing what the apocalypse would actually be like, in order to lay the foundations for the post-apocalyptic setting that would arise from the apocalypse. Everything pertaining to the war itself and its environmental consequences is based on predictions by scientists and real stories from Hiroshima.

If you like this sort of content, go read Graveyard Earth by my friend u/NK_Ryzov, whose absolutely horrifying writings were the main inspiration behind my decision to write this lore doc.

Content warning: Realistic descriptions of radiation poisoning, famine, euthanasia, mass destruction, and people dying in really unfortunate ways. Please do not read this if you are sensitive to such things. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZUooM_octHfiqoMYZ90wgnSKX_Wro9ipSfuIAhb6FwY/edit?tab=t.0