When conjuring a world of ash, dogma, and divine warfare.

The temptation is to begin with spectacle—blazing miracles, blood-soaked crusades, saints with flame-wreathed swords. But for us, that was not the beginning.

For the Sons of Loyola, worldbuilding began with rules.

Not just narrative rules—but sacred, systemic truths that govern everything: power, punishment, prayer, and plague. Laws written into the soul of the setting. Immutable structures that even the divine must obey.

Rooted in Fire: Real History as Foundation

This world did not arise from fantasy alone.

The Sons of Loyola are directly inspired by real historical movements: the Spanish Inquisition and the rise of the Society of Jesus, founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. These were not abstract events. They were seismic transformations of faith, power, and control. Our fiction echoes these ripples.

Ignatius’s early confrontations with the mystical Alumbrados—a sect deemed dangerous by the Catholic Church—mirror the ideological rifts at the core of our setting. These real-world heresies and purges inform the tensions in our narrative.

Likewise, the Ceuta Peninsula Penal Colony, a historical prison site on the edge of North Africa, has become a critical landmark in our lore: a crucible where heretics rot, and where the Leper Inquisitor forges his army of the decayed.

We don't reference these places and figures as window dressing. They are the bones beneath the skin. They lend weight to the fiction. They remind us that belief has always carried consequence—and that holy fire is rarely clean.

Every World Requires Order

Before we built our Orders or penned the first litanies of battle, we asked: How does this world work?

How do miracles manifest? Who decides what is heresy? What is the cost of sanctity?

Rules gave us answers. They created stakes. A world without structure is hollow. But a world bound by consequence becomes fertile ground for narrative. In Sons of Loyola, power—whether spiritual, arcane, or mechanical—never comes free. If a saint calls down fire, something must be sacrificed. If a heretic spreads rot, he does so against a backdrop of order that recoils in response.

Without rules, the extraordinary is meaningless. With them, every disruption becomes a revelation.

The Book Beneath the Book

Alongside the stories, we crafted something else: a codex. A private scripture. The Loyolan Compendium.

This internal document tracks everything: the chain of command within the Black Sons, the cost of relics in wartime, the rituals of execution, the taxonomies of sin. It isn’t public, but it guides every word we write.

Want to describe a cloister overtaken by rot in southern Iberia? We consult the Compendium to know what once stood there. Want to describe a Phantom Redeemers  sacramental oath? It's already written, rooted in the chain of spiritual command that echoes back to Ignatius himself.

What began as a reference for internal consistency became something deeper—a living theology.

A World on the Verge

The Sons of Loyola do not defend a utopia. They protect a decaying sanctum, holding back heresy with both relic and rifle. But rules were never meant to last forever. They’re tested. Bent. Sometimes broken.

We built a world of order to make its disruption meaningful. When a dogma shatters, when an inquisitor falls, when a miracle takes on the shape of a curse—you’ll know the cost.