The homeworld of the starting characters is an Earth, much like our own. The most visible difference is the presence of Unknown Cause Metamorphosis Syndrome (UCMS, also known as Junk Gene Activation Syndrome or informally as goblinization), a collection of conditions with unknown causes that caused roughly 10% of the animal population of the planet to slowly transform into odd variations of the baseline population. At the campaign start in 2015, human UCMS victims are another set of special interest groups, with some variants suffering real prejudice and others exploiting their strange transformations.