Hey Fortuna Citizens!
I’m Tanya, the main world designer and writer for Streets of Fortuna. You might know me from content I wrote and designed in Moon Hunters, Boyfriend Dungeon, The Shrouded Isle, or even bits of The Secret World, or Age of Conan.
Streets of Fortuna is inspired by Constantinople around 550 AD, so our typical reference point is midway through the reign of Justinian I.
I chose Constantinople because I've always found it to be fascinating, and because I could imagine it specifically as the perfect sandbox. 
Justinian, reference images
It was the wealthiest city in the world, with riots, diversity, coup attempts, and big personalities. Fortuna is a game about living your other life, and where better than the heart of the eastern Roman empire, during the messy adolescent years of monotheism?
Getting drunk
But rather than stick to the history, we want the freedom to do whatever's best for our gameplay experience, similar to the way Skyrim presents a more game-friendly version of Vikings. Our version of Constantinople is called Fortuna.
Fortuna Basics
So, what is Fortuna? It's a wealthy city-state on a peninsula, the center of the world’s trade. It has a central street, called the meze (or mese), from the main city gate to the Overlord's palace.
Buying meat from the market Most people or their house-servants do their shopping on the meze if they can afford it, or stop by for meals or a drink. Fortuna wasn't always the capital of the Latian Empire. It was refounded some 50 years ago, by the Overlord, who barely escaped as a refugee when the old capital was sacked by the Fritingians. By order of the Overlord, the old name for Fortuna was removed from most records and is considered bad luck to speak out loud, but some grandmothers might remember it.
Religion in Fortuna
Church concept art.
The Overlord belongs to (and benefits from) the Miteran Church, a religion that proclaims there is only one true God and only one true path to salvation. Most people attend their local Church and also take care of the neighborhood shrine to one of the dozen old gods, wear ancestral amulets, and follow whatever superstitions are supposed to bring good luck. People from Ellada (a neighboring island country) tend to follow the old ways more closely, even if they’re technically forbidden.
People in Fortuna tend to believe very strongly in artifacts, demons, spirits, and miracles, sometimes from first-hand experience.
We're building our religion systems modularly to have system-driven elements for later extension. The cosmos are governed by superphysical entities that are constant across all generated versions of Fortuna, but the way they express themselves and are understood by worshippers will hopefully become increasingly flexible as we go.
Wrap-Up
For the first release of the game we’ll only have those three populations I mentioned (the Latians, the Elladans, the Fritingians), but you’ll be at the bottom of the ladder in any case, with no money and no friends, so that’ll probably matter more than your culture, at least until we introduce language and literacy systems someday.
I don’t want to spoil too much so I’ll stop rambling here but if you have questions about the setting and world, feel free to ask.
- Tanya