This document, hereby made public for the first time, is a key lore file and synopsis written by Nasu Kinoko when first proposing Fate/Grand Order for production.
All contents written in this manuscript belong exclusively to 2014’s alpha blueprint.
World design
AD 2015.
The last era where magecraft is still functional.
Society was built by human hands, but the mages monopolized the knowledge of the world’s truths.
Magecraft governed the capabilities of past humans, which science is unable to decipher; while science built up towards the capabilities of future mankind, which magecraft will never be able to achieve.
They were wholly incompatible fields of study, but in one particular aspect, they aimed for a common goal.
Both magecraft and science seek to bring longer prosperity to the humanity advancing its studies—in other words, they’re guardians of history.
Human Continuation and Security Organization
//Maybe Human Order Continuation and Security Organization would sound more professional?
A special agency founded to observe the world that magecraft alone can’t see and science alone can’t measure, and prevent definitive bad endings (extinction) for mankind.
Designed for the mission of making human history outlast everything, it indiscriminately gathered researchers of magecraft and science alike.
AD 1950
LAPLACE, the Event-Recording Cyberdemons are successfully generated.
AD 1990
●●●, the Simulated Global Environment Model is completed.
AD 1999
SHEBA, the Near-Future Observation Lenses are completed.
AD 2004
FATE, the Guardian Heroic Spirit Summon System is completed.
AD 2015
TRISMEGISTUS, the Spiritron Computer is completed.
After a sequence of glorious successes, the HCSO proved history was safe for the next 100 years.
But then came April 2015.
With no previous warning, SHEBA lost its read on the future domain it was observing.
The calculations revealed—or rather, proved conclusively—that mankind would go extinct on December 2015.
Why? How? By who? To what end?
The HCSO researchers were flooded with questions.
Meanwhile, SHEBA observed a new irregularity.
AD 2004, a provincial city in Japan.
That place was the first ever “unobservable domain.”
The HCSO theorized this to be the cause of human extinction and decided to carry out the Sixth Experiment, which was still on test stages.
It entailed time traveling to the past.
A forbidden ritual where the practitioner gets converted into spiritrons and sent to the past, where they can locate time singularities to unravel or destroy.
The name for this ritual is Grand Order: Holy Grail Questing.
Grand Orders are a general term for all those who battle against fate and confront history to protect mankind.
LAPLACE
Exploiting the fact that magical energy can be sent to the past, it casts spells from the present in the past, spawning familiars that record all events in an area. After one year of activity, the familiars shut down and crystallize. By collecting the crystals in the modern age, it becomes possible to verify past events.
However, the longer it has been since the Laplaces crystallized, the more likely it is that the crystals got damaged, which demands that the summoner creates more potent familiars. As far as it’s currently known, none of the Laplaces sent to the BC era survived until the present era.
Earth Model
A simulated Earth created by a spell that reads all of Earth’s data past and present, extracted from Planet Earth itself. Its state can be set to a short-range estimation of the future, reaching up to 100 years ahead.
You’d expect it to take the appearance of a miniature Earth, but nope, it looks like a planet of pitch black darkness. Unfortunately, human senses turned out to be unable to peer into this Earth.
SHEBA
A special kit of lenses made to peer into the Earth Model.
Although they can’t be used to glean detailed information on the future, they do enable a good read on the level of civilization progress on any specific region.
While the results weren’t the exactly what was intended, they serve as evidence that mankind is still alive 100 years later.
TRISMEGISTUS
A spiritron PC completed with tech provided by the Atlas Institute. Read Fate/EXTRA Material for more details.
It’s possible to affect the past by using the TRISMEGISTUS to prove that a Master “exists” in the past.