Story Recap: Carnival Macabre

Jonathan here! This last weekend, we had our October game, Carnival Macabre, and a few big events happened over the weekend I’d like to recap. My hope is to cover something like this after every game to fill in the blanks for folks that might have missed some of the big plot points over the weekend for one reason or another.

Two major events happened during this last game: The Indulgence, and the Lone Star Cup.

The Indulgence

The October game coincides with the annual Indulgence - a “holiday” of sorts where for 24 hours the laws are suspended and the dangerous Lifers of Prudence Penitentiary are released. This event occurs each year and we play up the threat with unique, intelligent antagonists. This year included a few notable appearances by Lifers from previous years as well as brand new faces that wrecked their particular brand of terror and mayhem on Bravado.

Since the Penitentiary doesn’t take the prisoners back for 24 hours, the trick of the Indulgence is simply to endure and survive. An added complication this year was that the Lifers were tasked with dragging back helpless subjects to a house of torture, the Chateau la Mort, ran by the Unstable mad scientist known only as The Butcher. In their charnel house, the Butcher was tasked with collecting organs from her subjects through unnecessary surgery and electroshock therapy. Many Vados were harvested as involuntary organ donors, while several even died as the Butcher took everything they had to give.

Through diligent research, the heroes of the town were able to identify how Tabitha St. Mercy, the Warden, was able to track down her Lifers after the Indulgence and realized that they needed capture as many of the Lifers as they could alive. The town was unable to discover the location of the Chateau until it was too late, and the Butcher escaped with the harvested biomass collected from the townsfolk of Bravado. What she intends to do with it we may soon find out soon…

At the end of the weekend, we still had a few Lifers to account for:

• Eyeless Jack, the Nemesis Mindkiller of Killhouse, was finally returned to his cell after nearly two years on the loose. He was beaten by a combined effort of the townsfolk building the Depot into an inescapable trap, and the quick thinking of Patchup and Hammers in disarming and disabling the psychotic Unstable. Eerily, the Nemesis’ final request before incarceration was simply to deliver a letter to his father, a doctor in the Lovelace homestead of Widow’s Peak.

• Mother Herman and Father Diane Volstead, crazed Nuclear Family killers and gangsters, were given a chance at freedom and allowed to escape. The town even removed the implanted psionic crystals that allowed Tabitha to track them and the Volsteads were airlifted out of town on a zeppelin. This decision probably won’t come back to haunt people, don’t worry.

• Adam Moriarty, the “Spider” of Killhouse, was brutally executed by the town in an attempt to free Eyeless Jack. He remains at large and since he was the only lifer actually KILLED, he is the hardest to track and recapture. Having a Nemesis based on a Sherlock Holmes villain on the run with a reason to seek revenge on those that stopped his machinations seems like something you’ll have to deal with in the future.

• The Siren, a powerful psion with a dangerous secret, was actually smuggled out of town before the Indulgence ended. She was last seen on a caravan headed towards the Clutch, freed of the strange psionic muzzle that kept her from talking or using a dangerous psionic scream.

• Sid Sidewinder, the Nomad arsonist that was found to have been controlled by the villainous Volsteads, was set free of his chains and given a vehicle to escape Bravado by his friends in the Diesel Jock clan known as the Road Royals.

• The Saint of Three Mouths, a gluttonous Hedon that escaped Killhouse once by having people literally eat him alive, escaped with the Butcher away from the Chateau la Mort. He is still at large and is presumably still cannibalizing his way across the Lone Star.

• Daniel the Quiet, the lost scion of the Lovelace Family imprisoned in Killhouse for some “redacted” crimes, was last seen headed back to his family in Widow’s Peak. He is still at large, and escaped relatively unscathed.

That’s quite a few of the prisoners of Killhouse that are still unaccounted for at the end of the Indulgence. Surely they will all just return to their cells now that the laws are reinstated?

The Lone Star Cup

The other event this weekend was a tournament of the best Murderball teams in the Lone Star. The violent rugby-style game where every weapon deals Mangle Limbs instead of damage was sponsored by the Chairman of the San Saba Board. As a Murderball fan themselves, the Chairman even sweetened the pot a bit — the winner of the Lone Star Cup would choose who would be given an honorary VOTING position on the San Saba Board. Clearly, Tabitha St. Mercy wanted to earn a second vote on the Board, but other folks had equally viable interests.

Each major settlement and faction fielded a team into the contest, from the Barogue Behemoths, the Waking Naval Reserve, Widow’s Peak Avalanche, the Clutch Oilers, and the player led Bravado Breachers. Opposing the Breachers in the tournament game were the Killhouse Punishers, filled with the ranks of Lifers. The Punishers literally murdered some of the other teams (those poor, poor Behemoths), but were defeated by a combination of some retributive cheating, distracting the ref, and good old fashioned strategy and great plays by the Breachers. At one point, the Vados cheated to swap out a member of the Lifers for one of their own - the pyrokinetic Bea Forget-Me-Not!

The members of the victorious Bravado Breachers were Mikheil, Lyah Berry, Boris Sokolov, Drea Talrain, Criss Talrain, Justin Mercer, and Gregor McAxe! In the end, the success of this team earned the Vados the right to choose who gained the prize for the tournament (though the trophy itself was sold to the Lifers).

And much to the surprise of the Chairman, they chose The Junkerpunks (and specifically Admiral Sinker Swim!) to earn a seat on the board.

This is especially interesting, considered that the Junkerpunks were the only faction to be denied a seat on the Board by the veto of the Chairman themselves. How scandalous! This promises to have FAR reaching effects in the coming months as the balance of powers between the various factions of the San Saba shifts with the addition of the Junkerpunks to the Board.

UP NEXT: BLOOD FEAST

Our next event is coming up soon, and we have tickets already available for purchase HERE.

Our next event premise is going to be centered around some good old fashioned Thanksgiving traditions. Gathering with your friends and family. Enjoying a meal together. Eating your family… I mean, eating WITH your family. Good old fashioned cannibalism…

Lately, people have begun to go missing. Not just psions who are historically preyed upon by Confectioners across the Lonestar, but farmers and ranchers with no aberrant leaning in their family histories. Less than a month ago, the Vado citizenry experienced a rash of kidnappings designed to lift biomass from the delving population. Whispers of Bloodscourge, a plague spread by Bloodghasts that has come to haunt the Lonestar in the late Autumn, have also begun to crop up at the numerous edges of the public consciousness. Something is stirring in the guts of the Lovelace Lands, and it carries with it insidious purpose.

We can’t wait to have you join the BLOOD FEAST!

Lifers & the Indulgence

It’s Wednesday, so it’s time for a Rules Ramble from Jonathan! This week, our last blog post before the October event is focused on the Lifers of Prudence Penitentiary.

The Indulgence

We’ve posted a bit of lore about the Indulgence before HERE, as well as a short vignette written by yours truly about Killhouse HERE. The storied history of Prudence Penitentiary in our game is marked by a disaster known as the Killhouse Massacre, and the agreement to release all inhabitants of the Prison once per year in an event known as the Indulgence. We even had an entire virtual event set in the halls of Killhouse known as Justicalia during the last Indulgence.

The Indulgence is our annual Halloween game and is a time of high-stakes danger, visceral horror, and we strive to make the things that go bump in the night very, very, very real. In the tradition of classic Zombie films and movies like The Purge, the true horror of the apocalypse is not really the zombies themselves, but rather the depths of depravity that your fellow humans will descend into in order to survive.

The single most dangerous enemy you can ever encounter in Dystopia rising is another Survivor.

Unlike most Zed or Raiders, Survivors are a unique danger because they are intelligent, capable of using equipment and gizmos, and have motivations entirely different than you normally encounter from the common monsters. For this event, we will be featuring several unique “lineage” threats - threats that have a Strain, Lineage, and a character sheet much like any other player in the game.

During the upcoming 5th annual Indulgence, for 24 hours (from Friday at midnight to Saturday at midnight), the laws of the San Saba are suspended. Tabitha St. Mercy, the Warden of Prudence Penitentiary, releases the most dangerous inhabitants of the XXX Wing, the villains known as the Lifers of Prudence Penitentiary out into the world for the duration.

At the end of this time, Tabitha will offer a bounty in Brass notes for those Lifers returned to her ALIVE, not DEAD (they have to be locked up again - you don’t really lock up a corpse.) It’s a weird stipulation, I know, but you’ll be able to learn more about this reason during our October event. If you can survive until the end of the weekend, there is a significant amount of currency that can be earned by those willing to risk everything to take out a major threat.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In order to collect the Bounty, you must bring your target to the Grave Council Annex (Ops) after midnight on Saturday night.

In our focus on radical trust, we’d like to share a few of the mechanics and systems we will be using this weekend to represent these threats.

Mechanics of the Lifers

The first thing to know about the Lifers is that while they are dangerous threats, the Indulgence is still an OPT-IN experience. Each of the Lifers (like any other threat in our game) will honor our “OK Check-In” system for choosing to opt-out of a scene. We want this experience to be one of intense horror and danger, but our Lifers just play the bad guys on TV - not in real life.

Named Lifers are always portrayed by Storytellers and Guides and are generally “killing blow active”, which means they can use deadly force against characters in the game.

However, unlike most NPC Threats, we’ve put a few “guard rails” in place on these characters while they are in play in a narrative sense:

• First, all Lifers have an agenda and a personality. They are sentient individuals, with their own backstories, motivations, and reasons for why they earned their reputation as a villain. At first glance, a Lifer may be indistinguishable from another character. The Indulgence is not just an excuse for murder and mayhem: the Lifers are in Bravado for a REASON.

• Each Lifer has a primary and secondary objectives to complete. If they fulfill these goals, they will leave play until the next Indulgence. This means that not every encounter with a Lifer has to end in bloodshed - if you can identify and understand their goals you may be able to escape their notice or even become a temporary ally.

• In fact, EVERY Lifer has a specific type of character they will avoid killing, based on their story and motivations. If you can find out this weakness, you may be able to avoid an untimely demise at the hands of a particular Lifer. This doesn’t mean they won’t torture, maim, or injure you so tread lightly.

Mechanically speaking, each Lifer was built following certain guidelines:

• Each Lifer has a character sheet. They have a large amount of XP to spend on Skills, Resolve, Mind, Body, and PFAs and must follow the normal rules for other characters in our game. They must have a Supply Bag, and use phys reps for any weapons, armor, brews, injectables, or other Crafted Items they possess.

• For all intents and purposes, they must interact with the world in the same manner as players.

• Each Lifer has certain Skills they must purchase with their XP, including at least one non-combat Skill up to Master tier. This means they can have a very focused combat build, but not everything they can do deals damage.

• Each of the Lifers has access to a limited amount of Crafted Equipment. Honestly, this is probably the single biggest reason the Lifers can be unique threats as they can use those nifty gizmos, weapon augments, and brews against you. If they are killed or captured, these items can be looted or stolen (though they will have shortened expiration dates).

• Periodically, the Lifers will be able to resupply and gain new items from SUPPLY DROPS. These in-game events will have a chance to be stopped (or aided) by the players. If these are successful, the Lifers will be able to get new crafted items, brews, and replace a limited amount of equipment they might have lost.

• There will be opportunities to RESEARCH the backstories of the Lifers and gain clues as to their goals, abilities, and unique danger.

This weekend promises to be a dangerous and challenging time, but our goal is to create a unique threat that is a bit different from a zombie or raider. Each Lifer has a different story to tell, and we can’t wait to hear about your favorite encounters with these psychotic sociopaths! Let us know what you think!

See you Friday!

September Event Retrospective and Clarifications

Our first event was a success by nearly every metric. Our step into the new world, inside the new ruleset, under new management was as graceful as we dared to hope in the frantic weeks leading up to the game. Your feedback (of which there is so much thank you) largely indicates the playerbase agrees. That gives us a lot of hope, is a weight off our shoulders, and puts a shine in our eyes as we look towards the future. 

Every event has stumbling blocks though. And part of the reason we press you so hard for feedback is so we know what to change to make the gamespace more a fun, compelling and consistent environment for you to tell stories in. We want to address some of the concerns outlined in the feedback here so we’re all more prepared moving forward. These are not necessarily the most frequent feedback topics, but we consider these the most immediately pressing. 

“I didn’t understand how contracts work”

Contracts are an agreement between two parties to engage in a behavior for a duration. Those two parties can be private entities (just people who need to formalize a relationship), a private entity and a crew, a crew and a crew, or any other number of entities. If that contract is broken, which is a very severe wrongdoing in our setting, the person who broke contract is called a Breacher. There are various contracts that exist in the world that compel certain people called Lawdogs to detain a Breacher until an event at noon of every trade meet called The Gauntlet. At this event the Breacher is publicly beaten until death by a member of the RRC (an NPC) unless one of the following metrics are met: 

1. Another entity signs a contract making them responsible for the Breacher’s code of conduct for the next three (3) months or the next Indulgence, whichever is sooner. It is customary for the new contract holder to beat the Breacher in this instance. For small crimes, small injuries. For larger breachers like murder, thuggery or the like, a more severe beating is merited.

   1. The contracting entity (not the Breacher) is responsible for the Breacher’s code of conduct. They are NOT entitled to the Breacher’s time, ability or labor. The contracting entity is not getting anything positive out of this exchange, they are making a sacrifice to look after a person who has failed the most basic tenet of society. 

2. The contract is picked up by Prudence Penitentiary for the Peregrine and Penalized for the next twelve (11) months or the next Indulgence, whichever is sooner. 

   1. The contracting entity (in this case, the Prison) is responsible for the Breacher’s code of conduct. They’re carted off to prison where they’re held, largely at the RRC’s expense though Prudence Penitentiary surely has contracts with other faction identities, for the duration of their contract. 

   2. Nonviolent Breachers such as debtors, extortionists, ett are largely allowed to maintain their autonomy under guard and on prison grounds or with supervision outside the prison. This can look like commissary crews looking to sell wares, which the prison takes a portion of the profits for in order to maintain their infrastructure. 

   3. Violent Breachers such as murderers, thugs and robbers are kept in confinement for the duration of their contract and are not allowed the kind of autonomy that nonviolent Breachers are.  

Contracts are kept in duplicate, or triplicate if there is some kind of managerial entity (like a bookie or an accountant or a secretary) in charge of keeping contract copies. This is because if there is no contract collateral, there is no contract. 

“I worry the Prison is too close to the previous setting’s theme of slavery. It’s clearly evil too quickly.” 

This is a difficult discussion. So let’s do our best to come at it from a position couched in respect, compassion and the complexity this topic warrants. Let’s also understand that mods-as-written are not necessarily mods-as-delivered. 

The root of all evil in any setting, fictional or otherwise, is the unnegotiated denial of agency; the worst thing that people can do is make it so another person doesn’t have a choice. 

An uncomfortable truth is that all prison systems, by this metric, are evil. The ones that exist in our real lives, that serve a very real purpose insomuch that they give us a relatively humane alternative to killing people who don’t adhere to societal standards are evil.Not because of how the prisoners are treated, but because they exist at all. 

So yes, the Prison in this setting is evil. And there are derivative evils implicit in it being allowed to exist. Certain populations, disaffected minorities, uneducated people who sign contracts without reading them, whose land was destroyed years ago by a bomb, who are looking to assure their next meal, desperate and disparate populations who break contract out of necessity, are disproportionately affected by a function of their circumstance. And that’s horrible. 

Additionally and adjacently, the Prison houses the Breachers who are so damaging to society that, in a less civilized time, they would have been killed outright. Murderers, thugs, thieves, all of whom who otherwise would have met justice at the barrel of a gun - are instead sequestered away and allowed a last inch of agency that wasteland justice would have denied them. 

Humans have been trying for a very very long time to invent a method that works better than this one and scales with the population. But every iteration of culture has possessed some form of penal system because, when we come right down to it, the agency of a population is deemed more important than the agency of the individual. And removing a person from society who does not adhere to its standards allows that society to continue to exist. 

So we will always have antagonists that deny agency. History tells us this is how people behave. Our best bet is to burn the institutions themselves down occasionally so they don’t become so entrenched as to change our idea of who deserves agency and who doesn’t.  

If the Prison is moral or not is a long discussion. And it’s one I have always intended to have in the gamespace. I want your characters to hate it, to grudgingly accept it’s better than the bloody alternative, to demand something better, or to support it wholesale. I want you to submit plot requests to burn the contract library where they keep the prisoner contracts, to invest in prison infrastructure that disallows people from doing that because you firmly believe that this imperfect system is better than none at all, to incite riots, to create by the sweat of your own brow (or your character’s as the case may be)  a better world where agency is provided to all. 

So burn it down, build it up. Determine if it’s a system worth saving or if you can make a better one. Nothing in our setting is sacred, it’s a sandbox. Let’s build it together. 

“I am uncomfortable deriving entertainment from a theme that runs too close to real life and greatly effects POC - namely corrupt justice systems and systemic incarceration”

Friends, we hear you. LARP settings by and large are often about power dynamics, and while we can make our game a ‘safer space’ by removing language and analogues to sexism, racism, and transphobia, there are other dynamics that will always exist in a system that tells stories of struggle and inequality, society and justice. Disenfranchisement and classism are two byproducts of stories set in a non-egalitarian society. The Bravo-to-Bravado transition involved painful growth that advanced the social contract (quite literally) and ideals of ‘civilized society’ down the line from pure violence to something striving to be a bit more sophisticated. But it isn’t there yet. Just as we in real life have not found the perfect answers to society’s ills, Bravado is on the cusp of trying to figure out what a better world looks like through trial and error. There are factions devoted to defending the community, and there are opportunists ready to exploit those endeavors. And there’s you, our players, who can and will gain agency in making those decisions as you work your way deeper into our story.

Part of the conflict of this story, this setting, is this awkward growth period. Like a gangly adolescent, Bravado is trying to decide what it looks like in the heartache and revival of a post-Hiway War world. It’s ugly, and it’s meant to make you think. In real life, there is systemic disenfranchisement and incarceration that disproportionately affects specific demographics, namely POC. This is especially true of our real-life justice system, and those demographics by-and-large are not the people who play this game. We can try and mitigate some of those parallels, and to a certain extent we have - Bravado no longer has an election system, and so issues of gerrymandering and political corruption are 2.0 themes we are choosing to bypass right now. But we also want to be wary of removing the surface-level trappings of what makes us uncomfortable without acknowledging the underlying sickness, because that is a harmful sort of privilege as well. Which is to say, that shoving these themes totally out of the playspace might assuage some feelings of immediate discomfort in interacting with them, but is in some ways more of a disservice to the real life people these systems effect.

At the end of the day, we want to tell the stories you want to play, and we are willing to adjust the playscape in response to your feedback, but we do want to make those adjustments thoughtfully and carefully. We have members of our writing staff who have years of experience as prison guards, and others with experience as the incarcerated, and it is with those useful and lived experiences that we make content and move forward. It is likely that at some point in this setting,you will encounter some theme or mod you do not personally enjoy, possibly wholly separate from this one. For some of you, that might mean you do not choose to engage with these storylines, and you find your entertainment in other areas of our setting. For others, this is an opportunity to explore what it means to build a society up from nothing, and to try and find a better way to deal with some of these tricky subjects. We remind you that you are always welcome to ‘thumbs down” a scene that makes you personally uncomfortable, and to remove yourself from it. Our game will always be one in which you can choose who and what to engage with. Our negotiation and consent mechanics are stronger than ever, and we are always open to your feedback.

“People were hitting too hard.” 

We heard this one the MOST, believe it or not. We believe this is a function of a system that does not rely on clearly enunciated damage calls and instead on the notion of “sufficient force.” 

We’ll be working this topic into our opening announcements for the next few months. But our foundational solution is to take more hits than you think you’ve been struck with. People hit harder when they think their damage is being ignored. Don’t give anyone a reason to think you’re ignoring their damage. Make liberal use of the phrase “check your swings” and avoid an inciting tone in the way you express that. 

We’re all learning together. Stop hitting your friends so hard. 

In Summary 

Contracts are a system designed to enforce agreed upon behaviors. They don’t exist if there is no record of them. They do exist so long as a single, reference-able copy does. 

Our setting is a jumping off point for telling a massive, complex, lengthy story. No part of it is sacred. We’re happy to change how mods interact with the world, to accelerate the destruction of the Prison, to have conversations both in and out-of-character about the complex issue of institutionalized penal systems - but we’re largely un-okay with producing content for you in a world in which evil does not exist. 

We think that the perception thus far has been “This is the setting, you are not empowered to buck against it during the first year of play”. Going forward the party line should be “This is a setting where these vicious inequalities exist for complex reasons. Let’s explore those reasons together and tell a compelling story about it.” 

Oh and -  hit softer, take more shots. 

Last Words

The first light of dawn was just on the horizon, and already the sky was glowing with the impending sunrise.  It was that perfect moment before the day began and the end of the long night that meant the final few hours were gone.

The small enclosure the prisoner was trapped in overlooked the open air area of the recreation yard, a place the Warden called “Purgatory”.  The ground was mostly a cracked and broken black top, probably that once served as a parking area for the inhabitants of Temple Station before the Prison was built, but now served as an area to get a little sunlight if you had earned enough cred with the Commissary.  It was quiet at this hour, save for the two of them. He gazed at the gaping maw of the hole in front of him, and tried to suppress a shudder.

The true purpose of the yard was really the Pit.

At least thirty to forty across, the only notable feature near the edge of the chasm was the metal rings near the side that were used to lower the prisoners to the bottom of the Pit. No one really knew how deep it was, but it was deep enough. It was probably once a well or cistern, but now it served a completely different function.

It was a constant reminder of the price a prisoner could pay for doing the things even other prisoners found distasteful. There were lots of ways to die in Killhouse Prison, but this was probably the worst.  At least if the butchers in the Meat Grinder got you, you’d eventually be pulled out of the morgue by a graverobber. The Pit was the final place a prisoner could finish their sentence at the prison, though the Warden could call it “mercy”.

His cellmate was sitting nearby, outside the cage, watching the sunrise continue to turn the sky a glorious shade of crimson.  A small consolation from the gang, purchased with the last bit of good will the Warden might have had. No one else would come sit with him.

“I’ve got money with the bookie on ten minutes.  Think you will last that long, Tommy? I could use the cred.” 

Fitting he would be worried about money, even now, he thought. The cred could buy out his friend’s contract, maybe even earn him a spot on a work crew outside the prison.  He would have probably done the same, had things been reversed.

“I’ll do my best, but I’m a tinker, not a fighter.  Depends on how many zed are down there now.”

His cellmate only grunted in agreement.  

The Pit loomed large in the morning light, and you could barely make out the low groans of the dead below.  Even if the zed didn’t get you, you’d starve or die of dehydration eventually, and it would begin the cycle again.  The other prisoners and even the guards liked to bet on how long the poor fuckers thrown in could last. The big money was on the long shot of surviving past the first few minutes, but the bookies loved taking the sucker bets.

“I wonder if she will come to watch” he mused to his partner.

“Maybe. You really pissed her off.  I haven’t seen her that mad in awhile. Maybe the lifers have, but not me.”  

His cellmate was absently scratching at his chin, contemplating the crime that had earned him a trip to the Pit.

“You fucked up though, Tommy. We don’t really want another riot on our hands, no matter how much I like you.  I gotta survive till the Indulgence.” 

His cellmate put it rather matter-of-factly.  The condemned man was silent.  

No one wanted the atrocity of the riot that earned Prudence Penitentiary it’s real name of Killhouse Prison to happen again.  The prisoners policed their own. It was the rules. If the guards had to step in, you knew it was bad. He had fucked up. The grave tax had to be paid.

“Remember when the Law Dogs caught up with us outside of Essex?  You put up a mean fight there. Even knocked that puddle jumper out before his buddy clocked me in the head.  Maybe you can make it ten minutes. Wouldn’t that be something?”  

His cellmate chuckled to himself, remembering the times before the Prison.  They sat there for a few more minutes, silently contemplating the past.  

He could hear the bustle of the Prison as the morning shift was ramping up, though.  There would be a decent amount of onlookers, he thought. Everyone enjoyed the entertainment, as fucked up as it was.  

His cellmate pulled himself wearily to his feet, as the guards would be here soon.  Appearances were important to the Warden, and it wouldn’t be right if the others saw his cellmate here with him.  He didn’t want his partner to catch any flak from the rival gangs, either.

“Any last words for me bud?”

HIs cellmate looked at him one last time. He knew the ritual.  It was the first tradition you were taught you when you made it to Killhouse.

“Just remember, Tommy.  The shiv they give you before you go down isn’t really for the zed.”

---

A Killhouse Prison Vignette by J. Loyd

Concerning the Hiway War and her Lasting Effects (cont.)

If the first year following the exodus out of the Lands Bravado was a period of reset, during which the bones of the old burned in hellfire and the culture of a people died with their constituents, then the second year was a rebirth.

Like ashes scattered over a fallow field, riotous growth followed after. The discovery of grand mystery under the old town swept us up and along like a demagogue her flock. 

At first it was a trickle - a few dedicated Delvers disappeared into the mud to find the roots of that perfect obelisk of white stone springing up and out of the caldera. Within days they returned, eyes brighter than the treasures they found and adventure on their lips.

Below us, they said, there are steel doors that guard something precious. They spoke of blinking lights that still function. Live munitions that click and whirl like analog machines. Long stretches of corridor bored out by ancient machinations that turn the stone smooth for miles and miles. Nothing like the Lascarian Tunnels of Old Bravo - twisting things chiseled by time and circumstance - but something deliberate and terrifying in its implications.

More delvers followed. Irons and Retrogrades, mutants and evolved for whom the residual radiation was merely an inconvenience, dove into the Ruins like Saltwise into brine and came up again and again with ancient metals, defunct computing devices, niceties of a fallen world and, very occasionally, the delicate pages of notes held together by little more than the careful handling of their discoverers. 

And the Lonestar heeded them. 

What happened next was a complex two-step of bureaucracy and belligerence. A paperwork whirlwind that, when the cyclone died, created a powerhouse capable of producing a dynasty.

What was previously the Road Commission laid the first tracks near Essex, the first city on what would become The Bravado Line. The newly christened Railroad Commission contracted out evolved and mutant strains to carry and lay corrugated steel and heavy wooden beams along the old trade routes between the two settlements, while Warden Tabitha St Mercy of Prudence Penitentiary employed her penitent work crews to begin the same process on the Bravado end.

Using notes safeguarded for generations, the Conglomerate, a collection of Digitarian houses who possess a great and shrouded interest in the Ruins below New Bravado, began the process of constructing the first high-powered locomotive in the Lonestar. The Ox, at that time a skeleton of iron, steel and super-plastics, would eventually become a gestalt amalgamation of construction equipment, a half dozen derelict trains and the engine of a single downed jet plane. Contracted and funded by the Railroad Commission the Conglomerate employed the great and surviving minds of scientists and psionists alike in their research centers in the town of Waking to provoke the monolithic iron horse into motion. 

But all great movements cause waves, and the process of rebirth is often as bloody as it is brilliant. For all the steel and will of its warden, Prudence Penitentiary for the Peregrine and Penalized buckled under the weight of work crews, its guardship, and the compressed conditions of its cell blocks. Riots ensued and the sickness of man was put on morbid display. In the far displaced land of New Bravado, with no larger authority to appeal to, Warden Tabitha St. Mercy closed the doors of her prison and let Wrath determine the outcome.

Colloquially we now refer to the Penitentiary as Killhouse Prison in reference to this massacre, for when the doors were opened there were little more than corpses on concrete. The survivors begged for the Warden to again resume control. Amidst her Wrath there was Pride in her work and so the Warden struck a deal with her prisoners and the tradition of the Indulgence was born. No prisoner would be made to serve more than a year in the Prison, if they were smart. For once a year all prisoner contracts would unilaterally expire, rendering them free people. Twenty-four hours later the contracts would be reinstated, the doors would close and Warden Tabitha St. Mercy would sic the Law Dogs upon the retreating backs of any prisoner who loitered in her city.

And so, with the tradition instituted and upheld, Prudence Penitentiary resumed its work on the railroad with gusto, outstripping the paid workers of the Railroad Commission by several weeks. The uptick in bodies begged a question, however. The Killhouse Massacre was the most devastatingly fatal event since the Bomb that decimated Old Bravo. Without a proper morgue, many of those first prisoners escaped, we assume. Perhaps they retreated to the Dune Sea or fled east towards the Clutch.

Both the Railroad Commission and the Prison found themselves at a loss. Without a way to control the flow of bodies, a prisoner could simply commit an infection to the cause of their escape. Without a mechanism by which to enforce order in New Bravado the system would fail, and without voluntary work crews seeking to shorten their sentences the railroad’s production would be brought to a grinding, painful halt.

The Grave Council, a collection of Undead strains lead by the powerful Takheeta Firstborn, stepped in as the solution.

Through ritual and rite the Council of Grave Decisions determined the location of each morgue-to-be. They dispatched Graverobbers and Grave Touched to these sites, and committed their own bodies to the creation of these morgues and, in a brilliant exchange of power, negotiated total ownership of these sites and the right to tax anyone who used them. 

Now that their lives and afterlives were solidly controlled under comfortable capitalism, the survivors resettling the area found a great darkness lifting - literally. A land that had been burning with hellfire now burned with the lights of hundreds of new homesteads. In the spaces between powers, the voids of civilization, new stars were lit aflame. Had these people always been here? Or were they deposited on the shores of this disaster like flotsam on the beach after a storm?

Wherever they came from, they brought with them the salt of the earth, these settlers of the lowlands and hollers. They were the early risers, once more planting the seeds of hope into the soot-streaked soil. New quiet folk for a new settlement. Keepers of the land and Tenders of the hearth. Quick with a witty comment and slow to judgement. A magnet for a network of community bonds across the region - the Lovelace Family began to be used as a surname and identity of these landsmen, hundreds of families finding kinship under their good name. Thousands of strings of stories and lives tied together in hope for a beautiful agricultural future.

And among these quiet neighbors, there remained institutions of charity and well-being. Now that the immediate harm of the Great Disaster was healing, the Widows of the Lonestar turned their eyes to where else their kindly influence could improve the lives of others. They took a keen interest in the work of the Grave Council, and lent their weight into helping to prepare places of sanctuary and rest for those weary from work, sickness, and disease. Anyone seeking a meal, bed, or safety at their door was never turned away - including a large number of those who managed to escape the tall walls of Killhouse Prison. Above all, they sought to protect a populace that had, for too long, been victimized. 

To the north the Tribes Disparate under Holy Mother Queen Jasper thrived. Maintaining a friendly rapport with the Braves that saved their people, Jasper committed workers to the cause of re-building the city of Bravado even as she kept an iron grip on the thirteen tribes that writhed and strove beneath her. Houses formed, with figureheads who swear fealty to the Holy Mother in a feudal framework that benefits both the Lady and those who report to her. The individual tribes vie for her attention and favor, some committed by blood and sword - others by convenience.

The Junkerpunks, a loose coalition of seafaring folk, begin to earn the name alluded to in the first chapter of this long-form essay. Among their ragtag ranks a leader emerged, a Saltwise of dangerous charisma and wit, Sinker Swim captains the flagship of the Junkerpunk flotilla. 

The nature of their separation from the naysayers of the Clutch encouraged in the Junkerpunks an  underdog mentality that never truly left their culture. Seeking out the downtrodden, desperate, and dangerous to swell their ranks the Junkerpunks quickly became known as pirates, bandits - but also coy merchants in an era where few ships navigated the inland seas of the Spoiled Coast.

It was this mercantile mindset, this author believes, that lead the Junkerpunks to build a modern-day Tortuga in the middle of the lake that was Old Bravo. The marina, cheekily called the Punkerport by locals, trucks in undocumented finds from the Ruins as much as it does raw imports of food and supplies for the delve-camps there.

The Junkerpunks, in the second year of their watery pilgrimages, found an accord with the Spiderhause Redstar who have, in recent years, taken up residence in Essex and its surrounding plane-space. Both underdogged, both committed to uplifting those who otherwise do not have the means to achieve their own strength, the members of Spiderhause left the land that had treated them poorly to try again on the open sea. What the Junkerpunks lack in organizational skills and raw, coordinated strength, the Redstars of Spiderhause make up for in spades.

In the second year following the Bomb that destroyed Old Bravo, the world began again to turn. The hole in the sky closed up, mostly. The water in the lake might never be drinkable in our lifetime but the fish seem to like it just fine. The riotous growth-post-nuclear burned in the summer and regrew again in the following spring, just as it always has. These events in isolation beget no particular question. But in aggregate, in the context of the bomb and its thereafter effects, this author wonders aloud what arcane circumstances render this land livable again after only two years. And if the truth of this place is merely old, or truly ancient.

It is said around these parts that things are happening that have happened before. But it is this author’s humble opinion that previous trends do not indicate future behavior. And that just because something has happened before, does not mean it will always happen.

-  “Concerning the Hiway War and Her Lasting Effects”

By: Dr. Perenthius Goodfellow