The Fountainhead: Text Adventure

Click to download an interactive introduction to the City of Essex! Best on PC, not mobile.

The Fountainhead: Epilogue

Lonestar Skies: The Truth

The Festival of Light and Sound: Text Adventure

The Crystodyne Principle: A Deluge of Knowing

The Crystodyne Principle: Grave Music

And also about 15 minutes after that shit hits your brain pan THIS happens.

The Crystodyne Principle: The Demodulator

The Crystodyne Principle: Epilogue

“For there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musick of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony.”

This event included player submitted songs!

The Fountainhead’s Song

These are songs fed to the Fountainhead during the course of the event

Crystodyne Tunes

All songs enclosed in crystals carried by characters in our games.

Galatea: Text Adventure

 Galatea: Adumbration

Galatea: Actualize

Galatea: Epilogue

 The Shining City: Text Adventure

The Shining City: Epilogue

 Justicalia: Miasma

Justicalia: Confinement

Attention Prudence Penitentiary : The faint light of the red emergency backup lights begin to fade into darkness. Stillness. The blaring alarms slowly warp in their sounds as even those systems fade. Silence. Worse yet, the clean air you have been breathing becomes stale and choked as the whirring white-noise of the prison's filtration systems com to a shuddering stop. Emptiness. If we are to survive--if YOU are to survive--swift action is required. Effort. How long can you hold your breath? Maybe you didn’t want to play this kind of game, maybe not with these playmates, but life has a funny sense of humor sometimes. Reality. Ideas of what you can do begin to trickle across your grey-matter lobes as the initial panic shockwave subsides. Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky. Survive.

Justicalia: Deliverance

The tradition of Winter Lights once again is celebrated in the town of Widows Peak.

 Hearthbound: T’was the First Unrise

Hearthbound Letter Gallery

Hearthbound: Epilogue

Five months ago the San Saba Board signed itself into existence. An alliance of powerful personalities and factions from across the Lonestar Wastes; these hegemonic powers reinforce one another’s right and rule as a matter of contract. The Junkerpunks; a dynamic group of high-octane tradesfolk whose surf (and turf) are the wavy or winding routes that make up the skeleton of the San Saba’s domestic trade, were the only major financial identity in the Lonestar to find themselves without membership on the San Saba Board.

In the months following the inception of The Board, charters for Junkerpunk sailing vessels have dried up. JP ports, previously cramped with cargo, are now largely vacant. And their sailing crews, lifetime seafolk, are listless and drinking away their melancholy at port. It seems that, without a meaningful contract to the largest trade identity in the San Saba, the Junkerpunks may not be able to stay afloat.

And so, in a dramatic and characteristic fashion, the Grand Admiral Sinker Swim enacted a huge fucking heist, broke into the radio station that sits at the top of the tallest tower in Waking Prime, and played a prerecorded tape that found its way onto every radio band the entire Lonetsar Wastes over - and Sinker Swim let every Junkerpunk know in no uncertain terms that there’s a big fucking problem - and a big fucking party to be had about it.

Now, several weeks later in The Clutch, the party looms afore you in splendid Junkerpunk style; the streets of the port city are brightly lit with preserved-fish lanterns, burning eerily too-orange thanks to the distilled Leviathan blood that fuels them - and the air is thick with the salty scent of preserved meat and sea air and fireworks. Grand Admiral Sinker Swim may not be able to command the Junkerpunks and underdogs of the wastes to action with explicit authority, but they can certainly ensure the attendance of every hooch-fiend in the San Saba with enough booze.

The only question that remains - is what does Sinker truly want with the legion of Junkerpunk gutterrats, bilgebums and seadogs? And once the party is over - who pays the bar tab at the end?

Which Philosophy did the Junkerpunks Choose?

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Muddy Water affiliates, the situation does not take a more dire turn.

When the tides of action receded, leaving the Junkerpunks stranded along the shores of consequence like so many pieces of driftwood, the depot still stood! But at what cost?

The Clearwaters, smelling blood in the water, vow to take their rage out on any establishment that gets in their way of independence. The RRC will build an Oxline into The Clutch despite the Clearwaters resistance. Sinker Swim is acquitted and without too much attention slips away into the unknown so they can save face before returning once more as the shining Admiral.

For now, the rough seas have settled. The Clutch will endure as it has for ages. The Flotilla will gently rise and fall as the tide flows into the channel. Through their actions, those who attended Sinker’s Junkerpalooza have helped open up trade routes to and beyond The Clutch. The Junkerpunks have adopted the progressive Muddy Water philosophy. The Clearwaters, riot-minded as ever, continue to represent a dangerous splinter faction willing to resort to violence as quickly as verse

Also, did that person ever find their pants?

Dead Man’s Hand

Dystopia Rising National Event: April 2021 (Virtual)

The letter

You received a letter. No matter what urban industrial hellscape, criminal underground complex, western boomtown or literal LAKE you live in- you received a letter. Born by postman, locomotive or psionic link; you read it. And that letter told you, perhaps in so many words and perhaps not,  that you are noticed and that you are invited to the Grandest Tournament of our Time, and to the celebration that accompanies it. The letter tells you to come to Essex, the city of Light and Sound and Rare Beauty, and it speaks of riches and knowledge as the lowliest prizes offered by the sponsors of such an event. 

The paper smells like perfume and trail dust. You’ve heard of the overgrown city of Essex and the old machines beneath it. You’ve heard whispers of the monster and the mayhem that nearly leveled it more than half a year ago. You wonder what truths you might learn, or what blood you might earn - and you feel the stir of adventure in your gut before you fold the letter carefully and tuck it away; consideration in the furrow of your brow.

Welcome to the Brass Rose

Within the Thicket, the mass of plant life that has overtaken the streets and causeways of Essex, the newest saloon has become the breathing, beating heart of culture, music, and wealth in the city.  The business is a joint venture between the former proprietor of The Elbow Room; a bar that is now a hole in the ground, and a wealthy Vegasian from New Bravado. The saloon famously sells the Amberdraught beer that earned this town it's fortune, but no one knows quite how they obtained the recipe from the late Governor’s wife before she was assassinated. A shiny, brassy affair with three stories, The Brass Rose is normally operated by an ancient Iron enby named Rose whose arms, as strong and sure as anything, bear the scars of a lifetime of hard work. Rose runs their bar with, as the saying goes, an iron fist.

It Knows What You Want

Here, along sumptuous corridors and behind pollen-coated windows, mingle those survivors for whom surviving is insufficient. Clad yourself in the rough velveteen of our time and inhale the narcotic smoke of excess. The Brass Rose, just three months ago, was a rough foundation of too-white cement at the geodesic center of the Thicket. The building - and it’s staff, appeared as if from thin air in record time. Since it’s soft-opening several weeks back, the common folk of the city have returned from the opulent estate with incredible stories that verge on the impossible. Wild nights, barely recollected but filled with a reckless glee that affects them for days after.

So, Ante Up, Partner.

The mingled scent of blood and booze are a nostalgic cocktail to you. Every settlement has its penthouse, it’s whorehouse- or it’s bar. The Brass Rose is all three of these things; and more - in glut. Its gambling floors, dives, private showrooms and seediest corners are low-lit in the glow of psion crystals; pulled directly from the skulls of uncooperative debtors and run through with electric bulbs. 

Enjoy Your Libations.

And keep to the gambling floors.

The Festival of Light and Sound

Yearly, the city of Essex celebrates its history, its culture and its number-one export (booze) across a week-long extravaganza of excess. 

A year ago, the Festival of Light and Sound was accompanied by the Fountainhead Incident - a series of months that would rock the city to its core and then remake it entirely. The people of Essex did not celebrate - but rather survived. 

But the culture of Essex is the culture of the Lonestar; and it is not the dirt that makes a place, but its people. And so beneath the misty bows of The Thicket and in the cool-but-splendid copses that make up the city - the population of Essex prepares with an uncompromising intensity for this year’s Festival of Light and Sound. 

In treehouses that a year ago were ground-houses, distillers prepare strange liquors from the bizarre fruits borne by the strange flora that makes up the Thicket.

Children string lanterns that resemble zed-heads from the bioluminescent branches of the softy-glowing foliage. Entire groups build roughshod stages where musicians, performers and freaks will stand under hot spotlights for crowds of onlookers who have traveled across wastes of all variety to see them. The smell of cooked food hovers over the city like a welcome miasma and it is almost as if the Fountainhead Incident never happened - and Essex has always been this way. 

At the edges of the city however, the light and sound does not quite reach. The Cult of the Tiny God, led by a new and shadowy figurehead, is an understood feature of the Essex landscape; nearly a year following their inception. There are whispers, however, of a play in the works, of a coup or a culling or a convention. As the festival grows closer more and more shorn-headed monks of the Tiny God arrive in Essex, their foreheads stamped with a charcoal thumb-mark to indicate their faith. 

And so the city stands on the penultimate edge of a festival two years in coming, the leering eyes of the smallest gods peer out from the trees, the hungry hearts of survivors seek knowledge, absolution, violence or hard cash.

When the opening salvo of chaos and fear sounds across the forest-city of Essex, the crescendo thereafter will not be long in coming. 

The Dead Man’s Hand tournament

For the grand opening of the Brass Rose, the proprietors are holding a Tournament unlike any the wastes has ever seen.  While gambling with mundane games of chance like cards or dice is the surface level entertainment, those armed with a particular invitation are interested in another most dangerous game entirely.

The unfortunate souls that lose everything in the Brass Rose can go one step further. In debt to the bankers of the Grave Council, gamblers and guffers can let it all ride on the Infection for a chance at riches and glory.  Those that lose to the House are bound by contract to trade away their lifeforce to the Pallor Mortis ritual.  This means that there is always a ready source of Infection for those who can pay the price.

During the Festival of Light and Sound, a marketplace for this stolen Infection will attract High Rollers, the elite and monstrous alike, all looking to extend their lifespan a bit further.  Villains and famous malefactors from across the wastes are compelled to the Festival, in the hopes of extending their time with which to run roughshod over the wastes..  Given that the San Saba Territories have been lawless for the better part of four years, it is easy for even the infamous villains of the Wastes to sneak their way into Essex proper.

However, the mercenaries of the Red Ledger, a force hired to keep some measure of peace during the goings on of the Dead Man’s Hand and the Festival of Light and Sound, will determine that this macabre market of Infection is a legitimate threat to the good-time-of-all and must be dealt with accordingly; and with meticulous violence.  The Strikers of the Red Ledger hope to put a proverbial finger on the scale by identifying High Rollers, maximum priority targets and well-known fuckups, whom they are looking to eliminate wholesale.  While they are not interested in provoking a fight with the Grave Council directly, Red Ledger has no qualms about sniping their clientele and in order to ensure the Infectious Cycle continues or the threat is locked safely away in Killhouse Prison.

In exchange for assistance, the coffers of the Red Ledger can offer worthy prizes for the Hunt, such as

• Board tech developed for the better part of a year,

• Technical documents outlining clever new gizmos,

• and even poorly understood psi-tech pieces recovered from the nearby Dune Sea.

For those unscrupulous few that don’t care about the Red Ledger’s ethics, or the High Roller’s lack thereof, that most elusive prize can be obtained for the right amount of Chips - another chance at life armed with the Infection of unlucky bettors.

Dead Man’s Hand ARRIVAL Text Adventure Here

Dead Man’s Hand Epilogue Text Adventure Here

The Lost City of Barogue

The subject of campfire stories and fever dreams, the Roving City is a tale as old as the Wastes, dating nearly back to the Fall - but exists in the memory between ancient history, the ageless days since, and the present. 

In the wild decades after the Fall, when the first generations of Strains walked the scorched earth in search of resources and renown, there were many more living people who struggled and strove in competition as the great populations who preceded the Fall had not yet died off to suit the new and leaner world. 

Instead, there was chaos. Amidst that, a caravan of Rovers and their close cousins, the Diesel Jocks, banded together in numbers that would now be impossible to emulate, and constructed a raft between all their Rides, a kind of living and moving platform - and sailed into the unending desert that is now called the Dune Sea, to seek out resources and better land to cultivate.

But the intrepid band, of some two thousand, never found their new homeland. The Dune Sea is scorched and white and terrible - with only a few oases between the blast and death. Instead, they roved between these settlements and became a powerful and exclusive trade power. Their rickety platform of pick-me-ups, semis and RV’s became, in the space of a hundred years, an enormous and single-bodied municipality on tank treads individually the size of gymnasiums. 

The fuel source that powered Barogue, like much about the city’s history and culture, is a mystery. Some stories say that it was a great psion crystal, born from the brow of their first emperor, that powered the thing. Others, that they siphoned great quantities of crude oil from a wellspring of the stuff somewhere unmapped- a closely guarded secret that enabled their monopoly as a merchant kingdom. 

But all stories about Barogue end the same way, with the exhaustion or loss of their fuel source somewhere deep in the Sea, a great and deadly exodus as thousands of its citizens struck out across the dunes in search of salvation they would, supposedly, never find, and eventually - the total abandonment of the largest single trade vessel to surely, ever exist. 

Now, some hundred years later, Barogue is a cautionary tale told to children too ready to strike out on their own and to those who move too swiftly towards their goals - without the backing of their kin or clan. 

Until now.

The Map Bearers

Here are immortalized those names which are on the Claimstone for the finding of the Lost City:

Gilt “Gillie” Lyanna Schwinehund of Steel Horse Crossing

Gentleman Commander “GC” DJ of the Baja 10s of Hell Dorado

Vaan, Rover Sólkeisari of Litur Efni

Niche Head Librarian of Hell Dorado

Hargrave Moss-Iverspit Mercenary from the Verdigrift Gardens

Kell Hyacinth Summer Storm of Hell Dorado

If you have spent any meaningful time amongst the dust of Lonestar, you’ve heard the whispers of the mysterious city of Barogue. The tales hold that whoever finds the city will be blessed with treasure unimagined, however, facts about The Lost City have been drowned out by a sea of legend. It is even unknown when the last Wastelander wandered out of the city, making even the most learned minds have to guess how old it might be.

After the Dead Man’s Hand Tournament ended, more rumors began to circulate. The entirety of the territories came alive with baroguian fever, as more and more people grasped that the tales may be more than fiction. The possibility of a glistening city filled with treasure drives many survivors to delve into the Dune Sea. For most, that is the beginning and end of their adventure, and you are left to guess what fate may have befallen them as many do not return. 

You are confident that your crew’s skill surpasses those of the unworthy treasure seekers before you. Your team throws itself into maps and ciphers, hears every old campfire tale around, and cracks open any dusty old tome you can find. Still all you get are the same fairy tales you’ve been told since childhood. The Draining of the Wellspring Eternal, The Stealing of the Scion Vossa, and The Tragedy of the Resonance Choir; none of it gives you any clues as to the true location of Barogue. 

Weeks would pass before word reached you regarding a breakthrough in the search. A group of adventurers managed to unite all six pieces of the map auctioned away at The Dead Man’s Hand Tournament and formed their own expedition. They were joined by Felicity Redfeild who has made her interest in the legendary city very well known. Supposedly she held a piece of the puzzle that the adventures would need to find the final resting place of the Treasure City.   The wasteland waited with bated breath to see if this group would fare better than those who journeyed before them.

After many days of wandering Gillie Schwinehund, Gentlemen Commander, Vaan, Niche, Hargrave Moss- Inerspit, and Kell Hyacinth returned victorious. They brought with them tales of shifting sands, gargantuan leviathans, and murderous bands of raiders, but eventually they made it to their destination and all (but mostly Felicity) staked their claim on The Roving City.

The way is now open, and just like the gold miners of old; you are drawn to Barouge to stake a claim of your own. But beware, the sands are ever shifting. Nothing--including the new City--is ever what it seems. 

A Lonestar Skies Text Adventure following the Events of Act 1: Journey Long

The first expedition to Barogue has identified several way points along the path to the final resting place of the Lost City. Starting from the RRC forward camp (on the bottom center map piece), you should head north until you reach the Obelisk, avoid the raider camps at the Valley of Bones, travel northwest until you reach the site of the Frigate, and continue west until you reach the shifting sands of Barogue.

Several known threats accosted the first expedition, including Firebrand Raiders, deadly psionic raiders that worship fire, superheated winds that render most airships useless to make the journey, and roving gangs of Roughnecks, diesel jock bandits that have a large camp near the Frigate. Nearer to Barogue, you should expect to encounter Leviathans- massive multi-eyed sand worms that hunt by vibration.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step!

A Lonestar Skies Text Adventure following the Completion of the “An Ancient Vein” ZoM.

The foremost minds among you have considered, reflected and reasoned and rallied. You know, by now, that you are stuck inside some kind of temporal prison, or perhaps a memory. This behavior, a nonstandard Grave Etiquette, is reflective of the nature of this place, its history and the people who left half a myriad ago, but lived here first.

Matter is Imprint, Imprint is Matter. Baroque is a cathedral of psionic crystals, latticed together like a terrible crocheted scarf. The crystals themselves; captured imprint - an intersection, a segment, a moment of thought. And all, once, belonging to the thinking minds of the people who built this city. This place is made of memories, taken from the gray matter of screaming citizens and wrought into new and useful shapes to keep the great engines of this place churning. The City remembers what it was. It remembers because its citizens, in their mad dash to escape, left so quickly as to never allow another imprint to take hold. The idea of Bargoue has endured, unchanging, locked in the image it was left in. But you are here now, in this place, with YOUR thinking mind and YOUR notion of time’s passage and Bargoue is beginning to realize how old it truly is.

The Scion Vossa, if it ever existed, certainly is not here now. But in their studies, the research teams of this Expedition have come to better understand the crystal network that once powered this city - now failing rapidly - and doubly come to realize that it flows both ways. And, that in the absence of a authentic Scion Vossa to create the necessary psionic charge to shatter the lock and fend off the Great Leviathan that, by all accounts, is probably still attempting to strangulate the city even now - the resources may exist to create a simulacrum of the same. A kind of false crystal. A way to exhume the stranded population of Barogue, and return to the Greater Wastes on level ground.

A Lonestar Skies Text Adventure following the conclusion of Act 5: Ride Boldly Ride