The Unexplored Places The Unexplored Places

Join us this week for character and posse creation for Ruin’s Gate, in A Fistful of Darkness by Stefan Struck, a hack of Blades in the Dark by John Harper. 
 
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Art by Ben Prevas
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Indigeneity Consultation by Wind: https://twitter.com/windjammah, https://qomrades.com/

Once upon a time I might have poetically chosen to call Ruin’s Gate a “sleepy little town.” Hardly a town at all, in fact: a pilgrimage site and a few places for the specters to eat and drink and stay on their way to and from the hellstone mines. Not the sort of place you’d want to raise a family, and not the sort of place you’d be eager to write home about if you were struck with the misfortune of visiting. 
But power is as power does, and thanks to the machinations of a small handful of unrelated people, each with their own reasons for desiring a little more influence in this here world, that sleepy little town began to grow. And towns that grow, well, they have a nasty tendency to attract the wrong sort…
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A hold up causes chaos at the Felix Tavern Saloon.
 
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Art by Ben Prevas
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Indigeneity Consultation by Wind: https://twitter.com/windjammah, https://qomrades.com/

Now, there are all sorts of reasons people took to calling it the Ruin. Folk etymologies vary from “ruined land” to “land that will ruin you” to everything in between. An open wound cut across the surface of Antarras, and hellstone pouring out of it like blood. The frontier, the uncivilized space between towns, is dangerous on Antarras, teeming with beasts and outlaws and all manner of troubles. But the Ruin is, far as anyone can tell, where the demons come from: the hellhounds, the monsters, the shadows of something stranger on the horizon. 
Even the specters were reluctant when it first became apparent that hellstone deposits outside the Ruin were negligible compared to the wealth of what they'd find inside the Ruin. Records show a half dozen squads quit rather than sentence themselves to what they thought was certain death, digging stones out of the blood-red clay. They weren’t wrong: the track record hadn’t been good, up til that point. But, in a long string of debates, the need for hellstone won out, and the Guild set up new mines, overflowing with hellstone the second they broke ground. 
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: The gang attempts a stealth mission. 
 
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Art by Ben Prevas
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Indigeneity Consultation by Wind: https://twitter.com/windjammah, https://qomrades.com/
 

CONTENT WARNINGS: brief discussion of drugs (opiates, inhaled) [0:55:02-0:55:58], brief description of body horror [1:10:09-1:10:22]
Civilization has a habit of springing up in the unlikeliest of places, and Ruin’s Gate is no exception to that. Like flowers growing up through cracks in the concrete back on Earth, as the poets say, life sure does find a way. Against the harshest of wastelands, people made some place worth living. Not without its faults, its fights, its frictions, but nowhere really is, in the end. 
Like any frontier town, it has its banal charms, its creature comforts, its quotidian necessaries. But what it had more than any of that was something brewing beneath the surface—always something, someone scheming or schmoozing or making plans. Deals struck in hushed conversations when no one else seemed to be listening. Promises extracted like the very hellstone coming up out of the mines, with the same blunt-force charm and grace to boot. And secrets, flowing free as the watered-down booze at the Felix Tavern Saloon. 
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Plans are made and friendships are forged. 
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Art by Ben Prevas
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CONTENT WARNINGS: earthquakes, discussion of reactions to natural disaster [0:50:42-0:52:46], detailed description of body horror [1:29:12-end]
More than anything, what the Gate had going for it by the end was just that: the gate, a constructed visualization of what was, ultimately, a rather ephemeral boundary between “safety” and “danger,” the kind of danger the people who built that gate knew of all too well after watching their unfortunate neighbors in Jericho succumb to the horrors of the Ruin. It was the gate that kept people feeling secure enough not to turn tail and run straight back to the Earth that had forsaken them, the gate that allowed them some reasonable pretext to imagine that the same wouldn’t become of them. A useful fiction necessary for the matter of living life so close to certain death. 
But even still, the falling of Jericho shook the people of Ruin’s Gate. So much that it wasn’t until decades later that people began to forget just how dangerous this whole business really was. For a long, long time, the name Jericho sat on every parents’ tongue, a warning not to venture too far, a boogeyman to keep kids from wandering past the gate. But for every person who uttered the name like a prayer against danger, there were just as many who took Jericho for what it was—a promise that no town on Antarras could ever be built to last, not really. 
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A long-forgotten ghost town, far out into the Ruin. 
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Art by Ben Prevas
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CONTENT WARNINGS: description of body horror [throughout], detailed description of body horror [0:09:55-0:10:15, 0:56:25-0:58:05, 1:02:55-1:04:23], discussion of debilitating injury, discussion and depiction of drug use (inhaled, opiate) [1:17:20-1:19:00]
It may seem surprising, how commonplace the demons of Antarras became, to the people who decided to make it their home. Incomprehensible beings made up of nothing but pure terror itself, aberrations to the degree that so much as catching a glimpse of one in the distance was enough to make you question everything you’d ever been taught about the existence of anything even resembling a God. 
But maybe this is how the people back on Earth felt, in the face of their own horrors, their own disasters. You can only be scared for so long, after all, before reality takes over. Folks need to eat, after all. To eat, and work, and rest, and love, and everything in between, and fear can only take you so far. The demons were there, sure, but to most they were less material than they ought to have been. That was, at least, until you came face to face with one, and suddenly couldn’t keep pretending that they were just scary stories told to keep everyone else in line. 
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A showdown and a daring escape. 
 
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Art by Ben Prevas
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Indigeneity Consultation by Wind: https://twitter.com/windjammah, https://qomrades.com/