Signup for Alterra : Post-post-apocalypse with a twist - the info & signup thread
 

Okay, here's the poop:

I designed this world for use in my second novel, but it kind of took on a life of its own. It's a Sci-fi setting with varying technological levels, ranging from simple post-industrial to advanced nanotech 'smart' materials depending on what city you're in.

The history begins with a continent-wide megalopolis;

Silver spires and great metallic pyramids kilometers high broke the surface of the stratosphere, built on several stories of self-maintaining machine infrastructure. Roads and walkways ran like spiders silk between them.
This sprawling technological wonder was the center of a fledgling empire, just beginning to expand back into the galaxy after abandoning space travel twelve millennia before: The Alterrans had long been fully capable of traversing interstellar distances, indeed, that was how they had gotten to Alterra in the first place. Then they had encountered other intelligent beings, beings far more advanced than themselves. These new beings held a philosophy that, although other beings had a right to exist, they should not be allowed to explore beyond their own solar systems. With little effort, the colonists were pushed back to Alterra (which the hostile beings assumed was their homeworld, as it had been the first planet they occupied in that galaxy.) The Alterrans could have complained, or fought on to ultimate destruction. Instead, they agreed to the terms of surrender – they would not leave their own solar system, and they would be left alone.
They stayed in their new system - and for twelve thousand years devoted themselves to moving their technology forward, to a point where they could beat the oppressors and reclaim the stars. They reached that point and surpassed it, but the Alterrans continued, striving further and pushing harder; they wanted there to be no chance of failure, no possibility of defeat.
In labs outfitted with every possible safety measure, Alterran scientists created cybernetic and genetically engineered monsters of incredible power for use in the new Alterran military; beings they could drop on a planet and leave to do their work and Beings that could fight in armies side by side with Alterran men and women. In these same labs they pushed nano-technology to its limits, creating programmable molecular robots. The Alterrans terraformed other planets in their solar system, turning entire worlds into deep-space weapons platforms.

Then, on what was to have been the eve of their initial foray back out into the galaxy, what has since been identified as, for lack of a better word, a man, materialized in the sky above Alterra, accompanied by a massive space-time ripple. His appearance was that of a photographic negative; carrot-orange skin, silvery hair, clothed all in a color that could only be described as neon black. He cast a blazing white shadow. All of the city’s seven billion inhabitants heard his voice in their minds like a razor wrapped in silk:

“I am the Bealen’dal. I have chosen this place as my battleground. Your time is over. This is simply a fact; there is nothing you can do to change it.”

Clouds formed all across the continent and lightning flared. The ground began to shake as globules of explosive plasma rained from the sky, blasting mile-wide craters into the planets crust. The stranger flew through the streets at ultrasonic speeds, the shockwaves picking up vehicles and pedestrians alike and sending them tumbling through the air. In thirty seconds he crossed the continent, the pressure wave he left in his wake cutting a swath of greater destruction through the cityscape. As he flew, the Bealen’dal raised his hands to the sky; the clouds swirled and parted and a radiant beam of gossamer light burst forth from the opening, burning all it touched. Similar beams speared down elsewhere, intensifying the destruction already caused by the rain of plasma – one struck a major fault-line that ran the length of the Eastern seaboard with a deafening roar. The ground shook even more violently and hundreds of square kilometers of coastline separated from the mainland and slid into the sea. This initial quake triggered an intersecting fault, already destabilized by the constant explosive bombardment, releasing tectonic pressure that had been building for centuries; a mountain range was born, dividing the north of the landmass - the entire continent shook as Alterra wobbled on its axis ever so slightly slightly. The towers snapped and fell, exposing their greasy mechanical underbellies and sending debris crashing down on those who lived below. As the infrastructure crumbled and failed, aquifers that had been directed by machinery for centuries found themselves suddenly free to flow where they pleased, adding widespread flooding to the devastation, an event known in and of itself as ‘The Wash’.
The Bealen’dal flew at a more leisurely pace to the center of the continent, and in an anticolor blaze of power that leveled everything for a hundred kilometers in every direction, took off into deep space.
Despite the massive power of the Alterrans military technology, there was no time to mount a defense. A civilization that took twelve thousand years to build had fallen in twelve minutes.

The survivors totaled about five million. When no help came from their outposts, they concluded that those too had been destroyed by the enraged god that had come upon them with such ferocity. In time, this event came to be known as the Reckoning.

It is now two thousand years since the reckoning, but there are still reminders everywhere of the old civilization. A layer of fertile topsoil almost three meters thick has formed from decaying flesh and rusting metal, covering the ancient heaps of debris.

In the meantime, city-states have popped up, as well as smaller towns and villages. All villages are at least capable of putting on an appreciable display of force. Classic 'hamlets' are unheard of, because of

THE STALEMATERS

Scattered throughout the Northeast are creatures of terrifying power, capable of taking on entire regiments of TCE soldiers. The best anyone has ever achieved against one is a stalemate, hence the name. They are varied in size, shape, and population, some numbering in the hundreds and others the only ones of their kind. Some of these creatures are intelligent enough to reason with and a few have even made defense pacts with human cities. Others are mindless engines of indiscriminate destruction. The most well known varieties are listed here.



Flares
The common Stalemater, called a Flare, is a blazing orange gecko-like creature about twenty meters tall at the shoulder, with needle-like barbs lining the edge of each of its scales, which are capable of deflecting plasma-weapon fire. They can reproduce, but only mate when their total number drops below two hundred and fifty. It is thought that flares were created to act as heavy infantry support units in the military of the fallen empire.
Flares are highly intelligent creatures and their vocal apparatus allows them to speak, albeit in harsh, rasping tones. They live in groups of about two or three per hundred square acres in burrows they dig for themselves near to human settlements so that they may converse with travelers. Each of these burrows is easily the size of a football stadium. Flares can spit a highly viscous acidic solution from glands in the back of their throats, which can act as a weapon or as a powerful cement to provide structural integrity for their burrows.
It is unknown what they eat, but they drink almost their entire bodyweight in water every day. Flares are naturally predisposed to be friendly towards people, but like people, every flare is different, so there are exceptions.





Runaways
This is the rarest type of Stalemater of which more than one is known to exist. Its name is a reference to what you do when you see one – you run away. Runaways average anywhere from forty to fifty meters in height, and some can be even larger. Runaways are bizarre; they are usually reptilian, but some of them are more like giant birds or amphibians. They are each one of a kind, presumably created for specific purposes. All of them date back to pre-Reckoning times, the results of the Alterran bio-weapons programs. Whatever the original reasons for their existence were, what Runaways do now is simple: They crush, they destroy, they kill, and sometimes they do all three at once. The average Runaway is anywhere from twenty to seventy percent mechanical, and all of them have self-repair mechanisms of one variety or another. Very few of them can be permanently killed short of vaporizing or completely disassembling them. On average, any given Runaway will be active only one or two weeks a year.

The Screwit:
Like the runaways, The Screwit takes its name from the general reaction to its appearance: “Screw it. We’re all dead.” Unlike the runaways, there is only one Screwit, and unlike the runaways, The Screwit is active all of the time. Eyewitness descriptions of The Screwit are unavailable, as nobody in recent memory has survived an encounter with it. Rumors of The Screwit and exactly what it looks like are many and varied, but they all agree on four things: It is small by Stalemater standards, only the size of a full-grown grizzly bear, it is orange or light brown, it possesses scaly skin (and a shell according to some stories), and it can project some sort of force beams. The Screwit can pop up anywhere, at any time, leaving behind utter devastation, but for some reason stays away from population centers and heavily traveled roads.


The Legend
When encountered, The Screwit is death incarnate: it wanders the Ruins seeking victims, occasionally clashing with Runaways in titanic battles that shake the ground for kilometers in every direction.
Long after all other life is gone from Alterra, The Screwit will remain, forever haunting the night for its own, unknown purpose.



The Truth
In actuality, The Screwit is nothing more than a giant Earth creature - an armadillo which, caught and sucked in by a tear in space-time caused when the Bealen’dal brushed against its reality, got spit out with him upon his arrival on Alterra. At some point during this unscheduled journey, The Screwit came into possession of god-like power. Its carapace is impenetrable to all known forms of weaponry and can withstand pressures of up to ten thousand atmospheres without so much as cracking, and ten times that before The Screwit could be considered to be in actual danger. In terms of sheer physical power (if the whim should ever strike it) The Screwit could pulverize a mountain range with its stumpy little paws alone. It is also capable of generating a variety of energy waves and beams when it feels threatened, most notably a muon beam which disrupts all organic matter. Unfortunately for those who cross its path, The Screwit, although capable of dolphin-like displays of intelligence, usually thinks like an average armadillo, and feels threatened by just about everything; Once a person gets past the ‘destroying you out of fear’ part though, the Screwit is quite eager to make friends.

These things don't only exist in the northeast. That's just where they are most numerous. This would be a good time to mention that the main continent is divided into five sections - The northeast plains, the southeastern badlands, the northwest forests, the central area, and the southwest industrial wasteland. Characters are most likely to come from either the plains or the industrial wasteland.
On to the first major population center:

- THE BOJINGLES TECHS AND OMNICOM CITY

The Beginning
At the (new) eastern edge of the continent, a man dressed all in animal skin robes appeared. He roamed from settlement to settlement, dispensing things which were unlike anything seen since before the Reckoning. He told of a place to the North, a place where people could come to learn of technology and science if they were willing to dedicate their lives to the preservation and furthering of knowledge. Some called him crazy. Some tried to kill him – and were met with superb martial skill and a personal force shield. Six of them followed him. His name, he told them, was BoJingles.
BoJingles lead those who followed through the ruins to what remained of one of the huge pyramidal towers. Pipes and electrical conduits, blackened by oils and years of neglect lay broken and bent all around among the shells of fallen towers. The pyramid was only half there, the top having been blown off in the initial assault. As the group approached, its substructure loomed up before them, like the moldering intestines of some great dark beast, composed of the same pipes and conduits that lay shattered all around it. There was a noise coming from the structure, a noise which nobody had heard in fifty years, but had once been taken entirely for granted; the low-frequency hum of electrical current. BoJingles approached a huge metal plate, entirely smooth, which was set into the surrounding clutter. It slid aside as he drew near, revealing a descending stairway…

This was how BoJingles founded the BoJingles Techs. Over the next ten years, in the endless catacombs that existed below, he taught his new students everything he knew regarding electronics, thermodynamics, mechanics, biology, mathematics and physics. He introduced them to a device known as The Librarian which his father had created just before the Reckoning; an artificial intelligence that interfaced with a vast computerized storehouse of knowledge, cataloguing all the accumulated science and culture of their civilization. BoJingles’ father had somehow foreseen the Reckoning, and had taken this step to insure that all was not lost. What BoJingles did with this invaluable information was entirely his own idea.

Now
Over the intervening centuries, The BoJingles Techs grew in numbers and power. Using their knowledge they built the ruined pyramid into a technological fortress, which they expanded into the surrounding area: The Omnicom Stronghold. The pyramid itself, and many of the adjoining buildings, makeup an educational facility known as ‘BoJingles University’. Most of the Stronghold is underground, in the catacombs that had once been below the pre-reckoning city, ancient tunnels that had been used at various times for everything from transportation to housing. The BoJingles Techs control at least three operational fusion reactors, which they use to power this base. There are roughly five thousand actual members of the group, but easily two hundred times that many people live, study, and work inside their complex, exchanging skills and labor for food, education, and protection. All residents and visitors are required to register with the Firestorm Defense Database (FDD).

Defenses & Projects

The TCE Corp

Omnicom is defended by a contingent of three hundred soldiers, each equipped with a Total Conversion Engine; a cybernetic implant that slowly transforms their bodies into living weapons, possessing augmented strength, speed, and endurance, as well as heightened senses and in the newer models, neural computer interface ports. Each of these abilities gets stronger with time, so that the oldest TCE soldiers are nothing short of superhuman.

Despite the fantastic strength they grant, the TCEs are limited. They are incapable of increasing a soldier’s abilities to more than ten times what he would normally posses, and cannot improve upon their own design once activated. Even the most powerful of them cannot stand up to a direct hit with a half-decent plasma weapon. This is a built-in safety feature to prevent TCE soldiers from growing too powerful to stop if they ever went rogue.

Funkytown
In the woods to the north of Omnicom there is a small, dome-shaped house built of concrete, steel, and various ‘smart’ polymers. It is connected to Omnicom via a conduit as big around as most men are tall and an underground maglev transport. This is the home of professor Casmir Funk, head and only current member of the Humanoid Stalemater Research program. Professor Funk is easily the greatest mind that biology has ever seen, said to have created and promptly destroyed three different sustainable ecosystems in his bedroom, starting with only basic protozoa and some gene splicing equipment each time, before he turned eight. Unfortunately he is batshit insane. Perfectly content to spend his time in conversation with his house’s neural network, he stays inside most of the time, venturing out every once and a while to show off something he’s whipped up in his spare time. His eventual goal is (so he claims) to create a humanoid stalemater – unkillable, unstoppable, able to endure the harshest of conditions, handsome, charming, and intelligent. Why he would want to do such a thing remains a mystery, and many people believe it is just to prove to himself that he can. His research has yielded tremendous results in the field of human augmentation and anti-aging treatments, so he gets all the resources he could possible need. People leave Funk alone unless invited. He’s a nice old man, but he can have a vicious temper.


The Big Three

The three Prototype TCE Commandos, however, possessed, (and indeed, continue to possess) no such limiting factors. One-time students of BoJingles himself, their bodies have been rebuilt over centuries by their implants into things of terrifying power, capable of unleashing destruction on a scale not seen since the Reckoning. Should the Bealen’dal ever return, they will be the BoJingles Techs’ first line of defense.

Firestorm

The most powerful of the Techs’ creations (with the possible exception of The Big Three) is the security system that defends their Omnicom stronghold. Known simply as Firestorm, it has five defensive modes (DM’s), each more powerful than the last. In the event of an attack, the first defensive mode will be activated: panels throughout the stronghold will roll back, revealing a multitude of cannons, firing everything from searing plasma to explosive shells. Anyone not registered with the FDD system will be targeted, and the TCE Corp is scrambled. The second defensive mode is much the same, only it targets any non-TCE personnel on the Stronghold exterior and deploys anti-vehicle missile systems in addition to the cannons. The third defensive mode activates a satellite in geo-synchronous orbit above the Omnicom stronghold, which can target anything within a five hundred kilometer radius with a charged-article beam of unsurpassed destructive potential. An electromagnetic force-field over the entire complex, capable of stopping a twenty megaton nuclear blast, is activated. Blast doors seal off the lower levels from the surface. The fourth defensive mode is the one from which the system takes its name: ‘The Firestorm Protocol’. A series of ninety two low-yield nuclear warheads are launched in a ring around Omnicom out to a minimum radius of four kilometers, in addition to enacting all provisions of defensive modes three and two.
The fifth defensive mode has never been used, and nobody knows what it does or how to activate it, save for The Librarian.

The Space Program

About two hundred years ago, the BoJingles Techs instituted a space program, hoping to reach one of the other planets that their ancestors colonized and possibly meet others like themselves. They have put several satellites in orbit, including, a space station from which they are currently constructing a massive starship in orbit around Alterra. Based on pre-reckoning Alterran designs for an intergalactic war platform, when completed this ship will be capable of reducing entire solar systems to clouds of dust and patches of ultraviolet radiation. The Techs are well aware of the dangers they may encounter in the gulfs between the stars and are not about to venture into space without a significant amount of firepower at their fingertips.

Membership
Members of the BoJingles Techs are required to keep the peace in the stronghold, to have a working knowledge of at least one scientific discipline (three is average), and to teach anyone who shows interest. They tend to be inquisitive and usually somewhat off-the-wall people, the kind who enjoy picking at the fabric of life when they see a loose thread. All new members must be approved by a node of The Librarian, which has been expanded into a computer network running throughout the base, after which they have full access to the conventional section of the armory. Any cybernetic enhancements they may desire must also be approved.

The BoJingles Techs could have conquered the continent. Instead, they continue to serve as a bastion of goodwill and knowledge.

There's one other major population center in the Northeast.

- THE BOUNCERS AND ANCHOR FREEHOLD

The Beginning

With almost six-hundred thousand residents, the city of Anchor represents the fourth largest population center on the entire continent. Initially founded by the BoJingles Techs about forty years after the group was formed, at the time Anchor was intended to be a secondary research facility: a place where potentially catastrophic experiments could be conducted without endangering the Omnicom Stronghold. But as Omnicom grew larger and more secure, the needs once served by Anchor were centralized at the stronghold; Anchor was stripped down and abandoned, leaving only the building itself – a pyramid similar to, although smaller than, the one around which Omnicom was built – and a wind farm, built out of the debris jutting from the western mountainside to take advantage of the constant updrafts. Anchor remained unoccupied from 590 A.R. until 724 A.R, when it was rediscovered by a group of five wanderers, men and women who lived for the thrill of throwing themselves headlong into a crisis. Theirs was a hard life, one of constant fighting, trekking across miles of wilderness and sleeping when it seemed convenient. They enjoyed it, and wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world. They were Adventurers, for lack of a better word, and they were the best there were. Collectively, they called themselves ‘The Bouncers’. Individually, they were…


Gredel
The leader and moral compass of the group, the man who brought them together in the first place, was a powerhouse named Gredel. Gredel stood almost four meters tall, with shoulders half that, and arms the size of a normal man’s entire body, and as wide at the wrists. His entire frame appeared to be composed of muscle. He bulged and rippled when he moved, as though he were actually the multitudinous roots of some ancient tree, which had wrapped themselves around a skeleton then gotten up and walked away. So impossibly monstrous was his stature that rumors persist to this day that he was not actually human, but an otherwise unknown form of humanoid Stalemater. His general appearance did little to discourage such rumors; Gredel was white as a sheet, his body utterly devoid of color, save for a pair of flaming red eyebrows, and his eyes, which were jade green. Also remarkable was Gredel’s intelligence. It has been established that he spent several years studying (and maybe being studied) at the Omnicom Stronghold. Gredel also wrote several books in his time on various subjects, including his memoirs, a thorough medical study of his own remarkable body, and a book of poetry entitled In the Monster’s Eyes, all three of which are available in digital or hard copy at Omnicom.



Ched
Ched was the ‘Mr. Fixit’ of the group, a whiz with electronics, quantum science, and a crack-shot with any kind of energy weapon. Standing about one-hundred thirty centimeters, with Mephistophelian good looks and an attitude to match, he was almost as good at working with electrical systems as he was at getting laid. It was Ched who supervised the repairs to the damaged wind farm and got the electrical systems of the building back on-line. Ched met Gredel when they both studied at Omnicom, and stuck by him from that time on. Ched often used his technical know-how to pull elaborate pranks on his fellows, sometimes resulting in light-hearted violence amongst them.


Thehsh
Her full name was Thehsh’erral’an’d’anxann’ara. She fought using a pair of gauss pistols. She was the only woman Ched ever met that refused to sleep with him. She was a cynic, a master of the human condition. She could see through any lie and make any lie seem believable. The fact that a lie is easier to take from a beautiful face might have had something to do with it – out of all of The Bouncers, she had the most natural ‘bounce’. Thehsh had the sort of figure that almost never occurs naturally: 36-24-36, the classic ‘hourglass’. Her Flowing blonde hair complimented a face that was a vision of geometric symmetry and perfection. She possessed not a freckle, not a blemish. Thehsh met Gredel somewhere in the south shortly after he left Omnicom. She’d been making a successful living as a Femme Fatale, working for law enforcement or the underworld depending on who was paying her more at the time. Gredel and Ched stepped onto the scene when they were hired to take kill Thehsh by some of her associates, who planned to kill them both in order to cover it up.
But Gredel and Ched never took a job without doing their own private investigation into the circumstances around it. Gredel and Ched found out about the betrayal, tracked down Thehsh and told her of the plots against her. The three of them skipped town and formed an alliance to better defend against anyone who might be sent after them. This was when they first took the name, “The Bouncers”.
















Edberry
Edberry was the group’s cook. He often bragged that he could make anything taste good, and would attempt to prove it if challenged, using anything that happened to be at hand. In things that did not involve cooking, he was detached to the point of near catatonia. He fought using a pair of implements of his own devising, things which together he called a ‘wah-ful iron’. He cooked with these weapons as well, creating tiny cakes by heating them and filling one with batter, then pressing them together Edberry was thin like a stalk of celery, and no matter how many of his own creations he devoured, he never gained any weight. Edberry had stringy brown hair and eyes so bloodshot you could never tell exactly what color they were, and somehow he always conveyed the impression he was slouching, even when he was standing up straight.
Edberry joined the Bouncers somewhat by accident: a restaurant he had set up a short time before had been promptly destroyed by his neighbors, who thought it made the area smell funny. Overhearing an argument among them about who was going to cook their next meal and, having not cooked anything for a fell ten minutes, Edberry volunteered his services. He made them waffles, and upon tasting the delightful little disk-cakes, they immediately asked him to join them.


Doc
The most important thing to remember about Doc was that she was not a doctor. She had no medical training, and had no desire to obtain any: she was simply named ‘Doc’. In fact, Doc was usually the reason people required medical attention. Doc was the demolitions expert; she liked large bangs, both in the explosive and the sexual sense of the words. She was a small woman, just over one hundred twenty centimeters in height, but she was beautiful, possessing short, jet black hair, and a slim, compact body. Doc joined the Bouncers on one of their first truly impressive exploits. The Sons of The Bealen’dal, a breakaway appocalypticult sect of the Children of the Reckoning, was re-forming after decades of inactivity in the largest city on the west coast. Gredel found out about it, and from what he was able to gather, the movement wasn’t very large. It seemed straightforward, so he alerted the local authorities. Nothing happened. The Bouncers dug deeper, and found that nothing was being done because more than half the city was under the control of the cult, and that percentage was increasing rapidly. That very night, the Sons took over the city, killing the rulers and their families and locking it down. Doc approached the Bouncers half in shock as they were planning their escape, and asked them for their help. Her father had been on the city council, and she was a target for assassination. She wanted protection, and offered to make herself useful in any way they desired her to in exchange for it. Gredel asked what she could do for them besides what she was obviously inferring, and she told him she could make bombs. This intrigued Gredel, and after several minutes of discussion with his fellows, took her up on the offer. By the end of the ordeal not a building was left standing in the entire city, and Doc was firmly established as a permanent member of the Bouncers.

Regional oddities of the northeast are as follows:
GENEROUS BOB(S)

Easily the strangest inhabitants of the Northeast are the Generous Bobs; little pulsing gelatinous green things, shaped like tiny pears with sausage-like limbs, the largest of which only reach up to a child’s knee. Generous Bobs are somewhat of a mystery; every once in a while, for no apparent reason at all, a Generous Bob ( or Bobs ) will enter a town or city carrying a package wrapped in brown paper with ‘For’ and the name of a resident scrawled on it, followed by ‘From Bob’. Once at the destination, usually the home of someone seemingly inconsequential, the Generous Bob or Bobs deposit the package at the door and leave, somehow conveying an immense feeling of satisfaction and self-worth to those who witness their departure. The contents of the packages follow no particular pattern, ranging from bundles of sticks to atom bombs complete with instruction manual to crystalline devices that emit a strange hum and seem to flicker in and out of existence. If anyone attempts to steal a package from a Generous Bob before the package is delivered to its intended recipient or if a Generous Bob is attacked after it has delivered its package, it will leap on its attacker and latch itself onto the nearest patch of exposed flesh. Subsequently, the attacker begins to melt and is transformed into several new Generous Bobs, which accompany the original back to wherever it is the Generous Bobs call home. If there is no exposed flesh, the Generous Bob latches onto any spot at all and secretes a powerful acid that eats through whatever protection the thief may have. There is much debate over just when the first Generous Bob appeared, but it is universally agreed that they did not exist pre-reckoning. Their origin is unknown. If there is a way to kill a Generous Bob, it has yet to be found, but most people love the little buggers, so few people have tried, and nobody has tried more than once.

Atrocious Bob
There is one Bob who simply does not get along well with people (to put it mildly). This Bob is known as Atrocious Bob, and it is distinguishable from the Generous Bobs only because it is a slightly darker shade of green (the Generous Bobs being a vibrant sea-green). Atrocious Bob breaks into peoples houses at night and takes their possessions, which it arranges in little piles on their front lawn. Atrocious Bob then proceeds to set these piles on fire and do a happy little dance for several minutes before scampering away.
-ANOMALIS

There are many stories about Anomalis, the doomed subcity. In the years predating the reckoning, Anomalis was a subcity – a division of the continent-wide megalopolis – which housed many whose area of expertise was trans-dimensional and temporal astrophysics. They were all working on different projects, most having to do with exploring the universes adjacent to their own. It was here that the arrival of the Bealen’dal was first known. When the cosmic entity materialized in this universe, it caused a ripple to pass through space on several dimensional levels. The devices in Anomalis which were used for research, devices capable of tearing holes in space and tying time in knots, were suddenly flooded with feedback far beyond what they had been designed to accept. What happened next, what is indeed still happening, is not exactly clear. Immediately after the event, Anomalis appeared to have been vaporized, reduced to less than dust by the quantum energies unleashed, but in the intervening two-thousand years, there have been several instances of travelers in various places throughout the northeast reporting a glittering bastion of technology shimmering on the horizon during particularly fierce electrical storms. Some claim to have actually entered Anomalis.
These few say that once the boundary between the ‘real’ world and the phantom city was crossed, they found themselves living the eight days preceding the Reckoning. One man even brought back a souvenir, a hand-held device which recorded and played back the events as holographic images (this device, which shows a partial record of the man’s experience, was donated to Omnicom’s library, where it is kept under lock and key.) When the eight days are up, they say that several detonations shake the city, there is screaming and confusion, a loudspeaker system says something about a ‘phase distortion exceeding specified parameters’, and then everything goes white and they’re back in an empty field.

Exploration
Twice there have been expeditions which set out with the expressed purpose of finding Anomalis and using it as a gateway to the past, to carry a warning to their ancestors of the impending attack. One group, the Van Hauser Expedition, came back in defeat. The other, the Fermi Expedition, never came back at all. Its members are presumed to have left Anomalis and perished in the Bealen’dal’s initial assault, two thousand years before they even left, although there is some evidence that it may have been the Fermi Expedition that were responsible for the construction of The Librarian.





- THE WANDERLAST

There is a strangely barren area south-west of Omnicom Stronghold. Only about fifty kilometers in diameter, it is known as the Wanderlast. The original site of Anomalis, it is utterly plain. Nothing grows there. Nothing moves. There is no wind. All but the strongest of sounds do not carry beyond several meters. Things are seen here sometimes which defy reason, the laws of physics, or both; the legacy of the gaping wound the subcity’s destruction tore in reality. For obvious reasons, the Wanderlast is avoided.

Strange Bedfellows
The phenomenon known as Strange Bedfellows consists of four events which happen in sequence, only the fourth of which is remarkable. First, one person in a group of travelers will think they see something which, at second glance, isn’t actually there; usually a person, although sometimes a building is seen instead. Second, one member of the group will feel a sharp knock on the back of their head, and will blame it on one of their companions. No blows will be exchanged, but there will be feelings of suspicion and resentment. Third, someone will crack a joke at which nobody will laugh. Then the group will simply vanish from the face of the planet, leaving behind all their gear as though they had set up camp for the night and just walked away. In their sleeping bags will be found a wooden representation of them should anyone ever discover the camp-site.
Experienced travelers make sure to laugh at their own jokes and respond physically to insult while in the Wanderlast to break this series of events and prevent it from running its course.

The Wanderlast Terminus
The Wanderlast itself is only the tip of an iceberg. Travelers through the area are well advised to go straight through, because excessive turning around or doubling back will have catastrophic results: you could come out the other side. The Wanderlast acts as a gateway to an infinite plain – a Wanderlast without end, an Escher painting seen through a lense of cosmic malice; the Wanderlast terminus. Just about anything can happen there, and it does, but usually not in a good way. There are cities there that live by day and fall to ruin at night, the inhabitants turned to life-sucking shades; there are dark swamps housing horrors beyond imagining. There are single dead trees, protruding from a flat plain with nothing nearby for thousands of kilometers which, if asked nicely, will offer to reveal the a way back home if you perform some impossible task, like raising the dead or murdering your grandfather before your father was born. There are even some who say that this is where the Bealen’dal came from. There is no record of anyone ever returning from the Wanderlast Terminus, but clearly it is possible – how would anyone know about it otherwise?

BABKOK & KOKBAB
Must-see locations for anyone planning to travel through the Wanderlast, these two towns are directly opposite each other, northeast and southwest of their barren neighbor, each with a population of roughly two thousand. In a strange coincidence of the sort that seems to thrive in the area, the towns were founded (and named) completely independently, and with no initial knowledge of each others existence. There are other eerie similarities as well (example: a person lives in a house in Babkok; a person with the same first name lives in a similar house in Kokbab. They both have a limp in their left legs because they were broken climbing trees at age eight.). Expert guides can be found for hire in these towns, willing to lead customers safely through the Wanderlast for the right price. There are also a disproportionate number of crazy people in both towns.

HINKLEY
A large fishing village on the coast boasting a population of about six thousand, this town exists because there are so many fish to be had in Far East, and this is the closest piece of land. Everyone here fishes. Even those who do other things for a living fish in their spare time during the busy season. There are other fishing villages of course, but none as large or as dedicated as Hinkley. It also serves as the base of operations for those who wish to explore Far East, and diving equipment may be rented with little difficulty from most. Commercial establishments.



*whew*
That about covers the northeast. Nobody knows what's southeast, because the entire area is toxic - biological and chemical weapons which escaped from labs during the reckoning poisoned the area beyond salvation. The ground is a semi-solid chemical paste. If you do end up going there, I'll post more information on the interior of the badlands. There is one outpost there, but it's not worth mentioning.

The Northwest is cut off from the rest of the continent by a massive mountain range - the only passage through which is gaurded by a powerful stalemater. Once again, if it becomes necessary, I'll post info on the area.



So that leaves the soutwest. I'm just gonna post the whole southwest entry direct from my notes to save time - if not space.

The Southwest Industrial Complex
Pre-reckoning, it was devoted mostly to production; parts for starships were made here, as were supercomputers that would fit on your thumbnail. This was the first settled area of Alterra, built first and built to last. The manufacturing facilities, some occupying whole subcities, were extremely dense and ran deep below the surface. Most of them survived the high-energy bombardments and earthquakes of the Reckoning relatively intact, although still very beat up. Because of the abundant mechanical resources, several technologically advanced groups have risen in the area.

DENIZENS

THE STALEMATERS
There are very few stalematers in the southwest; being largely industrial it was unsuited to the creation of genetically engineered monsters (although several key components of the cybernetic Runaways of the Northeast were fabricated there). The Stalematers that are to be found represent a line of research that was apparently abandoned early on in favor of their biological counterparts: mechanical monsters, literal engines of destruction…

-King Klong
A machine standing forty meters high, and possessing a startling array of weaponry, Klong appears to be a quadruped constructed in polygonal sections from a dark green metal, which has blackened from centuries of roaming the ruins. It has a feline countenance similar to that of the Taurs found to the North. When Klong’s onboard AI perceives something which is recognized as an enemy, the giant war machine attacks with a ferocity only the most powerful Runaways can match, sprouting gattling guns and powerful particle cannons from recesses hidden within its armored frame. It is capable of venting excess nuclear plasma from its fusion reactor through a duct that opens into its mouth, (which is protected from the heat by a multi-faceted electromagnetic containment field) for use as a ‘breath’ weapon. Klong also has the expected claws and teeth of any feline. Klong is most often seen at the very edge of the mountain range, near the opening to the Northwest, and has been known to protect the area from incursion by other stalematers on occasion. The reason for this behavior is unknown.

-Zorm
An unpleasant little fellow, Zorm’s physical form consists entirely of a metallic hovering sphere, roughly the size of a large beach-ball. Zorm is docile unless overtly attacked, or otherwise threatened, in the event of which it defends itself using pulsed electrical discharges up to four megavolts in strength. Zorm is protected by a force-field from incoming energy or projectiles and possesses a child-like AI. It has been a key player in several small wars, destroying armies when the enemy lured them into making it angry.

-Dred
This stalemater is just plain strange. It is like Zorm in that its core seems to be a hovering metallic sphere, but there the similarity ends. There are several smaller spheres circling the large one, and in the space surrounding them there are still smaller ones, with even smaller ones circling those, which are themselves circled by spheres almost too small to see. These multitudes of floating metal baubles work in tandem to generate powerful electromagnetic fields, producing a variety of effects, from simple lightshows to ionic death-rays. It is unknown how intelligent Dred actually is – whether its fantastic displays are a product of creativity or simply pre-programmed attack routines. The general consensus is that it’s about as smart as an average five-year-old child with several complex subroutines to handle its electromagnetic wizardry.
Leftees
These are robotic creatures that have been created over the years for various purposes and ended up outlasting their creators. Now they roam the Southwest searching out opportunities to perform their appointed tasks. There are very few of them, as they usually end up getting scavenged for use as spare parts in larger machinery.

REGIONAL ATTRACTIONS AND ODDITIES
The things about this area that would usually attract scavengers – the abundant manufacturing facilities, the numerous intact fusion reactors, the easily defensible architecture of the buildings – most of it has already been claimed by several extremely powerful city-states which have arisen in the area. Those portions which are not already claimed are the regular stomping grounds of the stalematers that inhabit the region. People come to the southwest industrial complex to avail themselves of the goods and services that may be found there – mass production, customization of weapons and vehicles, black-market goods of every sort, and occasionally something truly surprising… Still, there three sites which stick out from the rest.






-GATEWAY PLAIN
Located at the mouth of the valley that opens into the Northwestern Rainforests, this is the domain of King Klong. This area of the Southwest Industrial Complex has been totally annihilated. There is nothing but twisted metal, fried circuitry, and shattered stone for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, the legacy of battles fought against stalematers intent upon reaching the rainforests.

-JIN
The only stalemater known to have been permanently killed, Jin met its doom at the claws of King Klong nearly fifty years ago. In life, it was truly a monster – similar to the Flares of the Northeast in shape but gradually shifting from biological to a machine composition about two-thirds of the way down its back, the end of its tail sported a particle cannon comparable in strength to the combined power of the four which defend Anchor Freehold. The battle lasted for days, the destruction doubling the size of the Gateway Plain, but Klong eventually prevailed, vaporizing Jin’s biological half with massive plasma vent that completely shut down its internal reactor and left the surrounding area so radioactive that it glowed at night. For several years it was believed that Klong and Jin had killed each other- both of their massive bulks towered above the surrounding devastation, never moving or giving any hint of activity. Then one night there was a blinding flash of light, and the next day Klong was gone and only the skeleton of Jin with its technological attachments remained. Shortly after, Klong was reported active again. Jin’s remains are still dangerously radioactive, and it is unknown how many of its systems survived the battle intact – certainly not its self-repair routines, but the cannon apparatus on its tail is of particular interest to those who seek weapons of singular power.

-HANGAR 12
An utterly nondescript rectangular building running east to west; sixty by eighty meters long by sixty meters high; there is a gigantic, faded number 12 barely suggested by the way shadows fall on the southern face. The Eastern face is just one massive garage door, which opens with a clanking squeal that can be heard for kilometers in every direction. Located in the exact center of Gateway Plain, it is believed to be King Klong’s lair. Whether this is true or not, something comes and goes from it with regular frequency, something which without the slightest hesitation destroys anybody foolish enough to venture nearby. Still, every once in a while somebody will get it in their head to go there – the lucky ones come back in boxes. The rest don’t come back at all.

REGIONAL INFLUENCES AND POPULATION CENTERS

There are three major powers based in the Southwest Industrial Complex, each one far more mechanized, though not as technologically advanced as Anchor Freehold ( all three are decades behind the work of the BoJingles Techs) and comparable in size and influence to either one of the northern powers. Known as the three sisters, these city-states have a stormy history and an uneasy, though not overtly hostile relationship with one another.

- THE CHILDREN OF THE RECKONING AND NEW ALTERRA

-The Beginning
Quite possibly the oldest organization on the continent, The Children of the Reckoning is also one of the most radical. The advent of the Children brought back something which had been long dead on Alterra - evangelical religious fanaticism. It started with a man named Sleeg. Sleeg represented a rare failure of the employee-screening system at a division of the company that made and maintained the fusion reactors for the secondary power system; he was a high-level administrator, obsessed with his job and with furthering his own position within the company. He was also batshit insane; one of those people who must have everything absolutely ‘perfect’ or they can’t function. The kind of person who arranges their pencils in order of size, color, brand name, and time spent in use.
Just hours before the reckoning, Sleeg’s superiors, in one of those seemingly inconsequential decisions that plot the course of history, decided to fire him; he had been getting on their nerves with his constant sucking-up, and several of his competitors for a promotion had met with unfortunate ‘accidents’. Sleeg did not take the news well; he stole the prototype for a new kind of super-high density solar collection unit, and brought it south, intending to get lost in the industrial area and sell the design to a competitor when the heat died down – then the world ended, and he found himself one of a few dozen survivors in the southwestern industrial complex. His super-orderly junior-executive brain couldn’t take it: Sleeg lost his grip on reality. Over the next several days, he came to five conclusions which would have profound effects on the future of Alterra

1.) The Reckoning and losing his job were directly related; one caused the other.
2.) The way things had been was flawed. Only a flawed system could betray his years of effort by firing someone as important as him.
3.) The Bealen’dal was powerful. Powerful people were important. Important people were to be sucked up to.
4.) With the old way of doing things gone, he could create his own version of perfection.
5.) He would need help with his new mission.

Sleeg took to preaching these conclusions, and as would be expected, he garnered himself a following; people desperate for a purpose; people who felt betrayed by the world for what had happened. Gradually, his conclusions turned into tenets, and his tenets became commandments, and after a decade, his commandments solidified into laws. There were six of them.

1. The Reckoning was merely the just punishment of the wicked by the forces of righteousness.
2. The world is flawed. It is our job to fix it by destroying the works of the corrupt.
3. The Bealen’dal represents the ultimate manifestation of perfection. He is the Messiah, and we are to prepare the world for his return.
4. Furthering your own position is as noble a cause as any, and is not to be frowned upon, no matter the means.
5. The Bealen’dal‘s chosen battle ground, the north and east, must be kept as He left it for His return.
6. This is the way things are. There is nothing we may do to change it. Those who resist must be shown the truth, and if they reject it, destroyed.

By the time the laws reached their final form, Sleeg had himself a full-blown religion on his hands, and his mind had deteriorated even further. During this time he came up with a lot of seemingly ridiculous little rituals for his underlings to perform, some of them actually quite disturbing. The most widely practiced and well known of these is the act of nipping at one’s own right shoulder when entering or leaving a room ( a mere nod to the right among the less devout).
Sleeg spent the last years of his life gibbering incoherently in a corner about improperly marked order forms and exact change, but by that time he was no longer necessary – The Children boasted a membership of over twenty thousand, and was still growing. They had rebuilt and put to work the giant machine-presses and automated assembly lines of their ancestors and created fortress-city several kilometers in diameter (although lacking the deep underground facilities of Omnicom and Anchor) powered by solar panels reverse-engineered from the one Sleeg stole from his employer, they called the city New Alterra.


At this point, I'm skipping the four-page story of the only continent-wide war in Alterran history.

-Now
The Children of the Reckoning tried to take the world in a toe-to-toe battle during the War of Faith and were nearly destroyed by their own presumptuousness and overconfidence. Omnicom withdrew their troops five years after the war ended, during which time they had, through humanitarian efforts and assistance with reconstruction, successfully brought about a change in the Children’s beliefs, turning the once xenophobic city of New Alterra into a place that welcomed strangers with open arms – or it did for a while anyway.



The Tally Men
The BoJingles Techs made a critical mistake in dealing with post-war New Alterra. They attempted to dismantle the Children’s organization without understanding exactly how it was set up, and as a result they were not aware of exactly hot to take it apart: They missed a few things, and one of these things was the office of The Tallyman.
On the face of it, the Tallyman was merely a census taker – he kept track of precisely how many people lived in New Alterra, where they lived, and how, and he did it with near-mechanical efficiency. It was a job passed on from father to son and had been ever since its inception during the time when Sleeg was in charge. The system didn’t appear to be broken, and with so many other things to worry about, the Techs didn’t fix it. What they missed was that the Tallyman had another function which he performed within the organization. The Tallyman family was notorious for their efficiency (obviously) but also for their almost supernatural clear-headedness. When Sleeg finally lost it completely, it was the first Tallyman that orchestrated his removal from power, despite holding the mousy little former-executive in near god-like reverence. Recognizing the usefulness of a ‘watchdog’, Sleeg’s successor charged the Tallymen with an additional duty: to protect the Children of the Reckoning (the organization) from the Children of the Reckoning (the people). There are rooms in New Alterra that only the current Tallyman has access too, and passages only he knows about. And nobody knows he knows. Nobody was ever told about this additional part of the Tallyman’s duty, save for the next Tallyman, so with the death of Sleeg’s successor it became a family secret. The Tallymen are expert assassins, capable of arranging almost any kind of ‘accident’, from a deadly case of food-poisoning to homoerotic asphyxiation.
The Tallyman at the time of the War of Faith was named Stu, and even among the Tallymen he was exceptional. Stu was gifted with a supreme understanding of how other people thought. He could predict with near flawless accuracy any given reaction of any given person to any given situation, provided he had heard a few words spoken by the person in question. When Stu realized that the people in charge were going to launch an attack on Omnicom Stronghold, he immediately began manipulating events, dropping rumors and planting doubts, putting key people in key places at key times.
It came together like clockwork. People met each other who would otherwise not have met, plans were made that should not have been made, and certain people began acting very visibly contrary to their actual nature just in time for the Techs to come thundering in and reorganize the power structure. Of the seven members of the ruling council set up by the Techs to govern New Alterra, all of them apparently upstanding, moral people (a rare commodity in New Alterra at the time), six of them were clinically insane.

The Underground
Insane though they may have been, the council members were far from stupid. Rather than try and resurrect the old government and be violently deposed, they allowed the Techs to believe that the fundamentalism which had prevailed among The Children was wiped out. With most of the population dead in battle and the city itself mostly undamaged, New Alterra had a surplus of just about everything. So the council played the part of a reform government, making laws that they knew were impossible to enforce to combat problems that did not actually exist. This conveyed the impression that they were accomplishing a lot, without them really having to change anything, and leaving resources free for more nefarious purposes. Over the intervening centuries, as the organization regained its strength, control over the city became more public again, eventually resulting in the founding of New Alterra’s two sister cities by those who didn’t want to live in the emerging theocracy.
Currently, the population of New Alterra is almost twice that of Omnicom Stronghold –about two million people. [/I]

Defenses & Projects

The R-Complex
Using technology gleaned from tools and weapons captured during their brief success, the Children of the Reckoning have spent the last millennium playing catch-up. The BoJingles Techs had almost destroyed them with superior technology, and they were not going to let it happen again. As soon as they could get away with it, a facility several kilometers wide was built under the ocean to the west, connected to New Alterra by an underground passage. The new facility, called the Retribution Complex, after what its builders hoped to achieve, became the heart of the Children’s non-public activities – mostly weapons development. Safety is not a primary concern at the R-complex, and it has had to be partially rebuilt several times, but they do get results, and they get them faster than they would if they took proper precautions. Some surprisingly innovative weapons have seen their birth here, usually amidst a pile or two of melted flesh and a lot of screaming.
The Complex is extremely well defended, considering almost nobody outside New Alterra has any idea it exists, boasting shockwave generators that can turn the ocean into a graveyard for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, and a powerful, (if somewhat unpredictable) storm generator, capable of summoning rain, lightning, and hurricane-force winds at a moments notice. This particular device has only been tested once, because it raises hell with weather patterns all across the continent, not to mention putting enormous, even dangerous levels of stress on the entire facility. There are more conventional weapons as well, including underwater mines and depth-to-air missiles, and the automated repair systems, although not as sophisticated as those at Omnicom, are nothing to scoff at either.

The Solution
Over the past thousand years, there is one area in which the Children of the Reckoning have surpassed even the BoJingles Techs: projectile weaponry. It’s only natural that crazy people would pursue weapons that rely on things hitting other things at very high speeds, and they have gone all out, creating railguns capable of bursting a full-grown Flare’s skull like a ripe watermelon hit with a golf club. These guns are referred to as ‘the Solution’, because if killing can solve problems, then they are the solution to every problem that ever was.

Number Four
There have only been three of these weapons tested, each test necessitating both a thorough remodeling of the R-Complex and a recruitment drive to replace lost personnel. This one will be number four, hence the name. It’s a temperamental little blue creature that transforms into a huge, nightmarish worm-like monster when disturbed – The children’s own attempt at creating a stalemater. The last three failed, obviously, as they were a) uncontrollable, and b) eventually stopped.

The Little Hands
It is unknown who the joker was that first referred to the military sector of the Children of the Reckoning as the ‘Children’s Little Hands’, but the name stuck. Raised for the purpose from an early age, the Little Hands are all highly trained professional soldiers, a far cry from the undisciplined mobs that served as infantry during the War of Faith. They number almost seven hundred and fifty thousand, each trained in hand-to-hand combat, piloting various kinds of vehicles, and counter-metanormal weapons tactics. The final faze of their training consists of surviving as five-man units for a full week, unarmed, on Gateway Plain. Predictably, the Little Hands are a force to be reckoned with.

Membership
One does not just ‘become’ a member of The Children of the Reckoning. You are either raised within the organization, pressured in, or brainwashed in. The surest way to put a member of the Children off his guard is to ask to join, as this almost never happens (People with the initiative to do so also tend to be too smart to do so). The trick works especially well if you are obviously a friendly, reasonable fellow.
The Children operate on a loose hierarchical structure, with the average follower at the bottom, possessing no particular restrictions, but no real privileges either. Go about your business without upsetting anyone and your fine. The hierarchy looks like this:

STATE/CHURCH
Tallyman (but nobody knows that)
|
The Voice (pope/president)
|
Speakers (cardinals/senators)
|
Messengers (priests)
|
CITY
|
Council(mini-congress)
|
Supervising Officers (governors/D.A.’s)
|
Public Officers (police)
|
Joe Schmoe