LOCAL SETTING details
Welcome to the Anvil!
Hey there! You’re a spark aren’t you? Oh, sorry - that’s what we call newcomers to our little burg, I didn’t mean no offense by it. Every spark can grow into a flame given time, we say!
I can see in your eyes that you’re curious about this little piece of the wasteland we call home – let me give you the broad strokes to help you get your feet under you and your head pointed in the right direction. Before you know where you’re going, after all, you need to know where you are!
The Anvil
So, this whole bit of land here is called the Anvil, which historically has been a pretty undeveloped place due to all the radioactivity in the soil, the plants, and the local mutated monstrosities - not the sort of place you’d want to settle if you had a choice. Well, we didn’t. See, that fungal wasteland not too far to the south of us, the Broken Bones Necropolis? Most of the locals used to live in one of the towns in that area, at least until the Booming Bay Incident - a necrological disaster that caused the very ground to heave up and erupt with the hungry dead. Nobody goes that way anymore if they value their lives, unless you count the odd curious scientist or graverobber with more curiosity than smarts.
Our nEighbors
Of course, we’re not the only people around here! A few other small settlements have sprung up near us as well, like the sleepy little quiet folk village of Kaleb’s Grove to the north. West will take you to our largest neighbor, Resilience, who’ve always kind of seen the radioactivity of the area as a benefit instead of a detriment - guess that’s what happens when you’re a town of mostly retrogrades, eh? Most of the electrical power in the Anvil comes from their unstable nuclear pile, at least when raiders or zombies haven’t torn through the wires lately! Further out is the Town of Cobb, a bunch of militant and largely isolationist Red Stars. We’ve got a lot of history with them, good history, and they’re solid allies even if we don’t see them much.
There’s also the Hazelands a little to the west of our town, but I wouldn’t call the natives people, exactly. There are raider tribes that have settled in that particularly radioactive bit of land, and we keep the roads barricaded and guarded around there to keep them on their side of things.
Life in Embersforge
Most of us, though, we’re focused on local concerns instead of politics, and by golly we’ve got plenty of them. If it isn’t a tide of undead emerging from the necropolis, an incursion from the haze raiders that maintain territories in the area, or some newly-evolved mutant critter that’s developed a taste for Lineage flesh - it’s bandits, or cultists, or some other problem. So grab a weapon or a tool and get to helping out. You’ll graduate from Spark to Ember in no time!
Welcome home.
embersforge
This here settlement that we’re standing in? Embersforge they call it, and we built this place with our own hands, blood, and sweat after the Incident. Our town’s perched on the shores of the Hammer Inlet, providing access all the way to the ocean and back again for traders and travelers alike. Maybe this isn’t the most sought-after land in the wastes, what with the proximity to the necropolis, the irradiated ground, the raiders, and all that… but it’s ours, and nobody’s going to take it from us.
We’ve got a governor and a town council that nominally govern us, although for a lot of the locals the idea of laws and guidelines that need to be obeyed is a new one - and there’re always those who just see laws as an opportunity for profit.
The Hammer Inlet Coalition
This whole area is part of the territory of what’s called the Hammer Inlet Coalition (HIC for short), a loosely-aligned group of settlements and towns with pacts and agreements to ensure the flow of trade between them and provide protection to one another in times of crisis. After the disaster, the folks up in the city of Steelbridge stepped in to offer us help, and promised us membership if we established a thriving settlement in the aftermath. Resilence and Cobb are some of the other members of the Coalition, and while Steelbridge is the de-facto capital it seems that all the real decisions are made further north, in the relatively mysterious place they call High Steelbridge.
