Setting

Kalashnikov

A humanoid VI bot who carries three of his namesake. The truly ancient machine guns are in basically pristine shape due to Kalashnikov's devoted maintenance routine. Its primary motivators appear to be ammo and credits, though it's unknown what he could possibly want the latter for (save to maintain himself and his guns). The bot has a strictly business-like attitude, taking mercenary, bodyguard, and bounty hunter jobs as they come. Whatever Kalashnikov's original function was is anyone's guess, but it has never deviated from the letter of any contract it has taken. It completes them with efficiency and professionalism that would put a "fleshling" to shame. Interestingly, it also appears to hate birds and will kill them on sight.

 

Daniel Rush, Ph. D.
Somehow, Dr. Rush found himself the reluctant leader of an urban resistance cell in Odessa. He was never a man of high minded ideals, and he certainly isn't a fighter. He is, however, a living symbol. He's just old enough to remember time before the Scream, when he was a physics grad student. He's something of an expert on the metadimensions, or as he would put it, "what passes fer one, considerin'." To many that live around him he's a symbol of what the world used to be like and what it could be like in the future. It's his memories and his stories that keep the younger generations fighting for their freedom. While Dr. Rush is doing his best to give them guidance and leadership, he spends his night hours pacing his bedroom worried about whether he's doing the right thing. The pressure of command is wearing him thin.



Napoleon

While an abhuman with a name, much less a distinct personality, is a rarity, this one has both in spades. He envisions himself as a dethroned conqueror, slighted by the insolence of his subjects (which is to say, everyone he meets). He's grandiose, narcissistic, and melodramatic. He never goes anywhere without his cape. More than once he has rallied a hoard of slavering abhumans to be his army and take back lands that are rightfully His Excellency's. Were his kind not predisposed towards brutishness then Napoleon's clever tactics would make them a force to be reckoned with. He plots and waits for his personal destiny and right of rulership to be finally recognized. Whatever his scheme is, it has drawn the attention of the Odessa shard of Mother. She expends a majority of her resources to thwart his efforts in the catacombs.

The Signal
"Can't stop the Signal!"
~ A common urban graffiti

The Signal is a distributed network of pirate broadcasters who have taken on the self-appointed mission of spreading news and information to disparate Enclaves. They're sometimes zealots, sometimes anarchists, sometimes conspiracy theorists, all a little crazy. While not very well organized, they all share a uniting goal to push back against Mother's propaganda with the real truth. While not always reliable, they're often the only source of outside information for distant Enclaves. They take pains to conceal coded information resistance cells need to communicate to each other in innocuous seeming replays of old advertisements, radio serials, and Bigfoot sightings, lest Mother find out what the unruly children are doing behind her back. And at the end of the day, sometimes it's just nice to listen to music to get your mind off the door kicking raids and food rationing.

Vezha Enclave
As much a location as a faction, the Vezhi are the people who live in the tower, an old multi-story luxury hotel located on a pier of Odessa's harbor. Their leader is a Scotsman named Dr. Rush, an old soul still alive from the time before the Scream. While most Odessans live under the thumb of the local Mother AI shard, this group of about 300 have secured the tower and surrounding city area well enough to exist as an independent Enclave. They have resurrected the hotel's separate water processing and power plant and control a large portion of the seaport, which enables them to live off the AI's infrastructure. Trouble, however, is not far. The majority of the city's other residents are holed up in various habitation zones patrolled by Civil Protection bots--prisoners in their own homes. Tower folk have aided them against the mad machine as best they're able, but resources are limited when your back is against the sea. Dr. Rush worries that it is, "only a matter of time b'fore the ol' shrieking harpy casts us into the drink." What's more, CP serves a useful safety function. The catacombs are filled with abhumans who perform organized raids on the surface. The bots are far better equipped to protect their human charges than the Vezhi.

Kilo-Lima-Romeo-Sierra
"Ninety-two Nine, Kay El Are Ess - Yesterday's hits: today!"

This is the callsign of a mysterious FM-band broadcast originating in an anomalous zone known to have temporal properties that don't always obey the arrow of time. Broken things inside jump back onto shelves they fell off of, birds fly backwards through the air before correcting themselves, one old man reported that his white hair started growing red again, etc. The Signal swears it isn't one of their broadcasts, but through all the static and distortion people with MES can hear a few bars of American Christmas music. Nobody has taken enough interest to investigate the zone to make an expedition yet, but there are reports of occupied buildings inside.

Launch Site 07
A rocket sits here on its pad, prepped and ready for a mission in orbit that never happened. The entire apparatus and the adjacent control center facility are seemingly ready for operation save for the overgrown vegetation and power loss. Restoring the ancient computer systems could reveal the mission's purpose (and for that matter, why it was abandoned), though the abhumans that took up residence there make that a dangerous prospect. Nobody knows what happened to the lost colonies out in the solar system, and this sort of facility would be a real opportunity to find out. Or the tech could be salvaged for a more immediate need here on Earth.

The Space Elevator (Hammer of the Gods Incident)
In 2150, terrorists seized the Mjolnir orbital defense platform intended for deflecting asteroids from the Earth. The world watched in horror as they turned the projectile system against the planet below, and though they missed their intended target cities, they did manage to devastate Western central Africa. Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic, and much of the Congo region politically collapsed in the weeks following the bombardment. Rather than risk capture, the terrorists plunged the Mjolnir into the Earth, where it burned up in the atmospheric reentry.

Spearheaded by the African Uplift Initiative NGO and the wealth of a great many nations originally targeted by the terrorists, a unified effort went into rebuilding the region. For the better part of a hundred years the Initiative captured the world’s attention, the work becoming a model of human cooperation and ingenuity. There were, of course, corrupt individuals who sought to take advantage of the massive influx of money and resources into the region, but for the most part the period is remembered as a time when humanity put aside its differences to help its fellows.

New cities, infrastructure, and a government were built. The techno polity that came out of it was call the Sub-Saharan Alliance. The symbol of the endeavor was the Space Elevator constructed on the Equator, billed as “Humanity’s lifeline to the stars,” which made it incentive for the investing non-Africa countries to ensure cooperation and success. Though a fledgling polity, the Alliance became an important economic center for resources to and from outer space.

The Elevator was utterly indispensable for humanity’s spread into the rest of the Solar System and, by extension, the establishment of the Terran Mandate. Although traffic on it by the time of the Scream had diminished due to the development of alternative orbital technologies, it still saw about half of all people and goods delivered to space. The Elevator has not been in operation since the Scream, and the Alliance faded with it. Restoring the Elevator is a necessity for humanity’s restoration of its solar civilization.

Lost European Zone
Eastern Europe saw a large part of its population depart for Western Europe before and during the Russian (backed by the Imperial State of China) invasion of the region in 2233. Though the shooting war lasted 6 years, the decade preceding was punctuated with steadily increasing hostilities that caused many refugees to flee the region. By the time the shooting started it was thought that about 40% of the entire region’s population had left in anticipation of conflict. Refugees continued to trickle into the West as the war came into their lands, though many perished along the journey. The European Union hegemon, bloated by its own bureaucracy, was in no position to resist its aggressive neighbor, so it solicited aid from the American Alliance to resist Russia's invasion.

The war ended in a stalemate, a ceasefire agreed upon that saw the western border of Russia expanded into Eastern Europe with EU-AA permanent joint operations established to hold the line. The "Lost European Zone", as it became known, came under Russian rule long enough to become an integral part of that country’s economy and political influence in the rest of the world. The uneasy truce lasted all the way to the establishment of the Terran Mandate more than a century later. By that point terrestrial border disputes became less of a concern as humanity’s attention was drawn into an ever more accessible outer space. As the Mandate’s authority grew to become a world power, the old polities diminished.

Then the Scream happened. The LEZ was fortunate during the Scream, much more so than the EU, who relied on considerable AI presence to operate their tightly regulated continental polity. In the death and chaos the AIs locked down the EU. Suddenly the LEZ found itself on the receiving end of refugees from the west, or at least those fortunate enough to avoid the bot patrols.

The 80 years since the Scream has seen the descendants of Americans and Europeans (both East and EU) building Enclaves in the ruins of former Russian towns, forests, and farmlands. They're an eclectic mix of ethnicities, many of whom have had centuries of cultural intermingling since the establishment of the Mandate to become cultures in their own rights. Collectively, they descend from a long line of people that have had to endure the oppression of one authoritarian after another, whether they rolled through with horses, tanks, or robotic legs.

Play will begin in the southern region of what was once Ukraine, near the Black Sea, though the rest of the planet is open for players to explore at their whim.

Odessa, Ukraine
What follows are a number of rumors originating in and around the city of Odessa. This list is intended to offer several sandbox opportunities for a group of intrepid player characters to get entangled in local events. It will only take a handful of player characters to upend the precarious balance of forces at play in this city.

• City of Odessa image gallery.
• For most, life in the city is oppressive. The people live under constant robotic surveillance by drones, subject to contraband search, violence, and arrest at the dictates of unfeeling "Civil Protection" bots that aren't programmed for mercy. Cooperative people who help Mother find the bad children are rewarded with extra food rations and better living accommodations. Bad children are punished and/or reeducated by the harshest means. Naturally this creates a great deal of mistrust between people. While Mother provides for all her children, food and essential supply shortages are commonly rationed. A great deal of haggling for needed supplies or rare luxuries occurs when the all-seeing bot eyes aren't present.
• Odessa has its origins in ancient Greece, and the depths go down further than people remember. Below the modern streets are a tangled labyrinth of catacombs humans use to sneak around the city and avoid CP. From there, a relatively small number of unusually organized abhumans make raids on the surface, clashing with CP and severely taxing Mother's ability to keep the city under control. Their grandiose leader Napoleon has co-opted broadcast relays across the city to give speeches, pronouncements, and propaganda.
• Dr. Rush believes it's only a matter of time before the Tower falls to continual attrition. He's looking to lead an expedition to take the Odessa train station and thereby reconnect with the inland Enclaves via old European railways. The supplies and manpower that could bring might be enough to drive Mother out of Odessa. However, even if he had the extra manpower to achieve such a feat, he's afraid to risk the lives of his people.
• The local Mother shard, headquartered in the city's fortified city hall building, appears to be less certain in her position than in most cities. It's believed she is cut off from the other shards by anomalous terrain, and with no means to resupply or communicate with the outside she has ratcheted up the authoritarianism to compensate. The harder she pushes, the harder the humans rebel. One of them is going to break before the other.
• Lands north of the city are still intermittently anomalous after all these decades, flipping back and forth between the normal terrain and a metadimensional forest with red chlorophyll and a pale white sky. The air is only tolerable to humans for a few minutes at a time, which makes crossing the zone quite perilous as a traveler never knows when they will be shunted from one dimension to another. Explorers have found thousands of little totem-like idols resting in niches carved in the trees. They're made of some sort of toxic meta-alloy that's psychically malleable. The alloy has been the source of some TL5 breakthroughs, but removing the idols attracts local fauna that have no qualms against tearing skin off of the interlopers. Such gathering expeditions tend to be very high risk/high reward for those foolhardy souls.
• The AI Virgil has his adherents in the city. They're a small, close-knit Imago Dei cult operating out of the city's famous opera house who seek freedom from their oppression in machine apotheosis. Most believe the cult is preying on people's desperation, though the adherents insist the Great Guide is leading them to a better life. They might be mistreated, but the cult's benevolence towards their fellow man appears to be genuine. Their technical expertise ensures their continued tolerance.
• Urban legend speaks of a metadimensional space that overlaps the area called Zemlya Mizh Vitramy, Land Between the Winds. It's akin to Irish folklore about the magical land of faeries. Some in the city claim to have encountered people who have appeared as if they had had stepped from out of thin air, which only adds to the mystique of the legend. The occasional disappearance of Messes, especially children, are sometimes attributed to these mysterious interlopers, though it's also common knowledge that Mother throws anyone found to have psychic power into a gulag. Considering how commonly the bots disappear people from off the streets, that more reasonably explains the absences. Still, rumor persists that there is a secretive psychic order that could conceivably have the power to move about in such a dimension. Rumors also state that they can be found by saying the right thing to the right people.