Edit History

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle (TN ??, result 17, 1 treasure spent)
  Between bandits, storms, and simple mechanical malfunctions, the Veehran wastes are a dangerous place, and it's not uncommon to lose the occasional traveler in the deep desert. For every traveler on a southeast heading to go missing, from well-armed caravans stocked with precious cargo to lone surveyors with nothing but a one-man dune buggy to their name, is quite another matter. Once the anomaly becomes clear, the Castaways set out to determine first the extent and then the nature of the hazard, using remotely-operated vehicles to avoid further loss of life. Does it respond to aerial vehicles? Is there a clearly delineated border to the so-called Veehran Triangle, or is it an approximate phenomenon? What does satellite surveillance reveal about the fate of the vehicles? Thousands of Todd-hours are poured into answering these and other questions.

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent
  Between the Group of Seventeen's decision to adopt nomad mercenaries en masse, tentative talks with the Soom-clan, and the arrival of seers from distant Kildora, the Castaways are mingling with their desert neighbors more than ever before. A number of Loop-born - both young and old - find meaning in the teachings of the Mother Serpent, a connection to the world beneath their feet that helps soothe the loss of their old home. Though the Group is of course neutral on matters of faith, closer relations with one's neighbors is to be encouraged.

• Selected excerpts from interviews with the oldest living Loop-born (Mytho-Historical Data Gathering)

   

  Rasha 1146: They want our histories and legends? Nearly fifty years of radio silence, and now they want to know about us?

  [static; the recorder does not pick up laughter well]

  For decades our pleas went unheard and unanswered, and they dare come to us asking... Fine then. Listen, children of Ophon, and hear what transpired after you abandoned us.

  -

  Mary-Anne 2926: They're calling them the Mausoleum Gardens these days, I hear. A nice name for a cave that smells like rotting corpses and shit.

  That's probably unfair of me. I hear they've prettied them up these days, made them almost like a real memorial... as long as you don't mind your loved ones' final resting place being covered in the same fungi you eat every day, that is. But there's nothing they can do about the smell. Sun above and Dust below, I will never forget the smell.

  -

  Tina 112: The first few months were the easiest, weirdly enough? Water was never a problem for us; all of the local towns relied on groundwater taps rather than vapor collectors, and those are underground, so they survived the blast more or less intact. Rhonda's hauler was carrying a shipment of fresh greens and produce to some of the outlying towns - that was Dometown's major export, you know, the dome made agriculture possible in spite of the windstorms around here... And Jamie had just finished shopping for their commune, so they had plenty of food in their rig. Most of it was even non-perishable.

  The problem is, more of us kept leaving the Loop. Six truckloads of food each day is a lot for a few dozen people. Even a few hundred. But our community kept growing, and the food we got out of the Loop stayed exactly the same.

  -

  R1146: We started rationing the food almost right away, of course. Intellectually, the problem was obvious. But none of us really understood the scope of the problem until we were in the midst of it. How would we? It would never happen in a normal community, because a normal community doesn't grow in the middle of a famine: people avoid having children they can't feed. That a town of ten thousand, already struggling to feed itself, would double its population in under a year? Madness. We did not understand because such a thing would never happen in nature. Our instincts are not calibrated for it.  

  But of course, the Loop doesn't care what is natural.  

  -

  Sadie 2926: The Veehran desert isn't a friendly place for plants. Good soil is a living thing, host to a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria, nourished by organic detritus. Without water, the wind strips away all of that; all that's left is dust, practically sterile. If there were plants, that would help slow the erosion... but of course, in order to grow plants, you'd need water and good soil.

  The Empire shipped in soil from someplace else - probably Sansar or one of the oases - to support their scientists when they set up Dometown. We didn't have that option. If we were going to feed ourselves, we'd need to figure out how to make our own topsoil, or go without.

  -

  R1146: We did everything we could to stave off starvation. We rationed our food; we grew mushrooms and tubers in underground gardens; we sent people out in every direction, bearing pleas for help. But it soon became clear that without some miracle windfall, we would not be able to feed everybody. Once we were forced to confront that... we soon realized it would be both kinder and less wasteful if a few embraced a quick death rather than a slow death by starvation.   

  -

  Mary-Anne 1739: There's a plant up in the foothills we call ice thistle. It's poisonous; the berries will cause muscle cramps and paralysis when ingested, usually fatal if untreated. Injected directly into a vein, it stops the heart in about ten seconds. I'd like to think it's painless, but... Well. It's better than what we had before, at least.

  -

  T112: They left me and Oliver out of the first few lotteries. It wasn't even a discussion at first; we were just kids, nobody was gonna argue that we should have to draw straws to see if we got to live. It was horrible enough that we were doing this at all. But after a few years, well... I was older than a freshly-emerged Jeremy. Should I still be exempt? If not, exactly how old did I have to be? People got into the most awful fights about it. Some people thought it wasn't fair to my parents to include me, because of course they'd volunteer to take my place if I was chosen, so putting me and my brother in the pool was basically doubling their chances. Some people thought that volunteers shouldn't be allowed at all, because it was tantamount to exploiting people with suicidal tendencies - and I can see their point, but how do you actually stop a Dave or Doris who just refuses to eat...?

  -

  MA2926: There's a lot of places in Tekhum where people's bodies are recycled after they die, in one way or another. Folks living in sealed habitats in Badal and Mekhala can't afford to waste biomass, and some of the Sansar faiths make a point of returning their bodies to the earth so that they can nourish new life. It sounds nice, in an abstract way. It's less nice when you have to grow your food atop a mass grave.

  My wife tells me I have too vivid an imagination for my own good. She's probably right.

  -

  S2926: My wife likes to say our whole agricultural base is built on corpses. She's exaggerating, of course. You can't make good topsoil out of corpses. You need a diverse mix of microorganisms and organic detritus for a healthy soil ecosystem - that's why monocultures are so bad for the soil. For that matter, if there isn't already a good mix of critters in there, it takes forever for bodies to rot - if you bury a body in Veehran dust, it won't decompose, it mummifies.  

  Lucky for us, human waste makes for much better fertilizer. We did run into that monoculture problem, though - seventeen people eating exactly the same diet for years on end doesn't make for a lot of variety! The only thing we had to supplement it was, well... those of us who didn't make it.

  -

  T112: We never did resolve most of those debates; the lottery was abolished before we got close to any kind of consensus. Our underground gardens were starting to bear fruit, so to speak, and enough outsiders knew we existed that we got merchant caravans dropping by on the regular to sell us supplies... I'm sure they thought they were charging exorbitant prices, but let me tell you, after six years of watching people die because we couldn't feed them? Nothing is worth more than food.

• Resist and hinder all unsupported buyouts
• Resist and hinder all conversions that would introduce a new plurality or majority

News and Rumors

• A strange advertising campaign for Sansar-based foods raises eyebrows among the Castaways. Though a few are insulted by the reference to past famines, most are simply bewildered. Who pays the Basu-Rahman Group for that much airtime, only to let the advertisement itself be made by... unpaid interns with a shaky grasp of Imperial Common? A low-quality neural network? Pod people? Does Sansar have a race of weirdly patriotic pod people? "Food sufficient to meet nutritional requirements" quickly becomes a meme among the younger Loop-born, but the ads have little lasting impact beyond that.

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle (TN ??, result 17, 1 treasure spent)
  Between bandits, storms, and simple mechanical malfunctions, the Veehran wastes are a dangerous place, and it's not uncommon to lose the occasional traveler in the deep desert. For every traveler on a southeast heading to go missing, from well-armed caravans stocked with precious cargo to lone surveyors with nothing but a one-man dune buggy to their name, is quite another matter. Once the anomaly becomes clear, the Castaways set out to determine first the extent and then the nature of the hazard, using remotely-operated vehicles to avoid further loss of life. Does it respond to aerial vehicles? Is there a clearly delineated border to the so-called Veehran Triangle, or is it an approximate phenomenon? What does satellite surveillance reveal about the fate of the vehicles? Thousands of Todd-hours are poured into answering these and other questions.

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent
  Between the Group of Seventeen's decision to adopt nomad mercenaries en masse, tentative talks with the Soom-clan, and the arrival of seers from distant Kildora, the Castaways are mingling with their desert neighbors more than ever before. A number of Loop-born - both young and old - find meaning in the teachings of the Mother Serpent, a connection to the world beneath their feet that helps soothe the loss of their old home. Though the Group is of course neutral on matters of faith, closer relations with one's neighbors is to be encouraged.

• Selected excerpts from interviews with the oldest living Loop-born (Mytho-Historical Data Gathering)

   

  Rasha 1146: They want our histories and legends? Nearly fifty years of radio silence, and now they want to know about us?

  [static; the recorder does not pick up laughter well]

  For decades our pleas went unheard and unanswered, and they dare come to us asking... Fine then. Listen, children of Ophon, and hear what transpired after you abandoned us.

  -

  Mary-Anne 2926: They're calling them the Mausoleum Gardens these days, I hear. A nice name for a cave that smells like rotting corpses and shit.

  That's probably unfair of me. I hear they've prettied them up these days, made them almost like a real memorial... as long as you don't mind your loved ones' final resting place being covered in the same fungi you eat every day, that is. But there's nothing they can do about the smell. Sun above and Dust below, I will never forget the smell.

  -

  Tina 112: The first few months were the easiest, weirdly enough? Water was never a problem for us; all of the local towns relied on groundwater taps rather than vapor collectors, and those are underground, so they survived the blast more or less intact. Rhonda's hauler was carrying a shipment of fresh greens and produce to some of the outlying towns - that was Dometown's major export, you know, the dome made agriculture possible in spite of the windstorms around here... And Jamie had just finished shopping for their commune, so they had plenty of food in their rig. Most of it was even non-perishable.

  The problem is, more of us kept leaving the Loop. Six truckloads of food each day is a lot for a few dozen people. Even a few hundred. But our community kept growing, and the food we got out of the Loop stayed exactly the same.

  -

  R1146: We started rationing the food almost right away, of course. Intellectually, the problem was obvious. But none of us really understood the scope of the problem until we were in the midst of it. How would we? It would never happen in a normal community, because a normal community doesn't grow in the middle of a famine: people avoid having children they can't feed. That a town of ten thousand, already struggling to feed itself, would double its population in under a year? Madness. We did not understand because such a thing would never happen in nature. Our instincts are not calibrated for it.  

  But of course, the Loop doesn't care what is natural.  

  -

  Sadie 2926: The Veehran desert isn't a friendly place for plants. Good soil is a living thing, host to a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria, nourished by organic detritus. Without water, the wind strips away all of that; all that's left is dust, practically sterile. If there were plants, that would help slow the erosion... but of course, in order to grow plants, you'd need water and good soil.

  The Empire shipped in soil from someplace else - probably Sansar or one of the oases - to support their scientists when they set up Dometown. We didn't have that option. If we were going to feed ourselves, we'd need to figure out how to make our own topsoil, or go without.

  -

  R1146: We did everything we could to stave off starvation. We rationed our food; we grew mushrooms and tubers in underground gardens; we sent people out in every direction, bearing pleas for help. But it soon became clear that without some miracle windfall, we would not be able to feed everybody. Once we were forced to confront that... we soon realized it would be both kinder and less wasteful if a few embraced a quick death rather than a slow death by starvation.   

  -

  Mary-Anne 1739: There's a plant up in the foothills we call ice thistle. It's poisonous; the berries will cause muscle cramps and paralysis when ingested, usually fatal if untreated. Injected directly into a vein, it stops the heart in about ten seconds. I'd like to think it's painless, but... Well. It's better than what we had before, at least.

  -

  T112: They left me and Oliver out of the first few lotteries. It wasn't even a discussion at first; we were just kids, nobody was gonna argue that we should have to draw straws to see if we got to live. It was horrible enough that we were doing this at all. But after a few years, well... I was older than a freshly-emerged Jeremy. Should I still be exempt? If not, exactly how old did I have to be? People got into the most awful fights about it. Some people thought it wasn't fair to my parents to include me, because of course they'd volunteer to take my place if I was chosen, so putting me and my brother in the pool was basically doubling their chances. Some people thought that volunteers shouldn't be allowed at all, because it was tantamount to exploiting people with suicidal tendencies - and I can see their point, but how do you actually stop a Dave or Doris who just refuses to eat...?

  -

  MA2926: There's a lot of places in Tekhum where people's bodies are recycled after they die, in one way or another. Folks living in sealed habitats in Badal and Mekhala can't afford to waste biomass, and some of the Sansar faiths make a point of returning their bodies to the earth so that they can nourish new life. It sounds nice, in an abstract way. It's less nice when you have to grow your food atop a mass grave.

  My wife tells me I have too vivid an imagination for my own good. She's probably right.

  -

  S2926: My wife likes to say our whole agricultural base is built on corpses. She's exaggerating, of course. You can't make good topsoil out of corpses. You need a diverse mix of microorganisms and organic detritus for a healthy soil ecosystem - that's why monocultures are so bad for the soil. For that matter, if there isn't already a good mix of critters in there, it takes forever for bodies to rot - if you bury a body in Veehran dust, it won't decompose, it mummifies.  

  Lucky for us, human waste makes for much better fertilizer. We did run into that monoculture problem, though - seventeen people eating exactly the same diet for years on end doesn't make for a lot of variety! The only thing we had to supplement it was, well... those of us who didn't make it.

  -

  T112: We never did resolve most of those debates; the lottery was abolished before we got close to any kind of consensus. Our underground gardens were starting to bear fruit, so to speak, and enough outsiders knew we existed that we got merchant caravans dropping by on the regular to sell us supplies... I'm sure they thought they were charging exorbitant prices, but let me tell you, after six years of watching people die because we couldn't feed them? Nothing is worth more than food.

• Resist and hinder all unsupported buyouts
• Resist and hinder all conversions that would introduce a new plurality or majority

News and Rumors

• A strange advertising campaign for Sansar-based foods raises eyebrows among the Castaways. Though a few are insulted by the reference to past famines, most are simply bewildered. Who pays the Basu-Rahman Group for that much airtime, only to let the advertisement itself be made by... unpaid interns with a shaky grasp of Imperial Common? A low-quality neural network? Pod people? Does Sansar have a race of weirdly patriotic pod people? "Food sufficient to meet nutritional requirements" quickly becomes a meme among the younger Loop-born, but the ads have little lasting impact beyond that.

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle (TN ??, result 17, 1 treasure spent)
  Between bandits, storms, and simple mechanical malfunctions, the Veehran wastes are a dangerous place, and it's not uncommon to lose the occasional traveler in the deep desert. For every traveler on a southeast heading to go missing, from well-armed caravans stocked with precious cargo to lone surveyors with nothing but a one-man dune buggy to their name, is quite another matter. Once the anomaly becomes clear, the Castaways set out to determine first the extent and then the nature of the hazard, using remotely-operated vehicles to avoid further loss of life. Does it respond to aerial vehicles? Is there a clearly delineated border to the so-called Veehran Triangle, or is it an approximate phenomenon? What does satellite surveillance reveal about the fate of the vehicles? Thousands of Todd-hours are poured into answering these and other questions.

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent
  Between the Group of Seventeen's decision to adopt nomad mercenaries en masse, tentative talks with the Soom-clan, and the arrival of seers from distant Kildora, the Castaways are mingling with their desert neighbors more than ever before. A number of Loop-born - both young and old - find meaning in the teachings of the Mother Serpent, a connection to the world beneath their feet that helps soothe the loss of their old home. Though the Group is of course neutral on matters of faith, closer relations with one's neighbors is to be encouraged.

• Selected excerpts from interviews with the oldest living Loop-born (Mytho-Historical Data Gathering)

   

  Rasha 1146: They want our histories and legends? Nearly fifty years of radio silence, and now they want to know about us?

  [static; the recorder does not pick up laughter well]

  For decades our pleas went unheard and unanswered, and they dare come to us asking... Fine then. Listen, children of Ophon, and hear what transpired after you abandoned us.

  -

  Mary-Anne 2926: They're calling them the Mausoleum Gardens these days, I hear. A nice name for a cave that smells like rotting corpses and shit.

  That's probably unfair of me. I hear they've prettied them up these days, made them almost like a real memorial... as long as you don't mind your loved ones' final resting place being covered in the same fungi you eat every day, that is. But there's nothing they can do about the smell. Sun above and Dust below, I will never forget the smell.

  -

  Tina 112: The first few months were the easiest, weirdly enough? Water was never a problem for us; all of the local towns relied on groundwater taps rather than vapor collectors, and those are underground, so they survived the blast more or less intact. Rhonda's hauler was carrying a shipment of fresh greens and produce to some of the outlying towns - that was Dometown's major export, you know, the dome made agriculture possible in spite of the windstorms around here... And Jamie had just finished shopping for their commune, so they had plenty of food in their rig. Most of it was even non-perishable.

  The problem is, more of us kept leaving the Loop. Six truckloads of food each day is a lot for a few dozen people. Even a few hundred. But our community kept growing, and the food we got out of the Loop stayed exactly the same.

  -

  R1146: We started rationing the food almost right away, of course. Intellectually, the problem was obvious. But none of us really understood the scope of the problem until we were in the midst of it. How would we? It would never happen in a normal community, because a normal community doesn't grow in the middle of a famine: people avoid having children they can't feed. That a town of ten thousand, already struggling to feed itself, would double its population in under a year? Madness. We did not understand because such a thing would never happen in nature. Our instincts are not calibrated for it.  

  But of course, the Loop doesn't care what is natural.  

  -

  Sadie 2926: The Veehran desert isn't a friendly place for plants. Good soil is a living thing, host to a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria, nourished by organic detritus. Without water, the wind strips away all of that; all that's left is dust, practically sterile. If there were plants, that would help slow the erosion... but of course, in order to grow plants, you'd need water and good soil.

  The Empire shipped in soil from someplace else - probably Sansar or one of the oases - to support their scientists when they set up Dometown. We didn't have that option. If we were going to feed ourselves, we'd need to figure out how to make our own topsoil, or go without.

  -

  R1146: We did everything we could to stave off starvation. We rationed our food; we grew mushrooms and tubers in underground gardens; we sent people out in every direction, bearing pleas for help. But it soon became clear that without some miracle windfall, we would not be able to feed everybody. Once we were forced to confront that... we soon realized it would be both kinder and less wasteful if a few embraced a quick death rather than a slow death by starvation.   

  -

  Mary-Anne 1739: There's a plant up in the foothills we call ice thistle. It's poisonous; the berries will cause muscle cramps and paralysis when ingested, usually fatal if untreated. Injected directly into a vein, it stops the heart in about ten seconds. I'd like to think it's painless, but... Well. It's better than what we had before, at least.

  -

  T112: They left me and Oliver out of the first few lotteries. It wasn't even a discussion at first; we were just kids, nobody was gonna argue that we should have to draw straws to see if we got to live. It was horrible enough that we were doing this at all. But after a few years, well... I was older than a freshly-emerged Jeremy. Should I still be exempt? If not, exactly how old did I have to be? People got into the most awful fights about it. Some people thought it wasn't fair to my parents to include me, because of course they'd volunteer to take my place if I was chosen, so putting me and my brother in the pool was basically doubling their chances. Some people thought that volunteers shouldn't be allowed at all, because it was tantamount to exploiting people with suicidal tendencies - and I can see their point, but how do you actually stop a Dave or Doris who just refuses to eat...?

  -

  MA2926: There's a lot of places in Tekhum where people's bodies are recycled after they die, in one way or another. Folks living in sealed habitats in Badal and Mekhala can't afford to waste biomass, and some of the Sansar faiths make a point of returning their bodies to the earth so that they can nourish new life. It sounds nice, in an abstract way. It's less nice when you have to grow your food atop a mass grave.

  My wife tells me I have too vivid an imagination for my own good. She's probably right.

  -

  S2926: My wife likes to say our whole agricultural base is built on corpses. She's exaggerating, of course. You can't make good topsoil out of corpses. You need a diverse mix of microorganisms and organic detritus for a healthy soil ecosystem - that's why monocultures are so bad for the soil. For that matter, if there isn't already a good mix of critters in there, it takes forever for bodies to rot - if you bury a body in Veehran dust, it won't decompose, it mummifies.  

  Lucky for us, human waste makes for much better fertilizer. We did run into that monoculture problem, though - seventeen people eating exactly the same diet for years on end doesn't make for a lot of variety! The only thing we had to supplement it was, well... those of us who didn't make it.

  -

  T112: We never did resolve most of those debates; the lottery was abolished before we got close to any kind of consensus. Our underground gardens were starting to bear fruit, so to speak, and enough outsiders knew we existed that we got merchant caravans dropping by on the regular to sell us supplies... I'm sure they thought they were charging exorbitant prices, but let me tell you, after six years of watching people die because we couldn't feed them? Nothing is worth more than food.

• Resist and hinder all unsupported buyouts
• Resist and hinder all conversions that would introduce a new plurality or majority

News and Rumors

• A strange advertising campaign for Sansar-based foods raises eyebrows among the Castaways. Though a few are insulted by the reference to past famines, most are simply bewildered. Who pays the Basu-Rahman Group for that much airtime, only to let the advertisement itself be made by... unpaid interns with a shaky grasp of Imperial Common? A low-quality neural network? Pod people? Does Sansar have a race of weirdly patriotic pod people? "Food sufficient to meet nutritional requirements" quickly becomes a meme among the younger Loop-born, but the ads have little lasting impact beyond that.

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle (TN ??, result 17, 1 treasure spent)
  Between bandits, storms, and simple mechanical malfunctions, the Veehran wastes are a dangerous place, and it's not uncommon to lose the occasional traveler in the deep desert. For every traveler on a southeast heading to go missing, from well-armed caravans stocked with precious cargo to lone surveyors with nothing but a one-man dune buggy to their name, is quite another matter. Once the anomaly becomes clear, the Castaways set out to determine first the extent and then the nature of the hazard, using remotely-operated vehicles to avoid further loss of life. Does it respond to aerial vehicles? Is there a clearly delineated border to the so-called Veehran Triangle, or is it an approximate phenomenon? What does satellite surveillance reveal about the fate of the vehicles? Thousands of Todd-hours are poured into answering these and other questions.

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent
  Between the Group of Seventeen's decision to adopt nomad mercenaries en masse, tentative talks with the Soom-clan, and the arrival of seers from distant Kildora, the Castaways are mingling with their desert neighbors more than ever before. A number of Loop-born - both young and old - find meaning in the teachings of the Mother Serpent, a connection to the world beneath their feet that helps soothe the loss of their old home. Though the Group is of course neutral on matters of faith, closer relations with one's neighbors is to be encouraged.

• Selected excerpts from interviews with the oldest living Loop-born (Mytho-Historical Data Gathering)

   

  Rasha 1146: They want our histories and legends? Nearly fifty years of radio silence, and now they want to know about us?

  [static; the recorder does not pick up laughter well]

  For decades our pleas went unheard and unanswered, and they dare come to us asking... Fine then. Listen, children of Ophon, and hear what transpired after you abandoned us.

  -

  Mary-Anne 2926: They're calling them the Mausoleum Gardens these days, I hear. A nice name for a cave that smells like rotting corpses and shit.

  That's probably unfair of me. I hear they've prettied them up these days, made them almost like a real memorial... as long as you don't mind your loved ones' final resting place being covered in the same fungi you eat every day, that is. But there's nothing they can do about the smell. Sun above and Dust below, I will never forget the smell.

  -

  Tina 112: The first few months were the easiest, weirdly enough? Water was never a problem for us; all of the local towns relied on groundwater taps rather than vapor collectors, and those are underground, so they survived the blast more or less intact. Rhonda's hauler was carrying a shipment of fresh greens and produce to some of the outlying towns - that was Dometown's major export, you know, the dome made agriculture possible in spite of the windstorms around here... And Jamie had just finished shopping for their commune, so they had plenty of food in their rig. Most of it was even non-perishable.

  The problem is, more of us kept leaving the Loop. Six truckloads of food each day is a lot for a few dozen people. Even a few hundred. But our community kept growing, and the food we got out of the Loop stayed exactly the same.

  -

  R1146: We started rationing the food almost right away, of course. Intellectually, the problem was obvious. But none of us really understood the scope of the problem until we were in the midst of it. How would we? It would never happen in a normal community, because a normal community doesn't grow in the middle of a famine: people avoid having children they can't feed. That a town of ten thousand, already struggling to feed itself, would double its population in under a year? Madness. We did not understand because such a thing would never happen in nature. Our instincts are not calibrated for it.  

  But of course, the Loop doesn't care what is natural.  

  -

  Sadie 2926: The Veehran desert isn't a friendly place for plants. Good soil is a living thing, host to a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria, nourished by organic detritus. Without water, the wind strips away all of that; all that's left is dust, practically sterile. If there were plants, that would help slow the erosion... but of course, in order to grow plants, you'd need water and good soil.

  The Empire shipped in soil from someplace else - probably Sansar or one of the oases - to support their scientists when they set up Dometown. We didn't have that option. If we were going to feed ourselves, we'd need to figure out how to make our own topsoil, or go without.

  -

  R1146: We did everything we could to stave off starvation. We rationed our food; we grew mushrooms and tubers in underground gardens; we sent people out in every direction, bearing pleas for help. But it soon became clear that without some miracle windfall, we would not be able to feed everybody. Once we were forced to confront that... we soon realized it would be both kinder and less wasteful if a few embraced a quick death rather than a slow death by starvation.   

  -

  Mary-Anne 1739: There's a plant up in the foothills we call ice thistle. It's poisonous; the berries will cause muscle cramps and paralysis when ingested, usually fatal if untreated. Injected directly into a vein, it stops the heart in about ten seconds. I'd like to think it's painless, but... Well. It's better than what we had before, at least.

  -

  T112: They left me and Oliver out of the first few lotteries. It wasn't even a discussion at first; we were just kids, nobody was gonna argue that we should have to draw straws to see if we got to live. It was horrible enough that we were doing this at all. But after a few years, well... I was older than a freshly-emerged Jeremy. Should I still be exempt? If not, exactly how old did I have to be? People got into the most awful fights about it. Some people thought it wasn't fair to my parents to include me, because of course they'd volunteer to take my place if I was chosen, so putting me and my brother in the pool was basically doubling their chances. Some people thought that volunteers shouldn't be allowed at all, because it was tantamount to exploiting people with suicidal tendencies - and I can see their point, but how do you actually stop a Dave or Doris who just refuses to eat...?

  -

  MA2926: There's a lot of places in Tekhum where people's bodies are recycled after they die, in one way or another. Folks living in sealed habitats in Badal and Mekhala can't afford to waste biomass, and some of the Sansar faiths make a point of returning their bodies to the earth so that they can nourish new life. It sounds nice, in an abstract way. It's less nice when you have to grow your food atop a mass grave.

  My wife tells me I have too vivid an imagination for my own good. She's probably right.

  -

  S2926: My wife likes to say our whole agricultural base is built on corpses. She's exaggerating, of course. You can't make good topsoil out of corpses. You need a diverse mix of microorganisms and organic detritus for a healthy soil ecosystem - that's why monocultures are so bad for the soil. For that matter, if there isn't already a good mix of critters in there, it takes forever for bodies to rot - if you bury a body in Veehran dust, it won't decompose, it mummifies.  

  Lucky for us, human waste makes for much better fertilizer. We did run into that monoculture problem, though - seventeen people eating exactly the same diet for years on end doesn't make for a lot of variety! The only thing we had to supplement it was, well... those of us who didn't make it.

  -

  T112: We never did resolve most of those debates; the lottery was abolished before we got close to any kind of consensus. Our underground gardens were starting to bear fruit, so to speak, and enough outsiders knew we existed that we got merchant caravans dropping by on the regular to sell us supplies... I'm sure they thought they were charging exorbitant prices, but let me tell you, after six years of watching people die because we couldn't feed them? Nothing is worth more than food.

• Resist and hinder all unsupported buyouts
• Resist and hinder all conversions that would introduce a new plurality or majority

News and Rumors

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle (TN ??, result 17, 1 treasure spent)
  Between bandits, storms, and simple mechanical malfunctions, the Veehran wastes are a dangerous place, and it's not uncommon to lose the occasional traveler in the deep desert. For every traveler on a southeast heading to go missing, from well-armed caravans stocked with precious cargo to lone surveyors with nothing but a one-man dune buggy to their name, is quite another matter. Once the anomaly becomes clear, the Castaways set out to determine first the extent and then the nature of the hazard, using remotely-operated vehicles to avoid further loss of life. Does it respond to aerial vehicles? Is there a clearly delineated border to the so-called Veehran Triangle, or is it an approximate phenomenon? What does satellite surveillance reveal about the fate of the vehicles? Thousands of Todd-hours are poured into answering these and other questions.

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent

• Selected excerpts from interviews with the oldest living Loop-born (Mytho-Historical Data Gathering)

   

  Rasha 1146: They want our histories and legends? Nearly fifty years of radio silence, and now they want to know about us?

  [static; the recorder does not pick up laughter well]

  For decades our pleas went unheard and unanswered, and they dare come to us asking... Fine then. Listen, children of Ophon, and hear what transpired after you abandoned us.

  -

  Mary-Anne 2926: They're calling them the Mausoleum Gardens these days, I hear. A nice name for a cave that smells like rotting corpses and shit.

  That's probably unfair of me. I hear they've prettied them up these days, made them almost like a real memorial... as long as you don't mind your loved ones' final resting place being covered in the same fungi you eat every day, that is. But there's nothing they can do about the smell. Sun above and Dust below, I will never forget the smell.

  -

  Tina 112: The first few months were the easiest, weirdly enough? Water was never a problem for us; all of the local towns relied on groundwater taps rather than vapor collectors, and those are underground, so they survived the blast more or less intact. Rhonda's hauler was carrying a shipment of fresh greens and produce to some of the outlying towns - that was Dometown's major export, you know, the dome made agriculture possible in spite of the windstorms around here... And Jamie had just finished shopping for their commune, so they had plenty of food in their rig. Most of it was even non-perishable.

  The problem is, more of us kept leaving the Loop. Six truckloads of food each day is a lot for a few dozen people. Even a few hundred. But our community kept growing, and the food we got out of the Loop stayed exactly the same.

  -

  R1146: We started rationing the food almost right away, of course. Intellectually, the problem was obvious. But none of us really understood the scope of the problem until we were in the midst of it. How would we? It would never happen in a normal community, because a normal community doesn't grow in the middle of a famine: people avoid having children they can't feed. That a town of ten thousand, already struggling to feed itself, would double its population in under a year? Madness. We did not understand because such a thing would never happen in nature. Our instincts are not calibrated for it.  

  But of course, the Loop doesn't care what is natural.  

  -

  Sadie 2926: The Veehran desert isn't a friendly place for plants. Good soil is a living thing, host to a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria, nourished by organic detritus. Without water, the wind strips away all of that; all that's left is dust, practically sterile. If there were plants, that would help slow the erosion... but of course, in order to grow plants, you'd need water and good soil.

  The Empire shipped in soil from someplace else - probably Sansar or one of the oases - to support their scientists when they set up Dometown. We didn't have that option. If we were going to feed ourselves, we'd need to figure out how to make our own topsoil, or go without.

  -

  R1146: We did everything we could to stave off starvation. We rationed our food; we grew mushrooms and tubers in underground gardens; we sent people out in every direction, bearing pleas for help. But it soon became clear that without some miracle windfall, we would not be able to feed everybody. Once we were forced to confront that... we soon realized it would be both kinder and less wasteful if a few embraced a quick death rather than a slow death by starvation.   

  -

  Mary-Anne 1739: There's a plant up in the foothills we call ice thistle. It's poisonous; the berries will cause muscle cramps and paralysis when ingested, usually fatal if untreated. Injected directly into a vein, it stops the heart in about ten seconds. I'd like to think it's painless, but... Well. It's better than what we had before, at least.

  -

  T112: They left me and Oliver out of the first few lotteries. It wasn't even a discussion at first; we were just kids, nobody was gonna argue that we should have to draw straws to see if we got to live. It was horrible enough that we were doing this at all. But after a few years, well... I was older than a freshly-emerged Jeremy. Should I still be exempt? If not, exactly how old did I have to be? People got into the most awful fights about it. Some people thought it wasn't fair to my parents to include me, because of course they'd volunteer to take my place if I was chosen, so putting me and my brother in the pool was basically doubling their chances. Some people thought that volunteers shouldn't be allowed at all, because it was tantamount to exploiting people with suicidal tendencies - and I can see their point, but how do you actually stop a Dave or Doris who just refuses to eat...?

  -

  MA2926: There's a lot of places in Tekhum where people's bodies are recycled after they die, in one way or another. Folks living in sealed habitats in Badal and Mekhala can't afford to waste biomass, and some of the Sansar faiths make a point of returning their bodies to the earth so that they can nourish new life. It sounds nice, in an abstract way. It's less nice when you have to grow your food atop a mass grave.

  My wife tells me I have too vivid an imagination for my own good. She's probably right.

  -

  S2926: My wife likes to say our whole agricultural base is built on corpses. She's exaggerating, of course. You can't make good topsoil out of corpses. You need a diverse mix of microorganisms and organic detritus for a healthy soil ecosystem - that's why monocultures are so bad for the soil. For that matter, if there isn't already a good mix of critters in there, it takes forever for bodies to rot - if you bury a body in Veehran dust, it won't decompose, it mummifies.  

  Lucky for us, human waste makes for much better fertilizer. We did run into that monoculture problem, though - seventeen people eating exactly the same diet for years on end doesn't make for a lot of variety! The only thing we had to supplement it was, well... those of us who didn't make it.

  -

  T112: We never did resolve most of those debates; the lottery was abolished before we got close to any kind of consensus. Our underground gardens were starting to bear fruit, so to speak, and enough outsiders knew we existed that we got merchant caravans dropping by on the regular to sell us supplies... I'm sure they thought they were charging exorbitant prices, but let me tell you, after six years of watching people die because we couldn't feed them? Nothing is worth more than food.

   

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle (TN ??, result 17, 1 treasure spent)
  Between bandits, storms, and simple mechanical malfunctions, the Veehran wastes are a dangerous place, and it's not uncommon to lose the occasional traveler in the deep desert. For every traveler on a southeast heading to go missing, from well-armed caravans stocked with precious cargo to lone surveyors with nothing but a one-man dune buggy to their name, is quite another matter. Once the anomaly becomes clear, the Castaways set out to determine first the extent and then the nature of the hazard, using remotely-operated vehicles to avoid further loss of life. Does it respond to aerial vehicles? Is there a clearly delineated border to the so-called Veehran Triangle, or is it an approximate phenomenon? What does satellite surveillance reveal about the fate of the vehicles? Thousands of Todd-hours are poured into answering these and other questions.

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent

• Selected excerpts from interviews with the oldest living Loop-born (Mytho-Historical Data Gathering)

   

  Rasha 1146: They want our histories and legends? Nearly fifty years of radio silence, and now they want to know about us?

  [static; the recorder does not pick up laughter well]

  For decades our pleas went unheard and unanswered, and they *dare* come to us asking... Fine then. Listen, children of Ophon, and hear what transpired after you abandoned us.

  -

  Mary-Anne 2926: They're calling them the Mausoleum Gardens these days, I hear. A nice name for a cave that smells like rotting corpses and shit.

  That's probably unfair of me. I hear they've prettied them up these days, made them almost like a real memorial... as long as you don't mind your loved ones' final resting place being covered in the same fungi you eat every day, that is. But there's nothing they can do about the smell. Sun above and Dust below, I will never forget the smell.

  -

  Tina 112: The first few months were the easiest, weirdly enough? Water was never a problem for us; all of the local towns relied on groundwater taps rather than vapor collectors, and those are underground, so they survived the blast more or less intact. Rhonda's hauler was carrying a shipment of fresh greens and produce to some of the outlying towns - that was Dometown's major export, you know, the dome made agriculure possible in spite of the windstorms around here... And Jamie had just finished shopping for their commune, so they had plenty of food in their rig. Most of it was even non-perishable.

  The problem is, more of us kept leaving the Loop. Six truckloads of food each day is a lot for a few dozen people. Even a few hundred. But our community kept growing, and the food we got out of the Loop stayed exactly the same.

  -

  R1146: We started rationing the food almost right away, of course. Intellectually, the problem was obvious. But none of us really *understood* the scope of the problem until we were in the midst of it. How would we? It would never happen in a normal community, because a normal community doesn't grow in the middle of a famine: people avoid having children they can't feed. That a town of ten thousand, already struggling to feed itself, would double its population in under a year? Absolute insanity. We did not understand because such a thing would never happen in nature. Our instincts are not calibrated for it.  

  But of course, the Loop doesn't care what is natural.  

  -

  Sadie 2926: The Veehran desert isn't a friendly place for plants. Good soil is a living thing, host to a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria, nourished by organic detritus. Without water, the wind strips away all of that; all that's left is dust, practically sterile. If there were plants, that would help slow the erosion... but of course, in order to grow plants, you'd need water and good soil.

  The Empire shipped in soil from someplace else - probably Sansar or one of the oases - to support their scientists when they set up Dometown. We didn't have that option. If we were going to feed ourselves, we'd need to figure out how to make our own topsoil, or go without.

  -

  R1146: We did everything we could to stave off starvation. We rationed our food; we grew mushrooms and tubers in underground gardens; we sent people out in every direction, bearing pleas for help. But it soon became clear that without some miracle windfall, we would not be able to feed everybody. Once we were forced to confront that... we soon realized it would be both kinder and less wasteful if a few embraced a quick death rather than a slow death by starvation.   

  -

  Mary-Anne 1739: There's a plant up in the foothills we call ice thistle. It's poisonous; the berries will cause muscle cramps and paralysis when ingested, usually fatal if untreated. Injected directly into a vein, it stops the heart in about ten seconds. I'd like to think it's painless, but... Well. It's better than what we had before, at least.

  -

  T112: They left me and Oliver out of the first few lotteries. It wasn't even a discussion at first; we were just kids, nobody was gonna argue that we should have to draw straws to see if we got to live. It was horrible enough that we were doing this at all. But after a few years, well... I was older than a freshly-emerged Jeremy. Should I still be exempt? If not, exactly how old did I have to be? People got into the most awful fights about it. Some people thought it wasn't fair to my parents to include me, because of course they'd volunteer to take my place if I was chosen, so putting me and my brother in the pool was basically doubling their chances. Some people thought that volunteers shouldn't be allowed at all, because it was tantamount to exploiting people with suicidal tendencies - and I can see their point, but how do you actually stop a Dave or Doris who just refuses to eat?

  -

  MA2926: There's a lot of places in Tekhum where people's bodies are recycled after they die, in one way or another. Folks living in sealed habitats in Badal and Mekhala can't afford to waste biomass, and some of the Sansar faiths make a point of returning their bodies to the earth so that they can nourish new life. It sounds nice, in an abstract way. It's less nice when you have to grow your food atop a mass grave.

  My wife tells me I have too vivid an imagination for my own good. She's probably right.

  -

  S2926: My wife likes to say our whole agricultural base is built on corpses. She's exaggerating, of course. You can't make good topsoil out of corpses. You need a diverse mix of microorganisms and organic detritus for a healthy soil ecosystem - that's why monocultures are so bad for the soil. For that matter, if there isn't already a good mix of critters in there, it takes forever for bodies to rot - if you bury a body in Veehran dust, it won't decompose, it mummifies.  

  Lucky for us, human waste makes for much better fertilizer. We did run into that monoculture problem, though - seventeen people eating exactly the same diet for years on end doesn't make for a lot of variety! The only thing we had to supplement it was, well... those of us who didn't make it.

  -

  T112: We never did resolve most of those debates; the lottery was abolished before we got close to any kind of consensus. Our underground gardens were starting to bear fruit, so to speak, and enough outsiders knew we existed that we got merchant caravans dropping by on the regular to sell us supplies... I'm sure they thought they were charging exorbitant prices, but let me tell you, after six years of watching people die because we couldn't feed them? Nothing is worth more than food.

   

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle (TN ??, result 17, 1 treasure spent)
  Between bandits, storms, and simple mechanical malfunctions, the Veehran wastes are a dangerous place, and it's not uncommon to lose the occasional traveler in the deep desert. For every traveler on a southeast heading to go missing, from well-armed caravans stocked with precious cargo to lone surveyors with nothing but a one-man dune buggy to their name, is quite another matter. Once the anomaly becomes clear, the Castaways set out to determine first the extent and then the nature of the hazard, using remotely-operated vehicles to avoid further loss of life. Does it respond to aerial vehicles? Is there a clearly delineated border to the so-called Veehran Triangle, or is it an approximate phenomenon? What does satellite surveillance reveal about the fate of the vehicles? Thousands of Todd-hours are poured into answering these and other questions.

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Sakar clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
  As multiple wars break out across the surface of Veehra, the Group of Seventeen realizes that they must prepare to face threats greater than the occasional band of raiders. Unfortunately, they are a tiny nation amongst the Elect, less than a million strong with no hope of growing past that. Even supplemented by drones and automated vehicles, their defensive militia cannot hope to match the size of the armies seen elsewhere on Veehra. And so the Group looks outside, to the nomadic clans who have been both friend and foe, and offer a pact: fuel and vehicles in exchange for defense. After some negotiation, the Orid and Tisal clans agree, seeing a chance to share in the wealth and power bestowed by the Emperor without bending the knee to their old rivals in the Soom.
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent

Castaways of the Loop

Veehra, Region 62
The Group of Seventeen
D6 | M4 | E6 | F2 | I4

Round Two

Actions

• [Diplomacy] Attend Event: The Millennial Jubilee of High Ishtahnos
  The Ishtahns have been a generous and reliable friend to the Castaways for decades - centuries, if one goes past the formation of the Loop to the days of Dometown. The Group of Seventeen honors that friendship with a formal delegation to the kingdom's celebration of its thousandth year of unbroken rule, including one of the ruling council.

  Sub-actions

  Pay 1 treasure to EMP as tax

• [Diplomacy] Mytho-Historical Data Gathering
  The Imperial Court's request for data raises hackles among the older Loop-born, who still resent the Empire's failure to lend aid after their experiments laid waste to Dometown. Nonetheless, the Group of Seventeen has determined that it would be best to remain in the Empire's favor, and they have done far more unpleasant things than compiling records and interviews in the same of survival. The data is sent... though the Imperial historians may find this set of records has a distinctly bitter tone compared to most.
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Military] Raise Ground Unit
• [Intrigue] Investigate the Veehran Triangle

Non-Actions

• Support conversion of Region 62 to Cult of the Mother Serpent