Casting Shadows

The Casting Shadows blog’s second Serial Setting will be running once a week over a six-month period, and provide details for heroic pulp adventures for the Ubiquity Roleplaying System as presented in Hollow Earth Expedition. These ideas, set in a fictional version of the Korean peninsula in 1936, present a community oppressed by faceless enemies and their own countrymen. It will additionally suggest routes, leads, and hooks for GMs to entice groups based elsewhere in the world to get involved.

7 The Fish Plant– There will be more than one arrayed against you…

Unsurprisingly where people are concerned, the intention to serve the self can often overpower the responsibility to serve the community. As is so often the case, in Samhang, it is those with the most to lose who have tried to parlay their position into endeavours to earn more, rather than leveraging it into ability to resist more effectively.

Unlike many businesses which were stripped from their owners and presented to important members of the invading forces, the Haelim Fish Plant has been allowed to remain in operation under its original owners, at the cost of a portion of the profits, and an oath of allegiance. The day-to-day language of operation has shifted to match that of the oppressors, and those who wish to retain their jobs are expected to follow suit.

With new customers, and an expanded ability to work with rather than under the new regime, the business at the plant is significantly up from the years before ‘selling out.’ It stands as a brilliant example of how nothing but progress and benefit will come who choose to wake up and smell the fresh, clean air of the liberation offered by the annexation.

Offering products ranging from fresh fish to dried squid, the plant is in a constant state of development as it is upgraded from its traditional methods to those the overlords insist are the very latest techniques in the industry.  Older employees are finding it harder and harder to keep up. Younger employees are torn between honoring the wisdom of their parents and ancestors and reconciling the superiority of the new equipment and standards.

On the glistening concrete floors of the new plant, the ideological war is not being fought with words and concepts, but with higher production and improved products.

Lee, Sang Hyun – Visionary, or Sell-out?

Older residents still speak with quiet suspicion about the death of Sang Hyun Lee’s father, but no one else dares to voice the opinion that the man’s quiet passing in his bed was anything other than nature taking its course. The next day, after a long meeting with the regional governor, the young Lee began his tenure as owner/operator of Haelim while the rest of the family mourned and buried their patriarch.

Sang Hyun’s intelligence is obvious, but his face is closed off and carries a stubborn, selfish cast that can quickly turn to anger. Although he never loses his temper in public, it is said that he still remembers slights from the day of his birth and will f ind a way to balance the account books in his favor before he dies.

No stranger to hard work, and raised in a lifestyle of relative privilege, Sang Hyun Lee has his health where many others do not, and has the energy born of success and support pushing him to achieve more and more. He is preparing to change the names of his family to those more suitable to the ears of the oppressors, and has long ago stopped speaking his native tongue.

In his mid thirties, he has gone mostly grey, but covers it up with a heavy black dye. He has strong eyes, but wears a pair of spectacles anyway as he feels it lends him a sense of intellectual gravity that the son of a fish packer would not normally instill.

Related articles

• Serial Setting 2 ~ Week 6 (runeslinger.wordpress.com)
• Serial Setting 2 ~ Week 5 (runeslinger.wordpress.com)
• Serial Setting 2 ~ Week 4 (runeslinger.wordpress.com)
• Serial Setting 2 ~ Week 3 (runeslinger.wordpress.com)
• Serial Setting 2 ~ Week 2 (runeslinger.wordpress.com)
• Serial Setting 2 ~ Week 1  (runeslinger.wordpress.com)