Casting Shadows

This Saturday Seed presents an idea for Atomic Highway by Radioactive Ape Designs.

The seed
The last few years have been milder than most and populations are growing. Forward thinking leaders realize that a cull might be in order.

Planting the seed
This seed requires substantial set-up, either as a part of an ongoing campaign in a stable and gradually revealed territory, or as part of the exposition for a shorter game or scenario. The characters can become involved in innumerable ways and be on one or more than one side in the coming conflict. They may even get involved before trouble really starts brewing.

The details

Recently, attacks by a tribe of nomads on outlying members of the various bartertowns which form an unofficial set of boundaries for this region have been a growing cause of concern. More recently, these attacks have grown more bold, been closer to town centers, and involved atrocities even hardened survivors find unacceptable.

Everyone wants something to be done. Either the nomads are persuaded to find someplace else to roam, or they settle down in the dirt for an overdue rest. The people demand satisfaction and safety.

A call goes out to recruit the toughest warriors, strongest fighters, best scouts, strategists, and hard-hearted survivors to end this threat. The rewards are lucrative, and the dangers… exhilarating.

What is going on

Rumors circulated briefly through several barely-civil bartertown communities a few seasons ago that their leadership had met in secret to discuss some sort of truce or arrangement between them. Whatever the truth of those rumors, open hostility has been in decline, although violence and aggression between individuals for individual reasons has continued unabated.

During this period, the spaces between these relatively distant communities have become a regular part of a band of nomads with a healthily growing population and similarly growing military skill. Although poorly equipped now, their grasp of tactics, use of terrain, and growing economic power and reach are factors which may tip the scale should they see themselves less as hunter-gatherers and more as the spiritual inheritors of the ancient Temujin.

To prevent the possibility of that future, squads of accomplished Road Warriors, Haulers, and Outriders are being recruited to crush a threat which will be engineered in the present just in case it manufactures itself in the future. The name of the game is genocide. The false name it walks under is survival.

Enjoy~