Places of Note

Outside the boundaries of our normal game site, stretches the San Saba Territories. This large region of what was formerly known as the Lone Star, and even further before the fall as “Texas”, is the setting of our chapter. While there are various locations mentioned in the tabletop books in this region, we instead focus on a few areas of our story that we introduced at the start of 3.0.

• NEW bravado

  • After the Hiway War rendered the former settlement of Bravo to black ash, a caldera of mud and radiation slowly filling with toxic sludge, a new refuge emerged north of the former oil fields as the exodus of survivors sought a new home. After the war, a new force of order emerged in the Wastes, a testament to the hard work and brutal determination of the people, newly formed into the San Saba Territories. In the middle of it all, a small settlement grew despite the ravages of raiders, zed, and strange creatures from the ruins below the town.

• Drywater

  • The infant settlement of Drywater, just a few hours walk to the west of New Bravado’s extended territory, has become a companion port to our home town. Queen Jasper, the sickly but politically powerful matriarch of the Antler clan, came to New Bravado to oversee the perilous and brave process of sculpting a homeland from irradiated dirt. With the help of the Longberths, a faction of the San Saba Republic who have historically butted heads with the smaller merchant faction, this scrap of land became a dry port of call only rivaled by Waking Prime.

• Essex, the City of Light & Sound

  • Essex is the first and largest stop on the Bravado Line - the iron wrought path of industry being blazed across the San Saba Territories by the newly formed Railroad Conglomerate. A city of light and sound and rare beauty, Essex is a metropolitan cousin to the boomtown, Bravado. Essex is built on the ruins of a city that came before it, and perhaps those ruins sit atop older ruins still that date back to before The Fall. A network of labyrinthian corridors run beneath the city, their nature yet unascertained.

• Waking

  • Waking once hung in the skies over the San Saba Territories like a dripping, industrial thunderhead. Now, it is a monument to hubris, a crashed ruins on the outskirts of Bravado, where it was “landed” during the VOX POPULI event. Gestalt, this city is made up of the weary remains of thousands of smaller airship vessels, dissolved wholesale and channeled into a mighty floating city whose attitude shares its namesake - Waking Prime. Waking’s history is shrouded at best, and utterly inscrutable at its worst thanks to the concerted efforts of its citizenry to build atop itself until the past is rendered a derelict foundation for the gleaming and new. While the surface city remains mostly intact, the interior decks remain dangerously irradiated and uninhabitable.

• Widow’s Peak

  • Widow’s Peak is the ancestral home of the Lovelace family, an unassuming dynasty of Quietfolk who have lived, largely unnoticed, in the Blastlands around Old Bravo (and now New Bravado) for decades. Quietly, they have tended their land and kept their traditions. And it was only in the starving years that followed the Hiway War that this insular community looked beyond its high walls to the fading Lonestar and said, with kindness, “let us help”. The Lovelace’s heavy focus on community and family have led them, in the past, to tend towards isolationism. Since the Hiway War and the de-installation of the Barons however, the Lovelaces have slowly gained ground both literally and politically. Now, in terms of landmass, their holdings rival the Railroad Conglomerate’s.

• Prudence Penitentiary, aka “Killhouse”

  • Our Good Home Prudence Penitentiary for the Peregrine and Penalized, often pilloried as Killhouse, is a massive prison complex built on the remains of Temple Station. Originally founded as a way to house the rebel soldiers of Hiway Rob, it became something more in the years that followed the Hiway War. Once, it stood as a bastion of justice, or so they say, where the Warden of Killhouse would send out their Justices of Sin to weigh the crimes of those that have violated the laws of the San Saba. Where Killhouse once housed some of the worse criminals the San Saba has captured, bound under lock and key until the annual Indulgence, now the halls and tunnels of the prison have been emptied of prisoners and staff alike. Killhouse remains an impressive fortress, and the San Saba Board has plans to use it as a forward base of operations during the War of Antlers.

• The Clutch

  • On the coast of the Lonestar, at the gossamer edge between blastland and the blind depths; lies The Clutch, oldest port city in the San Saba and generational home of sailors, fishmongers and leviathan hunters alike. The city itself, attached to the port, is a vibrant crystal growing from the fetid gray matter of the Spoiled Coast. Mostly old warehouses that have been patched and rebuilt so many times as to recall the topical Ship of Theseus, small lean-tos have been constructed in the eves of the oldcestor facilities. Possessing a kind of “grown over'' look, the thatch-roofed slums and converted boat houses meld into one another along a long promenade that begins at the mouth of the port and extends some half a mile inland. Otherwise, the porthouses of the clutch encrust the stone mantle of the port like so many glowing barnacles grown over a prefall shipwreck. 

• New barogue, the roving city

  • The subject of campfire stories and fever dreams, the Roving City is a tale as old as the Wastes, dating nearly back to the Fall - but exists in the memory between ancient history, the ageless days since, and the present. Armed only with these legends and snippets of a map won at the Dead Man’s Hand Tournament, Survivors began to delve West, looking for the lost passage between the San Saba Territories and the Burning Coast and it’s jewel, Hell Dorado. After the discovery of Barogue, it quickly became the newest resource for the San Saba, full of secrets and materials from generations previous. Now the western most stop on the Oxline, the Railroad Conglomerate is hard at work exploiting the scrap and metal riches of the city, tearing the ancient husk apart to feed their insatiable need for expansion.