Welcome to Gaia! ::

The world is dead, but you’re still here.

You grew up under a weak sun struggling to cast its dim rays through the ash-choked sky, played among the colossal hulks of long-dead trees, scampered over the moss that weeps blood and picked mushrooms that ooze vile purple pus. For as long as you can remember you’ve been on the move in a caravan that began with hundreds of people and now consists of barely more than sixty hardened survivors. Your own two feet have always been your greatest allies; there’s no gasoline and no pack animals, so you take with you only what you can carry and go only where you can reach by walking. You eat and drink whatever you can find, wash yourself on the rare occasions when it’s safe, and rightly fear the shadows always.

The wandering caravan is a tight-knit community; you can’t say who your birth parents are, or even if they’re still alive, but if someone asked for your mother or father a dozen people would gladly take responsibility. No one is left behind; the strong and fit carry the sick and injured, and those with extra food and water share willingly with those who’ve been less lucky. But everyone is expected to pull his or her weight, whether by defending the caravan, planning its course, or gathering its food, and you’ll be told bluntly if you’re not doing enough. The mere implication of being left alone in the forsaken wasteland is enough to terrify anyone into working hard. Savage beasts prowl in the night and day alike, and many would consider mutilation by one of these creatures preferable to the agonizing death brought on by a radiation cloud.

The oldest members of the caravan say that things weren’t always like this. They claim that the sky was once clear and bright blue, the sun shone bright and warm, and the trees were green and leafy. The snow wasn't always black, and the cities once bustled with countless people. But even they never saw such a wonderful time; they retell what their parents told them, and their parents’ parents before that. You wonder whether there’s any truth to it; if everything was so beautiful, what caused The War? Why did they squander the world and make it into this nightmare with their atomic weapons? You suspect you’ll never know, and it doesn’t pay to think about things other than the present. Winter is coming, and as always the caravan will need the skills of every member – and even then plenty of luck – to survive.

Welcome to Alaska, the road signs say. “Welcome to another piece of Hell,” you mutter. But you know in your heart that Hell is all you've got. Hold it tight.

The dark is hungry.




Premise: The player characters are young adults (aged 18-26) who grew up in the caravan, traveling through the irradiated and chemically contaminated wastelands of Alaska and western Canada. As the caravan returns to Alaska to prepare for a long winter, the players will be forced to make difficult decisions that will determine their survival as well as the survival of those around them. In a world gone horribly wrong, they will face both mundane and supernatural horrors along their journey into the darkness. When the humans died, who survived? The players will find the answers, though they may wish they hadn't...

Backstory: When the Fushito-Davis Corporation built their fallout shelters, they opened them to a tiny percentage of the world's population. Those outside those shelters were, for the most part, damned to agonizing deaths in the single most destructive moment in Earth's history: the Third World War. No human still living remembers who started it, or why, but every major population center and military base was hit with nuclear weapons that utterly obliterated most of the globe in a matter of hours. Billions died in those hours; the scant hundreds of millions left on the surface swiftly began to succumb to mass radiation poisoning as fallout covered the skies like a blanket. The millions who survived this watched as Earth's native vegetation withered and died beneath the sun-blocking cloud of ash, then withered and died from starvation and horrific mutations.

How many outside the shelters survived the Third Horseman's Gauntlet, as the ensuing famine became known, is difficult to say; groups of humans almost never meet, and even well over a century after the war the human population is in decline. The face of Earth has changed; such immense physical destruction and loss of life also ripped the barriers of the supernatural, allowing unknowable forces to leak into our world more easily than ever before. Strange new plants from the realm of Fae cover the ground beneath the skeletons of once-mighty trees, and the beasts that now roam the ruined superhighways and prowl the blasted wrecks of skyscrapers barely resemble the shy animals that once populated the forests. The humans that still survive live by the gun and by their wits; to go without either is a sure path to a gruesome death.

The caravan exists for one simple reason: Alaska, which had precious oil to capture, was not directly struck by nuclear weapons. Instead, it was blanketed in nerve gas. The vast majority of the state's population died slowly and painfully as their throats melted, and most of those who survived that died as radiation that had drifted up from other targets pierced and cooked their bodies, but a few of the citizens of the rural towns fled across the Canadian border into the Yukon, always staying one step ahead of the storm of radiation and chemical weapons. They survived the Third Horseman's Gauntlet by hunting and fishing, preserving most of what they caught for when times became lean. More than a century later they are traveling back across the border. You were born into this generation, living on what you can catch in the forest or scavenge from the ruins of radiation-scarred towns. It doesn't really matter where you go. You just have to keep moving; it's the only way to stay alive.

Character Submission Template: If you want to participate in the chronicle, please PM me the following template (filled out, of course). I don't guarantee immediate acceptance, but I'm willing to work with any and all applicants until they get characters that will really work well in the chronicle. Outstanding characters will be approved outright, as will excellent characters that don't ask for anything special (Second Sight merits, for example).

Name: (Caravan members don't have last names; see Dramatis Personae for examples)
Gender:
Age: (18-26)

Appearance: (At least one paragraph)

Biography: (At least two paragraphs; consider including some of the Dramatis Personae, listed below)

Character Sheet Link: (Either attach an image or provide a link; I have no preference).

Dramatis Personae: Some people in the sixty-some members of the caravan really stick out; I've made a list of them below. Including these people in your biography will help with the sense of immersion; it will also make your character more likely to be accepted. Feel free to invent a few characters of your own, if you feel confident enough to do so, but keep the setting in mind if you decide to go this route.

Autumn: The caravan's leader is well-spoken, a note of command in her voice that no other member can match. At sixty years old she's nearing the limit of the time she can reasonably expect to live, but it hasn't slowed her in the slightest. Regal but warm, she is glad to give advice and also to listen to it. Under her capable direction the caravan survived in the Yukon for more than a decade, and it is only because the suggestion comes from her that anyone has agreed to return to Alaska. The primary planner for the caravan's route, she also directs the setting up of camp and the distribution of food and other supplies as well as the settling of any disputes. With a halo of wispy white hair but a firm grasp left in her wrinkled hands, she commands (and receives) respect from all.

Babylonia: The caravan's resident fortune-teller, Babylonia is rumored to have gotten her name from the angry parting words of her former lover, Timothy. A short, curvaceous woman in her late thirties with amber eyes and dusky skin that speaks of a Mediterranean heritage (wherever the Mediterranean is, but that's what she says, so whatever), even she isn't entirely sure as to what exactly defines her abilities. Sometimes she can find things in places no one else even thinks to look. Sometimes she can predict whether doing something will bring good or bad luck, and when she does she's never wrong. On one notable occasion, she froze a feral dog solid and broke it into little pieces. Though many fear her, Babylonia is warm and friendly, and is glad to be a mentor to any who ask. She can even teach the coveted skills of reading and writing.

Crowbar: Perhaps the only man in the caravan who can rival Packers for sheer strength, Crowbar is named for the blunt instrument he carries everywhere, passed down through his family for generations and stained with the blood of many strange beasts. One of the few who keeps an accurate count of his age and celebrates his birthday, he's forty-three, with a tangled blond beard and a completely bald head that's as worryingly pale as the rest of him (it's genetic, he says, but no one knows what that means; it's just what his father told him). As one of the most famous Longstriders he is constantly in demand to lead the way just behind the scouts; his impressive collection of scars attests to his ability to come back from pretty much any injury. Though gruff and quiet, he's happy to befriend anyone willing to share the front with him.

Eve: At seventeen (or maybe sixteen, she's not sure) years old, Eve is the youngest member of the caravan; the all-pervasive radiation has ensured that all twelve pregnancies in the last several decades have resulted in the death of the baby and often the parent as well. Named for the time of day at which she was born, she isn't sure who her real father is; her mother had many partners, and Eve is lucky to have escaped the HIV which left her orphaned. As innocent as it's possible to be in the hellish world she knows, she's curious and incautious, traits that tend to get her into trouble but also cause her to be irritable when her self-proclaimed foster father Packers comes along to help. Though her bronzed skin is flawless (if grimy) she inherited none of her mother's curves, and is more commonly described as "cute" than "beautiful".

Fiddlesticks: Named for the expression she constantly uses when frustrated, Fiddlesticks is a stocky woman of around fifty, and the caravan's best shot after Mr. Marksman. She leads the wardens in their efforts to capture game for food, and she takes her duty very seriously. She respects success but not simple effort, and isn't afraid to give wardens who aren't being productive a good yelling at. Not much of a teacher, she gets irritated easily when things go wrong, probably because they almost never go wrong when she does them and she simply can't understand what's wrong with everyone else. With a full head of prematurely grey hair in a neat braid down her back she looks like she should be someone's grandmother, but she'll knock the teeth out of anyone who says so. The only sure way to earn her respect is through consistent good results on the hunt.

Glib: Named for her unceasing talkativeness, twenty-three year old Glib is one of the best scavengers the caravan has. She has an uncanny knack for just knowing where to find things and then spotting them without much difficulty. At times clocked at three hundred words per minute, with a tendency to run around on an inexplicable energy rush before crashing and ending up in desperate need of sleep, she's loud in more ways than one: the neon pink hair dye she found never did wash out, and she still wears the rhinestone nose ring she made (people still comment on how lucky she is the piercing didn't get infected). She wears her hair in pigtails, and dons bright clothing whenever possible. Tall, lean, and moderately curvaceous, she is loved for the salvage she brings in but loathed for her incessant chatter.

Lester: No one's quite sure how Lester got his name, but no one asks; their minds are usually elsewhere when they see him, and he probably wouldn't answer anyway. Quiet and reserved, he keeps to himself whenever possible, studying the textbooks he lugs around in a duffel bag through glasses that are more duct tape than frame. But whenever an emergency arises he quickly appears out of the background to take his role as the caravan's primary medic. Those who want to follow in his footsteps learn by watching him; he doesn't give verbal instructions (he rarely speaks at all, for that matter), but he points out what he's doing and what he'll need. A caucasian of average build, with salt and pepper hair he has earned from his fifty-five or so years of life, his strange ways are overlooked in light of his great skills.

Mr. Marksman: Taking his name from a character that appears in one of the comic books the caravan salvaged, Mr. Marksman is one of the oldest members of the caravan at somewhere around sixty-seven. A tall, lanky African-American with a well-trimmed white beard, he is, as his name would indicate, probably the best shot anyone knows. He's too old to go out and run around with the wardens in search of game, but he puts his nimble fingers to good use in repairing guns and making new bullets. Over the years he's also learned to fix a number of other devices, from watches to stoves, and anyone who wants to learn to shoot or to repair is welcome to learn from the patient, skillful master.

Packers: Named for his resemblance to a man on a faded poster advertising some sort of sporting event (the only word that can still be read is "Packers," so that must be the guy's name, right?), Packers is a tough, weathered man of Inuit blood. Though he's approaching fifty he's got a build like a tree, and he's still one of the strongest people in the caravan; the story is still told of when he carried a grown man on each shoulder for five miles to catch up with the caravan after the three of them were assumed killed in a bridge collapse. He considers himself Eve's foster father, and is fiercely protective of her; his real daughter died with his wife in childbirth, and he never talks about either of the women he's lost.

Patriot: Named for the ancient missile defense system because of his ability to warn and protect the caravan, Patriot is the leader of the caravan's scouts, collecting their gathered information, processing it, and relaying it to Autumn. A short, Inuit-blooded man of thirty-nine who has never worn shoes in his life, he moves like a shadow; no one sees him if he doesn't want to be seen. Though he's quiet and reserved, he's willing to be a teacher; unfortunately for his students, he doesn't bail them out of any trouble they make for themselves unless he absolutely has to. He carries a handgun that he's only fired five times; every one of those shots has passed through the head of his target, killing it instantly.

Timothy: A weedy, farsighted caucasian man of thirty or so, Timothy doesn't seem like the sort of man who would survive long in the wasteland. He takes his name from the Bible he fervently studies, and he often serves as the caravan's moral compass and advisor. He's one of the few caravan members who can read and write, and is perfectly willing to teach anyone who wants to learn, provided they don't mind getting a sermon on the side. Timothy is also charged with reading maps and keeping a record of the caravan's travels as well as logging every item recovered in each salvaging run, making him very important in everyday affairs. He has a strange relationship with Babylonia; the rumor is that the two of them were once lovers, but split when Timothy got too worked up over her "witchcraft".

Worcestershire: Named for the sauce he constantly wishes aloud he had, Worcestershire is in charge of preparing the caravan's meals. No one really asks how he does it; no one really wants to know. He takes the utterly inedible, mixes it with something else inedible, and creates something tolerable. A lot of violent curses and foul smells are involved, but the forty-six year old cook has managed to deliver for many years now. He's always glad for company, and happy to offer advice, but few stay close to him; he smells like the unspeakable byproducts of the meals he prepares.