This is the first in a series of posts intended the outline the framework for a game in the same vein as the official Campaign Starter Kits.
“All that you love will be carried away”
- Stephen King, Everything’s Eventual
One step at a time, clawing handholds and kicking footholds into the loamy, black soil you climb higher and higher toward the circle of washed-out, grey light. Thoughts of how long you’ve been doing this seem dreamlike. Maybe you’ve always been climbing? But there are other memories - however distant - of a time before. A time you chose to come here and longing grief that drives you. Then you reach the lip of the Pit and drag yourself out, finally, aching.
A barren expanse under an overcast sky sprawls around you as far as the eye can see. The only thing populating the landscape is wreckage: cars, boats, airplanes, dotted here and there in the distance. If you get close you can hear and see the people trapped inside. The ones who died in them, the ones who people loved.
Getting there is easy enough, pick a pile of debris on the horizon and start walking. There is no sun above the clouds despite the ambient light and reference points that seem to shift independently make it difficult to mark the passage of time or distance with anything other than hunger, thirst or exhaustion. On arrival you’ll find the dead locked in their last moments, seemingly alive but repeating the same loop of actions over and over. All it takes to rouse them is a touch, but careful, you can only wake one. Don’t let go or you’ll lose them forever.
Space works oddly in the Junkyard, each step away from the Pit covers distance as normal but on the return journey the distance yawns, stretching endlessly. Short jaunts from the Pit are easy enough to come back from but each step carries you an exponential distance. Out far enough landmarks shift in relation to each other and navigation becomes perilous. Like a black hole the Junkyard traps you with inexorable distance the further you stray into it.
There is a way to bridge this distance and for many, with all the searching it takes to find the person they are looking for, it is the only way to return before they run out of food or become lost in the Junkyard’s expanse. You can give up the the connection to whoever you hold dearest, whole or in pieces. The Junkyard is a place of lingering loss and grief and in its rapacious non-sentience it will release its grasp on those who willingly feed it.
Entering & Exiting the Junkyard: Like all otherspaces the Junkyard has a specific ritual for entry. You must travel to the site of a vehicle fatality, any will do so long as it has not been used to enter the Junkyard before. At the site, after sundown, start digging. No one who wishes to enter the Junkyard can leave the hole until it is fully dug. It must be deep enough to hide those in it from the outside and the outside from those in it. At midnight, in pitch darkness, start climbing. If these conditions are met the climb will be much longer than it should be, the climber’s memory and consciousness fading into a dreamlike state as they ascend towards the mouth of the Junkyard’s Pit.
Anyone climbing or falling back into the Pit lands in the hole they used to enter. If you’re holding onto a person they come with you, but no more than one. Hopefully your hole hasn’t been filled in yet.
Inhabitants: The Junkyard contains anyone who has died in a vehicle who was someone’s favourite (as in the mechanical relationship) until the time that relationship fades from the person who held them dear or they leave. Additionally a number of outsiders have also taken up residence in the Junkyard’s hostile environment, both temporarily and on a permanent basis.
Exploration: One step from the Pit is equal to one step back, the second covers twice the distance as far as the return journey is concerned, then quadruple and so on. In practice this would be tiresome to calculate, so don’t. Instead measure travel in encounters (say, two per game day). Give the players a handful on their way to their objective and then hit them with several times as many on the lengthy, uncertain journey back. More if they lose their way. Narrate the yawning distance behind them and the growing isolation from the safety of the real world as they move further and further in.
Unknown Armies isn’t exactly suited to hexcrawls. All exploration should be objective driven and based on choices over tedious logistics. Do the players want to take the short but dangerous route or go the long way and use more supplies? Do they want to risk a detour to interact with GMCs who may have information or aid they require? Exploration rolls, based on relevant abilities, should be granted to give players extra information to inform their choices in the right circumstances but never replace them.
Starvation and Other Dangers: Survival in the Junkyard is uncertain. Wreckage is the only shelter, food and water is limited to what little can be scavenged from picked over vehicles and there’s no medical services or mechanics for when people and things break down. Without resources people travelling in the Junkyard are at risk. Healthy Appetites by Alex Powell provides timeframes and penalties for starvation and dehydration.
Alternatively give a cumulative -10% penalty to all rolls for each day gone without, the progression temporarily stalled by a successful roll on Fitness or a relevant identity and reversed at the same rate by adequate provisions. At worse than -40% starvation/dehydration/exposure cause death. Things decay and breakdown quickly in the Junkyard, it’s only by constantly moving on and replacing what’s lost that any semblance of existence can be eked out.
Supply Rules: For players who want to prepare for the journey consider allowing them to build a Supply percentile pool - with milestones for resources and initiative poured into it like an objective - to act as a buffer against the worst. Instead of weathering the consequences when they happen a roll against this value provides material support. In return the available resources deplete as if the roll were an attack against the Supply pool (using hand-to-hand (light) or firearm (heavy, possibly capped) damage depending on severity).
When confronted with hunger, accident or exposure the Supply pool might represent the following:
- Stave off hunger and dehydration for everyone for a day (light).
- Access to first-aid supplies (light).
- Increased hardiness (+10% shift to Fitness rolls) from altitude training for short (one session, light) or long term benefit (several sessions, heavy, 30).
- Access to portable hydraulic rescue tools (heavy, 20).
Depending on the situation there may need to be additional rolls to solve the problem but the right materials are on hand. Matched successes or crits might indicate either supplies of a particularly high quality (+20-30% shift to subsequent rolls) or efficient resources (reduce depletion by half or three-quarters). Standard failures count as a success with complications (ie. extra depletion (+3/+6 points depending on damage level) or inferior tools (-10% negative shift on actions)) whereas matched failures and fumbles indicate no resources are available. Hitting 0% Supply means they’re tapped out on everything.
Specific and unique preparations taken ahead of time are excluded from these rules. They may be useful in the abstract to measure how limited a particular resource is but erring on the side of rewarding player ingenuity is preferable. Roleplaying these preparations is its own form of investment.
The Junkyard’s Appetite: The Junkyard is hungry. It doesn’t want you here. It wants to be left in peace to slowly digest your attachments. You can willingly feed it if you wish and it will reward you for doing so.
This can be used to fend off starvation, it can smooth the path of obstacles, it can even stave off death for a time. Anyone who is willing to give up part of their attachment may use their favourite relationship to substitute for any identity feature, supply roll or exploration roll. The trade off for doing so is that the relationship depletes by the sum of the roll regardless of success. The effects are never explicitly obvious, that gnawing hunger in your belly is overshadowed by dull emotional pain, that teetering maze of stacked wrecks disappears in a mirage as you round the rocky outcrop or that sucking chest wound seems less life threatening for a while.
It is unpleasant to give up something so fundamental this way. GMs are encouraged to apply stress checks.
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