The Hooverville crew (Minus Ryan/Cabbie, who is still away for school) just sat down for enclave and character generation for a Bust game where Tom (Gots) is the Market and I get to play!
We decided to set it in our hometown of Elk Grove, a suburban sprawl between the bustling urban center of Sacramento and the lazy stretches of vast, endless farmland of the valley. After speculating on location we also decided to set our enclave in the Promenade mall I detailed earlier in the thread, only in the alternate near-future of Red Markets the town finally got the project off the ground and it opened full of new stores just before the Crash. Because the enclave was positioned on the literal edge of town before the asphalt and concrete of the suburbs gives way to the green and brown farmlands, we dubbed our enclave "The End". It's three primary exports are Knowledge (Bookstore converted into a reference library by an Archivist), Trade (Serves as a bazaar for the farmers to the south and survivors in the suburbs who need food), and Food (Enclave expanded into the surrounding lands to grow crops of their own). It's three primary imports are Medicine/Expertise from the Hawk's Nest, Building Supplies from the suburbs, and Ammunition from all around.
The End was a brand new Promenade mall in Elk Grove before the Crash turned Sacramento into a death zone. The local EGPD, acting in absence of orders from the civil government, designated the mall as an evacuation center where the military could extract civilians without having to venture into the Vector-infested suburban maze. When the military failed to show the police and surviving aldermen established a tenuous social order which, while descended from the democracy of pre-Crash city politics, morphed into a sort of benevolent feudalism. After a while they were joined by a convoy of truckers with trailers stuffed full of refugees--these trucks and their trailers, along with the many big rigs abandoned on adjacent highway 99, would form the foundation of the wall that protected the budding enclave.
We also recorded the entire process and we'll try to get that uploaded if anyone wants to listen, but in the meantime here are some of the ideas we concocted (Names are tentative):
Hawk's Nest: Cosumnes River College has become the most secure, prosperous enclave in the south Sacramento area. Its close proximity to a cluster of hospitals and its nursing program means they ended up with the bulk of surviving medical personnel and equipment. Its architecture makes it very defensible. And the light rail station allows it to trade with enclaves in downtown Sacramento and as far away as Folsom.
The Farmer's Guild: Their isolation and self-reliance saved many of them during the chaos of the Crash, but even they needed to band together from time to time to survive mutual threats like raiders and mobs of Casualties. They value their freedoms and privacy and will happily leave you alone if you give them the same courtesy, and The End is as far north as most of them like to travel for trade.
Jeffersons: Some ideas persist even after the end of civilization. Taking their name from the State of Jefferson movement, this combination cult/political movement believes that cities and other dense gatherings of humanity are simply repeating the mistakes of the Crash. A thousand citizens are a thousand potential Vectors, so to prevent another catastrophic outbreak mankind must disperse and scatter into smaller and smaller villages, tribes, and family units. While the Jeffersons aren't notably violent like raiders they often harass travelers and enclaves. More than one town has thrown a Jefferson crier outside the fence.
The Prosperous: In California, the raiders rob you with a smile and an eerily-sincere "God Bless". The followers of a local megachurch took their survival through the Crash as a sign that God was with them, and that was practically a blank check for them to do as they pleased. If they needed someone else's food, they took "tithe" from their neighbors--at gunpoint. If they needed "donations" or "volunteers" they helped themselves to those too. After a while enough people got together to burn their church to the ground, but all that did was "prove" to the Prosperous that they were the righteous persecuted minority, and they became a nomadic enclave traveling from tentpole revival to tentpole revival, collecting "donations" from anyone they come across.
The Campuses (WIP): A loose alliance of high school enclaves run by a Lord of the Flies-esque group of surviving students that survive by scavenging the suburbs and trading for food and other necessities. They regularly compete with one another in a series of blood sports.
That's what I can remember off the top of my head, there's probably a few things I left out. We named our Taker crew "Blacklight", and the three employees are:
"Silver", as in hands, tongue, and thirty pieces of. The negotiator of the crew, who claims to be former carbait who voluntarily left the Recession to find her fortune in the Loss and pay her family's way out of a Free Parking ghetto. In reality she is a Steward for an unnamed corporation in the Recession, sent to California for an unknown mission. Her most distinctive feature and namesake are her painfully obvious prosthetic arms. Her "dependants" are her fellow Takers and her handler in the Recession, codenamed "Black Friday".
"Rufio", an Immune wild child from the Franklin High Campus who was a student when the Crash started summer vacation early. Her innate resistance to infection has made her reckless and headstrong, and the pseudo-communist society of the Campuses has given her a dim view of capitalism. She only came to be in The End after her parents heard rumors she had survived the Crash and hired one of the enclave's fencemen to track her down and "rescue" her, which he did. Rufio was resentful at first, but after being reunited with her parents and seeing how much her "rescuer" sacrificed to bring them together she chose to stay in The End. When she ran into a woman with prosthetic arms looking for Takers, she and Galavant agreed to sign on with Blacklight.
"Galavant", a rookie EGPD officer and one of the original deputies of The End. He was a respected member of the community when Rufio's parents came to beg for his help, and more notably he was Immune. He is no longer either of these things, after an errant bite frightened his comrades into injecting him with Supressin to "save" him from infection. While his fellow deputies still see him as one of them, people now cross the street and keep their distance from a man they used to call a hero. After a while Galavant realized that he had no future in The End and agreed to join Silver's small Taker crew.
Our first game will be recorded on Friday, so look forward to that!
