It’s Jonathan here with our next weekly blog post for the upcoming event, HELLS OF THE SAN SABA! This is leadup for our April DR:TX event written by our Overarc STs, Ash Sexton, Ren Lewis and Andrew Harper. Today we will talk a bit about one of the key threats of this event, the mysterious Resonant Raiders, a unique tribe of Raiders from the Dune Sea. We first released these local DR:TX threats during our online event exploring the Lost City of Barogue, but you might have already encountered one during a late night mod this season. The recent drought has resulted in aggravated raider activity near Bravado, and you will surely encounter these new crystalline foes during our April event.

Did you hear? We are running a Returning Player Campaign through the end of the season. If you have friends that have been away from DR for a bit, not only can you earn some CAPs for inviting them back, they can get a headstart with some free items and benefits for coming back home to Bravado.
There was a large March Blueprint Update that occurred last week, and 35 different prints saw some changes and 6 prints were removed from play. You can find more details at the Blueprint Changelog on the National website, but I’ll have a post on how we will handle this for DR:TX soon. Stay tuned!

TICKETS FOR HELLS OF THE SAN SABA are on sale now! don’t miss OUT!!!

THIS POST WILL DISCUSS A FEW LIGHT STORY SPOILERS FOR OUR NEXT EVENT, SO WE HOPE YOU ENJOY WHAT WE HAVE IN STORE!

Our art for this post is taken from our gallery of events from our online game series, Lonestar Skies. Resonant artwork and the Barogue map is by Jonathan Loyd, and our epic picture of Barogue below is by our friend James Pardee.

Let’s talk a little bit about the threats of the next event…

Barogue, the Lost City

In order to understand the threat of the Resonant Raiders you will face during the HELLS OF THE SAN SABA, we have to dig a bit into some juicy LORE of our setting.

During our online pandemic season, we explored several locations across the San Saba, from the humble homesteads of Widow’s Peak to the oily shores of the Clutch, into the depths of Killhouse Prison, to the floating skyship-city of Waking Prime and back through the streets and packed taverns of mighty Essex, the City of Light and Sound. But to wrap up the events of Dead Man’s Hand, the largest online National event so far, we released a mysterious treasure map supposedly leading to the long-lost city of Barogue.

Barogue was once thought to be an archeological legend and tall tale, a titanic moving city that was lost somewhere in the depths of the Dune Sea. A massive moving vehicle, the entire city was built on a series of tracks and wheels that propelled it across the landscape long ago, generations after the Fall of Man. Some told of finding massive formations resembling tread marks in the stone of the deserts to the west of Essex, “proof” they said of Barogue’s existence. Others spoke of songs of the dead city, or even crazed religious ramblings of the Final Knights. And there is a strange series of cryptograms and prophecies thought to be the words of the last leader of the fallen city, found in the strangest of places throughout the San Saba.

Weeks would pass before word emerged about a breakthrough in the search. A group of adventurers managed to unite all six pieces of the map auctioned away at the Dead Man’s Hand Tournament and formed their own expedition. They were joined by Felicity Redfield who has made her interest in the legendary city very well known. Supposedly she held a piece of the puzzle that the explorers would need to find the final resting place of the Lost City. The wasteland waited with bated breath to see if this group would fare better than those who journeyed before them.

A few lucky individuals got to lead the charge into the unknown, and helped uncover a city thought lost to time and legend. After many days of wandering, Gillie Schwinehund, Gentlemen Commander, Vaan, Niche, Hargrave Moss-Iverspit, and Kell Hyacinth returned victorious. They brought with them tales of shifting sands, gargantuan leviathans, and murderous bands of raiders, but eventually they made it to their destination and all (but mostly Felicity) staked their claim on The Roving City.

Since Barogue’s recent discovery by this team of scouts and Felicity Redfield, it has become a phenomenal source of metal, scrap, and materials for the Railroad Conglomerate. This scrap has been turned into new rail ties to expand the Oxlines, plating to reinforce defenses in Essex and the Clutch, and even attempts to help the city of Waking Prime with new power sources and engines. Many of the new technologies used by the Emerald Arsenal first started as scavenged pieces of oldcestor tech taken from the Lost City. Barogue has become an important resource for the San Saba Board and the various factions of the region, and has served as a safe place to rest and refuel on the path to Oasis and the Broken Coast. The path of progress moves ever forward!

Further secrets of the Lost City are still being uncovered, but one particular myth of old Barogue is worth exploring further… the tale of the strange inhabitants of the Roving City.

*The map fragments awarded during the Dead Man’s Hand Tournament.*

The Tragedy of the Resonance Choir

During the lead up to our Barogue event, we talked about a few myths and legends that had persisted about the city. While there were several tales shared about ancient Barogue, they all had a few common themes. Some facts remained the same throughout the telling, lending credibility to the legends of the Roving City. The city was somewhere to the west, perhaps lost in the Dune Sea, they said. It was a moving city, a technological marvel made before the Fall. The city was doomed by its hubris, relying on advanced technologies to evade the undead, but eventually succumbed to treachery from Mammon, a Final Knight demogogue in some stories, a traitor within, or even a nation of psions in others. From the fall of Barogue began an exodus, their people scattered to the ends of the San Saba, abandoning the carcass of their once mighty roving city, leaving the Prince Undying, their former leader, behind in a lifeless city to ponder its failure.

We released three tales of old Barogue, but the one to focus on today is the Tragedy of the Resonance Choir. This story speaks of one potential truth of the stories of Barogue, and the lessons we should take from its fall.

While many legends of ancient Barogue have been told, few focus on a single uncontested fact: Barogue was a menace and a threat to its enemies. At least 200 years ago but perhaps more, before the blastlands became the Dune Sea, the city of Barogue moved with impunity around the wastes. While it is known that the Roving City was mounted on giant wheels or treads that moved it around, the fleets of scavenger vehicles that roved out from the city were a true threat to settlements in the Lone Star in ways that raider or zed could never hope to achieve. You see, the Roving City was powered by the Resonance Choir - a combination of psions working in concert, pouring their effort and will into the singular task of charging the psi-tech that empowered Barogue. And the largest source of those psions to power the engines? Captured psions, turned into living batteries against their will. Their fleets captured any that showed the spark of psionics, and brought them to serve Barogue.
Chief of its enemies was the great state of Mammon, led by the Witch Queen. The Witch Queen was a powerful psion and worshipper of the Damned 33, and realized the nascent threat the Roving City represented to the wastes. She realized that the only way to threaten the powerful moving fortress that was Barogue was to corrupt it from the inside. It started innocently enough - she introduced an addictive new serum, capable of “super-charging” any psion into a mighty mental juggernaut… for a time. A wealthy city like Barogue didn’t care about the duration, as it was cheap enough to rotate out psions from their stable of “batteries”. For a time, life was good as newly powerful psions weaved the song of energy that moved the Roving City. But, the poison pill that was the Witch Queen’s creation was insidious - each time the psion took the drug, it sapped a bit of their life away and hastened their demise as they lost the ability to channel psionic force at all. Soon enough the plague of the drug addiction melted away the Choir bit by bit, until Barogue could no longer rely on their choir of psions to power the city.
Faced with dwindling reserves of survivors to scream their wordless energies into the hungry void of Barogue’s engines, they did the unthinkable. Instead of trying to find a new or different source of power, they simply began taking the undesirables and the unlucky from their own population and giving them the drug to power their unholy crystal tech. Before too long, it was any that opposed the collection - even the scions of the elite, or any that opposed the Prince Undying, the leader of Barogue. Like short-wicked candles, their own people were cast as new victims into the meatgrinder of Barogue’s unceasing demands for power. While the drug did not work as strong on non-psions, the feeble spark it lit was enough - provided they poured enough bodies into the Choir. Few can say if it was this cannibalism of their own people that caused the Exodus, or it was simply their people fleeing certain death at the hands of the elite of Barogue. But the population dwindled, scattered to the wastes, leaving only one man - the Prince Undying, to solve the eternal riddle of Barogue. How can a city form a choir without the harmonies and melodies of the psions within? The Prince sat with the decaying corpse of Barogue for generations, seeking an answer that could not be found.
As the wastelands turned to dust, and the hills and valleys of the scorched land to dunes, the city of Barogue sat as a reminder of the terrible cost of the psionic technology they sought to master. Psi-tech always has a cost and even if you think the price is easy at first, it is never sustainable. When you view people as property or things to be consumed like living batteries, you can never outrun that corruption. Eventually, even the Prince Undying abandoned the dead city, proving the truth that the Witch Queen of Mammon knew all along - when you rely on the power of others to survive, you don’t recognize your own powerlessness until it is too late. Seize power from those not worthy of it, but most of all realize that the true strength is in a community that does not feed on itself or a community that relies on cheap tricks to stay off the decay. Barogue was dying long before it fell, and once the wound grew septic it was their end. Barogue was doomed to fail for its sins, and many are glad that it suffered the ignoble fate of a quiet and soundless death, alone and unmoving in the sands.

How does this tie to the Resonant, then?

In the first nights of exploration into the depths of Barogue, the first scouts encountered terrifying enemies, dessicated corpses with psion crystals for eyes, capable of feeding on the emotions and fear of the living. These strange creatures appeared dead at first, but were only dormant, left behind in the lifeless city in a strange torpor, waiting for prey to return.

The Resonant

As the lost city of Barogue began to collapse in on itself during THE LOST CITY, a new type of enemy appeared from the wreckage, and from the morgue - The Resonant. First discovered in strange tubes and storage cylinders, these corpses first appeared dead but seemed to awake as survivors lingered in the catacombs and naves of the ancient city. There were countless banks of these preserved bodies in the bowels of old Barogue, suggesting that the Tragedy of the Resonance Choir was not so much myth as fact.

These crystalline raiders were a powerful threat, easily recognized by their eyes and foreheads encrusted entirely with a bismuth-like crystal. They were eerily silent, lurking in the darkness of the ancient city but drawn to the survivors like moths to a flame. Despite their silence, they were aware of the intrusion into Barogue and reacted violently. They could paralyze their prey with fear and use wicked claws to take down a survivor for later feeding, seeming to devour energy itself from the corpses of their victims.

The Resonant Raiders we know today are thought to be an unexpected consequence of Baroque’s desperate and cruel use of aberrants as living psionic batteries in a final attempt to keep the city moving. With the discovery of the final resting place of Barogue, the presence of aberrants among the explorers perhaps reawakened the Resonant raiders who have now begun to disperse across the Lone Star in search of energy to feed their eternal hunger after escaping being buried under the dune sea. Others have suggested that they were simply trapped in the defunct morgues of Barogue, released once the Mortis Amaranthine had enough Imprint nearby to begin again on the cycle of Infection. After the Lost City was later excavated by the Railroad Conglomerate, they reported that the bodies of the Raiders killed and buried in the evacuation of the city were gone and the majority of the Resonant were nowhere to be found.

Very little is accurately known of this strange raider clan, but since their escape from Barogue they have been spotted in small groups through out the San Saba. They seem to be more clever than the common Raider, and there are rumors that they have been getting stronger in the years since. Some even suggest that their numbers are growing somehow, perhaps by spreading some strain of Bad Brain to their victims, or even spreading the strange crystalline growths that fester on their bodies to other Raiders. Some early encounters suggested some organization to the raiders as they attacked defenses and probed ways to get through barricades and walls, as if they were seeking something or someone or searching for something ancient and forgotten.

Infested with crystalline growths, the most dangerous of Resonants have psionic crystals emerging and encrusting most of their torso and arms in addition to the growths from eyes and forehead. While all of the Resonant seem to be blind, with crystals growing from their eyes, they are more than capable of sensing their surroundings and even seeing through the stealthy camouflage of their foes. Their profiles are alien and difficult to make out as humanoid, with the most recognizable parts being crystalline claws and a vaguely humanoid head emerging from a mass of crystals.

The Resonant were first thought to feel your emotions and primitively track their prey this way, but later encounters suggest that they might simply sense psionic potential of aberrants. Some speak of them hovering near trembling foes in ecstatic glee before killing them. Other early encounters spoke of survivors trying to blank their thoughts and think of nothing when the Resonant are near as a tool to evade their preternatural senses, but just as many tales speak of this protection faltering at the last moment when they smell their fear. Regardless of the accuracy of such tactics, the Resonant all seem mildly telepathic and can react to strong emotions and fear in their prey. Whether or not they draw sustenance from this, they still exhibit cannabilistic tendencies like more common Raider clans.

Some of the more powerful Resonant seen recently seem to be voids of psionic energy, both drawing energy from anything nearby and exhibiting complete resistance to psionic attacks. These powerful Resonant are psychic vampires that find sustenance in the last laugh of a foe, or the psionic potential of those aberrants they track down to “harvest” in a bloody display of feeding on the despair and anguish of their victims. Fortunately, the presence of these types of advanced Resonant Raiders seems like to be limited to only a handful of reported sightings.

Successfully “psychically feeding” on downed foes seems to energize the Resonant like it would an undead cannibalizing a corpse, but the bodies they leave behind are desiccated and shriveled remains that seem to resemble the first sightings in the Lost City. There are multiple confirmed reports of them leeching energy from psionic use nearby, healing their wounds and reacting with an anomaly response. Regardless of how many they kill, feeding on aberrant energies seems to do nothing to truly sate the hunger of Resonant Raiders.

They always hunger for more.

What will happen or what will emerge when that hunger advances to be all consuming, leaving room for nothing else? Let’s find out together!

Wrap Up

That’s it for today Vados! I hope you enjoyed this bit of lore, and we hope you will join us for our next event, THE HELLS OF THE SAN SABA. It seems like the drought won’t be the only thing that’s a danger during the next event!

I’ll leave you with a bit of poetry by Shan, first released for our Barogue event. See you soon, Vados!

Old Barogue thy Humble Art
Driving through those Shining Seas
A Kingdom come from Lands Apart
To bring us what we sorely Need.
To Parth she brings the fuel and food,
To Chime she brings the bright young men,
From there she ferries them to Sand,
And ferries them back home again.
Ol Barogue thy Brave Art
To connect the Islands of the Sea,
To range afield and journey far,
To bring us sorely what we Need.
The White Death looms before us
And the White Death looms behind.
The White Death is a chorus,
That sings inside my mind.
The White Death could be joyous,
The White Death could be kind,
But the White Death is afore us.
And it takes us all in time.
How do you find that Old Barogue?
How do you go to the City that Roves?
Well young traveler just follow the Road,
Made by the passing of that Old Barogue!
If you are lost and the city is missing,
Look for the light of that Old Vossa Psi.
Cast a keen look upon each horizon
And follow wherever she colors the sky.
I cast these poems into the pit,
As a kind of time capsule.
I hope that when they are exhumed one day,
By smarter people than I ever was,
That they will remember Barogue,
And what we were capable of, once.
And could be again.