Story Overview  

Our Setting Premise

New Bravado was once a boomtown built on the promise of wealth, status and discovery before the fall of the San Saba Board. The wastelands that make up the San Saba; the greater region upon which New Bravado resides, are irradiated and unforgiving to the fragile Survivors who brave them.  From the empty sands of the Dune Sea to the forgotten ruins of once grand settlements, the wasteland is a cruel and brutal mistress.

Built by its own citizens, Bravado is a frontier town whose identity and relevancy are now staked almost entirely on The Ox, one of the few remaining locomotives built from the detritus of broken construction equipment, several derelict train cars and a single jet engine.  While the Ox once rocketed across the greater wastes at ludicrous speeds to deliver raw products and finished goods to their respective markets, the quickly decaying network of rails now only stretches between a few remaining settlements.

Beneath the city, in the ruddy clay of yesteryear, lie the bones of an ancient Facility - fossilized in the stratum below the surface by eons of disuse and quietude. Rare metals, scrap and salvage are harvested from within, wiring pulled from ancient and unknowable machines, steel plating ripped from walls, and glass and metals gathered from forgotten workshops below.  Despite the arcane script of Lost Barogue inscribed on walls below, only the Delvers and diggers who work for the Railroad Conglomerate seem to care any longer for the forgotten secrets within, and the howls of mutated Semper Morts that lurk in the shadows. 

Below them all, below the quiet streets of New Bravado, beneath the Facility and below what lurks beneath that, the Mortis Amaranthine churns with all the whirling surety of a meat grinder, and it waits inevitably for its time and its turn.  As the radioactive nightmare of the Exclusion Zone nearby seems to wane, new strange blue mushrooms absorbing and consuming the dangerous radiation within, the balance of the Grave Mind seems to have shifted.

Left alone to their own devices, doomed to repeat that which has been lost to a fog of memories, and ignored by once allies, New Bravado has entered a tenuous epoch during which its future is unsure, but its potential is vast. It will be up to the citizens of this ghost town to survive new threats and challenges from within and abroad, and to make a mark on history that can never be forgotten.

The Season six Story

Another deadly war has shook the foundations of Bravado, and the San Saba has settled into an uneasy and chaotic peace after the collapse of the San Saba Board.  Travel and communication across the area has grown more difficult, and towns turn their focus inward, towards their own fraught survival.  

It happened more quickly than many expected.  The outer rail lines that once reached as far as the Broken Coast and across the Dune Sea have been abandoned in favor of closer, safer routes between the immediate towns near Bravado and Essex.  Telegraph lines stripped for salvage and murdered postal runners mean that all but the most persistent communication between settlements has stopped, and the points of light at the edge of the map have dimmed.  Soldiers and mercenaries recruited for the war, now without a common cause, consider new allegiances, brutal banditry, or violent reckonings on rival settlements ill prepared for trained and well armed survivors at their gates.

In this new world, the implacable equilibrium of the wasteland churns onwards, reclaiming abandoned settlements in overgrowth, and damning once vibrant towns to destruction, returning the land once more to a lawless waste ruled only by what a survivor can claim for themselves.  Strange and dangerous raiders have overtaken the north, their war path marked by blood and the sounds of drum beats.  The dead have risen in even greater numbers, the Grave Mind turning the countless deaths of the War of Antlers into new and more deadly variants, bent on feasting on living flesh.

The factions of the San Saba have been broken and worn by the war, but each has consolidated what remains of their fortunes closer to the new heart of the San Saba, Bravado.  While it should be a new shining beacon on a hill, a pervasive sense of insignificance has rendered the town forgettable and alone, a ghost town tucked into a forgotten corner of the region.  A fog of memories, casting a shroud of forgetfulness and absence has settled over Bravado, perhaps a last dying gasp of an ancient terror trapped within or perhaps just the unfortunate reality of a world that has moved on after the fall of the Board.  As the town wanes in importance, new rivals flourish nearby, threatening to complete the fall into obscurity for our humble home.

Forgotten and left to decide their own future, our survivors face the harsh and horrific realities of survival in the wasteland.  Now, once easily secured resources like power, clean water, food, fuel, and scrap are in question, and the lean and hungry eyes of your fellow survivors seem not quite as friendly as before.  The future promised by the San Saba Board may be dead, but perhaps a new future can be forged from the ashes for the survivors that call Bravado home…