Crypt Cities: What the Dead Carry.

Really?

Grave robbery?

No, that term is too dignified for what you propose. Corpse pillaging is what this is.

Were you listening to anything? Are you aware of the things your fellow Awakened have had to suffer through? The sanctity of one's death mask? The difference between collapse and perseverance embodied by the smallest of trinkets and sentimentals on one's person?

You are, and you just don't care?

... Smart. You'll go farther than most.

When one of you has just about had it, and all seems lost, the embrace of true death nonetheless remains elusive. Instead, you crumple under the weight of the Need as well as your own personal anguish, and turn inward. Without a body strong enough to carry you to a sarcophagus, your mind turns inward and consumes itself, slowly. You can look forward to weeks, months, even years as a tormented Husk, trapped inside of that desiccated head of yours. And after that, when you start to fall apart at the molecular level, the real fun begins.

Some of the damage can be reversed, if you were to be placed within an enchanted coffin of your own.

Of course most of the other travelers who come across your bleaching hide will be less interested in picking up and helping you, and more interested in helping themselves to the pickings of whatever you might have had on you when you went catatonic. If you're smart, you'll keep your eye-slots peeled too.



(Roll 1d40 whenever you come across a suitably lethargic-looking cadaver. Any rerolls ignore the same result twice in a row.)

1	Nothing But Dust	The Husk and any rags it has left fall to ashes at your touch, its mask crumbling into nothing. Have a moment of silence for this most grim of fates.
2	Tattered Clothes	Little more than a filthy, stained loincloth. Gain one rag. If you are feeling particularly brave, gain one bandage or article of clothing.
3	Encrusted Thing	This object is completely covered over in gunk, grime, or dirt. You have no idea what it is or does. Gain one crusty old... something.
4	Vile Trophies	This Husk must have been one sick puppy to collect all these. If you are not Hunted, become mildly unsettled. If you are Hunted, have a laugh.
5	Abused Rucksack	Spacious, but weakening in places. Gain a medium-sized container. If it is ever filled to capacity, it ruptures.
6	Ghostly Whispers	You find nothing, and the murmur of wind and ash fills you with a sudden, dreadful urgency. You suffer one additional day of Need.
7	Scavengers	Carrion-eaters and worse things have found the Husk before you did. If you fight or scare the competition away, reroll.
8	Noose Necklace	A piece of fashion commonly sported by alumni of gallows the world over. Gain one short length of rope.
9	Snipped Sinews	Several of the Husk's muscles are still good. Gain three uses of stitching, or one bowstring, cord, garrote, etc.
10	Old Child's Toy	A weathered wooden figurine or a threadbare doll, probably kept as a memento. Gain one bitter reminder of your own lost youth.
11	Rendered Human Fat	A jar full of fragrant adipose tissue. Gain five uses of fuel or oil, and attract predators at twice the usual rate.
12	Visceral Trail	Dried droplets of black ichor, the lingering reek of death-smoke, and the occasional severed limb point toward potential danger- and profit.
13	Shiny Rocks	Not even the dead are exempt from humanity's fixation on shiny things. Gain a bargaining chip.
14	Befouled Liquids	These vials or skins once contained valuable potions or life-giving water. Now they are spoiled and noxious. They make you nauseous to drink, but could be used as a stink bomb or olfactory concealment.
15	A Fistful of Coins	A few ancient coins of unclear mint and composition. Flipping them into a body of water and wishing might do something. Like poison the water.
16	Corpulent Swelling	Jostling the Husk causes its abdomen to burst and shower you in insides which quickly become outsides. You can be smelled from a much greater distance until you bathe.
17	Awful Poetry	In sanity, this Husk used poetry as a creative outlet and coping mechanism. In catatonia, it serves to make you groan. Gain one use of fuel.
18	Powdered Herbs	They might have been an apothecary's wares. Or an old pressed flower collection. Gain two uses of medicine. Or placebos. Or poison.
19	Rusting Fragments	Anything made of metal such as weapons or armor has long since broken, but the pieces remain. Gain one use of scrap.
20	Infestation	At some point this body became host to a den of vermin or a squirm of large parasites. Gain one ration of food.
21	Infested	At some point this body became host to a den of small vermin or a squirm of large parasites. Now, so have you.
22	Old Wagon Wheel	Some Nomad cart won't be going anywhere without this. Gain a shield that breaks after deflecting three blows.
23	Mimicry	That isn't a Husk. That isn't even humanoid. And whatever it is, it looks hungry.
24	Gnarled Branch	Someone tore the face off of a particularly old Holt-Dweller, but didn't get around to working it yet. Gain one piece of wood.
25	Weaponized Femur	Whoever this belonged to must have had legs like a workhorse. Treat as a club that breaks after five successful hits.
26	Old Bone Dice	Bones for throwing, and a bit of idle recreation. They're probably not cursed.
27	A Ghost of Warmth	For the briefest of moments you feel faint, pleasant sensation that you'd thought dead for ages. Nothing about the Husk or its possessions tells you why or how to replicate it, however.
28	Crypt-City Brochure	An old flier both advertising for one of the smaller, newer Crypt-Cities, and calling for the violent expulsion of all Awakened. If you become lost, you may reorient yourself toward your goal once.
29	A Spare Limb	Everything seems to be in working order for one of the Husk's extremities. Randomly gain a spare left or right arm or leg.
30	Dislodged Corpse Nail	This foot-long wrought iron spike is hammered into the limbs and torsos of the Awakened by Hunters to affix them to a Groaning Pillar. Treat as a dagger.
31	Moldering Pages	Scraps of some old tome or journal. They may offer some insight into local dangers or past travelers.
32	Rot Blossom Sprout	Run. Run as fast as you can.
33	Sandals!	A marvelously underused pair of sandals. Gain the ability to travel the Wasteland in almost-comfort for the next hundred miles.
34	Passage of Death-Priest Psalms	These grim old hymns allow you to reflect upon your struggle and the goal which lies at its end, bolstering your resolve. You may ignore one day of Need.
35	Looted Mask	This Husk was once another corpse-pillager like yourself. Gain one blank death mask to use as a backup, and don't dwell overlong on this glimpse into your own future.
36	Map Fragment	Manic scrawling making use of parchment and ink of questionable origins outlines the general area and points of interest.
37	Mystery Cult Trinkets	Ritual tools and artifacts of ambiguous design and purpose. Using them correctly might allow for the casting of a single spell. Or they might explode.
38	Black Marrow	The bones of every Awakened become imbued with a hint of death-smoke essence over time, and these are still juicy. Become well-rested, if you can tolerate the grizzly, selfsame feast. Just ignore the nightmares.
39	Smoke Pocket	A pocket of death-smoke hasn't yet left the Husk's body. Split open the bubo-like protrusion in its flesh and huff deeply to repair light damage or remove one minor debilitation.
40	Not A Husk!	The corpse you're scavenging isn't entirely catatonic yet! Take light but unavoidable damage as it suddenly bites and flails mindlessly at the rude awakening.

What is that Heinous Idol for?

Mayan Cthulhu Totem by FoxH

The Pem-Pah people of Khaitam-po are positive dystheists who worship against a vast pantheon of malicious spirits which run amok across the world. In addition to offering prayers to confuse and confound the oftentimes nameless evils, they craft idols embodying them and their abstract, harmful concepts. These idols are then damaged and defaced over time to harm and weaken the concept embodied within it. This is believed to weaken the evil's power over the world by extension, offering temporary reprieve from it.

Normally they are located securely within village sanctuaries or pious, well-to-do households, but occasionally misfortune can land an idol in the wild, able to be found and picked up by passersby.

Perhaps they don't even stay in the right world for long.

Very rarely does an evil have an anthropomorphic identity. More commonly, they are identified by what they do or cause in the world. They are almost never named, especially not on their idols, even if such a label would be very useful helping the uninitiated in identifying just what a given mass of deliberately hideous carved wood and stone is supposed to represent.

Because of the nonstandard, highly individual way in which the idols are crafted, identifying a given idol can be relatively straightforward, or exceptionally difficult. Gut feelings, hunches, and intuition can lead to just as accurate an answer as a guess born of lifelong arcane study, so any member of a group of adventurers which might encounter an idol should have an equally unlikely shot at identifying it, regardless of skill training or ability score.

Special rituals appropriate to each evil are used to further debilitate them, either in the face of terrible fortune related to the evil, or in the hopes of improving one's circumstances further. In essence, cowing and tormenting an embodied evil "blesses" certain endeavors by removing a bit more of their eldritch taint from the area. This can translate to a small (+1 or +2) bonus on appropriate rolls for a period of time.

It is imperative that an idol never, ever be the subject of a ritual meant for an evil which is conceptually opposed to it. Nor should it ever be deliberately, completely destroyed. Doing so would empower or even release the evil essence embodied within it, and their mindless gaze rarely travels much farther than those who have released the evil. Such a mistake could result in penalties to relevant rolls as high as -5 or -10, or lead to disastrous events to be determined by the referee.

A set of example Pem-Pah Idols, their areas of affliction, and the rituals meant to deal with them, can be found below:

Pem-Pah Idols
1d20	Name of the Embodied Evil	What the Evil does	What You should do
1	The Lapping of Fire	Causes the start and spread of errant fires, which burn and consume indiscriminately.	Wrap it in scrolls of birch bark or paper. Ignite a fuse of human hair. Douse it in water before it catches fire.
2	The Bloody Lungs of Saltwater	Capsizes rafts and sailing vessels far from shore, destroying goods and drowning sailors.	Leech the moisture from it by hanging it over a fire. Bind it to a bowl floating in a tub of water.
3	An Unhealing Wound	Prevents fresh injuries from healing properly, or causes older wounds to open up and fester anew.	Cut a gash across the idol and immediately “cauterize” it with fire. Then pack the cut with gauze or bandage.
4	It Which Deceives	Fosters resentment among allies and tempts strangers and new faces to betray one another.	Place the idol in front of a small mirror facing its own reflection.
5	The Creeping and Slithering	Sneaks rare and deadly reptiles or other marshland creatures into places they don't belong.	Place it before a brazier in which a handful of reptile scales are burned.
6	Grinding Iron and Snapping Steel	Breaks or degrades metal of all types with use, not least of which being weapons and tools.	Ritually sharpen a blade under the idol's gaze, then us it to mar it.
7	The Thirst of Drought	Stagnates and spoils collected drinking water, causes local crop failure.	Plant it in soil and “water” it with sweat or saliva.
8	Howling from the Dark	Sends large, predatory animals to hunt far beyond their normal ranges.	Fix a collar around the idol's “neck” and shower it in tooth fragments or fingernail clippings.
9	Foolish Gibbering	Increases the likelihood that a person will announce themselves with a blunder, or be obliviously talkative.	Adhere a strip of material around the idol's approximation of mouth to gag it.
10	The Writhing Within	Unbalances one's gut fauna or compromises immune systems until the body is prone to diseases and massive parasites.	Bore a hole through the idol if one does not already exist, then flush it out with milk and animal blood.
11	Emptiness of the Gyre	Instills constant, gnawing hunger despite any and all food eaten, causing crippling starvation as well as gluttonous bloating.	Burn offerings composed of, or made to resemble, a healthily balanced meal.
12	Flesh's Fancy	Seeds the subconscious with growing carnal urges which a person would normally be averse to.	Seal the idol in a case full of purported anaphrodisiacs (real or otherwise) and lay it on its head.
13	The Lying Light	Conjures up deceptive lights and other mirages in far-off places to lead travelers astray.	Blindfold what passes for the idol's eyes using sap as an adhesive.
14	Luck's Blind Vexations	Influences mundane, day-to-day events to appear highly unlucky when it comes to random chance.	Nail a set of loaded dice or similar crooked game pieces to the face of the idol.
15	That Which Scrapes at the Dividing Wall	Provokes extreme paranoia and auditory hallucinations, eventually causes insomnia.	Bore a pair of “ear” holes into the idol and fill them with cork.
16	Lonesome Cries as if from Orphans	Inspires alternating periods of melancholy and gut-wrenching episodes of loss and grief.	Fashion a set of wax figures resembling a family unit and then melt them together to coat the idol.
17	The Crawling Fingers of Multitudes	Manipulates and harasses loose objects in a wide area, as well as causes pinching, grabbing, or crawling sensations across the skin of everyone therein.	Bind the idol in cord tightly, going counter-clockwise from the front. Then wind a differently colored cord opposite.
18	The Consuming Cold	Hampers sources of heat, including living bodies, and promotes unseasonable frosts.	Bundle the idol in a fur-trimmed blanket while ladling boiling hot broth over its face.
19	Wisps of the Tides	Summons up motes of the Killing Tides' suffocating embrace, starving the area of oxygen or fostering respiratory disorders.	Fan the idol vigorously while burning pungent incense around it.
20	Death-Rattle's Spite	Empowers the destructive, vengeful aspects of a dying wish or curse spoken by the dying.	Bury the idol in a symbolic grave with full honors and an accompanying song of soothing platitudes.

Crypt Cities: What's in a Mask?

Despite how long it's been, and how far some of us like to think we've come, the way we treat our Awakened varies considerably from place to place. As has been stated earlier, death isn't as great an equalizer as some poets make it out to be. But depending on what you were able to do with your previous life before its end, you might just be one of the lucky ones.

Well, "lucky".

Random Example Homelands & Masks (Roll 1d6)

1d6	Origin	Mask Appearance
1	The Plutocracy	A generic, clay worker's mask
2	The Thalassocracy	Theater mask with sea motifs
3	The Mystery Sects	Graven, deific imagery
4	The Holt-Dwellers	Sculpted parasitic plant matter
5	The Nomads	Bones of totemic animals
6	The Hunted	Whatever you scavenged up

The Plutocracy

"With death becoming so uncertain lately, we have only taxes left to take comfort in."
-Pilvic, Chair Secretary of Maldus & Kindred Incorporated, Collections Division.

Time, it has been said, is money. And when presented with the potential for infinite time, it didn't take long for some minds to turn toward the prospect of infinite money. So when the dead began to Wake among the interred members of certain guilds and business fraternities, their first and immediate thoughts were not ones dominated by the Need.

In a land where political power is explicitly and by design in the power of the most wealthy individuals, and things ranging from worker collective membership to voting rights must be bought and paid for, those without the keenest of business savvy and the richest of parents tend to accumulate a decent amount of debt over their lifespans. Regrettably, once upon a time these debts had to be transferred to slippery next-of-kin or altogether cancelled by their owners, leaving the food bowls of favorite pets un-festooned and the most purebred of ponies unbought for children's birthdays. But thanks to the advent of Waking, an honest loan-shark is able to collect indefinitely, at least every once in a beautiful blue moon.

You were one such debtor in life, or your relatives didn't want to front the bill for your funeral after you died, and you've become one since. A long stint as a manual laborer probably followed as you quarried stone, dug ditches, and tarred the rooftops of countryside villas.

But once you were, by some miracle, cleared of debt (or once the Need grew so great that they decided to discharge you despite trying to claw the face off of your foreman), you were freed from your dreary work camp and shipped inland toward your caravan.

You'll find many masks like yours out there- nearly featureless, light gray, made from a composite of clay and more resistant materials. But yours is still unique to you in some way, possessing an identifier scratched into its surface somewhere. It also happens to be a sort of canvas for your own personal expression. And though your time as a laborer was maddening toward the end, you worked alongside your Awakened kin--as well as those of living flesh and pumping blood--at close quarters for many a year. You escaped some of the worst indignities inflicted by the living, and the rest can be compartmentalized as "just part of business".

When the situation calls for diplomacy with the living, you are often the first pick by those who know you.

When the Need gnaws at your fellows, You may comfort them with the knowledge that worse pangs can be survived.

The Thalassocracy

"O endless sea. You are a curse, and an accomplice to human disquiet, but also the blood which runs in me. Take me and my batter'd ship, as you accept all that is and can be."
-Berucino, protagonist of the acclaimed melodrama A Death At Sea, and the first Awakened character known to enter the popular consciousness of "high culture".

 Ah, the sea. A bottomless womb of life and bounty which occasionally makes its power known via deadly, coast-obliterating reminders. Likened so often to a tempestuous lover, those who live beside it do so like they remain trapped in that abusive relationship. But every once in a while, a powerful navy, strong dykes, and careful meteorological predictions allow one clan of fish-eaters to claim they've mastered the oceans.

With their lives and deaths so intimately bound up in the whims of the waves, it isn't unusual to find romantics fixated upon them. For centuries, burials at sea were customary- a way of "giving back" to their provider. And this carried on just fine until the dead started to drag their waterlogged selves back up onto the beaches. Burning them and then carrying the ashes far out to sea on barges became routine for several fateful decades of the coast's history, but that practice ended when hundreds of crying whales started to beach themselves in unison and catches of fish started coming up with far too many heads, fins, and teeth.

Now the sheer cliffs and promontories of the coasts are given over to temporary burial chambers. But just because they are temporary, does not mean that they should be simple. Oh, no. You were probably swathed in more silk and gold in death than you had ever seen in your life. For a brief instant you were celebrated as a fellow actor in the same great play. The mask you now bear, similar to those worn in the theaters frequented by the members of elite houses, is a reminder of that. it's up to you to decide whether the motif of "comedy" or "tragedy" was a more appropriate choice for you, of course.

You are, as a result of this treatment, a remarkably well-adjusted Awakened one. Either by hearkening back to your noble blood, or by faking it until you make it, you just might resemble a leader with some amount of dignity among your fellow caravaneers.

And better yet, stripping bits and pieces of excessive grandeur from your mask might allow you to bargain for supplies or advice, if you happen during your journey to come across those who still care for things like gold.

The Mystery Cults

"The secret is in the Black Breath, I know it! We need only collect a few more vials of it..."
-Burisane to his apprentice, over a mortisected petitioner at the altar of Argent Gedes.

 Magic and monolatry go hand-in-hand the world over. Unfettered by distinctions such as divine or arcane, uncounted organizations plumb the depths of mysticism in nearly every culture- the only variable is how public or clandestine they are, or how embarrassing their initiation rituals can get. You would know, wouldn't you?

You would also know how rigorous the training is. How after initiation, one learns before anything else the whims and needs of their assigned teacher. Next, one learns the abilities and weaknesses of one's fellows, just in case the likely day ever comes where competition grows even more stiff. Hours poring over annotated tomes day in and day out might addle the senses to the outside world and a healthy sleeping and eating schedule, but in place of all of that cut-out fat, one is gifted true knowledge. While turning a blind eye to many of their peculiarities, folk across the land often rely upon these scholars for people learned in letters, numbers, and sciences which they master by mere incident of coming to understand their chosen path toward the secrets of the universe.

Unfortunately what you don't know, despite your many years of devotion to your chosen cell, coven, house, church, or tower, is actual magic.

No, no. You were a decade away from even witnessing the rituals which were performed in the outermost sanctum, let alone partaking. Though, somewhat fortunately, that may be the only reason why you were permitted to leave when first you stood back up after dying. Were you a true vessel of your order's secrets, your former associates would never have let you leave seclusion. At best, such great minds have been reduced to talking heads used to educate students in between maddened ramblings. At worst, they could be locked away with only the highest members of their orders privy to their whereabouts or the experiments conducted upon them.

Be grateful for your mediocrity then, but also appreciate how your imperfect knowledge still sets you a cut above your new kin. You have an inkling of the deeper meaning of the world around you, and the likeness of a godhead or sorcerer-saint etched upon your mask affords you much greater respect among the Awakened than you enjoyed in life.  And if you put your learning to practical use, you might even work a cantrip before your long rest.

Or peel back another fraction of an inch of the veil surrounding the Waking.

The Holt-Dwellers

"We don't harvest the limbs of those trees. If you wake up their fertilizer, it won't quiet down for another month."
-Agudai the Planter, senior forester.

The creeping expanse of the crypt-cities over the eons has been almost as much of an ecological disaster as the results of its alternatives. Vast stretches of the continent's interior have been rendered almost uninhabitable to most of the living, and that grey blot on the map seems destined to grow and grow. Yet there are those who still seek to defend the bastions of nature not yet despoiled. Or, more particularly, they seek to defend their last bastions of nature from others who need them just as much as they do. The dwellers in the deepest holts aren't in it for nature's own sake, after all.

These forest and hill peoples have been forced by necessity to adapt themselves to shrinking old growth, becoming experts in forest farming as well as more than a little experience in more esoteric forms of crop husbandry and hybridization. You come from a land of furniture which bears fruit, and bioluminescent crickets the size of small dogs. Everything that can be used in an experiment toward the end of sustainability, is used.

Up to and including the dead.

In ages past, the dead were interred in shallow graves with the seeds or spores of their plants of choice strewn about their bodies, so that they might feed a fresh upshoot of life. But when the dead started waking back up before the seeds could even germinate, initial dismay at a shattered worldview soon gave way to strange new options. They say that the oldest of the Awakened from the deep forests never left, and that their voices can still be heard echoing in the trunks of ancient oak and elm.

You probably don't walk alone. Somewhere on you or in you, a plant or fungus grows with fierce determination. To say nothing of your mask, which is quite alive, and quite literally rooted to your face. And though these plants are a mild drain upon your already strained life force, they offer you a strange new perspective. You know the helpful and harmful plants of the most remote places. You know their names and uses. Your fellows might be put off by your woody visage and knothole eyes, but they heed your herb-lore.

And you remember well the horrible tales of the Knight of Blossoms.

The Nomads

"The tragic part isn't to see a child of the open steppes confined to a tomb forevermore. It is to know that they wish it."
-Olroxes, chieftain of the Tauirisos.

Someone from settled lands likely wouldn't think of the Awakened as a great business opportunity (unless they were a very particular sort of plutocrat). But that is not at all the impression one gets when you travel inward from the soft and verdant periphery. As the wasteland has expanded, so too has the borderland between it and the rest of the world. Here, on hard land packed by hooves and cartwheels, the nomads thrive, if such a word could be used in this day and age.

Long ago, each land and polity dealt with those who woke individually, and in a self-contained manner. This worked at first, but when your numbers erratically swelled once in a while and those systems of transportation broke down, beleaguered states turned toward the herdsmen at their borders for assistance.

Traveling light and requiring relatively little food for your cargo, your people move from place to place as your animals and the flow of death dictate. You are the ultimate middlemen, and the closest thing to a ferryman across the river of death which many Awakened with a belief in such things will ever see.

But the last migration ended badly for you, and now instead of riding beside the odorous metal cages, you sit in one of them. You aren't there against your will, of course. The doors are rarely locked, and the bars overhead protect you and your new kin from the near-constant attentions of carrion birds circling overhead in the grey sky. You used to hate and desire a delay to the approach to the interior checkpoint where human life grew harder and harder to sustain, and you eventually gave the Waking over to their own abilities and devices. But now you can't stand how slowly the procession moves. You know now the Need that you always felt you could see in the vacant eye-holes of your wards.

Starting off, you are the wisest of all Awakened when it comes to the outer reaches of the wastes. Your knowledge might quickly dissipate the deeper your group penetrates inland, but your knowledge of land and beast might save precious time or limbs.

Your tribe has also furnished you for the journey as almost anyone would. Of particularly macabre beauty is the bone mask given to you and others, fashioned into the likeness of one of the animals hardy enough to survive in and around the wastes. You might not ever have believed the shamans who claimed that each mask granted a measure of affinity with its respective, often savage, totem.

Hopefully there's something to it.

The Hunted

"We'll give our due to the dead, alright... a five minute head start!"
 - More than one leader of a "good old-fashioned Hunt".

Oh.

You really are unlucky, aren't you?

Well, at least you're still standing on two feet that probably belong to you. You haven't been ashed, and if you aren't currently venting smoke like a lousy baker's chimney, you've found a mask or something almost as good.

You are one of the Hunted, and no matter the goodwill you fostered in life, you are now reviled by everyone and everything that once knew you. Most likely, you once hailed from the regions that skeptics today label "theocracies" despite them having a diversity of shapes and sizes. But what unites those disparate tribes, villages, or city-states is their outright rejection of social norms and customs pertaining to the Awakened as they exist in the wider world. You are monsters to them, to be killed in as just and thorough a manner possible. Worst of all is when your culture has legends of vengeful dead predating the first Awakened. Some people have always burned their dead, while others took to it specifically to combat the possibility of Waking. In either case, they often find that they have ecological crises of their own when so much ash stored in one place starts to make people's noses bleed and the laws of physics scream.

But they might not have chased you with fire. Maybe they came with chains, seeking to detain you in some small, mundane crypt until the Need renders you docile and still. Or they came bearing hooks and spikes, intent on nailing you to one of the aptly named "Groaning Pillars" which dot the prairies. Whatever the form of their cruelty, and whether it was motivated out of sadism or a genuine belief that this is what's right for you and your soul, you escaped them. Avoiding roads and clinging to the edges of badlands, scavenging on the refuse of living lands, you found your way. Working together with one of your rare fellows haunting those lands, you came to understand your new form through practice rather than tutelage. Or perhaps you competed with your kin, fought for resources, and stole the mask off of some crippled unfortunate while filling your decaying lungs with their smoky breath.

Now that you've found yourself a caravan, the foreboding wastes before you might seem almost like a leisurely walk for one so accustomed to a ruthless world.

You'll be proven wrong before the end, but for now you do what needs doing, and your grizzled determination inspires hope (and fear) in your companions.