Rust Belt Dev Log 01.02.25

So I got away from a lot of fantasy stuff when I was younger, Terry Pratchett and Dungeon Crawl Classics got me back into it. Both turned popular fantasy on it's head. A punk rock way of looking at the tropes of the genre and our own culture.

I had heard talk of Xcrawl, it took a while me me to get the actual idea of the setting. You can play it up to the excesses of the celebrity lifestyles and not have the characters be that self aware or you can run with the subversive ideas of what lies in wait to be satirized.

I hearken back to an ancient TSR game Gamma World and the Monty Hall Mentality of some of the wacky shit the Ancients had. And Xcrawl being a game show and blood sport I gradually was catching on to something cool.

Two years ago at Con on the Cob 2023 Brendan LaSalle was running an adventure for the new Xcrawl Classics and I had to get in on that. That's when you get the feel for a setting, when you're sitting at a table with a person who created the setting.

I was waiting for the rules to get done the Kickstarter (was a paycheck late for that) so I pre-ordered when the come was closer. I have friends with dark senses of humor and who like movies about gladiators. Plus keeping some things from DCC like the fuck you up disfigurations of miscasting a spell and turning into some evil space wizard villain from a galaxy down the street.

I was thinking about the abandoned cities here in the US and the old USSR. The rust belt cities and the cold war secret or war effort industrial towns over there. You get the 80s feel for cyberpunk and a bit of Xcrawl's earlier version. Its cool and not a bad thing.

I started thinking about the world changing between the two versions. The real world changed some people and places were winners and some were losers. In a place like the North American Empire what would happen if the world became a more global place? hard working third tier cities like Gary, Ind; Ashtabula, Ohio; and other rust belt cities would mostly be left to fend on their own. You're not really in a place to rebel but not quiet a lot of damned things either. You're city is basically forgotten by the nobles because all their industries left for a cheaper labor market. They cut their noses off to spite their faces.

The bread and circuses mentality, keep the rabble occupied with cheap entertainment was cheap for the nobles. Illegal and unsanctioned Xcrawl games sponsored by organized crime at first and later when things were in needing of cleaning up the nobles would regulate the games like on the outside.

The abandoned cities weren't true gulags but where was anyone going to go? Even by car the nearest cities were an hour drive away in open country patrolled by a territorial dragon. For the noble families ruling a city the Games allowed the masses to release their aggression towards other tribal factions of working class plebes instead of at the nobles and the emperor.

The folks would be in hard times, the worst of being poor in our society with no real police and emergency services. Since the empire doesn't have any poverty of course information coming out of the now poverty stricken ghetto/gulag was cut off. the beaches of Ashtabula were visited in the Gilded Age by the Nobles of Industry and working class plebes alike. For the commoners it was easy to write these cities out of memory, the Ministry of Information kept tight tabs on any real secrets. They do manipulate conspiracy theories to keep the plebes away from real issues of corruption. Why go after a regional governor for taking bribes when UFOs and Bigfoot are going to breed with your wife and daughters?

Most nobles don't care about the poor cities, they would rather the dragons swallow the population up so the taxes and other burdens would go away.

These cities would turn into slums, exploitative service industries and manufacturing would move in providing almost enough money to break even for the nobles.

Of course there has to be some sort of moral scourge and outrage. Spark, an alchemy drug/crystal that gives a whole body and mind orgasm for a few hours at a time. It was the cool drug to trip out to alone or with some friends. The cloudy translucent salt crystals are roughly the size of a wooden or mechanical pencil. in length and thickness. When snapped in half a purple glow fills the crystal and the fragmented salt fall from the crack like dark purple electrical sparks.

No one in the underworld seems to know anyone that makes it. The means to make Purple Spark and the counterfeit Crimson Spark are the myths of El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth rolled into one. The drug is all over but it can't be analyzed.

Spark was only a minor issue and usually just a reason for the remaining police forces to round up the usual suspects whenever there was dissident or other criminal activity. Somehow someone managed to make a look a like drug for Spark. When you snapped the Crimson Spark the sparks were a violent bloody purple red. Instead of an all over orgasm you were greeted with the pain of transforming into something else and being filled with rage.

Now there were military contractors, several police forces, gangsters and corporate sponsors of Xcrawl leagues who want to get their hands on crimson spark for the games and more militaristic uses.

This is just a little taste of what will be coming out over the first and hopefully more volumes of Rust Belt Zine.

JPK 01.01.25