Beta Playtest Primer
The following is offered as context for the beta playtest scenario. This event is canon, and what unfolds will be a permanent fixture in the main game.
For a broader picture of the world and the events that shaped it, please refer to the Timeline of Events. As always, use your best discretion in discerning what your character would and would not know.
The year is 1896. You have survived the initial collapse of the old world and secured a berth aboard one of the last known Crown commissioned liners departing Liverpool.
The HMS Perseverance, when you first saw her, was already a ghost of herself. Stripped bare by a dozen previous voyages, having carried the fortunate and influential toward whatever refuge remained in the Arctic territories.
Her manifest for this final crossing reflected the changing priorities of a dying Empire: lesser gentry spending what capital they had left to secure passage, soldiers conscripted to maintain order, and civilians selected by lottery or taken by press gang. The Crown had an obligation to its subjects, certainly. But a dying world had a way of reducing obligations to their most practical terms; the architects of humanity's survival needed manpower.
The journey lasted nearly a fortnight, with passengers confined to the inside of the ship due to the savage weather, and most everyone welcomed that shelter. For many aboard, it was also the first opportunity in some time to exchange news and word from beyond their dwindling circumstances in Great Britain:
What everyone aboard knew, was that they were heading toward something prepared. A settlement established to support what remained of the Empire's population through the foreseeable reality of unending winter. That was what the passage had been advertised as.
The official account of the “Why go North?” was rather simple: these regions had once been little more than frozen wilderness, but the frost had inverted their fortunes entirely. Where the ecosystems of the temperate world had collapsed beneath the cold, the Arctic had simply continued on. Its flora and fauna had spent millennia adapting to conditions that most of humanity was only beginning to reckon with. In its own bleak fashion, the North had become one of the last places on Earth where nature still functioned as intended.
Beyond that, certainty grew scarce. From early reports and official channels, the geothermal explanation, that the settlements were warmed by volcanic activity beneath the ice, was most readily accepted among the better informed of the upper decks. It was a sensible explanation, and one befitting an age of reason that many had already left for dead, buried beneath the snow back home.
The further below deck one ventured, the stranger the stories became. Some claimed it was no accident of geology at all, that the wealthy and the powerful had made their arrangements with the Devil himself, trading what remained of God's favour for the fires of Hell pumped up from below to warm their settlements. God had already abandoned the world to the frost, the reasoning went. Better the devil you know.
Others believed the frost was no catastrophe at all, but an older reckoning, that mankind had taken too much from the earth and that something ancient had finally stirred to collect what was owed. Even London had not escaped such whispers. For nearly everyone carried an anecdotal story from their months surviving the collapse, the cold and the desperation having drawn darker things from ordinary people. Things that did not entirely support the theory that humanity was the most dangerous creature in the equation.
Above deck, the crew had little time for speculation. They had a ship to keep alive in waters that had changed considerably for the worse. The watches grew longer. Their faces grew more drawn. The storms seemed endless. Until one morning, the engines stopped.
When the passengers emerged, they found the Perseverance locked in pack ice off an unfamiliar coast. Sometime during the night, the ship had been taken well off course, and with it the captain and the entire night watch. The crew who remained had simply woken to find their posts unattended, their watches never relieved. They were simply gone. The ice was already tightening around the hull, and there was no time to look for them. Every hand was needed to pull what they could before the Perseverance went under.
Now, those who remain of the Perseverance find themselves in a makeshift camp upon an unfamiliar shore, sheltered by a rocky overhang. An intact marine boiler was recovered before the haul gave way, where it may provide warmth once made operational. Among the survivors is a regiment of British Expeditionary reinforcements. A small mercy, for beyond the snow and ice, Prussian patrols have already been sighted crossing the frozen plains.
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