A stronghold for a New God for Locheil’s Invisible Hands setting. Don’t seek the nest of Economy itself, for it guides fittingly enough by an invisible hand, a spectre haunting America. PCs coming here know Atlanta is inimical to life, so they must be seeking something. A treasure, or a captive, or a way to buy out of a situation no one can solve but by mere fortune.
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| If you're R-G colorblind, there's a blue and orange version at the bottom of the article |
Although Atlanta is still a major metropolis, Economy’s shadow has ramped up atomization into outright hostility, making simple travel deadly for those not under its controlling influence. If you have a car, you can swerve through the wide dodecavial highways at double walking-speed. You can cover a hex every four hours on foot, two hexes every four hours driving on the highway, or three hexes on a Forklift.
Any meal you don’t kill yourself is sickeningly sweet and loaded with blissful poisons— 1d6 stress or 1d6 Economic influence, your pick. Coca-Cola has replaced water and comes with every meal.
Sticky Industry (red hexes) make up the churning heart of Atlanta. Encounters are 1d6+2 on the table. Everything is covered in syrupy slime and therefore swarming flies. Grim hi-vis workers buy premade sandwiches and tiptoe between rows of traffic on their way to work, eyes downcast.
Urban Decay (grey hexes) make up the dense neighborhoods and formerly vibrant communities. Encounters are 2d4 on the table. No one stops for you, every business is a parody of a way of life that died before anyone here was ever born. Old trucks rust. Children hawk cheaply-printed merch and gather to worship grindset idols.
Corn Fields (green hexes) are beautiful, identical rows of corn. Encounters are 1d8 on the table. Most of the HFC is imported from elsewhere in allegiance to a pact made with Flood, and what is grown here is fired like a missile to crash the food economies of other lands. Folk are nice and self-sacrificing, but easily crossed. They’ll offer a stranger a homecooked meal, then turn them out if the stranger has an allergy.
Points of Interest:
1. Recycling Center: Roll 1d4+3 for an immediate encounter. Here, cans are sent from all over the country and reworked, mingled into a leaden, plasticated alloy. It is a castle of horrible smells and soot covering everything.
2. Weeping Warehouse: Recycling tubs are sent here from area 1. They form a maze of soiled, sticky plastic, each dumpster-sized tub with a broken drain. Within, find rats, stultifying heat, a society of freedom-fighters, all mortally co-opted by Brands. Use your favorite dungeon, but make everything sticky and slimy.
3. Headquarters: The market has proceeded past the need for anyone here to do anything, so they focus on intense social fames and aggressive emails. Meet Bradley Ford, current CEO. See the Shareholders, in their robes of red and black. Read unabashed vitriol for Pepsi on the company slack, taped executions of their salespeople, and AI-generated cartoons of Mountain Dew being stomped out. Posting on the Slack or influencing a Shareholder can dramatically shift encounters around, bogging down a hex in mega-sized opposition or clearing the way for the party.
4. BigThinkz: data campus that downloads all the data from every Freestyle Machine in the country. Poindexters with cubicles full of branded merch crunch the numbers analogue as a crude defense against Opus, designing new flavors like Sprite Gunmetal, Coke Romani Rose Zero, or Jared Leto Melo Yelo. Such data is a treasure in itself. Soda Hell keeps the freestyle machines stocked nationwide, despite it all. The coke truck, piloted by a civil war era surgeon or perhaps a humanoid polar bear, is probably a welcome sight to a benighted American town as long as they have a McDonalds still running and they consent to turn over their Taco Bell employees to the whip and rod.
5. Monster HQ: like Zeus in the belly of Kronos. Disdainfully going about, making base commands. As an insurance policy, they keep a small force of Tank Imagos, which either patrol the neighborhood for excuses to fire or guard the discontinued products like the original Monster Moscow Mule, Assault, Ultra Zero Pygmalion, or Jailbait. Coke headquarters doesn’t like the presence of armor against them, but can’t risk lowering the profit margin by alienating the Monsters. Bottoms up, and the devil laughs.
6. Museum of Americana: Contains, enveloped in shrouds and locked within a case, the original Secret Recipe. Immensely valuable, and if ever made public would cause a public-domain wound in Economy itself, venomous far beyond the mere fiscal cost.
7. North Pole: Kept frigid by languid rivers of coolant and freezer-scented fans. A studio. A resort. A prison. Everything is uncanny, an AI-generated hallucination that tends to shift and sexify. Beyond the public areas, guarded by a dozen elfin False Ones, is Santa Claus. Brought to life by the Economy’s power in order to harness good-feeling and industry, the scientists who manage him learned that they couldn’t make a truly effective Santa directly invested by Economy, and so they carefully manipulate and control his life, bending him always to more and more work, with his only respite an ice-cold Coca-Cola. If freed and shown the truth (risky but possible— once out of the North Pole’s artifice he has impeccable judgement of character), he will be grateful to his rescuers, granting each a wish. Sensing at last that he is a creation with finite abilities once separated from his corporate role, the wishes all have the buzzkill rules they have in D&D, like a maximum budget or the mere replication of other spells. Once this final reservoir of power is expended, Santa fades away, curing 20% influence for any afflicted characters who helped him.
8. Community Outreach: well-appointed soup kitchen, with earnest-seeming volunteers from nearby distribution centers, each with a ring of light reflected in their eyes. Checking labels or testing reveals that even the “home-cooked” food here is prepared with the blissful poisons.
9. Barq’s Farm. Home to the ancient Edmond Barq and his new wife (a new one every year). A sticky, sweet-smelling Utnapishtim. If you drink his root beer concoction, he’ll let you stay the night so long as you help clear up after dinner and listen to his hateful, wistful, terrorful rants. Food here confers atavistic influence, not economic, and he’ll lend his Civil War-era armory to those at least 35% atavistic.
Encounters (1d6+2 in Sticky Industrial, 1d8 in Corn Fields, 2d4 in Urban Decay)
1. Blue Team Paladin (Stats as master thief but never has other monsters accompanying it. Sent by Economy to destroy Economy, which will strengthen Economy in the long run because competition is key. Nominally serves Coke’s competitor, driven into a disparate web of violent cells. Incognito.)
2. 3d6! False Ones (stats as zombie. Product placement simulacra, intent on consuming all those who are not influenced fully by Economy. For each round of droning ad copy you are subjected to, gain 1% economic influence.)
3. Advertisement Storm, visible even when you close your eyes. Save vs 1d6 stress and 1d6 economic influence. Can be skipped after five seconds, but at 50% Economic influence, why would you want to?
4. 2d4 Proles (stats as dwarves. Everyday folks sadly overtaken by Economy, territorial and insecure against those still independent.)
5. Trucker (stats as death knight, rig as clumsy purple wurm, 50% chance of having a squire-helper. 50% chance the trailer is full of product, otherwise specie and salvage equal to a dragon’s hoard).
6. 1d4 Syrup Slimes
7. 1d4 Forklifts (stats as rhinos that can’t buck a rider, max capacity 5950 pounds at ground level and 5450 at 40’ max height, must drink from a charger one hour of every 12-hour workday of heavy use. Affords overland speed as a riding horse)
8. Grinder (stats as flightless wyvern. A CEO hustler type, blessed with the form of a massive wrought-iron wheel to better crush others beneath him)
d6 Currencies
1. Smartwater, $100 an ounce.
2. Discontinued flavors— New Coke Babylon, Melon Sprite, Fanta Weinnacht, Tab, and such.
3. Mexican Coke. Desired by all Economized people far beyond its value to others.
4. Memorabilia, universally enjoyed by those outside Atlanta as classic and retro. Branded slip holsters, bottles with your name or death date printed on them, exc.
5. A payoff— cause enough trouble and the powers that be aren’t above a bribe to take it elsewhere, as long as you haven’t hurt a Shareholder.
6. Workahol, technically a flavor of Full Throttle. One dose can so equivalent unskilled labor to a single workday.
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| Alt-color version. Blue is sticky industrial, grey is urban decay, orange is corn fields. |
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