Thursday 3 March 2016

Maple Leaf Muties

For a long time, Sudbury was a joke. And by joke I mean industrial hellscape John Blanche would be proud of. Nickle mining, refineries, underground science experiments; they took their toll. Things were bad enough that NASA tested their rovers there. You know, the unmanned vehicles that explore airless desert worlds constantly bombarded by radiation?

Yeah. NASA thought Sudbury was a good simulation of that.

Things have improved in the last decade or so. But of course, the efforts to fix things never would have happened in Dark Future, and the situation would have been much worse to start with.

So let's go mess up Sudbury (and as a bonus, Windsor) in the name of Dark Future!

Sudbury
Throughout the economic ascendancy Canada enjoyed in the 1960s and into the '70s, Sudbury was a major player. The mining, metals, and technology industries saw runaway growth, creating a huge boom. But when the environment started to turn, and the economy fell out from under Canada, Ontario begin to pay the cost of its progress.

The Sudbury region had become a polluted wasteland, one of the worst in North America. Rampant mining had torn the landscape apart for miles around the city, and the byproducts of advanced and unchecked metallurgy lay in massive slag heaps. Underground, a less obvious but more sinister contamination had occurred.

Where once there had been the slow, steady march of progress, the tunnels and caverns below Sudbury had become home to a headlong race into the future, in the name of science and wealth. Corporations were free to pursue any wild aim, without the prying eyes of regulation and government oversight. Rivers of toxic waste, stockpiles of re-engineered genes, chemical weapons, and other, more esoteric developments were all left when Sudbury was abandoned by corporations seeking for fertile waters. With no one left to mind them, these abandoned laboratories soon fell prey to marauders, and gave up their corrupting secrets.

Today, Sudbury stands as an undesirable affliction on Canada. Lord Protector Peart has no interest in it, nor does Ottawa, or even the Americans. Even renegades steer clear of its mutant-occupied streets.

Windsor
Another former industrial capital, Windsor was devastated by Upper Canada's only real war. When Protectorate and American forces clashed over the city, it was gain control of the industrial capacity there, or to at least deny it to the enemy. This meant that what could not be held, or removed to a safe site, was destroyed, and in the end, Windsor-Detroit was left undesirable to both countries.

Without much foreign interest, Windsor has become a safe haven for renegades and marauders of all types. Or, at least a haven, if not a safe one, since there is one faction still interested in the city.

Wandering through Windsor's broken streets and crumbling buildings are the leftover robotic workers of the '60s and '70s. Largely ignored during the war due to their ease of replacement, the industrial models were abandoned along with the city they served.

Now, having operated years beyond their capacity and having gone without instruction for just as long, the robots have turned, in a word, feral.

Without instruction and without proper human maintenance, the robots left in Windsor were forced to fend for themselves - something which they should have been incapable of doing. Somehow, though, the robots have survived, repairing themselves from scrap and, occasionally, parts of unfortunate humans. There is no real organization to them, although loose groups do exist. Mostly independent, robots will work together if they wind up together, and sometimes remain in that group, at least for a while.



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I'm not a huge fan of the robots in the setting, honestly. I like a more Mad Max setting: things are bad and tough, but demons and robots don't roam the radioactive wasteland. But I do like the outright insanity and ridiculousness of the setting, so instead of rewriting and ignoring that stuff, I try to mostly gloss over it, and use it sparingly. Besides! This is Canada. Whose to say things are the same as they are down south?

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