The Unexplored Places

People always supposed it might be possible, that somebody lived out in the Ruin. In fact, I reckon most people assumed it had to be true. As dangerous and downright undesirable as it seemed, we'd made a home of Antarras out of a desire to find freedom and a chance at a better life, so why not the Ruin too? But the question was never taken all that seriously. Surely, anybody who chose to live out...

CONTENT WARNINGS: description of body horror (1:10:34-1:13:25) The Confessors, of course, were more than just priests. Having received the word of God directly from the source on their pilgrimages, it wasn't uncommon to hear the faithful say that the Confessors held onto some small fraction of His omniscient revelation. If you were lucky enough to have a Confessor located in your home parish, you...

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that there is no limit to what the Company would do to keep its grip on Antarras tight, but that doesn't mean the average person really understands the depths of the Company's machinations. What's worse, where it used to be the case that one could tell a Company member a mile away, from their dress, their deportment, or their demeanor, the decision makers...

CONTENT WARNINGS: discussion of auditory hallucinations   I heard a story, once, from one of the original settlers, out in Swallow's Pass, about the first time she saw a ghost in the Ruin. The ghost of her father, dressed in his work clothes, standing in the distance, in the fog, and calling her name. She said it felt as real as anything she'd ever seen, chilled her to the bone, and while she'd ne...

CONTENT WARNINGS: discussion of auditory hallucinations   What is a ghost, anyway? It's a question the people of Antarras have had to ask more than once. Leaving aside the obvious, here, there's more to consider than one might think there'd be. Is a ghost a demon? A spirit? Is it something else? Problem is, on a planet that plays tricks on the mind, it isn't just a question of "how real are the gh...

CONTENT WARNINGS : drug use [1:01:42-1:03:22], brief depictions of body horror [1:28:18-1:34-13] People found all sorts of ways to cope with the uncertainty that came coupled with living somewhere as dangerous as the frontier. Some turned to drink, to gambling, to all the vices known to mankind, as could be expected. Some to violence, to stupor, to fantasy. Some, of course, turned to God and all h...

CONTENT WARNINGS : missing child, discussion of parental death and grief, blinding [48:30] If you take the word of the people who've made their names in Ruin's Gate—and usually, dear reader, I am just wise enough to remember to do that—then the thing you most need to survive out here isn't luck, or money, or knowing the right people. It's something else altogether. Take, for instance, a game of Co...

CONTENT WARNINGS: missing child, discussion of parental death and grief If nothing else, there's something to be said for the collective spirit of the frontier. On Earth, as those who come to Antarras tell it, it's every man for themself—and maybe that's part of the problem. But there's no surviving a place like the Ruin on your own, and we've got the graves of those who've tried to prove it. Inst...

Surprisingly little is known about the specific effects of unrefined hellstone, all things considered. It is, after all, the key to life on Antarras, the little red miracle that put our humble planet on the map. But no miracle is complete without its side effects, and though the miners swiftly got to work developing their specter suits to keep them safe from the obvious visible mutations prolonged...

CONTENT WARNINGS : brief description of body horror [24:59-25:06, 55:03-55:09] "History" and "legend" are words that don't have a lot of meaning in a place like Antarras. The places where their definitions are distinct have a nasty tendency to blur. When history's as short as a generation or two, and fact is often stranger than fiction, it can be hard to tell the difference between the stories tha...

CONTENT WARNINGS: brief description of body horror [12:27-12:39] Small towns on Antarres have a tendency to stay small—at least, until they don't. The second a small town starts to grow, the process takes on a character I'd be tempted to call exponential: the moment people start to sense opportunity somewhere new, they have a tendency to go. So towns get bigger, better, and the more they do, the m...

CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (31:21-31:55, 45:34-46:06, 56:55-56:57, 1:01:37-1:02:06, 1:03:46-1:04:17), graphic violence (50:39-51:08, 1:03:46-1:04:17), discussion of mercy killing (55:25-56:57) (13)And lo! the Angel said unto him, you Shall be henceforth known as Genesis, and you Shall be My Prophet, and I Shall show you a Great and Beautiful Promise. (14)And the Stone before his eyes did part a...

CONTENT WARNINGS : detailed description of body horror [1:01:08-1:01:52, 1:18:34-1:21:13, 1:26:34-1:26:50] Faith has been important to the people of Antarres since they first set foot on the rocky red earth of their new home. Faith of all kinds—first, the abstract kind of faith, faith that they had what it took to survive the harsh environment of this new planet, that they would find something her...

CONTENT WARNINGS: description of body horror [29:30-29:55] Now the problem the specters faced, now that they'd found a use for the strange red stones they'd dug up out the earth on Antarres, was figuring out how to transport it. Raw hellstone, turns out, wasn't just injurious to man, but mighty unreliable when it came to traveling far distances. It had a tendency, to put it mildly, of taking off t...

After the Ostenberg Agreement was signed, there was still the unsettled question of under whose purview the refining and transport of hellstone would fall. The Miner's Guild thought it ought to be their job, given that they were the ones responsible for handling the raw material; the Company thought that, seeing as how no hellstone was getting off the planet without their help, it should fall to t...

CONTENT WARNINGS: discussion of drugs (opiates, inhaled) [0:09:30-00:10:40] In the years that would follow First Landing, when wave after wave of settlers made their way to Antarras at the new-found promise of work and wealth that came with the first few hellstone shipments, some of the details were lost. Before the Company, no one cared all that much about keeping records, and no one looked all t...

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CONTENT WARNINGS: description of body horror [throughout], detailed description of body horror [0:09:55-0:10:15, 0:56:25-0:58:05, 1:02:55-1:04:23], discussion of debilitating injury, discussion and depiction of drug use (inhaled, opiate) [1:17:20-1:19:00] It may seem surprising, how commonplace the demons of Antarras became, to the people who decided to make it their home. Incomprehensible beings...

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CONTENT WARNINGS:  earthquakes, discussion of reactions to natural disaster [0:50:42-0:52:46], detailed description of body horror [1:29:12-end] More than anything, what the Gate had going for it by the end was just that: the gate, a constructed visualization of what was, ultimately, a rather ephemeral boundary between "safety" and "danger," the kind of danger the people who built that gate knew o...

CONTENT WARNINGS:  brief discussion of drugs (opiates, inhaled) [0:55:02-0:55:58], brief description of body horror [1:10:09-1:10:22] Civilization has a habit of springing up in the unlikeliest of places, and Ruin's Gate is no exception to that. Like flowers growing up through cracks in the concrete back on Earth, as the poets say, life sure does find a way. Against the harshest of wastelands, peo...

Now, there are all sorts of reasons people took to calling it the Ruin. Folk etymologies vary from "ruined land" to "land that will ruin you" to everything in between. An open wound cut across the surface of Antarras, and hellstone pouring out of it like blood. The frontier, the uncivilized space between towns, is dangerous on Antarras, teeming with beasts and outlaws and all manner of troubles. B...

Once upon a time I might have poetically chosen to call Ruin's Gate a "sleepy little town." Hardly a town at all, in fact: a pilgrimage site and a few places for the specters to eat and drink and stay on their way to and from the hellstone mines. Not the sort of place you'd want to raise a family, and not the sort of place you'd be eager to write home about if you were struck with the misfortune o...

Join us this week for character and posse creation for Ruin's Gate, in A Fistful of Darkness by Stefan Struck , a hack of Blades in the Dark by John Harper .    Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/unexploredcast Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/unexploredcast Follow us on Tumblr: https://unexploredcast.tumblr.com/ Art by Ben Prevas Music by Andrew: https://andrewperricone.bandc...