Perhaps it’s his studious and scholarly nature: holding the world at long arms’ length, he observes more than he participates. Perhaps it’s simple humility: finding facts more important than his feelings, he shares few of these irrelevant emotions. Or perhaps it’s his...

Another night had passed before the wordmasheen.  Another halfmoon had passed since Aeg and Gutter’s departure. Insistent winds blew sand down broken roads, made the wooden walls groan around me, stuttered the tongues of every flame – and seemed to whip away every word, somewhere...

Seven days had passed since the Bazaar.  Tensions were still high; understanding was still low.  Aeg still slept, still murmured.  The Mutant Witch, hunted and haunted, had added strange things to the great circular daycounter – whorls of stones, precisely-placed eyes, a foul-smelling...

((Gently edited for grammar and punctuation and the like, these are the logs from the Barrelhead Bazaar of 5/6/2017.  In-character or out, I feel there’s little analysis I could provide that would be as gripping as the raw story.  All credit to Ned (Aborted Stickfigure,) Irk...

We crested a dune and found ourselves near the skeleton of some enormous ancient beast. Some distance from the skull, part of a weathered ribcage stuck up from the sands, canopied with crudely-stitched hides. Gutter pointed a gnarled greyish finger.  “That’s the place I saw that foul...

It was nearly a moon ago now when it happened.  The High Mesa is so far south of most squats, his cave so far up its face, his post so deep within, that perhaps it’s no wonder we didn’t hear.  But the cavern must have echoed with the noise. The scrape of wood on stone as his...

Knowledge comes in bits and pieces, if it ever comes at all.   I’ve come by this news all out of order — talking a couple nights ago with Pan ((Pandorah Ashdene)), who saw it all end, and the day afterward with Tsu ((Tsukiko Dreamscape)), who saw what came before.  As for what...

This all happened some time back now, on the 51st day of the Season of Shelter. I’ve been trying to keep it secret from untrustworthy folk, and trying to make sense of it all.  But, way things spread, they probably know already. I was wandering around the east side of the Stygian crater...

A curving beak.  Round glassy eyes.  A scarlet scalp.  These features usually describe a common critter known well to Wastelanders:  the turkey buzzard.  A simple-minded but patient scavenger bird valued for food and feather by many hunters.  Young and old alike know this bird is a...

No Pulp this week.  Only pulp happening here is the bloody masses I keep coughin’ up. Writing anyway.  Writing and drinking.  Takes my mind off the sick.  Can’t hardly keep focus to write, but it helps me anyway if nobody else.  Too sick n drunk to care. Don’t care if...

The Digger wrote up the basics of how all this started — the dead girl, the key, the stones, her weird tattoo, the Courier, and that old note from Madeye. None of us knew Madeye all too well; that time he was prancin’ about the Bazaar all crazylike was the first and only we’d...

Despite Shelter’s frigid chill, not everyone was frozen and still during the last few seasons.  A stranger’s death with a curious inheritance set off a complex chain of events.  Continuing into Revival, the rumors and stories turned into a buzz of activity humming across the...

Wastelanders generally don’t have the time to think about the past. We’re too busy trying not to die before nightfall.  And we surely don’t have the time to think of the past and present affairs of those distant settlements beyond our borders.  But everyone comes from...