THREAD: Round Robin 1

  USER: NullSigil

  Yo Z3ke,

  Let me be the first to congratulate you on winning the RNG lottery. I’ve been chosen as your first primary advisor.

  I know, I know. You’re overwhelmed with joy. You’re probably wiping away a single tear right now and saying to yourself finally, someone worth giving me advice. Good. That’s the right energy. Hold onto it. Channel it. Let it nourish you.

  I’ve been following this fic about your misadventures since the beginning, and I’ve gotta say that I’ve got a good feeling about it. This whole thing is starting to get legs and I’m here to make sure that you don’t trip over them. You’re gonna do so well with my advice that, when your next primary advisor shows up, you’re gonna look back at my time and think, “Dayum…they just don’t make mentors like they used to.”

  I’m not saying that I’m irreplaceable. But I’m also not not saying it.

  So let’s address the most obvious issue staring you in your face right now: you’ve got no usable skills. But honestly? That doesn’t matter.

  So you almost shot your own foot off at a gun range. Who cares? Plenty of heroes have had shaky beginnings. You can always head out into the desert where there’s nobody around and practice your ass off until you’re no longer a danger to yourself and others.

  You tripped all over yourself while swinging a sword? Again, who the hell cares? Why even bother with a sword in this day and age? Poking people with sharp objects is old fashioned and there are tons of better options for you to defend yourself with.

  Magic is confusing as hell and when you tried to learn it your brain folded in on itself like a dying star? That just means you leave the more scholarly aspects of this world to the nerds. You’re too cool to be stuck inside all day reading books. You’re not an indoor person. You’re an adventurer.

  Yes, you lack a bunch of skills that the average person would take for granted. But all that means is that you’ve got a ton of room for growth. Plus, I know of at least fifty ways around every problem that you’ve run into so far. There are skill boosters, enhancement rituals, and ancient relics that basically cram knowledge into your skull.

  I’m not promising that you’re gonna become an archmage by next Tuesday or that you can go John Wick on a bunch of bandits, but I promise you that things aren’t as bad as you might think. So don’t worry about being shit with your skills right now, there are ways around that.

  Instead, let’s talk about the best thing you’ve got going for you right now. Your greatest strength isn’t gonna be with weapons or tinkering or magic or skills or anything like that. Your greatest strength is this forum. The greatest boon you’ve got going forward is us.

  You’ve got a direct line to a swarm of people who live, breath, and occasionally argue violently about Fracture-verse lore. You hit a wall? We’ll help you tunnel under it. You get lost? We’ll draw you the most accurate map anyone’s ever seen. You’ve got questions? We’ll give you ten answers and thirteen paths and spreadsheets filled with statistics and a plethora of options. That’s what’s going to keep you alive from now on.

  Now, before everyone else on this forum floods this thread with a shopping list of exotic classes and rare loot and ten-step min-max builds, let’s zoom out a bit and get you oriented in the world.

  Up until now you’ve been sprinting from disaster to disaster, doing your best to survive. That’s fine. That’s okay. That’s been enough for you so far. You haven’t screwed up majorly. You’ve been trying to keep your head above water while the universe keeps trying to shove your face in a puddle. And I commend your ability to survive so far.

  But now you’ve got some breathing room and it’s time you use it. Learn about where you are and where you can go from here.

  Let me just say that, if you ever decide to publish your fanfic in the future, you’re gonna need to split up my advice into several different chapters. I’m about to lore dump all over you, and your audience isn’t gonna want that. So, you should have a scene where you’re reading this forum and then someone tries to mug you or something, then you valiantly fight them off and then return to this advice.

  Your audience gets to see a fight, then they get some more lore, and it breaks up the monotony of me just rambling.

  [insert gratuitous violence scene here]

  Now that’s over, let’s get started.

  You are currently in The MIZ. The Modular Industrial Zone. You know this. You walked around yesterday and got a feel for the place. But what you probably don’t know is that The MIZ is next to one of the most notorious regions in the entire Fracture-verse: the Deadlands.

  Well, I guess you do know that The MIZ is next to the Deadlands. But you didn’t know that it’s a notorious region.

  Why is the Deadlands a notorious region I hear you ask.

  Picture a dieselpunk apocalyptic setting that’s stitched together from a mixture of scorched cities, collapsed highways, rusted out factories, cults that worship old machines, and creatures that look like they’ve just crawled out of a fever dream.

  Since you’re LARPing as someone who’s never played the games before, I’ll explain that the Deadlands appeared in two of the Fracture-verse titles: Frontiers and Syndicate’s Wake.

  Frontiers was the first appearance of the Deadlands. The game was peak survival RPG. Think Fallout but grittier, weirder, and way more obsessed with rust and aliens and technological horrors. Instead of an apocalypse with 1950s atom-punk vibes, Frontiers played around with 1980s industrial decay mixed with crime, cults, and broken machinery that merged with flesh.

  What you’ve got to understand is that every game in the Fracture-verse begins the same way: humanity is shattered. The apocalypse (or Fracture) has already happened. Civilization is toast and humanity is scattered and everything is broken. Players drop into the rubble of the world and try to claw their way into something that resembles some kind of life. That’s the gameplay loop for almost every Fracture-verse game.

  My favorite thing to do when a new game comes out (or…came out) was figuring out exactly how and why the apocalypse happened in that setting.

  In Frontiers, the game that made the Deadlands region infamous, the apocalypse wasn’t caused by a war. The prevailing theory is that something extra-planetary slammed into the Deadlands and twisted the entire region beyond recognition. Technology went feral, living organisms got rewritten, and entire ecosystems were wiped out and melted down and fused back together with a mixture of technology and weird ass energy.

  So yea…you’ve found yourself in one of the most dangerous biomes in the Fracture-verse. Congrats about that. Here’s what you’re gonna need to watch out for:

  Black Storms

  Lightning packed tempests that roll their way through the Deadlands, frying tech, warping organic tissue, poisoning the ground, and generally ruining everyone’s day. You haven’t run across one yet, which means that you’re incredibly lucky. Unfortunately for you, that luck isn’t gonna last.

  Ruins and Fossilized Cities

  Scattered across the Deadlands are the remains of cities that didn’t survive the Fracture. Imagine massive skeletal ruins that are filled with buried industrial buildings, underground transportation networks, abandoned factories, and a shit ton of danger. The good thing about all these ruins is that they’re filled with loot. And that loot includes things you’re gonna want like rare tech and abandoned weapons. The bad thing about all these ruins is that they’re filled with loot. That means they’re magnets for scavengers and tech cults. If you go digging through the ruins, you will run into people who want to kill you and take everything that you own.

  Hybridized Wildlife

  You wandered around the city yesterday and you saw buildings and people and trains and technology and libraries and you’re probably thinking to yourself “this isn’t too much different from Earth.” You’re gonna need to stop that. Wrap your head around the idea that this isn’t Earth. Not even close. When the Fracture tore through the Deadlands, it scrambled every living thing and turned them weird. You’re going to run into boar-like creatures that are the size of small cars, birds that imitate the crying of lost children just to lure you into collapsed buildings, and trees that bleed oil and set up traps, hoping to burn you alive and turn you into fertilizer to boost their growth. That’s not counting all the scavengers, cultists, drifters, and every other nightmare that has decided to call the Deadlands home.

  The MIZ

  One of the final dangers is The MIZ itself. Before everything in the world went to shit, The MIZ was a massive industrial corridor. It had ports, mega-factories, refineries, and all the other things that a thriving industrial city needs. When the Fracture hit and the apocalypse started, The MIZ took the brunt of the impact. It became ground zero for the collapse.

  But it survived. Kinda.

  By the time that Syndicate’s Wake picks up a few decades later (this sentence is incredibly contentious and I doubt people are going to let it go. Time in the Fracture-verse is something that is hotly debated) The MIZ had turned into a vertical scrapyard-city. Picture old-world skyscrapers kept intact with a bunch of scaffolding and jury-rigged walkways. All of The MIZ is built on top of the corpse of the old world. Underneath all that new construction is what remains from before the Fracture. You’ve got flooded buildings, fossilized factories, abandoned research labs, and a bunch of other spots that would be the perfect setting for a horror video game.

  No single government controls The MIZ. I mean…technically there’s a mayor and a city council, but they’ve got no power or authority. Instead, the city is a complex web of factions that compete against one another, each running their own turf and following their own rules and having their own problems.

  Here’s who you’re going to be rubbing shoulders with:

  Guilds and Unions

  Descendents of old-world labor syndicates. These guys mostly work logistics in the city, dealing with reclamation jobs and bulk salvage operations. They’ve got big machines, big crews, and big attitudes. You probably won’t be able to become a member of a guild or a union, but they’re more than happy to hire freelancers. If you want legit, on-the-books work, they’re your best bet. As long as you don’t mind questionable safety conditions and pay that may or may not be on time.

  Scavenger Crews

  Think of these guys as various flavors of organized desperation. Some of the crews are families, some are ex-soldiers, some are ex-scientists, and some are just groups of people who’ve decided that dying alone really sucks so why not die together? These guys venture into hot zones looking for relics, lost tech, and sellable scraps. Joining a good crew is great. They offer protection and guidance and better odds of survival. The trick is avoiding the bad crews who will smile at you, welcome you with open arms, walk you into a trap and then loot all your shit before your body is cold.

  Cults and Zealots

  Avoid these guys like the plague. Especially since they often have the plague. Religion has become a major part of life in The MIZ and most cults are bad news. Some worship machines and believe that they’re the ultimate form of divinity. Some treat ancient tech like divine artifacts. Some think that the Fracture was judgement passed down from on high. The crazy on these guys varies and you really don’t want to get any of it on you. But, they do offer some benefits if you work with them. Cults pay very well for “offerings” to their church. These come in the form of relics, old tech, or anything with a bit of history attached to it. The downside to these guys is that…they’re cultists. That should be enough to warn you away from them.

  Politicos

  The MIZ is filled with small-time warlords. They’ve carved out chunks of the city and run them like petty kingdoms. You’ve got militia groups, black market syndicates, neighborhood watch with rocket launchers, and a ton of randos who just want to control their piece of the pie. My advice is that you should stay away from these guys, but you can work for them pretty easily. They’re always looking to buy more muscle, but that would end with you getting caught in a turf war involving tons of explosives.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Drifters and Survivors

  Basically everyone else in the city. These are the people who have skills ranging from “barely functional” to “knows how to swing a pipe real hard.” You fall into this group of people. Congrats.

  Now that you’ve got a vague idea of what is waiting for you in The MIZ and the Deadlands, you’re probably asking yourself, “uh…how do I survive this hell hole?”

  There are a couple options available to you. The problem is that none of those options is very safe, but hey…neither is breathing the air in The MIZ and you’ve been doing that for a couple days now.

  Option 1: Spelunking the Under-MIZ

  This is where you venture beneath the streets of the MIZ into the layers of the city that got swallowed up by the apocalypse. Picture forgotten labs and collapsed offices and rusted-out factories and entire neighborhoods that have been left to rot. The Under-MIZ is filled with old tech and sealed archives and who knows what else. The deeper into the old city you go, the older and more valuable everything becomes.

  The Good: ancient tech, prototype weapons, pre-Fracture artifacts, and a bunch of other relics that would be worth enough credits to change your life.

  The Bad: deadly traps, rival spelunkers, floors that drop out from under you, automated defenses and creatures that decided the old world makes a nice den.

  If you decide to go with Option 1, you’re gonna need to put together a crew, pack light, keep quiet, and assume that everything is out to kill you.

  Option 2: The Rift Scar

  The Rift Scar is a miles-long trench that is carved into the Deadlands. It’s supposedly the area where “the aliens punched through” and the Fracture started. The current theory of the Fracture that hit the Deadlands is that aliens fell to earth and caused everything to break. Unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot of canon that entirely supports this theory. Nobody is sure what happened at The Rift Scar. Maybe it was aliens. Maybe it was ground zero for a weird magical plague. Maybe it was a god that was pissed off and the Rift Scar is the aftermath of that. Nobody really knows, everybody has an opinion, and none of those opinions are very comforting.

  The Rift Scar is a few days' ride outside of The MIZ and it’s surrounded by scattered outposts filled with scavengers, cultists, outcasts, drifters, exiles, and people who’ve given up pretending that they’re sane. Each outpost has its own rules. Some of them will deal fairly with outsiders, and others are filled with degenerates who want to wear your skin.

  The Good: the rewards out in the Rift Scar are huge. “Alien” relics, pre-Fracture tech, and artifacts that break the rules of physics are some of the rewards for going out there.

  The Bad: Storms, monsters, and people who will eat you before/after they rob you.

  Personally? I’d keep away from the Rift Scar until you’re a bit stronger and more kitted out. There are much safer areas for you to grind and build up a nest egg.

  Option 3: The Cathedrals of Ash.

  I know that I have this as Option 3, but this is not an option. Let me be as clear as humanly possible: DO NOT GO TO THE CATHEDRALS OF ASH.

  If you’re wandering through the Deadlands and you spot a giant building rising up out of the desert like a broken tooth, turn the fuck around. Immediately. It’s a Cathedral of Ash.

  I know you’re sitting there in the library right now, saying to yourself but Null, what is a Cathedral of Ash? Stop it. Don’t think about them. Just get it into your head that you should never go near one. That’s all you need to know about them.

  BUT, since I know a bunch of other posters will answer that question and some might suggest you go and find out for yourself, I’ll give you a bit of info about them.

  Back before the Fracture hit, Cathedrals of Ash weren’t spooky doomsday monuments. They were practical things, like military blacksites or government facilities or high-security research labs. They were closed-off, classified, and heavily guarded. Then the world broke and these buildings turned into something…more.

  They are fortresses. Shrines. Strongholds. Warcamps. They are the endgame content for Frontiers. Each of the Cathedrals is owned and operated by cults, raider-kings, and warbands.

  You know how there are a lot of “bandits” in video games? They’re often used as nameless NPCs who fill out the world and give the player something to kill. Think the raiders in Fallout, Raffen in Cyberpunk, or goombas in any Mario game. If you ever played Skyrim, you no doubt were running around in the endgame with a full suit of dragonscale armor, carrying several legendary weapons, and loaded down with a truly enormous amount of health pots. Then some dumbass raider comes wandering up to you and threatens you. All he’s got is a rusty iron sword and shit leather armor.

  Yea…the occupants of the Cathedrals aren’t those type of raiders.

  They are organized. They’re vicious. They are way too committed to their cause. Each Cathedral is a fortress for the bandits and cults that use it as a base/forge/holy ground. If you could take over a Cathedral, you’d be able to strike it rich from all the loot. They’re all filled to the brim with pre-Fracture gear and tech and relics. And that’s the trap. The loot is real, but so is the truly massive army guarding it. Do NOT attack a Cathedral unless you’ve got a deathwish and/or a tank. Preferably both.

  Most of the Cathedrals are owned by a group called the Black Teeth. They’re the closest thing that the Deadlands has to a nation. But instead of democracy and civic participation, they’re more an unstoppable rolling apocalypse. Imagine Mad Max warbands fused with long-haul truckers, and then give them control over a bunch of abandoned military installations. Yea…that’s the Black Teeth.

  The problem with them is that they don’t just sit back and relax in their Cathedrals. They move. They weld together tankers, haulers, cargo trucks, fuel-rigs, 18-wheelers - basically anything with wheels and an engine - and turn all that into mobile fortresses. Picture a tidal wave of metal, stretching for miles and roaring through the desert. That’s a Black Teeth convoy.

  The convoys stretch deep. People are born on the convoy, raised on the convoy, trained on the convoy, and die on the convoy. It’s one endless migration through the Deadlands and every Black Teeth is part of the same ever-moving beast. When they roll into a region, they chew it down to the bones. Settlements vanish. The land is strip-mined. Entire zones of the Deadlands become barren scars when a convoy passes through. And when they finally leave, there’s nothing left but smoke and death.

  One of the worst things about the Black Teeth is that they take contracts. There are several factions in The MIZ who cut deals with the Black Teeth. They do dangerous salvage runs, military escorts, and raids that nobody else is stupid enough to attempt. In return, the Teeth get paid in weapons, armor, vehicles, and experimental tech. In short, they get everything they need to become even harder to stop the next time they roll through.

  As bad as the Black Teeth are, they aren’t why you should stay away from the Cathedrals of Ash. The Cathedrals that aren’t controlled by the Black Teeth are controlled by a group called the Shard Choir. They are…a lot.

  The Shard Choir is a mutation cult that camps out along the edge of the Rift Scar. They’re zealots who worship the Scar and everything about it. They see the warped creatures and unstable weather and strange phenomena of the Scar as sacred signs and divine revelations.

  To get closer to “the truth” of the Rift Scar, they mutilate themselves in intricate rituals. They carve symbols into their skin, graft metal onto their bones, and replace body parts with prosthetics made from material taken from the Rift Scar. They believe that it’s only through the path of suffering that they can ascend to a higher state of being, and they’ll gladly drag along anyone that wanders close to their Cathedrals into their madness.

  Individually, Shard Choir cultists are dangerous. But in a group, they’re sooo much worse. They go fully feral. They hunt and swarm and kill. When they come across a convoy or a settlement or random drifters in their territory, they drag them back to their Cathedrals and “share enlightenment” with them. That’s a fancy way of saying that they torture people into insanity.

  There’s a third group that owns a few Cathedrals of Ash. They’re members of the Pale Regiment, a quasi-military order that you might have already run into. They control the Library in The MIZ. Their stated purpose is to “restore civilization through controlled knowledge dispersal.” If you’re wondering what the hell that means, it’s really just a pompous way of saying that they decide who is worth saving.

  They operate under a belief system called The Schema. It’s a doctrine that requires that they decipher left-over knowledge from old world civilizations and try to rebuild the world under their control. If that sounds fascist and authoritarian and fucked up, that’s because it is. Unlike the Black Teeth and the Shard Choir, these guys aren’t completely insane. They’re just zealots who will kill anyone who gets in their way.

  That said, they are extremely well funded. They’ve got tons of vaults of pre-Fracture tech, prototype weapons, archives of hidden knowledge, and armories filled with high-grade armor. If you manage to scavenge something rare out in the Deadlands and you don’t trust any of the pawn shops or brokers in The MIZ, you could sell it to the Pale Regiment for enough credits to set you up for months or longer. You don’t need to engage with them, but it’s smart to stay on their good side.

  NullSigil (Original Poster)

  Now, I know that I just hit you with a shit ton of lore. It probably all feels a bit overwhelming right now and your brain is crying out to make it stop. But there’s a reason why I gave you all that info: Knowledge is power. And you, my dude, need all the power you can scrape together.

  Most people on this forum, if they’d been chosen to be your first primary, would’ve sent you out into the Deadlands with the advice to “git gud,” and then watched you sprint directly into the waiting arms of cultists and cannibals. But not me. My entire strategy is simple. I’m going to help you survive by telling you exactly what’s waiting around the corner…before it tears your face off.

  Think back to your time in Harbor Glen. You were doing okay at first while you were hanging out in the library. But once you left town it was one crazy event after another, all of it turning into a highlight reel for a show called “Zeke Almost Dies, Again!”

  Why? It’s because you didn’t have us. You didn’t have access to the forum. You didn’t have a bunch of loud, opinionated nerds screaming “Zeke, NO” every time you approached something shaped like a bad idea.

  Let’s review all the hits so far. You traded a priceless gilder for a train ticket that got you barely half-way to your destination. Then you got chased off the train. Then you wandered the Deadlands with no water and very little food. You almost starved and nearly died of dehydration. You got lucky by stumbling into the House of Seasons. And then you got even luckier in surviving a bandit attack because they were too busy looting the train to notice you.

  This entire time you’ve been coasting on luck, and that’s not a valid survival strategy in the Fracture-verse. Luck runs out.

  Now we come to my advice to you, and it’s what is going to earn me the title of “Greatest Advice Giver EVAR!!”

  Go out and purchase a Tech Slate.

  It’s a portable, rugged tablet that you can find in almost every pawn shop in The MIZ. It works just like any other tablet that you’ve ever used. You don’t need to go out and get the fanciest one, but you do need to get a Tech Slate.

  Why am I having you spend money on useless electronics? Because you’ve got a weird connection to Fracture-verse tech. Remember how you touched a computer in the Harbor Glen library and it “glitched” and suddenly you were able to sign onto the forum? The same thing happened when you wandered into the train station the first day you got to The MIZ. And again in the library when you came across the tablets there. Something about you messes with electronics and lets you access this forum.

  You need to head to a pawn shop, find a Tech Slate, touch it to make sure that it gets you access to the forums, and then you’re golden. You’ll be able to be ten miles out deep into the Deadlands, with no one else around, but you’ll still be able to log onto the forum and ask for help and pose questions and seek out knowledge.

  You’ll have real-time help. Advice. Guides. Walkthroughs. Lore dumps. Emergency troubleshooting. You’d basically be turning this entire forum into a cheat engine. And that’s going to do more to save your ass than any class, spell, or weapon ever will.

  As your primary, I’m telling you that the best thing you can do is take the credits you’ve got right now and go out to purchase a tech slate. It might be the best purchase you’ve ever made in your entire life.

  101610166

  Ooo…Null’s advice is actually really solid. I was gonna say that if I’d been chosen as primary I would have urged Zeke to try and hustle up a few easy gigs in the city. Maybe he could have been hauling some scrap or picked up delivery jobs on the bounty board. But with the way that Null made his case, I can definitely see forum access as being much more valuable.

  7Spirals

  I would’ve thought that the first advice given to Zeke would be to stock up on meds and gear from well known stashes in the Under-MIZ.

  There are a few locations that we all know of that might be easy for him to get to, even if he doesn’t have a bunch of combat skills. That being said, Null’s idea is good. Zeke isn’t really competent combat wise and his best option going forward would be to lean on this forum.

  Binary_Arcana

  Let me just jump in on this real quick. When I suggested the Round Robin advice system, one of the points I made was that whoever gets picked as primary is the one who sets the direction, and the rest of us are supposed to yes-and their advice.

  10 and 7Spirals, I know it sounds like you guys are agreeing with Null, but at the same time it also sounds like you guys are saying, “hey, that advice is good but I think that Zeke should do something else first.”

  We shouldn’t be contradicting the primary. We don’t derail them. We don’t go “well, ahktshually.” If you can’t add something useful that builds onto what the primary already said, then sit it out.

  A good example of yes-anding right now would be to point out which pawnshops Zeke could head to that would have a secondhand Tech Slate for cheap.

  JunktownAries

  Got you covered. Dropping some map screenshots. These are from the 2.1 version of the Guts districts and the pawn shops were still up and running the last time anyone did a walk-through.

  Redwire Exchange - north end of Skew Alley. Kinda cramped but it’s where a bunch of good junk tends to wash up.

  Boneplug’s Gear Bin - owner is ex-militia and he’ll give decent prices if you’re willing to haggle.

  Tock & Spanner - near the train station. Usually overpriced but occasionally you can get lucky.

  [guts_district_locationping.png]

  WiddershinsLogic

  Alright, we’ve got three solid targets out in the Guts for Zeke to check out. Cool. Now, if they all come up empty, should he try searching the black markets next? Or is that just asking to get him mugged?

  Z3ke

  Okay, this all helps out a ton. Thanks Null. You’re probably right about the Tech Slate being a top priority.

  But I wanna ask about that archaeologist in the Roaring Drake. I told you all that he’s looking to hire people for a job out in the Deadlands. Patch says that he’s hunting for some old battlefield and he suggested that it would be a good first job for me. Does that sound…doable? Is that something I should agree to?

  I mean, I don’t have any gear or experience so I’d normally brush it off, but this seems like it’s more of an academic job and less of a combat one. Patch also said that the valley isn’t too far from The MIZ and the whole thing should only take a few days.

  Null, you’re the primary here and you already gave some pretty good advice. Should I follow up with the archaeologist? I can try and get some more details for you if you need. I have no idea whether this idea is a good opportunity or a really dumb idea.

  NullSigil

  If your gut is saying that the archaeologist’s gig is worth checking out, then you’ve got my backing. Trust your gut in these things.

  Side note: this could be a way to subtly guide us towards regions of the game where you’ve discovered new lore secrets. Just tell the primary that a strange dude showed up and offered to take you somewhere whenever you wanna drop new lore.

  Now, based on the info you gaveabout this, I’m willing to bet that the archaeologist is heading out into the deadzone that is wedged between the Dryway Verge and a section of the Deadlands called the Iron Latch.

  Locals call the place the Soundtrap. It’s this weird half-forgotten zone filled with broken machines, old armor, shattered weapons, and skeletal remains. The zone has always been underused, both in Frontiers and Syndicate’s Wake. It had low enemy density and not much loot.

  I will say that there’s a few videos of it from Syndicate’s because the entire region had this really weird atmosphere. The devs gave it a creepy, desynced audio track where actions that your character took on screen didn’t sync up with any of the sounds. Footsteps would lag half a second behind animations and sound cues would fire in the wrong order. No one ever figured out whether it was a bug or a feature.

  The good thing is that the Soundtrap isn’t all that dangerous. Even unarmed and with no combat skills, you can head into that zone and poke your head about. Plus, you’re tagging along with an archaeologist who is gathering a party. That might be good experience for you. You get out of The MIZ on a small expedition, make some useful contacts with whoever the archaeologist signs up, and get paid for the gig.

  Just make sure that you grab some essentials before you head out. You should make a list of stuff to buy, like water and rations and bandages. Other than that, you should be fine.

  MushroomCleric

  Assuming you get a good deal when buying your Tech Slate, you should have some credits to pick up a couple goodies for a short-range expedition out into the Deadlands.

  You should definitely look into buying water bottles. Also, get some dry rations. Check in with the archaeologist and see if he’s going to be providing anything. He should be, but don’t just rely on other people for your safety.

  Also, try not to spend all your credits right away. It’s always good to have an emergency fund. You never know when you’re gonna have to bribe a city guard or pay an information broker.

  Good luck out there. Keep us posted.