Episodes
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Justice isn’t a word that has much meaning on Antarras. At least, not in the long term. While each town might have been built up with its own best intentions, in the end practicality wins out over idealism every time. Any Company Marshal or local Sheriff makes the decision they think is best, and more often than not, what’s best is resolving an issue expediently so that everyone can move on and get back to the harder work of living in a place like this: surviving.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A murder in the city.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (0:27:00-0:30:00, 1:34:00), drug use (0:40:00-0:42:00)
Scarcity has always been the name of the game on Antarras—our time on this planet has practically been defined by it. As much as the prospect of a new home among the stars seemed to offer the promise of opportunities beyond those limited few left on Earth to the early settlers, the surplus of opportunity on Antarras was always matched by a scarcity of other things: food, safety, answers. With each one, the people of Antarras made do; new ways to grow food, new ways to protect themselves. Humanity learned resilience on Earth, the saying goes, but it perfected it on Antarras. But the most dangerous scarcity of all, the one most necessary to stave off against the encroaching darkness, was hope. Despair, on Antarras, after all, is not only a mortal sin, but a death sentence.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Building hope.
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Missing episodes?
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Aside from the paths scouted between Antarras’ sparse collection of towns, and the maps kept by the Miner’s Guild, all too much of the planet remains unexplored. This reason is no small part of why the Buzzards do such good business: wander off just a hair in the wrong direction, and you might find yourself in unexpectedly dangerous terrain—and not just because of the landscape.
In fact, early settlers passed down the firm belief that the planet was impossible to explore in full. Not because of its size—as the planet is, in reality, no larger than Earth’s own moon—but because time and space, they alleged, didn’t always seem to work the way you wanted ‘em to.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Parting ways.
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To attempt a taxonomy of the creatures the locals call hellbeasts would be a futile task: the monsters that made their way out of the Ruin had no rhyme nor reason, no morphological consistency nor internal sense. They had the form, from the start, of something out of nightmares, and warped from there, in all manner of ways. Any attempt at cataloging them, or classifying them, would end up in a far muddier understanding of the practical information at hand than just listening to the names people took to calling them and going from there. Not to mention, anyone who got close enough to try was more like than not to wind up dead.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A town in need of saving.
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Fear wasn’t always the common denominator among the population of the newly-founded towns of Antarras. Maybe it was always something of a factor; maybe it could never have been totally absent from consideration. But when people talk about the early settlers these days, they focus too much on fear. The story is that they were scared, desperate people willing to try their hand at anything to escape the lives they were fleeing back on Earth. But those of us descended from them, or raised by them, or in community with those of them that still remain, know that fear was never the thing that drove them—it couldn’t have been. It never would have driven them so far.
That fear is the legacy of the planet, that desperation is the afterlife of that initial wave of settlement, is a story it benefits some people to tell. The Company, the Buzzards, the Church, or anyone who makes it their business to protect the frightened and guide the desperate. What that story downplays, though, is the determination, and just how much those settlers could get done when they set their mind to it, when they came together to make something better for themselves.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A meeting and a standoff.
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The Company installed its de facto leaders shortly after the Agreement was signed. Company Marshals took up residence in each town, according to one of the many clauses that were debated at the time of the signing, and while their job was, technically, to represent the Company’s interest in matters of disagreement, they fell easily into the more familiar position of a kind of unelected sheriff, promising to keep the townspeople safe and to keep wrongdoers in line. They made this transition with little to no comment from the emergent, makeshift forms of local government that had been in place before the war, with little to no notice from townspeople who were just glad to have some form of authority in place to protect them. So it was only a matter of time before people started to question just how easily the Company had used what little leverage the Agreement gave them to take hold of a little more power than, by all rights, they’d been intended to have.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Plans hatch and coalitions form.
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After the Ostenberg Agreement created a tenuous but stable peace between the Company and the original settlers, Antarras became a place that was surprisingly free from major conflict. Bandits and outlaws caused trouble occasionally, to be sure, and there’s no denying the danger of living in such close proximity to a dangerous, alien wasteland. But when it came to larger scales, concord was the name of the game. Maybe it was how no one wanted to damage the fragile peace after so much conflict in those early years; maybe everyone knew that our real enemies were the monsters and demons we did our best to keep at bay. Maybe everything we had to do to survive took away the will that might have otherwise been spent on war. But either way, upheaval was not something the people of Antarras had to grow accustomed to.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A rider brings death to the Gate.
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The truth is, most of us don’t want to know anything more about hellstone than what we already do—that it’s dangerous, and that it’s valuable. Whether or not you believe that ignorance is bliss, you can’t rightly deny that there’s something unfathomable happening with the stuff, be it at the atomic level or the ontological. There’s a reason the first settlers, the first specters, dug it up out of the earth and called it “hellstone.” Whatever they saw, whatever they found, whatever it did to them in those early days before we learned how to refine it, how to handle it, how to protect ourselves from it, it was closer to “hell” than what they’d fled on earth, close enough to warrant the name.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Man made horrors beyond your comprehension.
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Strange stories, sometimes, circulate in quiet whispers about the work that goes on deep beneath the ground under the Manufactory. Necessary research, no doubt—after all, if it hadn’t been for scientists like Greer experimenting with hellstone, this planet would be more of a graveyard than it already is. But “necessary” doesn’t always mean something bears thinking about, and imaginations tend to run wild when given free rein to speculate about what happens where you aren’t meant to see.
Dark and dangerous experiments, some say. Twisted trials on grotesque specimen. I’d reckon, if pressed, that it’s a whole lot more mundane than all that, the boring kind of science that makes real progress, not much of anything to the untrained eye. But so long as something is secret, the stories will spread, no matter how banal the truth may rightly be.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: How do you feel about borrowing?
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CONTENT WARNINGS: animal death, detailed description of injury to animals
Did our presence here transform the natural landscape of Antarras? Did our footsteps change the ground we walked on, which had never before seen human feet? It would be naive to pretend it didn’t, that’s for certain. But it would be just as naive to imagine that we could ascertain the exact extent to which we altered that environment, just as it altered us in turn. There’s no telling if the rivers would have started to run red in their own course, no knowing if the storms would have come on without us there to witness their thunderheads. It’s impossible to say with any semblance of certainty that Antarras became what it did because we interfered—just as it’s impossible to say that it didn’t.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Not a noble deed, but a necessary one.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: animal death, detailed description of injury to animals
Wildlife on Antarras was puzzling to the first settlers, who had never known any animals besides those few they’d encountered on Earth, the rare ones left in the wake of a mass extinction on the planet they were running from. Aside from horses, which the settlers had brought with them, they found themselves face to face with creatures the likes of which they’d never seen, and not knowing precisely what else to call them, they gave them borrowed names. An animal what flew became a bird, or a raven, or a vulture. One that slithered close to the ground they called a snake. A dog-sized four legged scavenger was a coyote, or a jackal. And a huge predator with massive teeth and terrible claws became a bear—less a species distinction, and more a warning, like language had a memory that would teach anyone who heard it to keep their distance lest they find themselves prey.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A stranger comes looking for aid.
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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 there would be a loner, a strange or lost soul, who probably wouldn’t last long enough to make any trouble for anybody decent. The hellstone’d mutate them til they turned into just another monster, or the monsters would kill them before it got the chance. There were too many problems sitting right at our doorsteps to consider what might be lurking far enough away we’d never have to face it ourselves.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Foreshadows of things to come.
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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 wouldn’t only go to them for the sacrament, or for confession: you’d probably also go to them for advice. Their instinct guided directly by His hand, it was rare for a Confessor to steer their congregant wrong. Not just priests but intercessors, guides. In the early days of Antarras, the Confessors were as critical as the Guild or the Manufactory in determining the order of things, how best to safely build a community that stood a chance at survival.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Several surprising revelations.
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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 higher up quickly learned that most Antarrans were conditioned to keep mum around anyone with a whiff of the Company about them, and made a move to arrange for operants under cover. No matter how strong a town’s collective spirit, there would always be one sucker hungry enough or tired enough or cowardly enough to accept an offer to pass along seemingly innocent information in exchange for a few coin, and when that didn’t work, well, the Company started hiring people who could act.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: X marks the spot.
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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 never believed in ghosts before, she knew this had to be one. But, she said, the strangest part was, her father had died on Earth, when she was seventeen. Two decades before any human ever set foot on Antarras, two decades before the first ships left Earth in search of this new home. “Is this hell?” she asked herself. “Have we fled a dying Earth only to find ourselves where the dead were already destined to go?”
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A return to Jericho yields surprising results.
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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 ghosts?” It can also be a question more along the lines of, what do we mean when we say “real?” If something has enough of an impact, can you say it’s real even if it’s only in your head? If something can really hurt you, does that make it real?
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Four puzzle pieces.
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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 his attendant mercies, to praying their rosaries and church on Sundays. And others still turned towards each other, to the workaday pleasures of tipping your hat as you pass someone on the street, lending a hand when it’s needed. It’s those last ones who run the risk of being forgotten, in these kinds of histories, these tales of how the world we know came to be how it is. But it’s those same people who built the floors we tread, who kept the walls standing upright. And when things on Antarras began to go badly, they were the ones left picking up the pieces.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A storm hits the Gate.
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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 Covenant. Odds are, you’re as likely to draw a hand of snakes as you are to end up with a pile of stones, but if you stop playing the game when you’ve only just drawn your hand, you’re missing the entire point. It isn’t just that any hand can win if you know how to play your cards: it’s that the whole point of playing is to leverage those cards to your own benefit. Every card, no matter how low, is an opportunity, and the people who thrive out here are the ones who’ve learned to see the right round to play it in.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A desperate race from danger.
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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. Instead, this town and the others like it were built through steadfastness and cooperation, and they prosper through the preservation of the very same. Say what you will about your neighbor, but they will always be your neighbor, and you’ll have their back when the time comes, and you can rest easy at night bolstered by the knowledge that they’ll have yours.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A missing child and a mysterious rider.
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