Episodes
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One day, a fellow reporter and I were sitting in our office at the end of a long day, passing a flask of whiskey back and forth, and she asked me a question I’d never asked before, but I’ve never since forgotten: What, she asked, after a long swig, do you think was actually here before us? After a moment, she went on: there’s water, here, and plants, and animals. Shelter’s easy enough to find, and there’s no shortage of oxygen. Seems silly to think we’re the first people ever set foot on this big red rock, don’t it?
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A promise kept.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (1:28:00), coercion (1:39:30)
The… unfriendliness, shall we say, of hellstone’s predisposition to spontaneously combusting upon transport in the early days of hellstone mining precipitated a whole host of research from all kinds. The second question—after, of course, how to safely mine the stuff—was how to safely move it, first to move it from the mines to the towns, and then how to move it from Antarras back to Earth where it could be traded and sold. Before the current refining process was finalized, there was a nonzero risk of the stuff setting off deadly chain reactions upon, for instance, atmospheric reentry—and of all the things the original settlers of Antarras gave up when the Company got exclusive trade rights in the Oestenberg Agreement, the responsibility of dealing with how to get hellstone safely anywhere was widely considered no great loss.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: The old-fashioned way.
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There had always been those who naively believed that hellstone could, in some way, in some novel form, actually be tamed—could be brought under control, made safer or more convenient, be “domesticated,” as the case may be. And there have always been opponents to that idea. When Eleanor Greer invented the process that would later go on to be cemented as the standard process for refining hellstone for safe use and safe shipment, the President of the Mining Guild at the time, a man by the name of Arn Goldman, would, allegedly, tell anyone who would listen for more than a minute or two, that Greer was a fool for trying: “it’s no coincidence,” he is recorded as having said, “that hellstone’s the very same color as blood. Anyone who doesn’t take that as a sign is stupid enough to deserve what’s coming to ‘em.”
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Nowhere to go but down.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (eyes) [00:05:09, 00:26:00], references to cannibalism [1:54:50]
Now, what’s deceptive about a sleepy little town — which, though I’ve argued before that Ruin’s Gate was far from, but for the sake of poetry, let’s say the sentiment stands — is that, sleepy as they might seem, that doesn’t mean there isn’t always something going on under the surface. Trouble brewing out of sight. Pieces moving on chess boards in back rooms. Plans hatching, plots thickening, deals being made in the dark. And in Ruin’s Gate, in those days, there was plenty of dark to go around.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Reunions and reconsiderations.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (eyes) [2:01:00]
Meanwhile, in the writings of Confessor Leviticus to her final congregants, this pilgrimage is characterized somewhat differently. She speaks of the pilgrimage not as a promise, or even as a journey, but as a kind of fortification, a taking up of arms. This should hardly be surprising: the visions granted to Leviticus by God were filled with this kind of martial imagery, and she seems to have seen herself as a kind of warrior or soldier, rather than a shepherd or a leader. But the idea stands, nevertheless. The pilgrimage isn’t so much about making oneself closer to god, but instead about enacting a service for the people of Antarras, undertaking a transformative journey wherein those strong enough to make the journey are also deemed strong enough to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: The soul of Antarras.
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In The Early Saints of Antarras, Apostle Celéne Osgood—who would go on to later undertake her own pilgrimage and become Confessor Psalms, the noted Evangelist—writes of the sermon given by Confessor Joshua upon returning from their pilgrimage. The pathway, Confessor Joshua is said to have declaimed, is not holy because it is the precise pathway Confessor Genesis once took, but because of the footsteps of those who followed him. The act of commitment undertaken when an Apostle sets out on that path is simultaneously an act of contrition, of devotion, and of service—to the town or community one comes from, as well as the one they will go on to serve in God’s name. It is that act that makes the pathway holy, and the meaning it has accrued as others have taken it, as feet have bled and skin has burned and prayers have alighted on the wind. To walk the path, Osgood writes, is to make a promise—a promise that is not upheld until the Confessor who returns from the journey devotes themself to the service of those not strong enough to walk the path themselves.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: The pilgrim’s path.
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The origin of what have come to be known as hellbeasts—distinct from the native animals found on the planet—has also been debated by historians of Antarras. Where the line between animal and hellbeast falls is not arbitrary, but neither is it universally agreed upon. Are the hellbeasts endemic to the planet, or are they, like us, invasive, coming to Antarras from somewhere else, like that unknown place the church calls the Burning Beyond? Do they evolve, the way fauna does, or change at all according to their environment? And, if so, what were they before they became the monsters that haunt our very nightmares?
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A colossal emergence.
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The first hellstone mutations that appeared, in the earliest groups of settlers, were in fact less likely to appear on the miners and more likely to appear on those who handled the pure, unrefined hellstone after its removal from the mines—couriers, bankers, or those scientists who first worked to develop the refining process that would come to be standard. The image of the mutated specter, a potent and lingering phantasm of anxiety in the mind of the Antarran settler, didn’t become the norm until much later, when external pressures to meet new quotas forced the miners to stay underground for longer and longer shifts.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Something moving in the Ruin.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: drug use (0:09:30)
One can’t help but wonder, thinking back on the early days of Antarras, just how and why the staple institutions ended up with the influence they did. Could it have turned out another way? Could, for instance, a different church have found purchase in the hearts and minds of the early settlers? Could a different corporation from Earth have gotten here first, before Creon Construction, Communications, and Co.? How different would life on Antarras have looked, if just one decision had been made differently, just one change in the way things were when it all started? Realistically, there ain’t much use wondering that kind of thing: the world we’ve got’s the one we’re stuck living on today. But one can’t help but wonder…
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Promises you’d best intend to keep.
Anamnesis by Samantha Leigh: https://blinkingbirchgames.itch.io/anamnesis
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Funerary traditions on Antarras vary by town. The early settlers brought with them a range of belief systems, cultural traditions, and dispositions towards death, so in the earliest days, there were as many cremations as there were burials, and almost as many mourning practices as there were settlements cropping up on the planet’s surface. Eventually, most of the planet settled into the same—or at least similar—general traditions, though there were some smaller settlements that held out against the planet-wide preference for cremation and kept well-tended cemeteries of their own dead nearby to town. But for most, superstition won out against any Earth-based cultural beliefs, and the dead were usually burned for fear that what was buried might not always stay that way.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: An act of remembrance.
Anamnesis by Samantha Leigh: https://blinkingbirchgames.itch.io/anamnesis
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You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who was alive that doesn’t remember the day the sun didn’t rise. You’d be even harder pressed to find anyone who could agree on what to call it. The eclipse, the great cloud, the long, dark night. No one wanted to talk about it, when it happened, so no easy name ever came into common parlance. Everyone had their own way of thinking about the darkness outside, and locked alone and scared in their homes, they took to thinking of it however they might.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: The search begins.
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What to do, with the truth? It’s a question as complicated on Antarras as it was through the history of human civilization on Earth. What to do with the truth when it’s more dangerous than a lie? When it presents a risk you might not be willing to take? Do we have a moral obligation to share the truth at all costs? To spare the feelings of those who might be hurt by it? To inform those who might not have otherwise known? Personally, I have always believed the latter: the truth at all costs. On a planet so hostile, when all we have is each other, it seemed necessary in a way that life was allowed to be more nuanced on Earth.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A much-needed catch up.
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Forgive an old reporter just a moment for a brief aside—a diversion from the story, sure, I’ll grant you that, but one that I think it very much needs. Because the thing the stories like this about Antarras miss, sometimes, is that there weren’t good guys and bad guys, not really. Heroes and villains are things of fairytales, of bedtime stories, and when stories about Antarras get told, they’re all too often the fanciful sort. The kind made to convey a particular message. No one's immune to this, and I'm not saying I'm any better. But the thing that gets forgotten, in the midst of all of that, is the part where, as much as we argued, as much as we fought, we were all just people, anyway. And people get hurt. People get mad. People don’t always act their best. But when you tell a story where you stop treating some of them like people, you miss the heart of what it was really all about.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Is this really where you meant to be?
I Have the High Ground by Jess Levine: https://jumpgategames.itch.io/ihthg
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CONTENT WARNINGS: violence, discussions of death
Though the original settlers did, for a time, use their own ships to ferry the hellstone they first found back to Earth, the Company’s intercession soon shut down any private or personal spacecraft in the airspace over Antarras—at first through violence, and then, as their first major demand in the Ostenberg Agreement, as a matter of policy. When you really look at the maps, at the paperwork, the Company doesn’t have jurisdiction over all that much land on the planet; what it has is the sky. Because when the people buying hellstone are a month by ship away, owning the sky is all you really need to do.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: Debts paid.
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In his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
He was almost right.
Unfortunately for Mr. Clarke, he had it backwards. What he should have written was that any sufficiently sophisticated magic is indistinguishable from technology. In fact, few are aware of just how many of the technological developments seen in the second half of the 20th century were the result of magical interference, and that’s at least in part because there are organizations in place to ensure that they don’t.
Organizations like the Forensic Department of Paranormal and Demonic Activity — a top secret private organization dedicated to studying, containing, and preserving the secrecy of rogue magical effects on the world. Utilizing a well-studied paranatural ability known as "Redaction" to maintain their confidence from the rest of the world, the Department has kept the existence of magic a secret since its founding.
But with the advances of magic-inflected technology now growing at an astronomical rate along with the approach of the turn of the 21st century, will it be enough to keep the truth from getting out?
The Forensic Department of Paranormal and Demonic Activity begins this June for all Patrons at the $1/month tier and above. Back us on Patreon now: https://www.patreon.com/unexploredcast
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CONTENT WARNINGS: desecration of corpses, body horror
It isn’t as if we ever properly understood death to begin with. Humanity’s spent exactly as many years telling stories about what death means and what comes after as it has dying. Wars have been fought and kingdom’s toppled over differences of opinion on the matter, and the mysteries that lie beyond that unknowable act are one of the first and most powerful of human fears. Some say the only thing about it we know for certain is that everything dies, but here on Antarras, even that seems like it may be less empirical than it seemed on Earth.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: To dust you shall return.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (1:34:35-1:35:00)
Of course, back on Earth they told stories about dreams—prophetic ones, ones with deep significance and all kinds of meanings, dreams that revealed the deepest anxieties and worries that might plague the inner recesses of somebody’s mind. On Antarras, though, there wasn’t the luxury for that kind of thing. Dreams, on Antarras, some would say, were more vivid than those on Earth: darker, stranger, and yet all the more real. When they had meaning, which they almost always did, that meaning didn’t come in metaphor. No teeth falling out, no moving as if through water. Instead, that meaning was all too real, and all too obvious. Less a symbol and more a warning.
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A nightmare made real.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: gore and descriptions of severe violence (0:35:37, 0:39:50)
The paradox of hellstone has always been this: it’s plentiful on Antarras but too valuable to keep; it’s rare on Earth, where they have the resources to experiment. It’s so useful as a power source that it gets used up faster than the time it would take to truly understand it. And so that little red miracle that saved the people who first fled to Antarras has remained far more of a mystery than the businessmen, the scientists, and the miners might like. Just what might hellstone be able to do, if we put it to the test? What other miracles, what other wonders or horrors could be at humanity’s fingertips, if we managed to use hellstone just right?
This week, on Ruin’s Gate: A disturbing truth.
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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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