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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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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