Fort River

Can a city be a character? Can the landscape have an identity?

In the beginning, there was Fort River. (Actually it didn't even have a name in the early posts. It took a player-poll to give the city a name & the beginnings of its identity.)

Everything started out small. Just Game Master's concept of a few city blocks, close to the banks of StormRiver. But each player coming in seemed to have ideas. Soon we needed more. More streets, more buildings, more landscape to accommodate the growing number of characters & NPC's interacting throughout the game. We needed to know little things too, like which way is East? Which direction does the river flow? What's the lay of the land outside this city?

Each new player, each new question...game-world began to grow. And to get battered. Most of it was because of war. The Brotherhood left Merchant Street & a good part of that neighborhood in ruins with subterranean bombs. The AK took their own toll on it, wreaking havoc from the army base to the ag-center. Mobs trashed buildings, started fires. Then there was the hurricane...

We've been pretty harsh on the landscape altogether, even outside Fort River. Bay View, another major city, was burnt to the ground by the Anti-kids. Ghost Town (closer in & way smaller) was left a smoking ruin. And the agricultural center on the east side of Fort River was pretty much left a wasteland at the end of the final AK war.

We've done a lot of things in-game to our poor city of Fort River. (We've even had to cajole players to keep them from demolishing her altogether, just for the impact!) If we'd done all this damage to an actual character, he/she would be dead & buried by now.

But Fort River endures. (And soon we'll have a new map that will try to chart out all our growth since season-2 of the game.)

Can a city be a character? Definitely. I'm just hoping we don't kill her off altogether. -Chyna

Photo source: Webshots