The Primary Islands
Brownstone Island serves as the cold and stoic backbone of the region. Constructed almost entirely from stonework and iron, its architecture leans toward gothic severity, with spiked defenses facing outward and inward—a hint at the internal horrors and secrets that linger beneath its surface. The population is hardened, their manner blunt, and their stories often whispered through clenched jaws in bars like the Grizzled Inn. At its core lies the Griswold stronghold, an imposing estate representative of the old families that keep the island’s law and order with quiet brutality and formalized hospitality.
Saltpier Island is the economic and military titan of the Wailing Shores. Anchored by Seawell, a heavily regulated urban sprawl, the island mixes brutal order with guarded prosperity. Overseen by the Chancellors of Order, Saltpier runs like a fortified machine, with Fort Breakwater's artillery installations and rapid-response naval squads offering protection from southern incursions. Meanwhile, the Beacons of Saltpier—lighthouses with cultish communities around them—maintain their eerie vigil and fuel production. On the northern end, the Acres Farming Villages provide food and agricultural resources, forming a rural counterweight to the militarized south. Saltpier functions as the de facto central authority of the region, not through declared governance, but through implied consequence.
Bluff’s Island is the most untamed of the major islands, a sprawling wilderness broken up by shifting encampments of Rovers, Tainted, and fringe Lineages. While semi-permanent encampments and light fortifications exist, Bluff’s is more known for its neutral gathering grounds, including the Circle at its heart and The Devil’s Turn—an adrenaline-fueled proving ground. The Barnacled Side acts as a brutal defensive barrier against oceanic undead, manned by volunteers and grim warriors. The entire island operates on a rotating population, swelling during seasonal clan meetings where politics, deals, and rituals play out under the watch of bones dangling from branches and wind-whistled metal.
The Smaller Islets
Phissbarrel Islet is a grimy slice of dockside hedonism and desperation. It hosts the infamous Phissfuq Bar, a patchwork den of debauchery and bad decisions where violence and trade swirl together in the reek of sweat, rot, and salt liquor. Alongside it sits Toppah’s Chunk Milk Farm, where grotesquely adapted animals are milked for sustenance no one dares question too closely. Somewhere among the grime is the “Original” Slap & Tickle, a brothel-entertainment hall hybrid that thrives on denial, illusion, and the broken dreams of drifters. Phissbarrel doesn’t pretend to be clean—it thrives in its filth and unapologetic vice .
Iron Mound Islet is all labor, metal, and smoke. The Fat Stacks Forge roars day and night, hammering out weapons, gear, and prosthetics, many of them just as deadly as the threats they’re meant to combat. The Harkness Union Hall acts as both guild headquarters and negotiator’s fortress, where work rights are debated with fists as often as words. The Iron Mound Shipyard stands at the edge, spitting out rust-shelled vessels barely held together by spite and bolt glue. This is where industry breathes hard and fast, and where the weight of obligation is heavier than armor .
Saltwater Islet presents a quieter face—pastoral on the surface, but with grit just beneath. Wellsworth Farm feeds mouths across the region, while Saltwater Village offers a tightly woven community bonded by superstition and ritual. Granny’s Glassmaking keeps alive old-world techniques twisted through grave science, producing tools, baubles, and lenses used for everything from beauty to necro-experimentation. Saltwater feels calm, but like still water, its surface can hide undertow or rot beneath .
The Mainland of the Wailing Shores
The mainland is not a place where people live—it’s where they end up. It’s a landmass overrun, a necrotic grave crawling with horrors both fungal and forgotten. Settlements are transient. Stability is delusion. The trees here don’t creak—they groan. The swamp itself is hostile, pulsing with residual Infection, radiation, and the ambient presence of something watching. Something that remembers.
There are no true towns, only mobile communities, roving bands, and temporary outposts that vanish as fast as they appear. The Rovers, Tainted, and Saltwise each claim parts of the mainland, but their claims are built more on survival than dominion. Diesel Jocks carve through the underbrush on two-wheeled death machines, waging their own strange wars of speed and ritual along root-choked trails. Among the trees, some of the Unstable still operate—surgeons and scientists who traded licenses for secrecy and now stitch flesh and Infection together in forgotten structures that rot into the canopyDR CT TTRPG.
Mainland visuals are stark: heavy leather, patch-welded armor, mud-soaked fabrics, and occult-wild masks. The aesthetic is “cryptid war cult meets rusted Americana,” a brutalist rejection of style in favor of utility. This is hellbilly country, where belief is instinctual and unspoken, and family is a bond formed at the end of a machete.