Political & Social Influence Groups
The Griswold Family - Rooted deep within the stone and filth of Brownstone Island, the Griswolds represent decayed nobility wrapped in necro-science and whispered indulgence. They are sadists with a social calendar, aristocrats of rot, and keepers of secrets buried as deeply as their dead. Their parties are rumored to blend hedonism and horror in equal measure, and their initiations test the boundaries of infection, sanity, and flesh. Yet behind the ritual and reputation lies something worse: they are effective.
The Merchant House of Harkness - Efficient, shrewd, and infuriatingly self-righteous, the Merchant House serves as gatekeepers for ship production, trade negotiation, and quality control. Based in the islets, they favor unionized labor and workers’ rights—so long as they control the rights in question. Their ability to stifle or facilitate trade makes them indispensable, if not beloved. Their diplomacy often stings like a sea nettle—painful, but hard to avoid
The Brick Workers Union - They build walls that last through storms, radwinds, and undead sieges. The Brick Workers Union is a power unto itself, commanding infrastructure and construction like a feudal guild of masons and engineers. Betrayal within the Union is a one-way trip to the jail cells they personally mortared—some of which still hold failed dissidents, locked behind stones that whisper loyalty or death.
The Leatherman Caravan Company operates as a semi-nomadic group of hunters, artisans, and logistics experts. While not always traditional in structure, they are considered a legal business force. Their direct interactions with other powerful groups such as the Griswolds and Merchant House of Harkness, as well as their critical role in the harvesting of valuable resources, position them as a necessary ally to many settlements.
The Pig Head Trade Company - Traders in food, flesh, and favor, the Pig Head Trade Company thrives in the gray. Known for moving meat, leathers, and timber across undead-infested routes, they maintain cordial ties with groups too disreputable for polite company. Their roots may stretch back to the Dead Market, and their wagons often carry goods that were someone else’s limbs not long ago. Yet they are necessary, and in the Wailing Shores, necessity is virtue enough.
The Wellsworth Family of Saltwater Islet serves as a local political and agricultural power. Centered around Wellsworth Farm, this family commands respect in regional governance and festival planning. Their influence shapes local policy and community safety, reinforcing their role as lawful stakeholders in the islet network.
Enforcers of Law and Order
The Chancellors of Order - The Chancellors are the iron grip behind Saltpier’s spine. Born from the militaristic faith of the Fallow Hopes, they hardened into a subsect obsessed with discipline, control, and the idea that survival is a reward earned through the eradication of chaos. They are not judges, they are executioners of structure. Every law they uphold is scripture, every act of governance a prayer. To them, hesitation is heresy. They maintain order in the region with such brutal clarity that even freedom begins to feel like a threat.
The Stormies - Saltpier’s infamous military force is known simply as the Stormies. Trained through hellish boot camps and ritualized drowning trials, they are ocean-hardened, tactically honed, and cold to their core. Stormies act as enforcers, border guards, and shock troops, equally at home aboard a storm-wracked skiff or knee-deep in blood on the docks. Their presence signals not just order but also stands as an unspoken warning. Stormies don’t speak with threats; they speak with action.
Arbiters of the Bond - Nomadic agents that operate as neutral enforcers and mediators across the Wailing Shores, often stepping in when jurisdiction between islands becomes blurred or contested. Respected for their impartiality and feared for their unwavering adherence to law, they serve as go-betweens during trade disputes, extradition negotiations, and regional hearings, ensuring that agreements made in one stronghold are honored in another.
Unsavory Sorts
The Rawhead Families - A patchwork of horror-draped clans who wear the bones of their own dead and the shrouds of their slain, the Rawhead Families blur the line between Lineage, cult, and nightmare. Living deep in the Bone Forest and aligned with the Pig Head Trade Company, they are cannibalistic survivalists who see the dead not as an enemy but as kin to be consumed or honored. Every adornment tells a story; every mask hides a history that is better left buried.
The Splicers - Mad scientists in butcher’s aprons, the Splicers operate behind closed doors in swamp-labs and coastal sheds, pushing necrology into grotesque new territory. Their public faces are respectable, even helpful. Their private experiments are the kind of violations that earn pitchforks and torches. Their work asks questions like, “Can a zombie host a living brain?” and “What happens if the Mortis Amaranthine is taught obedience?” No one asks twice.
The Black Dog Armada - They fly no national flag, owe no loyalty, and expect no rescue. The Black Dog Armada is a fleet of pirates that lives in the space between shadows, sailing under a possibly mythical admiral and delivering chaos where profit allows. They don’t attack the islands—they need the markets. But what they do to ships on the open water is another matter entirely. Freedom, they say, comes with blood in the bilge.
The Voiceless Deep - A cult of sea-worshippers who believe that only silence can keep the ocean's hungers at bay. The Voiceless Deep blend ritualistic sacrifice with maritime practicality, tending lighthouses during the worst of the storms but dousing flames during the annual Night of Terror. They listen to the sea, bleed into it, and believe that to ignore its voice is to invite its wrath. Their faith walks the shoreline with blood-stained feet.
Organized Crime
Murder Inc. and the Assassin Families - Operating like shadows in a world of gray morality, Murder Inc. sanctions death for order’s sake. Their families blend seamlessly into society until the job demands otherwise.
The Moss Family hides in plain sight as fisherfolk and pig farmers. Bodies vanish beneath crab pots and manure heaps, handled by killers who smile through sunburned cheeks.
The Mors Family creates killers by erasing the person first. They infiltrate, befriend, seduce, then erase. Their methods are final and their histories burned.
The Murk Family plays a longer game—graverobbers and occult scholars who study the Mortis and bury knowledge alongside corpses.
The Tidemaker Family controls the docks and the sea routes. Their retribution is theatrical: death by dragging or suffocation under barnacles. They leave no message unwritten in salt and blood.
The Black Market Syndicates – Where Murder Inc. ends with a corpse, the Black Market begins with a transaction. This isn’t a single cartel but instead it’s a loosely bound hydra of vice brokers, smugglers, black science labs, and social engineers who grease the wheels of survival with goods, services, and secrets that civilized society refuses to name.
Bedlam is a traveling vice ring with no permanent home and no fixed price. They specialize in entertainment that walks the line between pleasure and pain, buying and selling euphoria like fuel. Their followers call them artists. Their enemies call them predators.
The Jokers don’t deal in goods—they deal in people. Masters of manipulation, misinformation, and reputational sabotage, the Jokers control a web of favors and fears. They destroy credibility, manufacture scandal, and reshape public opinion with a whisper.
Corpus Delicti takes the raw material of the post-apocalypse—flesh, bone, nerve—and turns it into economy. Necro-biologists and body hackers, they extract value from the dead with surgical precision. To them, corpses are just coin purses waiting to be unzipped.
The Merican Financial Institute launders power through debt, not bullets. They offer loans almost no one else can afford and collect interest in favors, influence, and blood. Their books are balanced, their enforcers polite, and their reach absolute. Many ships and trade routes were funded with M.F.I. loans and the ships with past-due debts often succumb to pirates.