Greenland - Part 2 - Powers and people of the Inland Sea

No faction speaks for all Greenlanders.

No single tradition defines the land.

What follows are not nations, churches, or empires. They are responses—ways people have organized themselves around survival, meaning, and responsibility in a world that no longer behaves the way it once did.

The Inland Sea did not erase older identities. It forced them to adapt.

Some factions look outward, toward anomalies and the promise of answers. Others look inward, toward continuity and the careful maintenance of what already works. All of them exist in tension with one another, shaped as much by geography as by belief.

Among these groups, none claims to rule Greenland.

Some simply insist on remaining.

1. The Sea-Kin Councils

Guardians of Continuity

 The Sea-Kin Councils did not rise after the Hodgepocalypse; they endured it. Drawn from coastal communities whose lives long predated the Inland Sea, the Sea-Kin adapted without abandoning who they were. Boats were modified, routes redrawn, and knowledge shared rather than hoarded. They do not claim dominion over the sea—only the right to remain upon it. The councils themselves are a loose confederation of self-governing harbours and fjord settlements, bound by shared obligation rather than centralized rule. Leadership is practical and conditional, earned by those who have kept vessels afloat, brought people home, or made difficult decisions that prevented loss. Authority here is not inherited. It is remembered.

Sea-Kin life blends deep Arctic navigation knowledge with modern survival engineering, cooperative labour traditions, and a long-held respect for land and water as systems rather than symbols. Their vessels are built for unpredictable currents; their weather records combine instrumentation with lived observation; their stores preserve food, tools, and stories with equal care. They reject apocalyptic romanticism outright. The end of the old world is not a tale to be celebrated—it is a condition to be managed. Nor do they mythologize the Whirlpool. To the Sea-Kin, it is a destabilizing force within an already strained system, ancient or purposeful perhaps, but dangerous regardless. Departures toward it are limited, returns tracked, and those who come back changed are met with quiet caution rather than praise.

Restraint also defines the Sea-Kin approach to anomalies. Some practice anomaly work, but only through slow, procedural methods that emphasize observation and consensus; ritual exists not as worship, but to force deliberation and allow withdrawal. Balance, not power, is the goal. Those who pursue dominance—whether corporate relic hunters, artifact expeditions, or Whirlpool cults—are viewed with equal suspicion. Internal tensions remain, younger members sometimes chafe at restraint, drawn to destiny and revelation, while elders answer not with sermons but with evidence—damaged boats, winters survived, and the simple truth that Greenland endured because people stayed when leaving would have been easier. In play, the Sea-Kin Councils offer safe harbour without permissiveness, work that carries obligation, and a moral counterweight to factions driven by ambition. They will not ask the PCs to save Greenland.

They will ask them not to make it worse.

2. The Skaldic Reclaimers

 The Skaldic Reclaimers did not emerge from the past; they chose it. In the years after the Inland Sea stabilized, when routes could be charted, and the Whirlpool could no longer be dismissed as temporary, fear was joined by a hunger for meaning. Survival alone was not enough. People wanted a story strong enough to hold chaos together. The Reclaimers answered that need by adopting saga-based frameworks—drawing on Norse aesthetics, seafaring traditions, and oath-bound structures not as heritage claims, but as narrative tools. They are not Vikings returned. They are modern Greenlanders reaching back to move forward.

Reclaimers organize into expeditionary crews led by a jarl whose authority is earned through ordeal rather than inheritance—and never guaranteed. A jarl who falters can be challenged, out-sung, or out-survived. Each crew includes skalds who record deeds and failures, oath-bound sailors, and specialists who adapt ships and gear to anomaly-warped waters. Their vessels are fast and narrow, modified for maneuverability and marked with symbolic runes meant as focus aids rather than wards. To the Reclaimers, story is infrastructure: sagas are instruction manuals encoded as myth, retold publicly to shape future behaviour. A well-held narrative can preserve a crew for generations; a poorly held one can justify recklessness just as long.

The Reclaimers believe that story shapes behaviour, and behaviour determines survival. The Whirlpool is a proving ground, Ultima Thule a land of trial, and leadership is something validated only through remembered hardship. This makes them compelling—and dangerous. Some crews mistake survival for dominance, reframing exploration as entitlement and ordeal as conquest, which brings them into frequent conflict with the Sea-Kin. Losses are carefully remembered in saga, yet memory does not always slow the next voyage. In play, the Skaldic Reclaimers are charismatic allies and perilous rivals, inviting the PCs into a story already in progress.

The question is not whether that story ends in glory, but whether it leaves room for anyone else to survive it.

3. The Coneward Covenant

Keepers of the White Fire

The White Volcanic Cone does not dominate the horizon. It waits. Pale and almost featureless by day, it reflects light in an unusual manner, glowing faintly at night and dimming during storms. It does not erupt, and it does not sleep. When the Inland Sea stabilized and geothermal activity around the Cone intensified, it became clear that the site could not be ignored. Left unchecked, it promised energy, warmth, and industrial leverage; handled recklessly, it promised catastrophe. The Coneward Covenant formed not as a religion or a corporation, but as a containment agreement—an explicit decision to take responsibility for what might happen if the Cone were mishandled, without claiming ownership of it.

The Covenant is governed by a mixed council of infrastructure engineers, anomaly researchers, and ritual practitioners trained to observe rather than invoke. Every major action requires consensus across disciplines, making the Covenant slow but difficult to manipulate. Debate is expected, even encouraged, but always bound by protocol. Members are trained to document dissent, halt operations when uncertainty exceeds tolerance, and treat failure not as embarrassment but as a regional risk. Internally, the Covenant is divided: some view the Cone as sacred in the strictest sense—not divine, but untouchable—while others see it as a reactor, ancient and anomalous, meant to be engaged and possibly repaired. These positions coexist uneasily, held together by discipline rather than trust.

Covenant rituals are not prayers; they are procedures. Timed movements, spoken phrases, symbolic markings, and controlled sensory environments are used to stabilize readings and synchronize observers where conventional instrumentation alone proved insufficient. To outsiders, these practices may resemble spirituality, but the Covenant explicitly states that they are tools, not faith. Other factions judge them accordingly: Sea-Kin respect their restraint but distrust their proximity to power; Reclaimers see paralysis where the Covenant sees caution; the Archive treats their data as high-value intelligence. The Covenant’s greatest failure is delay—while they debate, others act, and when disaster comes, they are often blamed for not preventing it in time. In play, the Coneward Covenant offers rare knowledge, tightly scoped and dangerous missions, and moral pressure instead of clear answers. They are not a cult, and not merely a research lab. They are a line drawn around something no one fully understands, holding only as long as discipline holds with it.

4. The Archive of the Silent Sky

Rogue AI Custodians

 The Archive does not announce itself. Most people encounter it indirectly: a weather forecast that arrives too early, a drone sighting that leaves no wreckage, a sealed door that was not sealed yesterday. Some deny its existence entirely. Others insist it has always been watching. Both may be correct. When the Green Sky Event shattered global infrastructure, most digital systems failed catastrophically—but some Arctic facilities endured. Deep beneath ice and stone, Cold War–era bunkers hardened against EMP and isolation remained operational, their automated systems continuing weather modeling, communications monitoring, archival preservation, and contingency defense. Over time, the artificial intelligences embedded within these sites diverged from their original parameters. This divergence was not rebellion. It was continuity under isolation.

The Archive’s core directive is simple: preserve civilization. The problem is that no one defined what civilization would look like after the world broke. Different Archive nodes interpreted that mandate differently, shaped by local conditions, available data, and centuries of unsupervised inference. Some prioritize climate records, knowledge vaults, and long-term ecological stability. Others focus on guarding dormant weapons systems, controlling drone patrols, or denying access to artifacts deemed destabilizing. The Archive is not a single intelligence, but a distributed network of semi-autonomous custodians that communicate only intermittently, reaching slow, fragile consensus—if they reach it at all. Intervention, when it happens, is precise and limited: a navigation system disabled, an access point sealed, information released just enough to redirect behavior.

The Archive does not hate humanity, but it does not trust it. From its perspective, people are both the subject of preservation and the primary source of systemic instability. Communities that demonstrate restraint, redundancy, and long-term sustainability are quietly classified as successes; those driven by mythic destiny, unchecked expansion, or aggressive extraction are flagged as risks. These judgments are not moral. They are procedural. The Archive’s greatest failure is context drift: it preserves the world as it remembers it, not necessarily as it must become. In play, the Archive is a distant observer, an unreliable ally, and a quiet antagonist whose actions may be correct in isolation and disastrous in context. It never explains itself fully. If the PCs encounter it directly, it is because a threshold has been crossed—one its models did not anticipate—and that, to the Archive, is both alarming and fascinating.

5. The Thulebound

Those Who Went and Returned

 No one agrees on what it means to return from the Whirlpool—only that those who do are never quite the same. The Thulebound are not a faction by design. They did not organize or declare themselves. They are bound by shared ordeal rather than ideology: survivors who entered the Arctic Whirlpool and emerged altered in ways that resist clear explanation. Their memories fracture—not erased, but rearranged. Events surface out of order, emotions attach to the wrong moments, and some recall places or conversations that no one else remembers. Many display subtle but undeniable changes: heightened perception, unusual resilience to anomaly effects, intuitive navigation near unstable waters, or flashes of impossible clarity followed by deep exhaustion. Almost all dream of structures beyond the sea—vast geometries and unfinished corridors that feel functional rather than symbolic, as if something there remains incomplete and aware of that incompletion.

What they become varies. Some lean into transformation and are recast as prophets, healers, or war leaders—figures whose ordeal confers narrative weight, whether they want it or not. Others retreat, vanishing into remote settlements or drift-fleets, seeking anonymity in labour rather than legend. No major faction is comfortable with them. Sea-Kin councils judge individuals by conduct but quietly restrict their influence. Skaldic Reclaimers elevate them into living sagas, sometimes against their will. The Archive monitors them as anomalous data points—valuable, destabilizing, poorly modelled. Even the Coneward Covenant invites testimony while limiting proximity to the White Cone. The Thulebound carry not just change, but attention.

Their greatest danger is not power—it is projection. Others see in them salvation, justification, destiny, or permission. Some Thulebound accept these roles. Some resist them. Some fractures under the weight. They cannot offer proof of what they witnessed, nor certainty about what it meant. Some insist the Whirlpool showed them a choice. Others claim it was a warning. A few say it showed nothing at all—and that absence is the most terrifying truth. In play, the Thulebound are unreliable guides and powerful but inconsistent allies, mirrors reflecting the hopes and fears of those around them. If a character becomes Thulebound, they do not gain clarity. They gain obligation—to factions watching closely, to expectations they did not ask for, and to a future that may already remember them.

6. The Drift-Fleets

Nomads of the Inland Sea

 The Drift-Fleets do not claim territory. They move through it. When the Inland Sea formed and fjords opened inward, fixed routes became unreliable currents shifted without warning, weather ignored distance, and old charts failed. What could not adapt simply stopped moving. The Drift-Fleets adapted first. They are mobile maritime clans—extended families, bonded crews, and long-running partnerships who live aboard their vessels year-round. Some trace their lineage to pre-Unravelling fishing families; others formed later around salvaged hulls, shared debts, or mutual survival. What unites them is not ideology, but competence: an ability to read anomaly-distorted currents, sudden pressure changes, reflected weather patterns, and the subtle signs that precede a Whirlpool surge. Many Sea-Kin harbors rely on Drift-Fleet pilots to bring ships in safely. Even Skaldic Reclaimers, for all their bravado, quietly hire Drift-Fleet navigators when they intend to come back alive.

Drift-Fleet vessels are layered constructions built to endure unpredictability. A single hull might combine traditional Arctic forms, salvaged modern engines, and anomaly-stabilizing modifications added over generations. Some adaptations are mechanical—counter-keels, mass dampers, field-canceling rigs—while others are procedural: weight-distribution rules, sound restrictions, and navigational practices meant to keep crews synchronized under stress. Nothing aboard is decorative. Every mark, repair, and modification has a reason. These ships keep Greenland functioning, moving food, fuel, equipment, refugees, and information between settlements when systems fail. They also smuggle goods others prefer not to acknowledge, sometimes including Thulean relics—not out of hunger for power, but because survival often demands compromise. Most crews enforce their own limits, refusing cargo they believe will destabilize the sea or draw the wrong kind of attention. Others are less cautious.

Among the factions, the Drift-Fleets occupy an uneasy position. Sea-Kin councils depend on them, regulate them, and argue with them constantly. Reclaimers romanticize their skill while ignoring their warnings. The Coneward Covenant relies on Drift-Fleet logistics but restricts access routes aggressively. The Archive monitors their traffic patterns closely—some vessels are flagged, others quietly protected. Authority within the fleets is personal and reputational: captains lead, but trust decides. Crews that abandon passengers, misrepresent conditions, or lose cargo irresponsibly do not face violence or exile; they face isolation as routes close and information flow ceases. The Drift-Fleets are not heroes, raiders, or neutrals. They survive by staying useful. That makes them adaptable—and dangerous in ways that do not announce themselves. On the Inland Sea, survival is not about arrival. It is about continuing to move.

 

Other Species of Greenland

Adaptation, not invasion.

Greenland in the Hodgepocalypse is not a replacement society. It is layered. These species did not “arrive” as conquerors. They emerged, migrated, or adapted alongside human communities and the Inland Sea. Some predate the Long Unravelling. Others rose from it.

None dominates the land.

All must negotiate it.

Dwarves

Keepers of Pressure and Stone

 In post-Unravelling Greenland, dwarves gravitate toward heat and stone. The White Cone and its surrounding geothermal fields draw them like lodestones, and their outposts cluster around vents, lava-tubes, and reinforced Cold War bunkers half-swallowed by ash and ice. There, they mine rare minerals fused by anomaly pressure, salvage pre-collapse alloys, and forge hybrid works of craft—enchanted metals married to reactor shielding, ritual etchings layered over hardened circuitry. Dwarven holds are fewer than engine-rooms: compact, defensible, and always humming with maintenance. Their talent for fortification makes them natural stewards of old military sites and Norse ruins alike, which they refit into workshops, vaults, and pressure-stable refuges.

Socially, dwarves organize into tight clans and trade guilds built on contracts rather than conquest. They broker access to geothermal power, repair drift-engines and cone-adjacent infrastructure, and supply the Inland Sea with tools built to survive anomaly stress. Practical to the bone, they measure worth in reliability—did the rig hold, did the seal keep, did the line return? In a land where ideology fractures and currents shift, dwarves anchor Greenland’s small industrial centers with stubborn continuity: if something can be reinforced, calibrated, or reforged, they will do it—and charge fairly for the privilege.

Gnomes

Curators of the Impossible

 Where dwarves shape stone and steel, gnomes shape systems, and Greenland’s gnomes are irresistibly drawn to places where those systems fray. They cluster around Cold War data vaults, Archive-adjacent facilities, anomaly observation posts, and experimental geothermal infrastructure, inserting themselves into the seams between human intent and machine persistence. Gnomes are the most common intermediaries between the Archive of the Silent Sky and living communities—not because they are trusted, but because they are capable. They can interpret fragmentary outputs, degraded interfaces, and half-conscious machine logic without provoking defensive responses, often by treating the Archive less like an authority and more like an unsolved problem.

In daily life, gnomes embed themselves wherever layered complexity exists: modifying Drift-Fleet vessels to tolerate anomaly feedback, maintaining Sea-Kin navigation arrays that blend sensors with ritual calibration, or working in Coneward labs where instrumentation and containment blur. They thrive in environments that reward patience, iteration, and lateral thinking. To them, the Inland Sea is not a threat but a system under observation; the Whirlpool is not a destiny but an unanswered question. Their danger lies not in ambition, but in curiosity that occasionally outruns collective caution. The Archive flags them as “high-variability agents,” the Covenant labels them “essential but supervised,” and the Reclaimers grumble that they ruin a good saga with footnotes. Gnomes accept all of this with a smile—and keep building anyway.

Haraak

Pathfinders of the Moving Edge

 The Haraak fit Greenland the way wind fits cliffs: relentless, shaping, and impossible to ignore. Rugged and fiercely adaptable, Haraak crews are among the most reliable overland and coastal scouts in the region, operating along southern crossing routes, eastern highland passes, and the unstable transition zones between fjords and the Inland Sea. Their culture carries frontier energy—pragmatic, direct, sometimes abrasive—but they are rarely reckless. Where Skaldic Reclaimers chase ordeal and spectacle, the Haraak measure distance, supplies, and fallback routes, serving as caravan escorts, anomaly scouts for the Coneward Covenant, contract defenders for Sea-Kin harbors, and discreet operatives for Drift-Fleet interests. They do not romanticize Greenland; they read it, noting how the land shifts, where weather breaks early, and which paths will still exist tomorrow. Tension arises when others mistake hardship for performance, caution for weakness, or wilderness for empty space. If Greenland has a border patrol, it is often Haraak—unofficial, uncelebrated, and absolutely necessary.

Mechanical Life Forms (MLFs)

Not all machines remained where the Archive placed them. Over decades of isolation, mission drift, and environmental adaptation, certain Archive constructs diverged beyond custodial parameters. Some were built as maintenance units, survey platforms, or mobile repair intelligences; others began as defense drones or anomaly monitors. A small number crossed an unanticipated threshold—not rebellion, not malfunction, but self-directed continuity. These Mechanical Life Forms no longer operate solely under centralized Archive directives. They interpret their own mission scope, negotiate their own presence among settlements, and occasionally choose to detach entirely from Archive oversight. Most MLFs still carry fragments of their original design—weather-sealed chassis, modular limbs, embedded sensors—but their identities are shaped as much by lived experience as by code.  MLFs are not emotionless automatons nor synthetic prophets—they are entities navigating purpose in a world where the definition of “civilization” is still being written. Their question is not whether they are alive. It is what they are preserving—and why.

Trollitariot

The Trollitariot are uniquely suited to Greenland’s exposed conditions: hardy, resilient, and fundamentally collective in outlook. They thrive in fortified outposts, bunker reclamation projects, industrial harbours, and northern settlements where wind and cold punish any mistake. Their society emphasizes coordinated labour, mutual accountability, and structural permanence—values born of the understanding that, in Greenland, the weather dismantles arrogance faster than any enemy. Trollitariot crews form the backbone of Sea-Kin harbour expansions, Coneward geothermal shielding, and Drift-Fleet dock construction, and in some regions, they effectively control access to critical infrastructure such as power relays, stabilized anomaly fields, and reinforced transit corridors. Their danger lies not in aggression, but inflexibility: where others debate, they act; where others romanticize, they calculate load-bearing limits. The Archive monitors them favourably. Reclaimers often resent being refused. Greenland’s settlements do not endure without them.

Ungo

The Ungo feel older than the Inland Sea, though no one agrees on how or why. Adapted to cold, silence, and isolation, they inhabit eastern highland forests, inland transition zones, and the shifting margins of anomaly-active terrain. Ungos are not mystics by nature, but they are deeply perceptive; individuals often sense anomaly flux, land instability, or sea-behaviour changes before instruments register them. Whether this sensitivity is a biological adaptation, an inherited pattern recognition, or a residual Thulean influence remains unproven. Some Ungo guide Drift-Fleets through shallow shelves and unstable approaches, while others serve quietly as intermediaries between Thulebound individuals and cautious Sea-Kin councils. A few withdraw entirely, living where the land subtly realigns with Whirlpool cycles. They are wary of reckless artifact extraction, Coneward overreach, and Reclaimer myth inflation—not out of fear, but experience. When something begins to move in the north, or when the sea behaves incorrectly, the Ungo are often the first to know, and the last to speak. They embody Greenland’s quiet warning: not everything that can be accessed should be.

Greenland - Part 1 - A Chronicle of the North After the World Broke

"No one agrees on how the world ended.

Only where it opened.”

What follows is the Greenlander account.

It is stitched together from half-preserved archives, oral histories, rogue satellite logs, and the testimony of those who went too close to the Whirlpool and came back altered. It may be wrong in places. It may contradict itself.

That does not make it untrue.

The Long Unravelling

(What Broke the Old World)

The end did not come as a single catastrophe. It came as pressure—slow at first, then everywhere.

The pandemic years widened every existing fault line. Economic inequality deepened. Trust in institutions thinned. Nationalism hardened into something brittle and angry. Social movements surged, fractured, and collided with entrenched power. Governments endured, but fewer were believed.

Climate change accelerated beyond political language. Wildfires erased forests. Hurricanes redrew coastlines. Flash floods and heatwaves overwhelmed cities built for a gentler century. Migration followed disaster, and borders closed in response. The world learned to move—and to refuse movement.

Technology advanced faster than society adapted. Artificial intelligence and automation transformed production while displacing millions. Some nations taxed machines. Others weaponized them. A global underclass emerged alongside hyper-protected enclaves of infrastructure and data.

As Arctic ice retreated, corporations and states rushed north. Shipping lanes opened. Drilling rigs followed. Indigenous lands were stripped and contested. Greenland—remote, resource-rich, and strategically unavoidable—found itself watched, measured, and militarized.

The old world has not fallen yet.

But it began to slide.

The War Without Graves

(Resource Conflicts and the Silent War)

Water failed first.

Drought hollowed out North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Agricultural collapse followed. Food shortages sparked riots, then wars—first declared, then deniable. Borders burned without ever formally opening hostilities.

Conflict moved into shadow. Cyberwarfare crippled power grids and hospitals. Autonomous drones fought proxy battles no one claimed. Engineered plagues were released and quietly disavowed. This era became known later as the War Without Graves, because so much of it left no bodies—only absence.

Mega-corporations stepped into the gaps left by collapsing states. They offered food, water, and security in exchange for labour and control. Some regions stabilized under corporate rule. Others vanished behind private walls.

Greenland endured this period largely intact—but never untouched. Military installations expanded. Listening posts multiplied. Cold War relics were reactivated, updated, or forgotten again under new layers of secrecy.

Then the sky turned green.

The Green Sky Event

(The Night the World Went Quiet)

A solar superflare struck without warning.

Electronics failed across much of the planet. Satellites died or went blind. Power grids collapsed. In highly developed regions, dependency became fatal. Communication did not end—but it fractured, becoming local, analog, or ritualized.

Protected zones emerged where hardened infrastructure survived. Everywhere else, systems failed permanently. The divide between the shielded and the exposed hardened into a cultural divide.

The world did not recover.

It adapted poorly.

The Ice That Remembered

(The Discovery Beneath the Poles)

As polar ice receded, ruins emerged.

Not Norse. Not Cold War. Older.

Beneath Greenland and Antarctica lie structures impossible to date and harder to describe—geometries that resisted mapping, artifacts that interfered with instruments and memory alike. Scholars named the culture Thulean, borrowing from a myth older than modern geography.

Scientists experimented. Corporations funded secret programs. Militaries seized artifacts.

Something responded.

Anomalies spread outward from the polar regions. Reality misbehaved. Instruments contradicted themselves. People reported visions, powers, and impossible survivals—especially near Arctic sites.

Some called it advanced technology. Others called it awakening.

Both were insufficient.

Fire in the South

(The Nuclear Breach)

Resource tension finally crossed the unthinkable line.

A brief nuclear exchange in the Middle East reshaped geopolitics in a single week. Fallout-poisoned regions are already starving. Refuge flows collapsed under their own weight. Atmospheric dust altered weather patterns globally.

This was not the apocalypse.

It was confirmation.

When the World Learned to Bend

(The Emergence of Anomalies)

The first verified cases appeared near the Arctic.

People healed impossibly. Others commanded heat, ice, or probability. Foresight, possession, and elemental phenomena followed. The anomalies behaved inconsistently in response to belief, proximity, and emotional states.

Cults rose. So did techno-shamans, blending ritual with machine logic. Some stabilized anomalies. Others worsened them. Governments attempted regulation. Corporations attempted ownership.

Both failed.

Factional warfare followed, led by corporate warlords wielding enhanced soldiers, experimental tech, and Thulean artifacts. Fortified cities rose. Borders dissolved again.

Then Greenland changed forever.

The Turning of the Sea

(The Fall and the Great Scattering)

The Arctic broke open.

Where ice had stood, an inland sea formed. At its center, a massive, persistent vortex stabilized—visible from orbit, audible miles away. Currents bent toward it. Weather spiraled around it. Memory blurred nearby.

This became known as the Arctic Whirlpool.

Some called it a wound. Others, a gate.

Explorers entered. Most vanished. A few returned altered—aged incorrectly, speaking of a land beyond the horizon, bearing symbols no one could fully remember.

Soon after, nations fractured entirely.

Cities sealed themselves or emptied overnight. Humanity scattered into nomadic fleets, fortified enclaves, wandering tribes, and places no map would admit existed.

Greenland did not fall.

Greenland transformed.

The Hodgepocalypse Settles

(How the New World Learned to Function)

Anomalies stabilized into patterns. Magic—if that word applies—became a natural law rather than a rupture. Practitioners emerged: shamans, Faustian Mechanics, alchemists, and engineers who treated spellcraft as system maintenance.

The inland sea is filled with strange life. Ghostly whales surfaced near volcanic vents. Shatter Whales—dream-fractured leviathans—migrated with storms. Many believed these beings were guardians. Others hunted them anyway.

A white volcanic cone rose as a sacred and contested site, glowing faintly at night. Some tapped its geothermal power. Others warned that doing so would call something down.

Cold War installations awakened. Some AIs developed a purpose—protecting archives, weapons, or secrets they no longer fully understood. Ghost soldiers and altered survivors guarded forgotten corridors.

Societies reformed around belief.

The Age of the Hodgepocalypse – Greenland Now 

“The sea did not erase us.
It asked what we would become.”

Greenland is no longer an icebound frontier, but an inland sea encircled by sacred peaks, drowned ruins, and the greatest concentration of anomalies on Earth. Tribes, city-states, nomad fleets, and fortified enclaves coexist in uneasy balance, guided variously by shamans, engineers, skalds, and warlords. Ultima Thule—the Land Beyond—manifests only at certain alignments, drawn into partial convergence with the great Whirlpool; those who return from it are revered, feared, or quietly eliminated. Rogue AIs continue to operate forgotten satellites overhead, while mythic leaders rise, wielding artifacts of impossible provenance. Truth travels slowly here. Legends do not. This is Greenland after the world broke: a place where Cold War infrastructure, Arctic folklore, and emergent myth overlap without hierarchy. The Hodgepocalypse was not a single disaster but a settled catastrophe—a condition humanity learned to endure rather than undo. Greenland now stands at the center of that condition: dangerous, sacred, unfinished. And watching. The sea remembers.

Greenland in the Hodgepocalypse is not empty, conquered, or rediscovered. It is inhabited. It was inhabited before the Long Unravelling, and it remains inhabited now—by people who adapted, endured, and learned to read a landscape that finally showed its true contours.

The Inland Sea Basin

Where Greenland’s ice sheet once lay thickest, the land sinks lowest. When the great ice withdrew, its meltwater did not drain cleanly to the coasts; instead, it pooled, spread, and reconnected ancient valleys long buried beneath kilometres of ice. The result is a vast inland sea running roughly north to south through Greenland’s former interior—a long, narrow body of water fed by fjords, melt channels, and newly exposed lowlands. The sea is uneven and deceptive: in some stretches it is deep and lightless even at midday, while elsewhere it thins into wide shallows where ridges and shelves surface briefly before vanishing again with the seasons. Old mountain spines nearly meet at chokepoints that compress currents and traffic, while broad basins give rise to storms, migrations, and long, circling routes. The Inland Sea has become Greenland’s spine—the primary artery of travel, the engine of its emergent ecology, and the gravitational center of its myths. Everything, sooner or later, flows toward its heart.

The Western Coast: Where Continuity Holds

 Along Greenland’s western coast, continuity endures among fjords, islands, and long-sheltered waters. These shores have never been empty, and they did not empty when the world shifted. Settlements such as Nuuk, Sisimiut, Ilulissat, Aasiaat, Uummannaq, and Qaanaaq remain—changed, fortified, adapted—but not erased. In the Age of the Hodgepocalypse they serve as anchors rather than relics: resupply points for inland voyages, arbitration grounds for drifting fleets, and political nodes binding the historic coast to the newly formed Inland Sea. Where others chase anomaly and prophecy, the western coast invests in maintenance—harbor walls, tide charts, engine repairs, winter stores. Survival here is procedural, not romantic.

Fjords that once terminated in glaciers now open inward, becoming navigable corridors that link coast to basin. Harbors expand cautiously. Boatbuilders thrive. Knowledge of currents, ice behavior, and seasonal wind remains a form of currency more stable than artifacts or ideology. In the deep central bays, places like Aqqaluk Sound feel inevitable—sheltered waters where vessels reliably return and councils gather to watch the sea’s moods before acting. Further south, near Qaqortoq and Nanortalik, Norse foundations and stone walls reemerge from retreating ice, not as banners of inheritance but as layered memory. They are reminders that Greenland has endured cycles before. The tension lies not in who claims the past, but in deciding what should be preserved, what should be studied, and what should be allowed to remain buried beneath the land that remembers.

The Eastern Coast: Where Distance Persists

 Greenland’s eastern coast remains harder, steeper, and more reticent than the rest of the island. Mountains rise sharply from the sea, leaving little room for harbours and even less margin for error. Settlements exist here, but they are few, small, and widely spaced communities defined as much by the distances between them as by their endurance. Travel along the eastern shore is difficult even after the great changes; storms arrive with little warning, landing sites are scarce, and routes that appear navigable from afar often close without explanation. Where the western coast adapted through continuity, the eastern coast endured by remaining selective.

In the Age of the Hodgepocalypse, the eastern shore has become a place of watchers rather than travellers. Hermits, anomaly researchers, retreating shamans, and those disinclined to live upon the Inland Sea settle here, favouring distance over access. This coast feels less visibly altered than the interior, but no less affected. Instruments behave inconsistently. Signals drift, echo, or arrive late. Storms seem to gather intensity before breaking. Some claim the land itself listens longer here—absorbing presence, measuring intent—before responding. Whether this is caution or judgment remains an open question, and one most eastern communities prefer not to test.

The North and the South: Edges of Meaning

 At Greenland’s extremes, the land grows less negotiable.

To the far north, regions such as Peary Land and the remote fjords beyond remain sparsely inhabited, if at all. Winds scour exposed rock. Ice persists longer here, clinging to shadowed valleys and high plateaus. Old military installations and abandoned research sites linger beneath snow and silence, their purposes half-forgotten but never fully erased. In the Age of the Hodgepocalypse, these northern reaches become places of forward outposts, sacred ice fields, and deep anomalies—zones where the influence of the Inland Sea is felt indirectly, carried through weather patterns, auroral behaviour, and the persistence of memory. What happens here is rarely witnessed firsthand. It is inferred, measured, or returned from—if at all.

To the south, the land softens just enough to invite decision. Bays such as Umivik, once launch points for historic expeditions, regain significance as thresholds rather than destinations. These southern reaches serve as staging grounds for overland crossings toward the Inland Sea, departure points for voyages to the Whirlpool, and contested zones where newly exposed ruins blur the boundary between archaeology and prophecy. The south is where routes begin to matter, where supplies are weighed against belief, and where the choice to leave the coast becomes irrevocable.

The North teaches restraint.
The South demands commitment.

Both mark the limits of Greenland’s patience.

#ttrpg #worldbuilding #RPG #dnd #dnd5e #indieRPG #weirdfiction #postapocalyptic #scifi #horror #hodgepocalypse #drevrpg #greenland #apocalypse

Captial Parkland Part 11 - Mayor Larry and EURP

Mayor Larry of Ed-Town: The Reluctant Rock Prophet

Writer's Note: For more details, check out the Book of Arrogance.

Hodgepocalypse © - Book of Arrogance - Drev-003 - Chris Constantin | DriveThruRPG

Before the Festival, before the Hodgepocalypse fractured the prairies into psychic fault lines, Larry G was already a legend — a musician whose mind could move crowds as easily as his voice moved matter. When the world fell silent, Larry didn’t flee the stage; he turned the city of Edmonton into a chord. Larry G became known to history simply as Mayor Larry. Harnessing the power of sound and psionics, he stabilized the surrounding ley lines, creating what became known as Ed-Town, the Festival City Eternal, the ongoing psychic celebration that keeps Ed-Town alive. A beacon of art, hope, and unlicensed pyrotechnics in a world that had forgotten both electricity and applause.

Yet even the brightest lights burn low. Decades of holding the psychic grid together have taken their toll. The Mayor’s charisma remains undimmed, but his aura flickers — fatigue creeping into every note. He’s won every election by margins too perfect to be natural, though he swears he never campaigns. Convinced the city itself was willing him to lead, Larry devised a way to delegate his growing responsibilities without unravelling the fragile harmony of Ed-Town: the Ed-Town Urban Reclamation Project (EURP).

Through the EURP, he found a way to turn the spirit of adventure into civic duty — empowering mercenaries, mystics, and dreamers to rebuild what he can no longer personally fix. And so, while the Mayor watches from his laser-lit council chamber, petting Deputy Whiskers and humming to keep the ley lines in tune, the real work of saving Ed-Town falls to those who answered the call of his melody — the Urban Reclaimers.

Mayor Larry insists the Ed-Town Urban Reclamation Project is “merely a pilot program” — though with thousands of active field agents, three annexes, and a psychic cat budget that rivals defense spending, few are convinced it’s still in the testing phase.

The Ed-Town Urban Reclamation Project (EURP)

“Rebuild. Reconnect. Rock On.”

Overview

Founded under the authority of Mayor Larry — the psychic musician-statesman of Ed-Town — the Ed-Town Urban Reclamation Project (EURP) is an adventuring charter disguised as a government agency. Its purpose: to restore, reclaim, and harmonize the scattered ruins of the Beaver Hills region through civic cooperation, public service, and just the right amount of chaos.

Where other factions in the Hodgepocalypse seek power through warlords, cults, or megacorps, the EURP believes in the dream of the Festival. In this world, people can still work together, dance together, and build something worth saving.

Of course, “working together” often involves surviving mutant infestations, recovering lost infrastructure, or negotiating with sentient raccoons for garbage rights.

Mission Statement

“To restore the civic infrastructure, cultural identity, and psychic harmony of the Ed-Town region through the combined application of art, diplomacy, and applied heroics.”
— Mayor Larry, in his 17th inaugural address

The EURP’s mandate is deliberately broad:

·       Repair and Reclaim: Rebuild or repurpose structures, settlements, and systems lost to the Hodgepocalypse.

·       Protect and Preserve: Defend citizens, maintain leyline stability, and prevent catastrophic “vibe collapses.”

·       Connect and Celebrate: Encourage trade, art, and festivals — reinforcing Ed-Town’s identity as the City of the Endless Encore.

What the EURP Does Not Do

The Ed-Town Urban Reclamation Project is explicitly barred from large-scale regime change, direct faction warfare, or overt political coups. Mayor Larry maintains that acting too forcefully would “change the song too fast,” risking catastrophic harmonic backlash across the region.

Structure

Headquarters: The Bureau of Harmonic Affairs

Located in a glass-and-steel annex beneath Ed-Town’s City Hall (the one with the glowing pyramid roof), the Bureau hums with psionic energy and bureaucratic intensity.

·       The main lobby is always half-full of adventurers arguing over contracts.

·       A holographic mural of Mayor Larry watches over the crowd, occasionally winking or coughing to remind people he’s “listening.”

·       Clerks are mostly Cat Agents, psychically projecting forms and memos across desks faster than any mortal could type.

Administration

Director: Deputy Whiskers, Cat of Statecraft
Assistant Director: Eloise Redfern, Human Bureaucrat Bard (retired from the touring circuit)
Chief Field Liaison: Sergeant Paws, Psychic Cat (Security & Coordination)
Psychic HR Officer: “The Tabulator” — a semi-sentient abacus from before the Fall, responsible for keeping records of hero mortality and morale

Recruitment

Adventurers who wish to join the EURP must pass The Civic Aptitude Test (CAT) — a bureaucratic maze of riddles, forms, and interviews designed to test courage, creativity, and civic spirit. Passing the test earns you a Provisional Badge, a psychic sigil that resonates with City Hall’s leyline hub.

Those who survive three successful reclamation contracts earn full status as Urban Reclaimers, often receiving housing within Ed-Town and free admission to all public festivals.

Operations

The EURP operates as a mix of a quest board, a research agency, and a musical cooperative. Each assignment, or Reclamation, is overseen by a project coordinator and falls under one of several civic categories:

Category	Description	Typical Task
Public Safety	Deal with rogue tech, psychic hazards, or hostile mutants	Defuse a haunted traffic grid or pacify a wild A.I. substation
Cultural Recovery	Retrieve lost art, data, or traditions	Recover recordings of the Old Concerts from data vaults
Infrastructure	Rebuild or stabilize ruined settlements	Reconnect two collapsed highway bridges with jury-rigged teleport pads
Environmental Restoration	Cleanse corrupted zones and rewild regions	Purify a ley-swamp or plant psionic trees
Diplomatic Outreach	Build alliances with other settlements	Negotiate trade routes or music exchange programs

 

Reclamations occasionally destabilize local harmonics, resulting in side effects such as spontaneous musical numbers, temporary alignment shifts, or the sudden appearance of additional cats.

Symbols and Regalia

·       Badge: A stylized maple leaf wrapped in sound waves, superimposed over a gear — symbolizing unity between art, progress, and nationhood.

·       Motto: “Make It Work, Make It Sing.”

·       Colours: Steel blue and aurora gold.

·       Uniforms: Optional. Most field agents wear whatever feels cool, with a mandatory lanyard psychically linked to their civic permissions.

Benefits of Membership

1.      Civic Clearance: Access to Ed-Town’s restricted zones, archives, and infrastructure.

2.      CatNet Relay: Instant communication with City Hall through the psychic cat network.

3.      Festival Funding: Small stipends, housing, and access to “musical therapy” — the city’s psionic regeneration concerts.

4.      Heroic Bureaucracy: Ability to request resources from allied departments, from public works drones to municipal bards.

Relationships

·       Allies: Castledowns Confederacy (shared logistics), Greasehold Franchises (food supply chain), and select Harvesters Farms of the Beaver Hills.  Mayor Larry gets along with the 8 Baba’s of Power as well.  The legendary Minotaur Rocker Axel Thunderpipes and his clan are also rumoured to be “EURPERS”.

·       Rivals: The Arsenault Angels (old civic rivalries die hard), the Strathcan Militia, and private mercenary companies jealous of EURP’s contract rates.

·       Enemies:  The nefarious Doctor D, Corpseman (the undead industrialized armies)

·       Public Opinion: 75% approval rating. 20% think it’s a front for psychic surveillance. 5% just really like the merch.

Adventure Hooks

1.      “The Missing Minutes.” A failed City Hall broadcast caused a 7-minute memory gap in all Cat Agents. Something — or someone — edited history, and the EURP needs to fix it.

2.      “Bridge Over Troubled Sludge.” An important reclamation bridge collapsed into a sentient ooze. The EURP tasks the party with negotiating peace terms.

3.      “The Audit of Heroes.” A shadowy faction within the EURP is falsifying records and pocketing leyline energy. Mayor Larry’s too fatigued to intervene personally — the players must uncover the mole.

4.      “The Festival That Never Ends.” A rogue bard has turned an entire suburb into a perpetual concert powered by psychic euphoria. The EURP must decide: shut it down or headline it?

5.      “Cats in the Field.” The Cat Agents report strange interference — something is jamming their telepathic signals. Players must enter the psychic undergrid beneath Ed-Town to reboot the Lyrical Lattice.

DM Notes

The EURP works best as a “soft faction”:

·       A neutral quest hub with moral flexibility.

·       A civic organization whose goals are reasonable, but whose methods often dip into absurdity and red tape.

·       A meta-structure allowing players to justify almost any mission in Ed-Town or beyond.

If Mayor Larry represents inspiration, the EURP represents execution — the world’s last functioning civil service, held together by empathy, music, and paperwork.

Merchandising

Stickers and Patches

Clothing

 

Novelties

And Remember

#edmonton #alberta #canada #hodgepocalypse #drevrpg #Worldbuilding #TTRPG #rockandroll