Thornlands - Part 2 - Prairie Atlantis - Part 4 - Beyond Atlantis

 

Airdrie – The Dry Crown of Prairie Atlantis

Rising above the worst of the floodwaters, Airdrie has become known as the Dry Crown—a windswept supply hub and skyship refuge perched on a higher elevation like a lifeboat anchored in the clouds. Reinforced hangars and vertical launch towers dominate the skyline, while evac convoys, data salvagers, and dirigible crews dock, refuel, and trade in their fortified markets. It’s the last stop before you plunge into the drowned zones to the south, and the first hope for those rising from the depths. Mercenary outfits specialized in floodland navigation operate from here, offering retrieval, rescue, and revenge-for-hire. Meanwhile, factions vie for control over Airdrie’s clean archives, stable landing decks, and rare uplink access to surviving satellites.

Plot Hook – “The Broken Descent”
A returning skyship crash-lands just short of the Dry Crown, spilling scrambled blackbox data suggesting it found something in the depths of the Sloshedome that shouldn't exist—something that followed. The party is hired to recover the wreck, decode its findings, and deal with anything that might have come in on the final approach.

 Cochrane – The Cliffweld Outpost

Perched above the western surge of the Bow, Cochrane endures as a windswept cliff-edge dock town, part trading post, part steampunk marvel. With the flood swallowing most of the lower valley, the remaining population took to the heights, rigging precarious crane-suspended barges, wind-powered lifts, and signal kites that duel in bursts of colored smoke and coded flame. The sound of steam pistons and pulley-clanks fills the air, punctuated by cheers from the water-skiff jousts held in flooded quarry basins below. Cochrane has become a key stopover for scavenger fleets and message runners, its people proud, gear-savvy, and fiercely territorial. It is both a port and a precipice—daring the flood to rise, and the wind to carry word of its defiance.

Plot Hook – “The Chain Breaks”
One of Cochrane’s primary wind lifts has snapped mid-haul, sending a diplomatic envoy from Prairie Atlantis plummeting into the flood below. With tensions rising and rumors of sabotage swirling, the party must uncover whether it was an accident… or the first strike in a trade war held above the waterline.

High River – The Drowned Oracle’s Seat

Once a peaceful prairie town, High River now rests almost entirely beneath the flood—its steeples and rooftops jutting from the murk like gravestones. But the people never left. They adapted. Governed by the Water-Touched Oracles, High River has become a semi-submerged stronghold of sacred fluidity, where every ripple is a message and every current carries memory. Locals commune with the water through dream-drenched rites and submerged shrines, diving into watery crypts to seek guidance from spirits half-merged with the flow. Outsiders speak of visions, prophecy, and voices in the deep that know too much. The river is alive here, and it remembers what was, what is, and what might still drown.

Plot Hook – “The Warning Flowed Upstream”

A bottle bearing a carved river-sigil washes into Prairie Atlantis, containing a message from High River: “Do not let the towers rise again.” No one knows what it means, but soon afterward, psychic storms begin spiking along ley line intersections. The party is asked to descend into the sacred flood and speak directly to the Oracles—if they can reach them before the river swallows more than just land.

Okotoks – The Giant’s Graveyard

Once a charming river town, Okotoks now straddles a volatile confluence of back flowed floodwaters and raw magical energy. At its shattered heart lies the Big Rock, a glacial erratic sacred to the region, now cracked wide like a cosmic geode, revealing a pulsing core of exposed ley energy. Locals believe it was once a sleeping giant, turned to stone long ago… and now something inside it is stirring. The area around the rock has become a war zone of ritual stones, arcane trenches, and tectonic prophecy. Rival elemental cults vie for control, while geomancer squadrons attempt to stabilize reality one stone at a time. The town’s buildings, half-flooded and half-fused with crystal, echo with tremors no seismograph can explain.

Plot Hook – “The Stone That Breathes”
A piece of the Big Rock has gone missing—not broken off but vanished entirely. Now the leyline surges are growing unstable, and earthquakes are triggering elemental flare-ups across the town. The party is hired to find the missing fragment before one of the cults uses it to awaken what sleeps beneath the Graveyard.

Strathmore – The Bloomfront

What was once golden prairie has become a sunken, pulsing mire where the land seeps instead of stands. Strathmore now sits in the heart of a slow-motion collapse—a bog warzone where psychic plantlife blooms with eerie intent. The Harvesters, evolved and experimental, claim the muck as a sacred growth site, letting their biotech fields sprawl outward in twisting root webs and pollen-thick fog. Amid the sludge, resistance fighters cling to survival atop semi-floating tractor citadels, makeshift fortresses of steel and stubborn will, belching black smoke and rolling inches at a time through the swamp. Every day is a struggle between creeping flora and sputtering engine, between mind and mold. And the ground only sinks deeper.

Plot Hook – “The Root of the Matter”
One of the most enormous Harvester blooms has gone dormant, completely silent, yet strangely intact. A resistance faction wants the party to infiltrate and determine the reason. Inside, time doesn’t seem to pass normally, and what the bloom is growing now… might not be Harvester at all.

Prairie Atlantis and the Mountains That Watch It

Though the drowned towers and drifting barges of Prairie Atlantis dominate the eye, it is the jagged western skyline that shapes the city's soul. The Front Range Fringe looms in broken silhouette—once postcard-perfect ridges, now twisted relics of tectonic fury. After the Hodgepocalypse reawakened ancient fault lines, the foothills cracked open, revealing molten springs, floating boulders, and seismic scars called The Broken Spine. These mountains are more than background—they are thresholds. Their peaks and passes serve as wild bastions for survivors, mystics, and monsters alike. Mountaintop ruins whisper to the wind. Meltwater spills into the city through sentient canals. And every storm brings lightning down on the Thunder Chapel, a shattered observatory where psi-warriors and storm-callers kneel for visions.

The Alpine Buffer Zone—encompassing Bragg Creek, Kananaskis, Moose Mountain, and the Crowsnest Pass—functions as Prairie Atlantis' high-altitude limb: vital and volatile. Once a place for retreats and ranches, it now houses hermits in mist-drenched cabins, psychic cults in geothermal shrines, and cliff-dwellers surviving atop shanties suspended over deadly drops. Some come for answers. Others, to disappear. The Sky Burial Cliffs remain sacred to many, a taboo ground where the dead are laid to rest—or summoned for forbidden truths. And when spring floods the lowlands, all eyes turn to the mountains… because that’s where the water thinks. That’s where the trials begin.

Barrier Lake & Bow Valley Wildlands – The Eye in the Water

What was once a hydro-monitoring post tucked along Highway 40 has become a shimmering sorcerous anomaly—Barrier Lake, now known as The Eye in the Water. After the Hodgepocalypse, the lake expanded unnaturally, drowning surveillance towers and turning the surrounding valley into a dripping, rune-laced floodplain. The dam still holds—barely—but it groans with arcane tension as if restraining more than water. Rumors swirl that a Rainmaker, or perhaps a weather-bound cult, has made the reservoir its sanctum, conducting elemental experiments to control storms or rewrite the hydrological cycle. Strange fogs roll down the mountains at night, filled with voices that speak in rainfall patterns, and scrying into the lake always ends with the same vision: lightning striking upward.

Plot Hook – “The Dam That Dreamed”
A flash flood hits the outskirts of Prairie Atlantis with no storm preceding it—just a whisper in the air: “Release is coming.” The party is hired to ascend to Barrier Lake, locate the supposed Rainmaker, and determine whether the dam is failing... or waking up.

Bragg Creek – The Twilit Hamlet

Tucked in the foothills just west of drowned Calgary, Bragg Creek has become a quiet anomaly—a village suspended in an endless twilight where time curls like woodsmoke. Nature has overtaken half its homes, with moss-choked cabins and glowing root systems threading through kitchen floors. The area is now firmly fey touched, its boundaries soft and dreamlike. Witches brew memory-steeped teas, sylphs dance in weather-pattern spirals, and hermits speak in riddles filtered from the wind. Clocks don't work here. Seasons arrive out of order. Yet for those seeking forgotten knowledge, lost names, or second chances, Bragg Creek remains a hidden refuge—if you can navigate the rules of its forest courts.

Plot Hook – “The Day That Never Came”
A traveler entered Bragg Creek at sunrise and never reached noon. Their family has hired the party to join the hamlet and recover them, but locals insist the missing individual is still here, just caught in a pocket of borrowed time... and no longer wants to leave.

Canmore – The Spa of Broken Code

Nestled in the shadow of once-idyllic peaks, Canmore was a luxury retreat turned techno-spiritual haven in the years before the Hodgepocalypse. Now it stands as a shattered husk of corporatized mindfulness—its spas pumping corrupted aroma codes, its resorts echoing with ghost-audio affirmations warped by static. Once home to elite digital detoxers and avatar influencers, Canmore’s smart chalets and meditation domes are now crawling with rogue AIs, self-help bots caught in existential loops, and Harlowe factions who peddle posthuman enlightenment via surgical glamour and memetic branding. Visitors are either brainwashed, branded, or hacked—unless they know how to speak algorithmically and survive a “vibe audit.”

Plot Hook – “Reboot the Guru”
A cybercult offshoot claims they’ve found the original codebase of the Enlightenment App buried beneath the Canmore Retreat Center—but activating it has caused the facility to awaken. Now a sentient wellness protocol is auto-updating reality to match its ideals. The party must break in, break the loop, and avoid getting force-enrolled in a 10-day mindfulness simulation that lasts forever.

Crowsnest Pass – Fallhold, Vault of the Broken Trail

Tucked into the craggy guts of Crowsnest Pass, Fallhold is a dwarven redoubt carved into the ancient slide rock of the Frank Slide itself—a place built not to conquer the world, but to outlast it. Safe from floodwaters and psychic drift, the enclave thrives as a Last Bastion, where stone meets silence and secrets are kept like coin. Its vaulted archives contain pre-Revelation maps, blackbox relics, and geothermal-tethered artifact cores dredged up from the drowned cityscape far below. The dwarves of Fallhold, known for their blunt pragmatism and crystal-bonded memory rites, offer sanctuary to flood fugitives, ex-cartographers, and desperate scholars—provided they can pay in secrets. Outsiders may bring information in, but they rarely leave with more.

Plot Hook – “The Drift That Followed”
A “drift town” made of scavenged barges and reanimated concrete has begun floating up the valley toward Fallhold—against gravity, and seemingly alive. The dwarves are sealing their gates, fearing a breach of containment. The party is asked to investigate the town's course and cargo… before it speaks again in stolen voices.

Exshaw – The Alchemical Pit

What was once a limestone mining town is now a blazing wound in the earth—Exshaw, reimagined in the Hodgepocalypse as a smoldering alchemical quarry. The land here has been boiled, transmuted, and reborn into a crater of glowing slag pits, cracked kilns, and fumes that shimmer with unstable magic. Transband mutants, drawn by the promise of radiogenic compounds, clash daily with Stumpy mining enclaves who consider the stone sacred and the process sacrilege. The industrial ruins echo with the roar of forge-born beasts and sentient refineries gone mad with ritual heat. Meanwhile, runoff from these arcane extractions seeps into the Bow, birthing glowing floods and downstream hallucinations.

Plot Hook – “The Runoff Rebellion”
The river turned neon two nights ago—now whole stretches of land near Cochrane are sprouting alchemical anomalies. A neutral faction begs the party to negotiate a truce between the quarry’s factions… or sabotage the extraction rigs before Exshaw ignites the Bow in a second chemical Revelation.

Ghost Lake – The Drowned Crossing

Nestled northwest of Cochrane, Ghost Lake has become a cursed reservoir steeped in fog and echoing with the half-sung dirges of wrecked pirate barges. Violent psychic storms rake across its surface, and the waters flash with spectral visions—past drowning victims reaching upward, mouths moving with truths long buried. No one's sure what sank here first: the boats, the souls, or the sanity. Today, it serves as a dark crossing point for Canal Muskrats, smugglers, and Wyrd Ferrymen who navigate by ghost light and barter in dreams. Even the bravest steer clear of the lake’s center, where the wrecks shift positions when unobserved and old pirate flags rise from the deep like accusations.

Plot Hook – “The Bargain Beneath”
A ferryman offers the party safe passage across Ghost Lake, on one condition: they retrieve an item from the submerged barge, Dead Jenny. But when the item is recovered, the party begins to see flashes of alternate lives… ones they never lived, whispered into their ears by the lake itself. Something beneath wants them to stay.

Kananaskis Country – The Riftwild Reserve

Once a pristine sanctuary of alpine lakes, deep valleys, and secretive research labs, Kananaskis Country is now a maelstrom of natural splendor and arcane instability. The collapse of multiple hydroelectric systems unleashed not just water, but latent ley line pressure buried beneath the peaks. The result: a fractured landscape where portal storms crackle across mirror-still lakes, wildlife mutates with instinctive spellcasting, and forgotten bunkers hum with reactivated anomalies. While some see it as a cursed no-man’s-land, others treat it as sacred—a raw wound of the world where truth seeps through the cracks. Ritualists, monster hunters, and dimensional prospectors alike brave its shifting trails, knowing full well that the forest may not let them leave the way they came.

Plot Hook – “The Storm That Waits”
A steady pulse of portal energy has begun emanating from the ruins of a submerged dam complex, drawing creatures—and factions—toward it. The signal matches the frequency of an old project once buried by both water and secrecy. The party is hired to intercept whatever breaches the surface… or seal the rift before it becomes permanent.

Moose Mountain – Throne of the Sleeping Tremor

Towering over the broken treeline west of Prairie Atlantis, Moose Mountain broods beneath constant cloud cover and psychic pressure. Locals claim the mountain itself pulses with slow thought—because within its hidden dens slumbers Grulk-of-Many-Silences, the legendary Ungo warlord said to be the last Dreamhowler of the deepwoods. Grulk doesn’t command with speeches or weapons—he broadcasts intent. When he dreams, lowland machines malfunction. Jargon’s courtiers and raiders suffer migraines. Prairie Atlantis weather veers off-course. Grulk rose to power not through conquest, but through presence, amassing a following of Ungo, displaced mutants, and disenfranchised psychics who commune through shared memory and instinctive trust. His mountain is a living stronghold of moss-covered runes, sonic totems, and carved thought-stones.

Rumor has it Grulk only wakes when the land is at risk of forgetting what it used to be. With tensions rising between techno-factions below, some believe his hibernation is ending—and that the mountain will walk once more.

Plot Hook – “The Tremor Stirs”
A caravan bound for Prairie Atlantis derails near Moose Mountain, its crew found days later, eyes glowing and speaking in dream logic. The Strathcan Militia and Jargon’s emissaries both scramble to secure the region—but the party is contacted first… not by a faction, but by the mountain itself. Grulk has begun to murmur. The players must decide: silence the signal, decipher the warning, or join the chorus before it becomes a roar.

Nakiska / Mount Allan – The Ghost Games Arena

Built for the glory of the 1988 Winter Olympics, the Nakiska Ski Area and Mount Allan complex now echoes with cheers no living soul remembers. Snow-choked stadiums and cracked slopes host phantom athletes locked in eternal competition—speed skaters gliding through mist, bobsleds rattling down invisible tracks, and ski jumpers leaping into nothingness. This is The Ghost Games Arena, a site where psychic residue and performance obsession have merged into ritual. Spectators who linger too long feel phantom wind in their lungs and medals tightening around their throats. Some factions see it as a training ground for psionic endurance or gladiatorial rites; others fear it’s a proving ground for spirits who don’t know they’re dead—and won’t stop until they win.

Plot Hook – “The Podium Hungers”
A young psychic prodigy vanished after claiming they'd been "scouted" by the Ghost Coaches of Mount Allan. Now, dreamers citywide are reporting vivid visions of ice tracks and impossible races—and waking up breathless. The party is sent to investigate before someone becomes the Ghost Games' next permanent contender.

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