A living wound where earth, fire, and ooze mix into one.
The Scoop is a wound in the land — a pit where the earth
itself seems to smolder. Once carved by industry and left to fester by
greed, it has since been reshaped by magic into a living scar of tar, ooze, and
flame. The air tastes of melted plastic and gasoline; the ground buckles with
shifting sludge; pillars of black smoke mark the horizon. Yet people endure
here, clinging to the toxic bounty of Slick fuel and the dangerous promise of
fortune. To outsiders, it is a living hell. To those who survive its fumes, it
is home, opportunity, and damnation all at once.
History
Before the Fall
Long before the Hodgepocalypse, the land that became the
Scoop was already scarred by human hunger. The Cree and Dene knew the banks of
the Athabasca River for their strange black pitch, seeping from the ground like
wounds in the earth. They used it to waterproof canoes and tools, treating the
tar as both gift and omen. European explorers took note in the 18th century,
but it was the industrial age that truly saw fortune in the sticky earth. By
the early 20th century, scientists confirmed that beneath the muskeg lay one of
the largest petroleum reserves on the planet. The oil boom was slow to develop,
but once it began in earnest in the 1960s, Fort McMurray transformed from a
remote outpost into a thriving frontier of steel, fire, and relentless
extraction.
The boom carried a terrible price. Forests fell before
machines, rivers choked on runoff, and the air grew thick with the smoke of
bitumen upgrading plants. Massive open-pit mines spread across the boreal like
craters from some forgotten war. Tailings ponds, shimmering black and toxic,
sprawled larger than lakes. Companies dreamed of refining bitumen into liquid
gold, and governments invested billions in making that dream a reality. Behind
the billboards promising prosperity lay the reality: migrant labor crammed into
camps, rivers poisoned with mercury, and entire ecosystems sacrificed in the
name of oil. Yet the tar sands endured as a symbol of human progress — brutal,
dirty, but powerful.
It was in this crucible of ambition that projects like
bioengineered fuel microbes and AI-driven megamachines emerged, experiments
meant to solve the problem of scale. Among them was Ol’ Scoopy, a machine meant
to consume the land itself, and the designer microbes that could turn tar into
ready fuel. These innovations laid the groundwork for both the prosperity of
the old world and the horrors of the new. When magic returned and the
Hodgepocalypse reshaped the earth, the tar sands did not collapse — they metastasized.
The Scoop is not just a scar of apocalypse. It is the final echo of centuries
of extraction, a wound first cut by human hands long before sorcery ever
touched the soil.
The Collapse
When the Hodgepocalypse struck, the scars of industry became
open wounds. The engineered microbes seeded into tailings ponds mutated
overnight, no longer content with digesting bitumen and plastic. They consumed
anything — soil, flesh, even steel — leaving behind volatile ooze that twitched
with its own hunger. Tailings ponds boiled into black seas, their surfaces
rippling with living tar. Refineries split apart like carcasses, their chimneys
belching fire long after the last workers fell. The boreal forest retreated
under a tide of sludge and smoke, its silence broken by the rumble of Ol’
Scoopy, which never stopped chewing the land. The Athabasca became a river of
oil-streaked nightmares, carrying corruption far downstream.
Magic did not heal these wounds — it deepened them. Storms
rained plastic and resin, auroras burned black and orange, and the land itself
twisted into glassy dunes and smoldering muskeg. Animals that strayed too close
fused with ooze, shambling half-formed across slag fields. Camps of survivors
adapted, learning to corral oozes like livestock, bleeding them for fuel while
choking on the smell of burning tires. In time, the Scoop became not just a pit
but a kingdom of its own, ruled by fire, tar, and the steady, endless grinding
of Ol’ Scoopy. What had once been called the oil sands was reborn as a living
scar, a place where greed and apocalypse fused into one.
The Scoop became both deathtrap and lifeline, a place where
ruin itself could be harvested. Survivors learned to wrangle the oozes like
cattle, bleeding them for volatile fuel amid smoke that reeked of burning
plastic and charred earth. Camps clung to the pit’s edges, half refinery and
half frontier town, where every breath was a gamble and every barrel of Slick
could mean the difference between survival and collapse. Civilization endures
here, but only barely — choked by toxic fumes, haunted by whispers from the
ooze, and bound to the endless grinding hunger of the valley itself.
Geography
The Scoop yawns across northern Alberta like a wound that
will never close — a vast pit carved from the bones of the boreal forest and
swollen far beyond the old Athabasca tar sands. Its terraced walls tumble into
black lakes where tailings have become living seas, and its floor shifts with
sluggish rivers of ooze that glisten under smoke-choked skies. To the north and
east stretch muskeg bogs that smolder year-round, while to the south, shattered
dunes of glass and obsidian mark the faultlines where magic tore the land
apart. Gregoire Lake steams with oily runoff, and the Athabasca River itself
skirts the valley’s edge, carrying its corruption downstream. From above, the
Scoop looks less like a mine than a continent-sized maw — one that never stops
chewing, thanks to Ol’ Scoopy’s endless labor.
The Husklands
Sprawling around Anzac and Gregoire Lake, where the forests
once thick with spruce and pine are now nothing but charred husks. In their
place rise eerie, glass-like trees that crackle with arcane energy, their
jagged branches bending in defiance of the wind. Traders and sorcerers covet
these crystalline growths, though few dare harvest them, for the Husklands are
alive with whispers that gnaw at the mind. The deeper one ventures, the more
the land itself unravels — time stutters, gravity shifts sideways, and ghostly
echoes of the forest-that-was flicker between the crystalline trunks, reminding
all who enter that the collapse never truly ended here. A standard theory is that it is it’s own
dimensional gauntlet that is a trial for those that enter…assuming they can
leave.
Plot Hook: A team of crystal tree lumberjacks has not
returned from the Husklands. Witnesses claim they were last seen being
“absorbed” into the glass-like trees.
Lake Styx
Once a tailings pond south of Fort McMurray, Lake Styx has
swollen into a black inland sea that drowns the land between the Athabasca
River and the old Suncor site. Its waters are thick and tarry, bubbling
constantly with noxious gases that ignite in eerie flashes whenever lightning
storms roll across the valley. Slick-coated wranglers gather on its banks to
herd oozes into makeshift pens, but the ground is treacherous — entire rigs
have vanished overnight into its depths. Strange shapes drift just below the
surface, and some camps whisper that the lake itself is alive, watching with a
patient hunger. To outsiders, Styx is a cursed place, but to the Scoop it is a
lifeline, the largest and richest ooze reservoir in existence.
Plot Hook: A storm has set Lake Styx ablaze, and in
the fiery chaos something vast and unseen has begun to rise from its depths.
Millennium Mine
Once one of the largest open-pit operations of the Athabasca
oil sands, the Millennium Mine sat about 40 km north of Fort McMurray,
near the Athabasca River. In the Hodgepocalypse, the mine has collapsed into a
sprawling labyrinth of shattered draglines, rusting conveyor towers, and
tunnels slick with ooze. The place hums with strange echoes — metallic groans
that sound almost like voices, whispers that carry too clearly through the
empty machinery, and shadows that linger a heartbeat too long. Travelers say
the deeper one ventures, the more the tunnels seem to twist into themselves, as
though the mine resists being mapped. Most avoid it unless desperate for
salvage, but the few who return speak of a presence in the dark that makes even
hardened wranglers uneasy.
Plot Hook: A salvage crew vanished in the collapsed
tunnels of Millennium Mine, and the camp hires the PCs to recover their gear —
but the whispers in the dark suggest the miners may not be alone down there.
Steepbank & Muskeg
The bogs at the valley’s edge are a mire of black water and
smoldering peat, where ooze seeps through the moss like blood through bandages.
The ground is soft and treacherous, swallowing unwary travelers whole, while
smoke from endless underground fires drifts for miles, choking the lungs and
staining the sky. The muskeg is both barrier and lure — rich with salvage from
machines half-buried in mire, but cursed with a silence that feels older than
the Scoop itself. Few linger here long, for even the air seems to resist
intruders.
Plot Hook: A convoy has gone missing in the muskeg,
and the only trail left behind are strange burn patterns leading deeper into
the smoke.
The Sinkfields (Syncrude & Suncor Sites)
Where Syncrude and Suncor once ruled the oil sands, the land
has given way to a nightmarish sprawl of collapsing tunnels, half-sunken
refineries, and tar pits that bubble like open sores. The skeletal frames of
mega-facilities jut from the sludge like rusted cathedrals, their broken pipes
belching fumes into the sky. Wranglers risk everything to drive ooze herds
across the mire, chasing the richest veins of Slick, but the ground shifts
treacherously underfoot, swallowing machines and men alike. Twisted remnants of
industrial excavators still roam the ruins, animated by both machine code and
something darker, their bulk fused with living oil. Beneath it all stir the
Deep Crawlers — colossal oozes that dwell in the lowest pits, their movements
deliberate, their awareness disturbingly sharp, as though the Sinkfields
themselves were watching.
Plot Hook: An old automated refinery has somehow
restarted on its own, producing pure fuel, but the closer one gets, the more
bizarrely intelligent the facility seems. The adventurers must determine
whether this is a technological miracle, a trap, or something far worse.
The Tar Caves (Mildred Lake’s Underground Network)
Beneath the collapsed shafts of Mildred Lake lies a
labyrinth of tunnels where the earth sweats ooze and the walls glisten as if
alive. Here, the most dangerous of the Dread Tar Oozes breed and evolve,
pooling together in slow, deliberate tides. Some have merged into hive-minded
monstrosities, their collective mass reshaping entire caverns into twisting,
suffocating organs of living tar. Explorers whisper of carvings etched deep into
the stone — spirals, glyphs, and crude figures far older than oil rigs, hinting
that this place was claimed long before the industry arrived. The lowest
chambers hold pools of pure, primal oil: black as night, volatile as fire, and
so reactive that a single spark or shaft of light could ignite the caves into
an inferno. To enter is to risk not just death, but being swallowed by
something far older than humanity’s greed.
Plot Hook: An oil baron is funding an expedition into
the Tar Caves to retrieve primal oil, but none of his hired crews have returned
— now the adventurers are asked to succeed where the others vanished.
The Twisted Athabasca Dunes
Once celebrated as a fragile ecological jewel, the Athabasca
Sand Dunes have become a living anomaly where time, memory, and matter unravel.
Pulled southward by magical fault lines, the glacial sands have fused with tar
seepage and arcane fire, giving birth to a jagged desert of obsidian ridges and
shifting glass kames. The dunes advance unnaturally fast, burying forests,
lakes, and old-world ruins beneath their grinding tide, only to reveal them
again months or years later. The sand itself is strange — its grains cling to
thoughts, triggering forgotten memories, while lightning-born obelisks crackle
with unstable power. Life here has twisted to survive: crystal-laced pines claw
upward from drifts, predators stride across the sands on glassy limbs, and ooze-tainted
beasts burrow beneath the shifting surface. Most unsettling are the ruins that
appear and vanish, hinting at pre-collapse research stations, ancient
foundations, or something far older stirring in the depths.
Plot Hook: A buried research station has
resurfaced from the dunes, seemingly untouched by time but those who enter are
lost to visions, vanishing halls, and whispers carried on the storm.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.