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.