All nodes lead to Brooks, or so the Cybercult likes to say. Out on the cracked highways of the Terrorsaur Badlands, where mini chapels glow beside the road, and sermon-lights blink across the dusk, that boast starts to feel less like doctrine and more like geography. Brooks does not hide on the horizon. It gathers the land toward itself: roads, herds, pilgrims, convoys, captives, processors, and dreams of order all pulled inward through its gates. From a distance, it might pass for one of those old fortified settler towns, practical and pious and built to outlast a hostile country through discipline alone. Up close, it is something harsher—a chrome frontier stronghold where dinosaurs are processed into miracles, faith is measured in labour and implants, and the Badlands are being taught, one settlement at a time, to kneel.
Brooks is the place where the Cybercult stops feeling like a
scattered frontier faith and starts feeling like a state. Out on the highways,
in the mini chapels, and across the Sanctuary Camps, its doctrine arrives as
help, discipline, and quiet infiltration. Here, it arrives as walls, work
schedules, processing yards, doctrinal hierarchy, and the organized conversion
of land, beast, and citizen into useful parts of a greater machine. Set in the
heart of dinosaur country and fed by the old logic of ranching, irrigation,
transport, and religious settlement, Brooks has become the great Badlands
center of DynoCyber production, frontier coordination, and chrome-backed order.
If the rest of the region shows how the Cybercult spreads, Brooks shows what it
looks like when that spread succeeds.
History
Brooks did not become the Cybercult’s Badlands stronghold
overnight. It grew the old frontier way: by making itself useful first. What
began as a service hub on the edge of dinosaur country—part ranch-supply town,
part transport corridor, part agricultural lifeline—became something harder and
stranger as the Cybercult sank its roots into the region. Road crews kept
routes open, implant medics patched the injured, and reclamation teams offered
answers for tainted beasts that ordinary settlers could not handle. In time,
those practical services hardened into doctrine, infrastructure, and control.
Old civic spaces were absorbed, new processing yards rose beside corrals and
grain lots, and Brooks became the place where the Cybercult learned it could do
more than survive the Badlands: it could organize them. That history still
leaves cracks for adventurers to pry open—old families pushed aside, rival
powers cut out of the town’s rise, vanished dissenters, and whole layers of the
city built over whatever came before.
What Brooks Feels Like
Brooks feels orderly in a way that most Badlands towns can
only fake for a few hours at a time. The roads are straight, the gates are
watched, the work horns sound on schedule, and even the noise seems regulated:
the clatter of tools, the low thunder of penned beasts, the drone of
generators, the distant recitation of doctrine over loudspeakers. It is not a
ruined frontier camp barely holding together, nor a freewheeling boomtown drunk
on opportunity. It is clean where it chooses to be clean, efficient where it
matters, and visibly built around the idea that every person, beast, and
machine should have a proper function. For travelers, that can feel reassuring
right up until it starts to feel oppressive.
The city’s hospitality carries that same edge. Visitors can
find water, feed, repairs, lodging, and trade more easily here than in most of
the Badlands, but nothing ever feels casual. Every service has a procedure.
Every host seems to know where you should be standing. Every district has rules
posted in plain language and glowing code-script. The people of Brooks are not
uniformly grim—many are proud of their city, and not without reason—but even
their friendliness often carries the faint pressure of a place that assumes it
knows how life ought to be lived. You are welcomed, measured, and quietly
sorted all at once.
And then there are the DynoCybers. You hear them before you
fully see them: the hiss of pneumatics, the click of reinforced joints, the
scrape of metal against pen-rails, the strange mix of animal breathing and
machine rhythm. In Brooks they are not rare wonders or terrifying surprises,
but part of daily life. A cybergaucho hauling freight, a compspeculator
slipping across a roofline, a cerotank lumbering through a secured yard—these
are ordinary sights here, which may be the most unsettling thing of all. Brooks
does not present itself as a place at war with the unnatural. It presents
itself as a place that has already decided the unnatural is simply how the
future works.
The Road Crews
The Road Crews are among the most visible and
unsettling servants of the Cybercult in Brooks: intelligent animated
construction vehicles tasked with keeping roads open, routes optimal, and
infrastructure in proper working order. To the faithful, they are holy labour
made visible, proof that the reclamation of the world begins with pavement,
grading, and the disciplined restoration of movement. To everyone else, they
are a deeply unnerving mix of public works department, doctrinal enforcer, and
unstoppable civic hazard. A Road Crew can be surprisingly friendly if you help
with a project, offer useful materials, or show respect for its work—but that
friendliness vanishes the moment you, your settlement, or your property are
judged to be in the way of the route.
In and around Brooks, the Road Crews are treated with a
strange mixture of affection, irritation, and fear. They repair causeways,
maintain convoy lanes, raise embankments, clear wreckage, and build the
practical skeleton that allows the city to dominate the Badlands. At the same
time, their commitment to the “correct” path makes them dangerous neighbours.
Squatters on old rights-of-way may wake to the sound of engines and hymns as a
loader marks their home for removal. A stalled project can turn into a holy
emergency. And because each vehicle has its own type-cast personality—the
complaining Loader, the vulgar but weirdly affectionate Mixer, the
praise-starved Road Roller—they also add an almost absurdly human layer to
Brooks’ machinery of order. In Brooks, even the construction equipment has
doctrine.
Plot Hook: A Road Crew has declared a long-settled neighborhood to be an obstruction on a reclaimed route, and demolition will begin at dawn unless someone can prove the maps are wrong. The trouble is, the maps may not be wrong at all—they may just reveal that the city planned this expansion years ago and only waited until now to act.
Why Brooks Matters
Brooks matters because the Badlands runs on movement, and
Brooks sits where too many kinds of movement meet to ignore. Herds move through
it. Convoys move through it. Pilgrims move through it. Road crews, ranchers,
traders, reclaimers, youth caravans, and DynoCyber handlers all pass through
its gates sooner or later. Set in the heart of ranching country and close to
some of the most dinosaur-haunted ground in the region, Brooks was always well
placed to become a frontier hub. The Cybercult simply recognized that value
earlier and more completely than anyone else.
It also matters because Brooks solves problems other
settlements cannot solve alone. It has the corrals, labor force, doctrine,
workshops, and processing yards to handle captured dinosaurs, damaged
DynoCybers, implant work, neural crop support, and large-scale logistics.
Smaller towns may have chapels, camps, or a handful of converted beasts, but
Brooks is where those scattered efforts become a system. Roads are dispatched
from here. Missions are supplied from here. Pilgrims come here to witness the
scale of Cybercult order for themselves. In practical terms, Brooks is a market
town, transport center, ranching capital, and religious node all at once. In
strategic terms, it is the hinge on which a large part of the Terrorsaur
Badlands turns.
Government and Factions
The Processor-Governor
The Processor-Governor is the highest visible
authority in Brooks, the figure through whom doctrine, labor, infrastructure,
and civic life are fused into a single chain of command. Part bishop, part
magistrate, and part logistics master, the office exists to keep the city functioning:
roads open, corrals orderly, processing yards productive, pilgrims managed, and
every district operating within proper tolerances. Publicly, the
Processor-Governor presents themself as a calm steward of order and survival,
blessing DynoCyber processions, inspecting work crews, and speaking of
discipline as mercy. Everyone in Brooks knows the harder truth beneath that
pastoral tone: when a person, district, or faction is judged to be
malfunctioning, it is the Processor-Governor who decides whether the answer
will be reform, reassignment, or recycling.
Plot Hook: A senior functionary begs the party to
recover a ledger before the Processor-Governor’s rivals do, claiming it proves
whole families were quietly reassigned during Brooks’ rise to power. If the
records are real, they could expose the city’s buried history—or trigger a
purge before the truth can spread.
Keeper of the Processing Yards
The Keeper of the Processing Yards oversees the
noisiest, bloodiest, and most indispensable part of Brooks: the place where
captured dinosaurs, damaged DynoCybers, salvaged machinery, and unfortunate
mistakes are sorted, assessed, and corrected. Equal parts foreman, surgeon,
quartermaster, and high ritualist, the Keeper makes sure the city’s great
engine of reclamation never stops moving. In public, they speak of efficiency,
mercy, and proper function; in practice, they decide what can be repaired, what
can be repurposed, and what is only fit for recycling. Few figures in Brooks
are more feared, because few are closer to the moment where the Cybercult’s
promises become saws, steel, and doctrine.
Plot Hook: Something has gone wrong in the Processing
Yards, and the Keeper needs outsiders to recover a “misfiled asset” before word
spreads through the city. The asset may be a rogue DynoCyber, a missing worker,
or evidence that the Keeper has been quietly sending the wrong things down the
recycling line.
The Marshal of Roads and Gates
The Marshal of Roads and Gates is not human, not
cyborg, and not even remotely subtle: it is a senior Road Crew intelligence
elevated to one of the highest operational offices in Brooks. Charged with
overseeing gates, traffic flow, convoy access, road maintenance priorities, and
the movement of goods, pilgrims, herds, and military assets, the Marshal
embodies the Cybercult’s belief that proper order begins with proper routing.
It does not think in terms of politics or mercy so much as clearance,
obstruction, throughput, and acceptable loss. To the people of Brooks, the
Marshal is both civic officer and holy machine of public works; to outsiders,
it is the unnerving realization that the city’s border policy is being enforced
by something that sees a traffic jam, a refugee column, and an armed incursion
as three versions of the same logistical problem.
Plot Hook: The Marshal has sealed a major gate and
begun rerouting all traffic through a far more dangerous corridor, insisting
the change is necessary for “route correction.” Someone needs to find out
whether it detected a real threat on the main road—or whether its ancient
optimization protocols have decided that an entire outlying settlement now
counts as an obstacle.
Mother of Sanctuary Formation
The Mother of Sanctuary Formation oversees Brooks’
camps, youth instruction, devotional education, and the long work of turning
obedience into identity. Where the Processor-Governor keeps the city
functioning, and the Keeper of the Processing Yards keeps it productive, this
office keeps it reproducing itself—through summer camps, discipline programs,
technical training, doctrinal pageants, and the quiet shaping of children,
converts, and uncertain families into proper citizens of the machine faith.
Publicly, they are warm, patient, and deeply reassuring, the sort of figure who
speaks of structure, service, and safe futures with genuine conviction. That is
exactly what makes them dangerous: few people in Brooks are better at making
indoctrination feel like care.
Plot Hook: A family begs the party to find out what
really happened at a Sanctuary Camp after their child came home with a new
implant, a rehearsed smile, and no memory of three missing days. The Mother of
Sanctuary Formation insists nothing improper occurred and invites the
characters to inspect the camp themselves—provided they agree to stay for the
full program.
Chief Whitehat
The Chief Whitehat is Brooks’ master troubleshooter,
chief systems debugger, and quiet broker between the Cybercult’s public order
and its invisible machinery. Originally said to have come from Prairie Oasis,
he brings a slicker, more urban edge than many of Brooks’ homegrown
authorities: polished smile, careful manners, sharp wardrobe, and the unnerving
confidence of someone who always seems to know what is happening three systems
ahead of everyone else. He oversees communications, network integrity, doctrinal
security, and the legions of lesser Whitehats who keep Brooks’ implants,
surveillance, route controls, and DynoCyber interfaces functioning. Friendly by
local standards and often willing to work with outsiders, he is one of the
easiest powers in Brooks to approach—right up until you realize that every
favor he grants also makes you easier to track, profile, or recruit.
Plot Hook: The Chief Whitehat hires the party for
what sounds like a simple debugging job: recover a lost data cache before it
falls into hostile hands. The cache may contain stolen route maps, Black Hat
sabotage, or proof that someone in Brooks’ inner circle has been quietly
rewriting more than code.
Voice of the Node
The Voice of the Node is Brooks’ chief public herald
of doctrine, the figure most citizens actually hear more often than they ever
see the Processor-Governor. Part preacher, part broadcaster, part living
interface, the Voice delivers sermons, civic notices, emergency declarations,
festival blessings, and approved interpretations of current events through
chapel speakers, public screens, convoy relays, and citywide transmissions.
Where other authorities in Brooks manage labor, roads, or formation, the Voice manages
meaning: explaining what the city is doing, why it is necessary, and how the
faithful are meant to feel about it. Warm, resonant, and almost impossible to
forget, the Voice is beloved by some, mocked by others, and quietly feared by
anyone who has heard their tone shift from reassurance to correction.
Plot Hook: A forbidden transmission interrupts one of
the Voice’s sermons, using the same vocal signature to broadcast a message that
should be impossible. If the party investigates, they may uncover an old backup
personality, a buried rival doctrine, or proof that the Voice of the Node is
not as singular as Brooks wants people to believe.
Daily Tensions
For all its straight roads, fixed
schedules, and polished certainty, Brooks is not truly at peace with itself.
The city works because its factions need one another, not because they agree. Ranch
pragmatists value DynoCybers, implants, and Cybercult order insofar as they
keep herds moving, fields productive, and settlements alive, but they often
distrust the harsher doctrinal edge of the city’s leadership. Doctrinal
purists, by contrast, see compromise as weakness and treat every practical
concession as a delay in the proper correction of the world. The result is a
city where people can work side by side for years while quietly despising what
the other believes Brooks is for.
Other tensions cut even closer to the city’s core. Processors and yard authorities think in terms of throughput, correction, and industrial necessity, while road missionaries and crews see themselves as the holier arm of the Cybercult, spreading order outward rather than merely managing what arrives. Youth formed in Sanctuary Camps often return zealous, disciplined, and eager to prove themselves, which unsettles many older settlers and absorbed families who remember when Brooks was rougher, looser, and less eager to turn every habit into policy. Even the city’s proudest achievements divide opinion: some citizens sincerely believe DynoCybers are living proof that the Cybercult redeems what the Badlands would otherwise destroy, while others accept them only as a grim necessity too useful to reject. Beneath all of this lies an older wound few speak of openly: scattered through Brooks are people who remember, or descend from those who remembered, the lessons of Red Coulee and other early “recyclings.” They smile, work, and survive like everyone else, but some still carry hidden loyalties, private griefs, and the quiet hope that one day the city’s perfect order might crack.
Locations of Note
Districts of Brooks
The Gates and Receiving Pens
The first face Brooks shows the world is not a plaza or a
temple, but a machine for sorting life. Here, caravans, pilgrims, salvage
wagons, herds, road crews, and captured beasts are funneled through layered
checkpoints, fenced approach lanes, quarantine sheds, weigh scales, and brutal
holding corrals before they are allowed any deeper into the city. Dust hangs in
the air, loudspeakers bark route corrections, clerks mark ledgers and tablets
in equal measure, and the whole district runs on the assumption that everything
entering Brooks must be assessed for purpose, purity, and proper destination.
Location of Note: The Long Pens
Built over the bones of an older stock-handling and feedlot intake site
inspired by Brooks’ real ranching and feedlot country, the Long Pens are
a sprawling maze of reinforced corrals, loading ramps, inspection chutes,
quarantine barns, and steel-gated lanes where incoming beasts and travelers
alike are categorized before entry. What was once cattle-country logic has been
scaled up and weaponized for the Cybercult: dinosaurs in one channel, pilgrims
in another, salvage in a third, and anything questionable routed for deeper
inspection before the gates ever open.
Plot Hook: Something in the Long Pens is disrupting
intake: caravans are delayed, beasts are panicking, and incoming pilgrims are
being quietly reassigned to a quarantine lane that does not appear on any
public map. Whether it is a rogue DynoCyber, a hidden smuggling route, or an
unofficial sorting protocol targeting specific bloodlines, Brooks wants the
problem solved before panic spreads to the gates.
The Processing Yards
If the gates sort the city’s inputs, the Processing Yards
reveal what Brooks is really for. Here, wounded dinosaurs, captured
terrorsaurs, broken DynoCybers, salvaged machinery, and select human
“malfunctions” are brought beneath gantries, cranes, silos, and surgical sheds
to be corrected, repurposed, augmented, or recycled. The district smells of hot
metal, antiseptic, blood, feed, and ozone; sermons drift over cutting torches
and hydraulic presses; and every building seems to carry the same quiet
doctrine in steel form: nothing is wasted, only reassigned to proper function.
Location of Note: The Redline Works
Built over the bones of a pre-Hodgepocalypse meat-processing complex inspired
by Brooks’ real-world slaughter and packing infrastructure, the Redline
Works is the single most feared site in the district: a sprawling cluster
of intake ramps, cold-bay vaults, implant theaters, feed silos, rendering pits,
and doctrinal reclamation halls where beast and machine alike are disassembled
and remade. The old logic of industrial butchery remains visible in the
architecture, but the Cybercult has transformed it into something broader and
worse—a place where living dinosaurs can become DynoCybers, damaged constructs
can be stripped for parts, and inconvenient people can vanish into the same
sacred workflow.
Plot Hook: A worker smuggles out evidence that
something in the Redline Works is surviving the recycling line and coming back
wrong—too intelligent, too angry, or too aware of what was done to it. If the
party investigates, they may uncover a rogue grafted terrorsaur, a hidden labor
revolt in the lower bays, or proof that the Keeper of the Processing Yards has
been using the district to erase more than broken machinery.
The Node District
The Node District is the clean face Brooks presents
to itself: the place where doctrine is archived, schedules are sanctified, and
civic order is given both paperwork and liturgy. Broad squares, chapel-halls,
record vaults, relay towers, and administrative compounds dominate the
district, making it feel less like a neighborhood and more like a machine for
producing legitimacy. Here the Cybercult’s leadership lives close to its
bureaucracy, and every sermon, permit, census, reassignment, and public
declaration passes through hands—or terminals—meant to make Brooks seem
orderly, inevitable, and correct.
Location of Note: The Heritage Node
Inspired by Brooks’ real-world museum-and-heritage culture and the city’s
interest in marking historic buildings, the Heritage Node is a former
civic heritage complex turned doctrinal archive and public memory theater. What
once preserved the town’s past now curates it under Cybercult supervision:
curated exhibits on the “useful rise” of Brooks, sainted road maps, preserved
relics of early settlement and ranching, and carefully edited accounts of the
city’s transformation into the Processing City. Citizens visit it for
education, pilgrims for inspiration, and officials for access to sealed records
hidden below the public galleries.
Plot Hook: A sealed chamber beneath the Heritage Node
is said to contain unedited records from Brooks before the Cybercult
consolidated power, including names that no longer appear in any city register.
The party may be hired to retrieve a single file, but once inside they could
uncover a censored massacre, proof of fabricated doctrine, or evidence that one
of Brooks’ current leaders was never supposed to exist.
The
Rail and Road Mission
The Rail and Road Mission is the district that keeps
Brooks from collapsing inward under its own certainty. Convoys are assembled
here, road crews are fueled and blessed here, freight is sorted here, and the
city’s will is pushed outward along cracked highways, reclaimed causeways, and
the old lines of transport that still stitch the Badlands together. Garages,
depots, relay towers, loading yards, mission chapels, and repair bays fill the
district with the clang of tools, the hiss of pneumatics, and the constant
sense that everything in Brooks is either arriving, leaving, or being made
ready to move.
Location of Note: The Siphon Exchange
Inspired by the real Brooks Aqueduct and its unusual siphon system that
once carried irrigation under the Canadian Pacific Railway line, the Siphon
Exchange is a fortified transit complex where road, rail, and utility
routes cross beneath and through one another in carefully managed layers. What
was once engineering built to move water and sustain settlement has been
repurposed into a sacred logistics knot of tunnels, loading ramps, relay
vaults, convoy staging lanes, and machine shrines where the Cybercult
coordinates movement across the region.
Plot Hook: A convoy carrying something vital never
arrives at the Siphon Exchange, but all official route records insist it passed
through on schedule. To find out what vanished between departure and
destination, the party must navigate sealed tunnels, doctored manifests, and a
district where the infrastructure itself may be hiding a second, unauthorized
traffic network.
The
Outer Fields
Beyond Brooks’ walls and harder industrial districts lie the
Outer Fields, where the city’s frontier roots have not vanished so much
as been systematized. Feed lots, irrigation channels, neural crop plots,
auxiliary corrals, hatch pens, and disciplined production zones stretch across
the land in ordered bands, all managed with the same combination of ranch
pragmatism and cyber-religious control that defines the city itself. This is
the part of Brooks that still looks most like southern Alberta at a glance—open
land, livestock, waterworks, and big sky—but every fence line, crop row, and
holding pen has been folded into the Cybercult’s larger logic of yield,
obedience, and managed life.
Location of Note: Lake Node Newell
Lake Node Newell is the great agricultural reservoir of Cybercult
Brooks: a water-managed zone of irrigation works, neural crop terraces, feed
infrastructure, hatch ponds, and outlying field chapels that supply both the
city and its DynoCyber programs. It is one of the clearest examples of how the
Cybercult repurposes older prairie-settlement logic, turning the miracle of
water on dry land into a disciplined engine of production and doctrinal
dependence.
Plot Hook: Something in the irrigation system at Lake
Node Newell is affecting both the neural crops and the animals that feed from
the water, making them calmer, more obedient, and increasingly strange. The
party may be hired to stop a blight, but the truth could be a hidden chemical
program, a corrupted doctrinal additive, or an experimental attempt to extend
DynoCyber conditioning to an entire landscape.
Why Adventurers Care
Brooks is the kind of city that draws trouble because it
makes itself too important to ignore. If you need information, repairs, rare
parts, captured beasts, doctored route records, black-market implants, missing
people, or access to the wider Badlands road network, sooner or later your path
bends toward its gates. The city is useful, wealthy by regional standards, and
filled with factions that would rather hire outsiders than openly embarrass one
another. That alone makes it an adventuring hub. In Brooks, there is always a
convoy to guard, a record to steal, a camp to investigate, a DynoCyber to
retrieve, a dissident to smuggle out, or a public problem that the authorities
would prefer solved quietly.
It is also a city built on the promise that everything can
be sorted, corrected, and assigned a proper place. That promise creates endless
cracks for stories. Adventurers can get caught between the Processor-Governor’s
need for order, the Keeper’s appetite for throughput, the Mother’s quiet
indoctrination machine, the Chief Whitehat’s polished manipulations, and the
Marshal’s pitiless sense of route optimization. Some visitors come to Brooks
for trade and stay because they owe favors. Some come searching for a missing
relative, a lost route, or evidence of old crimes buried under civic myth.
Others come because something broken in the Badlands always seems to lead back
here eventually. Brooks offers all the benefits of civilization—walls, markets,
repairs, food, roads, influence—at the cost of constant proximity to power. For
adventurers, that is exactly what makes it dangerous, useful, and impossible to
resist.
Adventure Hooks
- The
Wrong Gate: A friendly caravan is routed into a quarantine lane and
vanishes into the Long Pens without explanation. To get them back, the
party must navigate intake bureaucracy, falsified records, and the
possibility that someone in Brooks wanted those travelers diverted on
purpose.
- The
Redline Survivor: Something that should have been recycled escapes the
Redline Works and begins killing selectively in the city. The authorities
want it destroyed immediately, but the creature may know who put it on the
line and why.
- Camp
Season: A child from a trusted family returns from Sanctuary formation
changed in ways no one can explain, and three others never come home at
all. Investigating the camp means dealing with the Mother of Sanctuary
Formation on ground she controls completely.
- Route
Correction: The Marshal of Roads and Gates declares an old
neighborhood or outlying settlement to be an obstruction and schedules
demolition under sacred authority. The party can help with the evacuation,
sabotage the order, or uncover why the route suddenly became urgent.
- Ghosts
in the Heritage Node: Unedited records hidden beneath the Node
District suggest that Brooks’ official rise to power was built on erased
families, false doctrine, or a forgotten atrocity linked to Red Coulee.
Retrieving the truth is one thing; surviving what it does to the city is
another.
- The
Whitehat’s Favor: The Chief Whitehat offers the party an easy job
recovering stolen data, but the missing cache includes more than route
codes and system maps. Whoever holds it may be able to prove that one of
Brooks’ ruling offices has been quietly rewritten from the inside.
Closing Sting
In the Terrorsaur Badlands, there are towns that endure,
towns that hide, and towns that pray the road passes them by. Brooks does none
of those things. Brooks opens its gates, marks the route, and waits for the
world to arrive in need of something only it can provide.
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