The Booming bay incident

the booming bay incident

There was very little warning before it happened; those with radios may have had an idea that something was going on ahead of others, as the Firewatch issued an advisory that Booming Bay had gone silent, not responding on radio while expected trade caravans moving through the town hadn’t shown up. Recommendations were sent out to avoid the area while they sent in a group to investigate.
Then the Firewatch went silent too.

The ‘what, why, and how’ of what ignited the Incident are still being put together, but the reality of the situation for many was that the entire Crossbones area became a necropolis almost overnight. Something spurred a massive growth in Mortis Amaranthine fungus that started with Booming Bay and spread rapidly. Morgues collapsed one by one in its path, and with them hordes of the dead rose from the earth, some of types never before seen. One by one, settlements in the area fell to this unnatural disaster, the massive hordes of dead  strengthened by the necropolis combined with the lack of any morgues to return from meant that when defenders fell - many times they returned somewhere that they were just sent under again in short order. And the ranks of the dead were strengthened by them, and the seemingly unstoppable reaction rolled onwards. Wishbones, Belling, Cryoworld, even the mysterious ‘Puzzle Factory’ fell to the hunger of the suddenly ravenous Mortis Amaranthine. The fall of

Crossbones Central was the gravestone set atop the pile, and it seemed like the entire region would be wiped out.
Until the spread of the necropolis suddenly slowed to a crawl. Not because something had halted whatever was fueling it, but because it hit the spreading radiation zone near the Town of Cobb, killing the over-grown infection attempting to push deeper into the area. What was once an increasingly worrying hazard suddenly became an unlikely source of hope, as refugee camps began to proliferate throughout the area.

Crossbones, however, was not the only power present in the region. While its anarcho-capitalistic tendencies had kept it from joining the larger community of settlements in the region, the Hammer Inlet Coalition was watching from afar with growing concern. The reports from Cobb, a trading partner in the HIC, reached them - and they decided to act before it was too late, and their own lands fell as well.

The establishment of ‘the Anvil’ as a border zone between what was being called the Broken Bones Necropolis and the Hammer Inlet Coalition territories was decided  swiftly and decisively, and with the aid of the militant forces of the Town of Cobb they began sending in aid to the refugees in the Anvil – the desperate, the despairing… and the wasteland survivors who had held out against the Curseborn, against the spider threat, and so many others in the near past.

Those rugged survivors would become the best hope of keeping the undead of the Broken Bones Necropolis from washing over the Anvil and spilling out into more populated and lightly defended lands, and turning this necrological disaster into an end to civilization in the area entirely.