Afterfall Embers: Doon Rising

About the adventure

Doon—once a dusty speck on pre-War road maps—straddled a freight spur beside cracked I-80. The town smelled of diesel, corn mash, and river-mud; grain elevators stabbed the prairie sky like tin cathedrals, and a lone stop-light cycled through colors no one obeyed. Life ambled: elders swapped harvest gossip at the Blue Ribbon, kids raced bottlecaps, dogs dozed on warm asphalt. That calm blew apart four months ago. The Anarchists—raiders in soot-streaked pads, trucks daubed with bloody handprints—ringed Doon at dawn and demanded surrender. The militia barred windows with church pews and held three brutal nights. On the fourth, a courier reached a Brotherhood artillery squad at Fort Calhoun. Five howitzer shells screamed in, turning silos to molten stalks, folding clapboard homes like paper, and leaving Main Street a chain of craters wide enough to swallow pick-ups. Today a knot of survivors drifts back. Boots crunch on glassy slag that still steams after rain. The twisted Farmers’ Co-op—now called Cinder Watch—looms above the rubble, its bent catwalks repurposed into lookout posts. From there sentries sweep the horizon, lanterns trembling in the updraft. Resources are scarcer than mercy. The courthouse well gurgles radioactive sludge, so settlers siphon brackish water from the coolant pools of a derailed atomic freight engine. Scavengers pry canned peaches fused shut by heat, fish rebar to lash into barricades, and weave trip-wire webs of bottlecaps along the southern approach. Behind the scorched diner—its “TRY OUR PIE” sign half-melted into asphalt—they coax mutant corn from trenches of pulverized brick, gambling that roots don’t mind glass. Hope is hammered together a plank at a time. The church bell, miraculously uncracked, divides days into work, watch, and weary dreams. Children stencil “MINES AHEAD” in highway orange around the largest crater. The gutted bank vault serves as an armory where scavenged rifle barrels jut through blast holes like fangs. Elders huddle by barrel-fires, drafting sentry rosters while scorched paper snow drifts on the wind. Yet Doon’s dangers linger. Anarchist scouts still prowl the corn stubble, bone charms clacking on belts. Something alien hunts the collapsed rail tunnel—metallic chittering, a wet rasp that snuffs lantern flame. Traders speak of a roving dust storm glowing like coals that strips both Geiger counters and flesh. Some nights a broken radio crackles with a woman’s voice repeating coordinates that drift with the moon. Even so, the settlers refuse surrender. In every shattered window they see a promise: nothing left to lose but the tomorrow they will invent. Around embers they forge a new oath: the next banner over Doon will not bear a red hand but a gear-toothed phoenix, wings spread above molten scars. Whether that emblem is stitched from canvas or myth hardly matters. What counts is the vow carried into each sunrise that flares off glassed streets: “We rebuild, or we burn again—on our terms.!!"