Guns of the Chinese

There’s a lot of good guns in the Outlaw, a lot of good, American guns. (5400 manufacturers and 310 million weapons, remember.) So how did a Chinese variant of a Soviet WW II assault rifle become the weapon of choice for a lot of good Americans in 2039?

The Chinese. They had the money, and the need.

When the fleeing Communist Party arrived in Xiyatu (Seattle) in force, they brought with them a (literal) boatload of Type 56 rifles and lots of ammo. A mistaken incursion into Vancouver territory (in 2019) started a long-running, low intensity conflict with the recovering Canadian state, which ate into their ammo reserves. Plus, there was the usual incursions from the various gangs roaming the Outlaw (though it wasn’t yet called the Outlaw).

The mainland was still fighting a vicious civil war, so trade was nonexistent. And American supplies of the 7.62mm round were scarce, to say the least. So the Chinese turned to the next best thing: a still-extant (and expanding) American arms manufacturer.

Utah had avoided much of the violence of the Black Year (the year of famine and disease after the rotting plague, 2015-2016). They had enough food on hand to feed their people (when redistributed), their economy was still functional, if only just, and they even had domestic sources of oil in southern Wyoming and refineries in the state capitol of Salt Lake City. Browning Arms (in Morgan, Utah) was making guns and bullets as fast as they could.

See, the word spread that Utah had food and gasoline. A great many packs and gangs thronged the state. The packs were taken care of as best as the state government could manage, but the gangs were dealt with harshly. This took weapons and ammo, which Browning could provide. So when the Chinese went shopping for ammo (in 2020), Browning was pretty much the only potential source. If they could be convinced to begin production.

The Chinese had escaped with billions in bullion and other valuables. They needed a steady supply of ammunition, so they contracted with Browning to provide 7.62mm rounds on a permanent basis, in exchange for gold (US and Chinese tender being useful only as tinder at that point). On the strength of that contract, Browning expanded their operations.

Browning took over a small building in Morgan (that used to be an Ace hardware store, before the Collapse), and began making 7.62mm shells. As time went on, they expanded their operation, even mechanizing it (to an extent). In the years to come, they would also begin manufacturing replacement parts for the Type 56 rifles and even assembling new ones for sale (they had the parts just lying around...).

Post-Collapse, violence was common and self-defense a necessity. People needed guns. AK’s are very easy to manufacture, and consequently cheap, so when presented with a rugged, effective, and cheap weapon, many people opted for the Chinese variant of a Soviet assault rifle, even if they were American.

The AK-47 was adopted for practical, identifiable reasons. But its first appearance in the Outlaw, and its ubiquity, was entirely due to the Chinese.

Crime and Gun Decisions

During the Collapse, self-defense became a necessity. There were no cops, no courts, not even an army to impose martial law. Firearms were a prerequisite for survival, and in the 24 years since, that hasn't changed.

The contract with China allowed Browning to begin manufacturing Type 56 rifles in large quantities. In addition to private citizens, Browning sold many to private security companies, Guns, and military forces throughout the Outlaw, including the State of Utah.

Browning introduced their own variant of the Type 56 in 2022 (2 years after the trade deal was signed). This was the famed Kalashnikov-Browning 2022, popularly known as the KBR. The KBR sold in great numbers, and continues to sell to this day.

Essentially every Utah home has a KBR (all Utah males serve in the state military, and all keep their rifles after mustering out). And KBRs are bought and sold in arms markets across the Fed and across the continent. The 7.62mm shell is the most common barter commodity on the continent, and can be found almost everywhere.

The only Fed polity which doesn't use the KBR as its main weapon is the Federal District of Manhattan (the Fed capital). Fed soldiers use the AR platform instead (itself an evolution of the M-16). This forces them to locally source their ammo, which has to be made by hand. Consequently, it is very expensive. (Lacking the deep pockets of the Fed, the city government of Manhattan outfits its police and security forces with KBRs.)

After the Emergence, massive and malevolent creatures became commonplace, and people began to demand a weapon with greater stopping power. In 2035, Browning selected a 10mm round for use in their new assault rifle, and designed a rechambered KBR around the bullet. The new weapon — the KB-35 — had the same benefits as an AK (rugged design, cheap manufacture) but simply did more damage, while maintaining penetration. This made it especially effective against Emerged monsters.

The same year, they introduced a Colt 1911A1 pistol variant — the CB-35 — that used the same 10mm shells. The pistol took a small hit to its stopping power, but could hold an extra round in the standard size clip.

The pistol and rifle were designed to use the same round, to allow people to use the same ammo for both, simplifying logistics (a critical advantage to people who spend a lot of time in the Outlaw). No longer did people have to haul around different calibers of ammo for their rifle and sidearm.

Though not yet common, the "twin 35's" are seeing a sharp uptick in sales, as they have proven very useful in fighting Emergences and for extended forays into the wild. Both the BP and Texas Rangers have begun an aggressive purchasing program, hoping to arm their forces completely in 3-5 years. Guns are also avid buyers of "2 35's", but the relative scarcity and high price of 10mm, in comparison to the ubiquitous 7.62, has slowed adoption.

Survival in the Outlaw requires that people be willing to defend themselves, and be capable of doing so. Familiarity with firearms is a simple necessity, and the better your gun, and the better you are with it, the greater chance you have of living until you die of old age.

"An armed society is a polite society."

Computing in The Outlaw

The Collapse blew up the existing social order. Most people died, and most of the rest were uprooted as they fled violence in the cities, consequential diseases, and famine.

With few exceptions, the nation’s infrastructure was largely abandoned. No one maintained roads, rail networks, power lines, substations, power generation facilities, telephone lines, switching stations, cellphone towers, Internet nodes, transcontinental backbones, DNS servers, and on and on. These emplacements gradually fell into disrepair, or were damaged in fighting (often for control of the facility), or were sabotaged or scavenged. (Copper thieves have, in the 24 years since the plague, stripped nearly all of the powerlines outside the Fed, and much inside.)

(Again, there were exceptions. Places which largely escaped or survived the violence, for whatever reason, suffered from degradation, but their infrastructure could be salvaged. This included Jefferson, California, the Dakotas, and other polities.)

By the end of the Collapse, and the beginning of Reconciliation (in 2018), there was no national power infrastructure, no national telecommunications infrastructure, and no Internet. (Local networks did survive, in some places, as did LAN’s, in places with access to power.) Road and rail networks were degrading quickly, often due to simple weather conditions. And satellites, used for telecommunication, weather prediction, and the GPS system, fell from the sky or gradually broke down. (Space debris, power failure, or just the march of time and the second Law of Thermodynamics.)

(And that was just the Collapse. The Emergence didn’t do anyone any favors, in these areas.)

People responded by adapting to the new conditions. "Mankind Adapts." When phone lines went down, they used radios. When the Internet collapsed, they used jerry-rigged signal amplifiers to establish links to other extant sites. They repurposed underground phone cables, that weren’t damaged or scavenged. They established makeshift cellphone towers, using mobile cell hotspots. They stuck laptops high in a tree, with a signal amplifier, and established an ad hoc WIFI network that spread for 100 miles.

All of these solutions were ingenious and amazing, no less so because they actually Goddamn worked. In limited places, for a limited time.

Remember the borders. Dip your fingers in india ink and flick it at a white piece of paper. Each black dot is a city or settlement.

WIFI nodes, or signal repeaters, or power substations can only exist at or near one of those dots. (And that’s assuming the dot has some kind of power source. This isn’t always true.) But around each one is the Outlaw. Powerlines, run through the Outlaw. Roads, run through the Outlaw. And each individual component of a wireless network is isolated from all the others, in the middle of the Outlaw.

A bezerkergang attacks. Down goes the phone switch. An Emerged creature blunders into power lines. Down goes the power grid. (And anything attached to it.) A fire breaks out in the forest. Down goes the Internet node.

Telecommunications, power, and other infrastructure is fragile, requires constant maintenance to avoid degradation, and requires multiple emplacements to operate over a wide area. This is a problem in the Outlaw.

The Internet uses multiple computer mainframes (nodes) to route communications from one computer to another. It was built to survive a nuclear war, and when one node goes down, signals are rerouted to other nodes. It is highly robust.

But what if the signals themselves are stopped? What if nodes simply cannot communicate with each other? In such a case, the Internet ceases to exist.

So, with no telecommunications network, no root DNS servers, and no reliable nodes, how do you establish and maintain a computer network across a continent or, God forbid, between continents?

The answer was the Skywave Mesh.

Skywave

The name “Skywave Mesh” sounds outrageously florid, almost Bond-worthy, a name a science fiction writer would give their fictional technology to make it sound all badass (while wholly failing to do so). In this case, it isn’t badassitude at all, but rather the name of the two different technologies that were smashed together to make the Internet of 2039.

But first, let’s talk about acoustic couplers.

The first modems were ridiculously low-tech, low-fidelity devices. They operated by means of an acoustic coupler, two circles of rubber, shaped like cups, attached to a plastic device. You clipped the handset of a bog-standard AT&T-issued home telephone into the device, the speaker in one cup, the mic in the other. The computer made noises in one cup, and listened for sounds in the other. By means of this baroque (nearly steampunk, almost Rube Goldbergian) device, computers could “talk” to each other over the phone lines.

Ingenious.

They took an existing technology and repurposed it, allowing it to do things the designers never intended. (The quintessential characteristic of humans.) And in so doing, allowed everyday computers to communicate without expensive, dedicated infrastructure or specialized equipment emplacements.

Let’s talk shortwave radio. Shortwave radio has an odd characteristic called “skywave propagation”: radio signals sent out from one station (which can be as small as a breadbox, or smaller) can bounce off the ionosphere and reflect back to Earth. These signals can be received across the continent, on the other side of the ocean, and even on the other side of the planet.

Literally, on the other side of the Goddamn planet.

Using a shortwave radio, you can talk to anyone, anywhere on the planet. (Intermittently. Depending on time of day, the season of the year, solar flare activity, available channels, and so forth.) Without satellites or transcontinental cables, shortwave is the easiest way of establishing worldwide communication.

So what? What good is shortwave radio to computer communications? Can it even be used for that?

Sure. Acoustic coupler, bitches.

Not the same piece of equipment, obviously, but the same general principle: transmit and receive sound over a communication channel. Encode digital data in sound, send it, receive sound, decode it. This is a common piece of equipment, called a modem, which was the successor to the acoustic coupler.

In extremis, you could literally stick a microphone in front of the speaker of the radio, and receive information that way. (Reverse it to send.) Of course, this isn’t very effective.

The smarter, and easier way, takes precisely two cables: radio speaker out to computer sound in, computer sound out to radio mic jack. Two cables, and a piece of software to do the encoding and decoding, and all of a sudden you can talk to computers on the other side of the planet.

Simple. Ingenious. Effective.

You can send data. Receive data. And have your own little network.

Slowly — real time video streaming is O-U-T. (You’ll take your painfully slow Unicode text transmission, and thank God for the privilege.) Intermittently — as affected by the health of the skywave bounce. And unreliably. (This is the Outlaw.) But it can be done.

A communications channel is just one part of setting up a replacement Internet. The other part was done via an existing technology called Mesh networking.

Skywave propagation + Mesh networking = a new Internet. And a name a Bond villain might have employed: the Skywave Mesh.

(“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”)

Black Skies

Let's take a step back, for a moment, and look at why shortwave radio became necessary. As a conduit for data, it's abominably slow and easily disrupted. So why choose it? As with so much in 2039, it's because of magic.

The Emergence began (in most people's estimation) on May 15, 2025 when a flight of dragons emerged from out a vortex, over the city of Xiyatu. Over the course of the next year, vortexes became more and more common and more and more beings Emerged into our world. On May 16, 2026 (a year and a day later), the vortexes reached critical mass.

Massive vortexes opened up simultaneously over every major population center of the globe (and many other places besides). What came out, however, wasn't monsters, Beyonders, or magical creatures. What came out was total darkness.

They called it "Black Skies", a total global disappearance of the sun, moon, and stars. The sky, horizon to horizon, was completely black, all over the world. No clouds, no smoke, no obscuring mists, just darkness. And it shrouded the skies.

Radio traffic was disrupted, including communications with orbiting satellites. Power grids went down. Computers failed. Cars stopped working. Flashlights, and all other electrical devices, failed. It was a gigantic, global EMP, but without any explosion.

Temperatures plummeted. Winds died off. Sound became muffled. People saw ghostly beings, wandering through the darkness. It was like living in the Shadow World.

The entire world was shrouded in night, cold, and silence. And it lasted for an entire day.

When the lights came back on, the world was radically different. In Europe, the vortexes released dozens of predator species, including the brutal and cunning Dire Wolves, and caused massive and rampant vegetative growth that continues to this day. (This is the "Green Eruption".)

In southern Canada, just north of the Dakotas, a massive vortex opened up, changing weather patterns across Canada and letting loose the gigantic armored Vishloess, the savage Losiv (whom people call "yetis"), and the crystalline (and cold-based) insectile Isek. Dakotas' everlasting struggle dates back to this day.

On the coast of Oregon, the breakaway republic of Jefferson was lost behind a massive anomaly. As far as can be determined, the Black Skies still rule there. No one knows for sure, because no one who enters has ever made it out.

The State of North Carolina (one of the founding members of the Fed) was wiped out overnight. No bodies, no deaths, the entire population of the state just disappeared, right in the middle of whatever they were doing. All that is left are ghost cities, places people used to live, but no more. Only the hardiest, or most desperate, scavenge there, and only the unbalanced live there — ghosts are said to haunt the ruins.

The first Accursed — the vampires, ghouls, weres, and more — appeared shortly after the Black Skies. And though Chicago and Boston didn't die that die, from that day it was only a matter of time.

Unique events, similar in magnitude, happened all around the globe. And even when the vortexes began to fade (though not all did), the strange events remained.

Radio went out during the Black Skies, and never came back on. No FM, no AM, no microwave, no television. You can set up a transmitter, and even broadcast up to three miles away, but further than that, nothing.

All telecommunications were cut off (including fiber optics and GPS), and most of the planet was isolated from each other. Messages and news were restricted to the speed of foot or car.

After the Black Skies, the vast unreclaimed wilderness became a dark continent. No one knew what was happening there, unless they went and looked. It may as well have been another planet, and that's what people began thinking of it as: an alien and dangerous land, beyond the world they knew. That's when all that space — which had once been an unreclaimed part of America — became the foreign country known as The Outlaw.

What they did not know, and would not discover for several weeks, is that shortwave radio still worked. When all other forms of communication failed, shortwave survived. And in the time of chaos after the Black Skies (which caused another wave of violence and breakdown, like a mini-Collapse), shortwave was the only means to communicate across the continent and across the world.

The Mesh

The Mesh, the computer network of 2039, is not the Internet. It is not a world-wide network of computers, linked with fast and reliable networking, that exchanges untold amounts of data, including real-time video and streaming media.

What it is, is an unreliable and slow means of linking together hundreds of nearly-isolated networks worldwide, a best-available-but-worst-imaginable solution that, for all its flaws and oddities, nonetheless works. If only just. It is slightly better than nothing at all.

Black Skies killed telecommunications - radio, microwave, telephone, telegraph, fiber optic cables, modulated power lines, pulsed signals, and nearly ever other form of communications tried since 2026. With all of these, as soon as the signal gets more than two to three miles away from its source, it just fades out. It become indistinguishable from noise.

The primary exception are purely visual communication methods, like semaphore, signal lamps, and smoke signals. Also excepted are mid-to-low frequency radio, otherwise known as shortwave.

Shortwave radio is highly limited in bandwidth. It is also easily disrupted (meaning information can get corrupted), and can go out for hours (up to a day). Given these limitations, the fact that the Mesh works at all is amazing.

Most major North American polities operate their own, very different, computer networks. They each have their own architecture, hardware, and strengths and limitations.

Each of these local nets has one or more Mesh nodes, which allows them to send and receive signals from the other networks. Messages come from their local net, through their node to another node, then on to its attached network. The Mesh is a bridge between computer systems that would otherwise be totally isolated.

In a Mesh network, each node talks to all the others at the same time. There are 30 or so nodes in North America (some Outlaw settlements operate nodes, every Chartered Company does, and some of the major polities operate more than one), and a maximum of 50 can be on-air simultaneously. Each of these nodes broadcasts on one channel, and receives on every other channel. This maximizes the bandwidth of any single node.

The Mesh is limited to 50kbps theoretical maximum throughput. More reasonably, people get around 40kbps effective speed (when error correction, routing information, and other overhead is taken into account).

In perspective, 50kbps is slower than an old 56k acoustic modem, and 40kbps is just a little faster than a 33.6k modem. The Mesh talks about as fast as the old squealing modems used to.

Any and all information that needs to be sent from one net to another has to travel through that single, slow connection. All email, all web pages, any and all information that bridges from one network to another.

As a result, cross-net traffic is expensive, and only done when the expense justifies it. As with all other changes in communications technology, this has heavily impacted how people send, receive, and perceive information.

A Matter of Resources

[Note: When you’re building something from scratch, sometimes you have to back up a little and change some things to fix a mistake or two. I’ve largely avoided that on this series of posts (at least that you’ve seen), which is a goddamn miracle. But I need to change something now: I’ve mentioned that telecommunications are limited to 2-3 miles, but that should be 25-30 miles, depending on the power of the transmitter. I’m going back to edit the original posts in my notes, and using that figure going forward.]

Most people don’t appreciate how deeply economic issues permeate our lives. What we as individuals, and we as societies, are capable of are strictly limited by the resources we have available to us. What raw materials we can draw on, what we know how to do with those raw materials, and how many people we can keep alive, functioning, and willing to do things with them, all strictly govern what a society can do.

It’s theoretically possible to build a series of repeater stations across the continent, from New York to California, and avoid the telecom “shroud”. It’s 2845 miles from Albany, New York, to Sacramento, California. That’s only 114 different posts, set slightly less than 25 miles apart.

Each post would need power, of course, a tall antenna, a radio transmitter, routing equipment, a building, people to operate and maintain the equipment, people to protect the building, food and water for those people, working sewage, ammo, spare parts for everything, transportation to and from the site, a power generation facility, people to protect and maintain that, munis (supplies and services) for those people, and...

In the Outlaw, each emplacement is a separate tiny settlement. And each requires a noticeable investment in resources. And one outage — one successful bezerkergang attack, a nearby Emergence, or even a heavy summer storm that knocks out power — would void the whole chain.

And that’s just from New York to California (taking in Utah along the way). What of a chain to Texas, or the Dakotas, or Xiyatu, Mexico, Vancouver, Quebec, or Alaska? And then there’s Outlaw settlements — how to bring them in?

Within the borders of a polity, maintaining a telecom network is possible. Difficult and expensive, perhaps, but possible. But stringing a series of posts across the Outlaw, and investing the manpower and resources to protect each one, is simply not practical. And it’s all down to economics.

The country has been locked in a Long Depression since the Collapse, meaning:

• Many people are out of work, and most that are employed work in agricultural fields, on a subsistence basis. They generate little economic activity.
• Credit — money that can be loaned to businesses, startups, or the government — is tightly constrained.
• Industrial output and employment is weak.
• Economic output (the value of goods and services produced in the economy) is stagnant.

Complicating this (and, to an extent, contributing to it):

• The country runs on a largely barter-based (commodity exchange) economy. Those poor farmers in Utah (and New York, Dakota, California)? They trade for what they can’t make themselves, and barter interactions generate no tax receipts, nor do they contribute to the larger economy.
• Fed currency is only accepted in the Fed, and not even all of that.
• The tax base is nearly nonexistent (meaning the government is almost totally broke).
• Most economic activity takes place “off books”, in barter exchanges or the Outlaw economy (black market).

The economic problems of the Fed are a tangled web, and the presence of the Outlaw makes them even tougher. Increase taxes? People go to work in the Outlaw economy, and the government loses money overall.

Issue new currency? The Outlaw works on barter (most things being standardized against a single Browning-made 7.62mm shell), and Outlaw settlements hate the Fed. If the Outlaw economy won’t take Fed bills, no one will (outside of Manhattan).

Borrow money for government spending? From who, and how can you pay them back?

The Fed can’t even occupy Manhattan, its own capitol, being limited to one half of one half of the island, and unable to police all of that. There's an open air market selling illegal weapons and contraband within sight of the Fed headquarters building, and they lack the manpower to shut it down permanently. That’s how starved for resources the government is. (Independent polities — Texas and Xiyatu — are not much better off.)

It costs money and resources to build a relay chain. Without money, you can’t build it.

The Fed lacks the manpower, firepower, and material resources to maintain even a token presence in the Outlaw, much less a string of forts across the continent. Unable to build, man, and maintain a telecom network, people accepted the worst imaginable, but only available solution: the Skywave Mesh.

All Right, Jerkface, Where’s The Fun?

So right now you’re probably irritated, wondering who the hell dragged in the Econ 101 text. Or you’re bored, wondering when we’ll hear more about something interesting. “Yeah, like ‘crystalline, cold-based insectoids’. What’s that all about?”

I’ll cop to the fact that the last two posts weren’t as interesting as some others. But they were absolutely necessary.

The entire game is based around Guns, who are (in essence) D&D adventurers in a different setting. You get hired to stop bandits, kill monsters, protect innocents. Or you can search through ruined cities. Or explore the Outlaw. Or go vortex jumping into the Beyond.

Guns are also cyberpunks in a different setting. You get hired to intervene in a gang war. Or raid a company outpost. Or enter the Shadow World and crack a computer system. Or steal a spell or martial technique from a rival magus Tradition or shadow warrior School. Or kidnap someone. Or rescue someone who’s been kidnapped. Or kill a guy who badly needs killing.

That’s the point of the game: jobs and adventure opportunities, interesting allies and enemies, and interesting places for all this to happen. It’s raw material for gameplay.

(There’s also interesting toys for PC’s to play with. That comes from setting details as well.)

So why the econ? Because I’m creating this setting, and I have to understand it. And until I can explain it to myself, I can’t explain it to other people. The economic issues are a primary explanation for a huge percentage of the game.

New York City, the capitol of the Fed, is divided into three zones: the Green Zone, heavily policed (think the Alliance planets, from Firefly), the Red Zone, an urban hellhole (think Robocop or Death Wish III, with the thick crowds of Blade Runner), and the Black Zone, a wasteland inhabited mainly by monsters (think New York from the Will Smith I Am Legend movie). But why? Why doesn’t the Fed just flood the city with soldiers and bring it under control?

Economics. It doesn’t have the money or men to do that. And even if it did, there’s better places to commit those resources.

What about the Outlaw? Any idiot can tell it’s a bad idea to allow bandits, bezerkergangs, and bloodgangs free reign over the countryside. Why not send out the troops, pacify the countryside, unite the country?

Again, economics. Not enough men, not enough vehicles, not enough bullets.

Well, why don’t the settlements just join the Fed? They’re Americans, they love their country, they should just sign up.

Well, now we’re back to the three depressing posts about the plague and the Collapse. For years after the Plague, Americans fought other Americans who were trying to take their homes and their food. People they know were killed, and they killed others.

And it wasn’t just strangers fleeing the cities, it was former neighbors, cities just up the road. Imagine the TV show “Jericho”, with the escalating conflict between Jericho and New Bern, and instead of ending with military intervention, the feud just continued for 24 years. This is the situation across much of the Outlaw.

America is tribalized. People trust those like them — members of their tribe — and distrust everyone else. Outlaw settlements both loathe and fear the Fed, and won’t join it voluntarily.

The central trope of the entire setting is this: “small islands of civilization in a vast ocean of chaos”. (Hence cyberpunks + adventurers.) To explain why this exists at all, I needed to understand why people remain apart (tribalism) and why the central government can’t just forcibly re-unite them (economics).

(These two issues, along with the Black Skies, also explain the Mesh’s existence. The Mesh itself, and the telecom shroud, explains other aspects of the setting.)

Those details on economics won’t appear anywhere in my final writeup. GM’s don’t have to read them, nor do players.

But when the equipment list gives prices in “shells” (how many 7.62mm bullets something costs), or when players notice everybody is poor, or when they dump some Fed dollars for 1/2 face value, because no one will take them, the economics will be there.

These issues will be implicitly embedded in setting details. And in order to do that, I have to understand and explain these issues.

(Next post — back to the Mesh.)

Back To That Mesh Thing...

Let's talk a little tech.

The Mesh was built by combining several already-extant pre-Collapse technologies. The first is digital radio.

Analog radio (your AM's and FM's) suffers from signal attenuation: the further you are from the source, the weaker the broadcast (the harder it is to perceive). This isn't a linear relationship: most of the drop-off happens very quickly. It also suffers from interference (which you can hear as static).

Digital radio compensates for both. Attenuation is pretty much inverse: the signal stays relatively constant until very nearly the edge of the range, then drops off suddenly. It's also fault tolerant; very little static.

The second tech is software defined radio. All Mesh nodes are software defined radios. An SDR replaces radio hardware (mixers, amplifiers, etc.) with software; the only piece of equipment you actually need is an antenna, everything else happens in the computer.

SDR has numerous benefits over hardware radios. It can use multiple protocols (and switch between them at will), it can adjust broadcast strength to the minimum required on-the-fly (reducing interference with other nodes on the same channel), and it can more easily detect faint signals (a critical advantage for the shortwave Mesh).

The last technology is the modem, the modulator-demodulator. Digital signals are encoded so they can be transmitted, and received signals are decoded back into digital information. (In the Mesh, this is a piece of software, not hardware.)

Taken together, these three technologies form the telecom aspect of the Mesh. Then there are the protocols: rules as to how the network will operate.

The Mesh divides up the shortwave frequencies into 50 separate channels. One node broadcasts on one channel, and receives on the other 49. (Mesh networking means all signals are sent to, and received by, every node at the same time. This is necessitated by the physical nature of radio itself.)

A root node has a specific and reserved channel, all other nodes get what space is available, top to bottom, first-come-first-served. Because North America only has 30 operating nodes, that means the bottom 20 channels are usually unused by standard Mesh traffic.

Some nodes reserve and use them for additional transmissions (doubling their bandwidth), some for duplicate transmissions (to ensure critical information is received), some for non-node Mesh transmissions (from groups out in the Outlaw), and some by pirate radio operators for actual voice transmissions. (Everybody hates those guys.) All of these uses are on a contingency-only basis; if standard Mesh traffic ever needed the space, they'd be displaced.

[Note: That paragraph packs a bunch of interesting setting info in a very tight space. Pirate radio and non-node Mesh traffic have interesting consequences, and interesting uses, and I hope to get back to them at some point.]

Of the 30 nodes in North America, eight are root nodes: one each for the four Fed states, plus the FDNY, Texas, Xiyatu, and Vancouver. Eastern Canada, Alaska, and Mexico have all applied for root licenses, but haven't been granted them yet. They each have nodes, just not certified root nodes. (It doesn't help that the three polities are generally untrusted, having reputations for unsavory dealings. Unjustly so in Mexico's case.)

As with the economic details, these technical details won't appear in the final writeup. They're useful to define the scope and nature of the Mesh for my purposes, but players and GM's will never have to understand what they mean other than: it's slow and flaky, and the powerful, connected, or rich have dibs. (I'm sorry. "Priority." Suck-ups and cronies have "priority".)

The Mesh in the Setting

Sometimes you create a piece of a setting because you need it, to explain some other aspect of the setting or satisfy some gameplay need. Sometimes you create things off the cuff, just because. And sometimes you create something off the cuff that fulfills needs you didn't even know you had.

The Mesh was one of the latter. As it turns out, the flawed, flaky, unreliable Mesh and the telecom shroud both serve important needs in the setting. For one, they underscore important themes of the game.

Islands of civilization in an ocean of chaos. In the enclaves, you have TV, phones, computer networks, and so forth. Computers within an enclave network can communicate fairly rapidly, meaning they can stream movies or video calls, access websites quickly, and so forth. "Islands of civilization."

In the Outlaw, none of that exists. There are no cell networks, no phone networks, no TV or radio to listen to or broadcast on. You can't radio back for help or orders. You can't check email, download a map, or do anything else that might otherwise be possible.

When PC's head into the Outlaw, they're heading into the unknown. They are cut off from the outside world, cut off from civilization, and they don't necessarily know what's ahead, unless the people out there have a radio and are using it (and are telling them the truth).

The only people around who can help are their team-mates and maybe — maybe, possibly, it could happen — the settlers in the next town. They are journeying along in the "vast ocean of chaos", and no one is coming to save them.

Outlaw settlements are frontier towns. Enclave cities have all the tech. Outlaw settlements usually don't have electricity, and if they do they usually don't have computers, and if they do, they have no Internet. The settlements are more limited, more primitive than the enclaves. The telecom shroud makes this so.

Connections and nepotism. (And low-tech high-tech.) The Mesh is less an Internet, more an inter-library loan: you request data from a foreign network, and get it when everyone involved is damn good and ready. Some people just have priority, so their messages go first: the connected, the powerful, and the government.

For everyone else, it's expensive (pay for priority), so they have to conserve data. Sending a Mesh email is like a telegraph used to be: you pay by the word, so you count each letter. The restrictions on the high tech means it operates like low-tech, 1800-era solutions.

Isolated places. To find out what's going on somewhere, you have to go there, or someone else does. News, therefore, is more often rumor than fact. Each settlement is alone, cut off from news until a traveler arrives. The more remote the settlement, the rarer travelers are. Even enclaves are largely isolated from each other, communicating only via a dog slow and unreliable radio connection.

Other places are other places. America has Balkanized into a few enclaves and thousands of small settlements. It is not one country, but many, many independent polities. Part of this is due to the tribalism, caused by the Collapse. Another part is due to their lengthy isolation.

The difficulty in communicating means each place has developed its own culture, its own customs, even its own linguistic traits. The people in California live in their own country, one far removed from New York or Texas. The Mesh helps explains why this is so.

And those are just some of the things the Mesh (and the telecom shroud) enhance. They also enhance adventure opportunities. I'll talk about those tomorrow.

Mesh Adventures

The Mesh, as any good setting element should, drives adventures. Its flaws and its strengths create new adventure opportunities, but also drive players towards more interesting adventures.

Cracking, not hacking. Hacking, realistic hacking (which this is), is freaking boring. It's months or years of sitting at a computer, researching the target, or trashing (going through their trash, looking for info), spear phishing (sending them emails with links to bad things), or social engineering (pretending to be people you're not, to dupe others into giving you info). It requires technical knowledge of the network in question (which varies from enclave to enclave) and personal knowledge of the people and organizations involved. It takes a long time, and isn't terribly interesting.

Cracking, on the other hand, is very interesting. Each computer creates a convergence in the shadow world. Inside each convergence is a small world, with its own physics, architecture, and geography (a construct). Deciphering the construct allows you to control the computer. This is a mini-adventure, and the whole party can (and should) play.

More, each construct is different. One might be a ghost-haunted cruise ship lost in Arctic waters, another might be a section of WW I trenches under attack by German werewolves, another a trackless desert beset by mirages that can suddenly, unexpectedly become real. Anything goes. (Half of you are thinking The Matrix, the other half Inception. That's fine. Either works.)

I'm of the opinion that cracking is more interesting, in terms of gaming, and the Mesh drives people towards cracking. Especially because hacking, in this world, is more difficult than ever.

See, radios broadcast in the clear: anyone can intercept them. So the Mesh encrypts all traffic, client to client. This means normal hacking is very difficult.

Both hacking and cracking can be done, but cracking is much quicker and more effective. Therefore, most computer intrusion attempts revolve around the shadow world and computer constructs. Which is something you'd want to encourage in any case, as that's a cool mini-adventure the entire party can participate in.

Moving data about. Given the flaky and slow nature of the Mesh, messages take a long time to travel. The chief solution? High tech sneakernet. Sometimes it's just faster to physically carry data from place to place.

In 2039, data is cargo and is moved like any other cargo. And that movement invariably involves Guns somewhere along the line.

• Cargo ships, in addition to spare parts and consumer goods, carry computers with requested data. Xiyatu is the crossroads of data cargo coming from Eurasia, especially the Chinas and Siberia.

• Convoys, in addition to carrying bullets and corn, also carry data. (They usually have their own mobile wireless network, as well.) Who guards convoys? Guns.

• The vast majority of settlements can't afford a node, but many still have computers. How do they get their data in to and out of town? Couriers. And courier contracts can be lucrative. (And if a courier disappears? Guns get hired to retrieve him.)

• One postal company, Taylor Couriers, pioneered a "Pony Express" style messaging service for data deliveries that have to be somewhere damn fast. They use dirt bikes, ATV's, and ultralights instead of ponies most of the time, but the same theory applies. Other courier companies have sprung up, but Taylor couriers is the first and most trusted.

• Many enclaves have need of internal couriers. Chartered Companies in Manhattan hire specialized data carriers all the time, to communicate with their outposts in the Black Zone.

This is an era of computers and high tech, but the telecom shroud means that, outside the enclaves, email has to be carried just like letters used to be. (Fortunately, you can fit a lot of letters on a thumb drive. Plus, you can back them up, meaning losing one courier doesn't mean losing the message.) This allows for PC adventure opportunities, but also highlights the strange technological contrasts of the setting: the past and the present, mixed in baroque and unexpected ways.

Isolated places. As I said yesterday, to find out what's going on somewhere, you have to go there, or someone else does. Sometimes, people hire Guns to do that, to find out what's going in in Georgia, to find out why a settlement dropped off the radar, and so forth.

The Mesh is odd, flaky, and barely usable. Yet by existing, it makes the setting better. It encourages adventure opportunities, makes the setting more colorful, and helps players get into the mindset of post-Emergence America.

Not bad for a barely workable, highly unreliable, dirty little kludge of a technology.

Hodge-Podge Mesh Post

And now, another hodge-podge post dealing with some final technical details not previously discussed.

Nodes and Clients

In the Mesh, there are nodes and clients. Client devices are what people use (PC, laptop, smartphone). They connect to the local network, using whatever devices and protocols apply. (Each Enclave has their own unique network.) Nodes send and receive data to and from other networks, on behalf of client devices.

If you're in New York, and request data from another New York computer, the Mesh doesn't know about it, doesn't care about it, and isn't involved in any way. It only cares if you request data from, say, San Francisco. Then the request is queued up, to be sent as soon as your priority allows. San Francisco's node will send the data back, as soon as your priority allows. This can take quite a while.

(Mesh traffic being slow and expensive, people are maniacally focused on using every single possible trick to compress the data. Typically, these are implemented as a preflight process, before encrypting the Mesh-bound data. Speaking of encryption...)

Encryption

Mesh broadcasts occur in the clear: anyone with a radio can receive them. (In fact, people operating deep in the Outlaw have special receivers that can tune in Mesh transmissions, allowing them to receive, but not send data.) Therefore, all Mesh traffic is encrypted at the client level. Failing that, the node encrypts the data (necessary for pre-Mesh clients).

Encryption works something like PGP: you encode with one key, and anyone with the correct key can decrypt it. (This is a "public" transmission.) Alternately, you can send a "private" transmission, which can only be decrypted on the device you're sending to.

Encryption is designed to be transparent and effortless. The protocols are built into every program with network access.

Technically, these protocols are only required for the Mesh, but most local networks apply them to all traffic. For the most part, all network traffic in 2039 is encrypted, and with lengthy keys. Mundane hacking is possible, but the easiest form of data intrusion is cracking via the Shadow World.

(Traffic is encrypted in "chunks" of data, the same size "chunks" the Mesh broadcasts. This ensures that any errors that slip through the error checking only corrupt a single chunk, not a whole file. It also ensures that Mesh nodes only have to resend that single chunk.)

Unless something comes up, that's the last of the Mesh posts. I'm hoping to post one more message about the telecom shroud tomorrow, but after that it's on to something new.

Theories of the Shroud

Magic is largely a mystery. The Emergence is only 14 years old, and no Earther has the time or experience to have learned any more than the basics of magical lore. Even the Beyonders, with over 10,000 years of experience with the five Talents, can't explain the vortexes, much less Black Skies.

As for the telecom shroud that hampers all telecommunication, Beyonders barely understand the theories behind electronics, much less what would cause them to go haywire. They simply have no explanations to offer.

So what theories have been cobbled together to explain the effects of the Emergence are unproven, tentative, and conflicting. Even so, they are the best that can be managed, for now.

The Shroud

After the Black Skies, conventional radio stations could operate, and could be clearly received, but only within 25 to 30 miles. Increasing the power of the broadcast does increase this range, but with decreasing efficacy: it takes larger and larger amounts of power to get smaller and smaller increases in range.

This dampening effect extends from mid-frequency radio waves, all the way through microwaves. It doesn't seem to affect infrared radiation or higher frequencies, or mid to low frequency radio. Shortwave radio (and lower frequencies) are not noticeably affected.

(Careful measurement by researchers revealed the same dampening effect does affect shortwave, but the range decreases are on the order of a few feet.)

[Note: The following theories are an attempt to take known or suspected physical and metaphysical facts, and extrapolate from those an explanation for the telecom shroud. No one in-world knows this, but that approach is problematic when discussing magic. At some point, I hope get back around to explaining why.]

Theory One: Photon Wake

Electricity moving along a wire causes currents in magic. (This is the basis of technomagic.) Similarly, magical energies can interfere with, or enhance, electrical phenomena and other forms of energy.

Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation, carried by photons. Certain frequencies of radio waves are believed to cause a wake in the magical field, a buildup of magical energy that is carried along with the photon.

This magical energy acts to disperse the energy of the photon, dampening the radio wave, causing it fade out far, far earlier than would otherwise be the case. An FM broadcast that might easily reach for hundreds of miles, is instead restricted to a range of only 25 or so.

(Different frequencies of EM energies interact with matter differently. Light and radio, for example, are the same thing, but one passes through walls and one does not. Thaumophysicists theorize that different frequencies of EM interact with magic differently, hence why light and shortwave isn't dampened, but high frequency broadcasts are. There has been no systematic study of the ways that other frequencies of EM radiation might interact with magic.)

Theory Two: Contra-Light

It is known that dark is an active force in the Beyond (called "contra-light" by thaumophysicists), an energy that affects the world by canceling light. (Hence darklamps, which radiate darkness around them.) It's also suspected that one of the fundamental laws of Beyonder physics is "Opposite energies are drawn to one another."

Light is one example of EM radiation. Darkness, it is theorized, might be just one example of contra-EM energies, possibly including contra-radio. If so, then contra-radio would be drawn to radio waves, and act to dampen them out. Under this model, the problems with radio broadcasts are not due to a "magical wake", but to contra-EM energy, of which dark is one example.

(This — posited but unproven — mutual attraction of opposite energies would also explain the dampening that afflicts fiber optic lines longer than 25 or 30 miles. Focused light would draw darkness to it, and that darkness would act to dampen it out.)

Empirical Problems

Direct observation of magical effects (to verify the photon wake or the attraction of opposite energies) is only possible through divining the shadow world (or by using one of the few spells and devisements that replicate applicable forms of divination). This is an inherently subjective and intuitive endeavor, subject to personal interpretation.

It is doubtful that observation of magic and magical energies could ever be mechanized, and thus the phenomenon never be precisely and specifically measured. Even if it could some day, it can't right now.

There is thus no direct confirmation of the photon wake, broad-spectrum contra-EM energy, or the attraction of opposite energies. Both theories rest on speculation and extrapolation.

There is one more wrinkle. Reports from a single team of Guns in the Beyond claimed that there was no telecom shroud there: their radio broadcasts functioned normally. This report is unconfirmed, and likely to remain unconfirmed for some time.

It is difficult to access the Beyond, and even more difficult to carry out experimentations there. It would require crossing over, separating a party by more than 30 miles, and carrying out controlled experiments on multiple radio bands. Such expeditions have been proposed in thaumophysics journals, but no action has yet been taken.

In the meantime, technomages and spellcasters continue trying to identify a cause for the planetary blackout, so a means to counteract it can be devised. Others ignore the cause, and just seek to find a way to skirt the limitations of the shroud, so the slow and flaky Mesh might be replaced with something speedy and reliable.

As long as we're on the subject of magic...

Just last week, I put together some introductory posts for a new venue. They contain information compiled from all of the previous posts, rewritten and integrated, with some new info. They're informative enough to post here. I'll start with:

Magic in The Outlaw

Magic permeates the Beyond, that alien world of monsters, mages, and magic. It emanates from the Shadow World, an unearthly and quicksilver plane of gray mists and deep shadows. (Imagine a sandstorm, at night, dimly lit by a full moon.)

When the vortexes opened, magic Emerged on Earth. Energies from the Shadow World inundated Earth, spirits from the Shadow World entered our plane of existence, and magicians could now work magic anywhere on our planet. So long as a single vortex remains open, this remains the case.

There are five different methods for people to work magic: augmentation, imbuing, shadow walking, sorcery, and spellcasting. These are called "the five Talents", and each manipulates the energies of the Shadow World in a different way. Each functions differently — different laws, different capabilities, different limitations. Characteristics that apply to one Talent do not bind the others.

These abilities are called "Talents" for a reason: they are innate capacities, that you have to train to use effectively. People can be born with them, or can develop their latent Talents later, but everyone must learn how to channel them.

Developing a Talent requires significant devotion and focus. Few develop even one Talent (save among the fae), rarer still they who develop two. Those who develop all five are known as archmages, and they are personages of legendary power. There have been no archmages among the Beyonders for well over five centuries.

These are not the only types of magic. There are dozens, maybe hundreds. Dragons have their own magic, and True Dragons have yet another. Ghouls and vampires have come under the sway of yet another form of magic, an anthrophagy curse. Archmages — magicians who mastered the five human Talents — were said to have their own magic, but as no archmage has arisen in the last five centuries, that cannot be verified.

All magicians draw upon the energies of the Shadow World to work magic. How they do so, what they can do with those energies, and what limitations they operate under define their Talent.

I'll start posting details on the five Talents tomorrow.