About This Adventure

You run a sixty-operator mercenary company out of the Cumberland Plateau, eleven years old, taking work from counties and corporations alike for the right price. Two clients have hired you to hold the same river lock above Chattanooga, each under a different toll, and a loaded grain tow is drifting below the gate with no fuel to spare and the sun forty minutes off. Whatever rate goes on the board goes up under your patch.

Opening Scene

Chickamauga Lock sits on the Tennessee a few miles above Chattanooga. It still cycles because Sequatchie Land and Power runs the dam's hydro, feeds the gate motors, and pays the lockmaster in diesel. Rhea and Meigs counties grow the corn upriver. Hamilton County owns the terminal and the warehouses below. A tow that cannot lock through ties off and waits for the water to drop or the grain to spoil. Whoever runs the lock posts the toll, and since the Corps left nobody has argued with the board. Nobody has stood on it with rifles either. You have run the company eleven years, sixty full-time operators, based on the plateau seventy miles northwest. Two days ago Sequatchie's operations director, Marla Teague, signed you to secure the lock through harvest: four hundred gallons of diesel a day, a generator rebuild, and the lock opens at her toll. Yesterday Hamilton County's judge-executive, Royce Hambrick, signed you to guarantee Chattanooga's grain locks through at the old Corps rate: ha...

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Tags

adventure, custom, central-character-gender:Male, historical:contemporary-modern, environment:ruined-civilization, social-structure:merchant-republic, social-structure:corporate, social-structure:criminal-underworld, social-structure:military-hierarchy, role-profession:merchant-trader, role-profession:soldier, role-profession:working-class, tone-atmosphere:grimdark, tone-atmosphere:mundane-danger, story-mechanics:conspiracy, story-mechanics:anti-hero, politics-ideology:pragmatist-realist, politics-ideology:corporate-capitalist, target-audience:neutral, lang:en