It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that there is no limit to what the Company would do to keep its grip on Antarras tight, but that doesn’t mean the average person really understands the depths of the Company’s machinations. What’s worse, where it used to be the case that one could tell a Company member a mile away, from their dress, their deportment, or their demeanor, the decision makers higher up quickly learned that most Antarrans were conditioned to keep mum around anyone with a...

CONTENT WARNINGS: discussion of auditory hallucinations   I heard a story, once, from one of the original settlers, out in Swallow’s Pass, about the first time she saw a ghost in the Ruin. The ghost of her father, dressed in his work clothes, standing in the distance, in the fog, and calling her name. She said it felt as real as anything she’d ever seen, chilled her to the bone, and while she’d never believed in ghosts before, she knew this had to be one. But, she said, the strangest part...

CONTENT WARNINGS: discussion of auditory hallucinations   What is a ghost, anyway? It’s a question the people of Antarras have had to ask more than once. Leaving aside the obvious, here, there’s more to consider than one might think there’d be. Is a ghost a demon? A spirit? Is it something else? Problem is, on a planet that plays tricks on the mind, it isn’t just a question of “how real are the ghosts?” It can also be a question more along the lines of, what do we mean when we say “real?”...

CONTENT WARNINGS: drug use [1:01:42-1:03:22], brief depictions of body horror [1:28:18-1:34-13] People found all sorts of ways to cope with the uncertainty that came coupled with living somewhere as dangerous as the frontier. Some turned to drink, to gambling, to all the vices known to mankind, as could be expected. Some to violence, to stupor, to fantasy. Some, of course, turned to God and all his attendant mercies, to praying their rosaries and church on Sundays. And others still turned...

CONTENT WARNINGS: missing child, discussion of parental death and grief, blinding [48:30] If you take the word of the people who’ve made their names in Ruin’s Gate—and usually, dear reader, I am just wise enough to remember to do that—then the thing you most need to survive out here isn’t luck, or money, or knowing the right people. It’s something else altogether. Take, for instance, a game of Covenant. Odds are, you’re as likely to draw a hand of snakes as you are to end up with a pile of...

CONTENT WARNINGS: missing child, discussion of parental death and grief If nothing else, there’s something to be said for the collective spirit of the frontier. On Earth, as those who come to Antarras tell it, it’s every man for themself—and maybe that’s part of the problem. But there’s no surviving a place like the Ruin on your own, and we’ve got the graves of those who’ve tried to prove it. Instead, this town and the others like it were built through steadfastness and cooperation, and they...

Surprisingly little is known about the specific effects of unrefined hellstone, all things considered. It is, after all, the key to life on Antarras, the little red miracle that put our humble planet on the map. But no miracle is complete without its side effects, and though the miners swiftly got to work developing their specter suits to keep them safe from the obvious visible mutations prolonged contact caused, once that was dealt with, people sort of stopped asking questions. Whatever...

CONTENT WARNINGS: brief description of body horror [24:59-25:06, 55:03-55:09] “History” and “legend” are words that don’t have a lot of meaning in a place like Antarras. The places where their definitions are distinct have a nasty tendency to blur. When history’s as short as a generation or two, and fact is often stranger than fiction, it can be hard to tell the difference between the stories that get passed around and the ones that really happened. The thing that feels like hard-won truth...

CONTENT WARNINGS: brief description of body horror [12:27-12:39] Small towns on Antarres have a tendency to stay small—at least, until they don’t. The second a small town starts to grow, the process takes on a character I’d be tempted to call exponential: the moment people start to sense opportunity somewhere new, they have a tendency to go. So towns get bigger, better, and the more they do, the more people come.  It’s not always a bad thing. Big towns have their own charm, their own...

CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (31:21-31:55, 45:34-46:06, 56:55-56:57, 1:01:37-1:02:06, 1:03:46-1:04:17), graphic violence (50:39-51:08, 1:03:46-1:04:17), discussion of mercy killing (55:25-56:57) (13)And lo! the Angel said unto him, you Shall be henceforth known as Genesis, and you Shall be My Prophet, and I Shall show you a Great and Beautiful Promise. (14)And the Stone before his eyes did part and reveal unto him that Great and Beautiful Promise, that Genesis would deliver His message unto...

CONTENT WARNINGS: detailed description of body horror [1:01:08-1:01:52, 1:18:34-1:21:13, 1:26:34-1:26:50] Faith has been important to the people of Antarres since they first set foot on the rocky red earth of their new home. Faith of all kinds—first, the abstract kind of faith, faith that they had what it took to survive the harsh environment of this new planet, that they would find something here to make it worth the trip. And then faith of a more concrete sort, as a humble preacher from...

CONTENT WARNINGS: description of body horror [29:30-29:55] Now the problem the specters faced, now that they’d found a use for the strange red stones they’d dug up out the earth on Antarres, was figuring out how to transport it. Raw hellstone, turns out, wasn’t just injurious to man, but mighty unreliable when it came to traveling far distances. It had a tendency, to put it mildly, of taking off the fingers of anyone who happened to be carrying it. And putting it on a ship back to Earth,...

After the Ostenberg Agreement was signed, there was still the unsettled question of under whose purview the refining and transport of hellstone would fall. The Miner’s Guild thought it ought to be their job, given that they were the ones responsible for handling the raw material; the Company thought that, seeing as how no hellstone was getting off the planet without their help, it should fall to them instead. So the Manufactory, originally a loose collective of refinery owners more interested...

CONTENT WARNINGS: discussion of drugs (opiates, inhaled) [0:09:30-00:10:40] In the years that would follow First Landing, when wave after wave of settlers made their way to Antarras at the new-found promise of work and wealth that came with the first few hellstone shipments, some of the details were lost. Before the Company, no one cared all that much about keeping records, and no one looked all that hard beyond the narrow purview of their own self-interest.  But in those early days,...

CONTENT WARNINGS: description of body horror [throughout], detailed description of body horror [0:09:55-0:10:15, 0:56:25-0:58:05, 1:02:55-1:04:23], discussion of debilitating injury, discussion and depiction of drug use (inhaled, opiate) [1:17:20-1:19:00] It may seem surprising, how commonplace the demons of Antarras became, to the people who decided to make it their home. Incomprehensible beings made up of nothing but pure terror itself, aberrations to the degree that so much as catching a...

CONTENT WARNINGS: earthquakes, discussion of reactions to natural disaster [0:50:42-0:52:46], detailed description of body horror [1:29:12-end] More than anything, what the Gate had going for it by the end was just that: the gate, a constructed visualization of what was, ultimately, a rather ephemeral boundary between “safety” and “danger,” the kind of danger the people who built that gate knew of all too well after watching their unfortunate neighbors in Jericho succumb to the horrors of...