Erin Tarn’s survey now moves into the final major regions of North America before crossing the Atlantic and looking at the wider world.
The Coalition State of Iron Heart is arguably the third-largest and third-most powerful member of the Coalition States, behind Chi-Town and Free Quebec, with Lone Star and Missouri following it.
Iron Heart controls an enormous Canadian territory stretching from North Bay, west of the Ottawa River, westward to Lake Nipigon and north to James Bay. This encompasses roughly the eastern half of old Ontario and the southwestern tip of Quebec.
Despite its size, most of Iron Heart is wilderness.
Scattered through that wilderness are small hunting, fishing, and mining communities. Combined, the territory contains approximately 700,000 humans, 100,000 non-humans, and another 100,000 squatters.
Its capital is the City of Iron, constructed upon the ruins of old Sudbury.
The city is a harsh industrial place reminiscent of the early twentieth century. Factories belch smoke into the air, coal-fired furnaces burn constantly, and mining and heavy industry dominate the economy.
In fact, the City of Iron is larger now than Sudbury had been before the Rifts.
For people willing to endure the smoke and grime, the city offers something extremely valuable in the post-apocalyptic world: employment, technology, civilization, and the protection of the Coalition States.
Iron Heart’s greatest resources are its mines and processing plants. Iron, nickel, copper, coal, and smaller quantities of silver and gold are all extracted from the surrounding territory.
But natural resources were not the only reason Chi-Town wanted Iron Heart inside the Coalition.
Pre-Rifts Sudbury had once been home to Science North, one of Canada’s largest science museums, as well as an extensive mining museum.
During exploratory mining operations, Iron Heart’s government uncovered information and artifacts preserved at these sites.
Chi-Town wanted them.
Part of Iron Heart’s agreement to join the Coalition required turning the archaeological discoveries from Science North over to Chi-Town for identification, research, and integration into the Coalition’s technological network. Officially, the information was supposed to be shared among all Coalition members.
Tarn doubts Iron Heart would have fully exploited the discoveries on its own anyway.
The population is overwhelmingly illiterate.
Even within the city and its government, literacy is uncommon. Tarn estimates that less than fifteen percent of the population can read. Most people are industrial laborers. Others are Wilderness Scouts, Headhunters, Vagabonds, fishermen, or farmers.
Politically, Iron Heart is an almost ideal Coalition member.
Its people see the Coalition States as the great new empire of the Americas and the salvation of humanity. Coalition laws and operating procedures have been adopted enthusiastically.
Magic is forbidden.
Psychics, mutants, and D-Bees are disliked.
Before joining the Coalition, Iron Heart was infamous for outright witch hunts in which practitioners of magic and D-Bees were hunted and slaughtered.
Coalition influence has made those practices somewhat less openly brutal.
They have also given them a more respectable name.
Now they are military peacekeeping operations.
Iron Heart maintains conventional Coalition infantry, SAMAS power armor, a Dog Pack division, and robot units. But its greatest military asset may actually be its Wilderness Scouts and Psi-Stalkers.
Few people understand the wilderness of northern America and Canada better.
Iron Heart’s scouts have traveled as far as the American Northwest and the Canadian Northwest Territories. Their knowledge has proven essential to Coalition surveillance of the Xiticix in Minnesota and Manitoba.
Much of what the Coalition knows about the northern wilderness comes from these scouts.
Next comes Free Quebec.
After Chi-Town, Free Quebec is the second most powerful member of the Coalition States.
The Coalition claims all of the old province of Quebec, but the actual fortified city of Free Quebec lies in eastern Canada, roughly one hundred miles west of the ruins of old Quebec City.
Compared with Chi-Town, it is relatively small.
Approximately one million people live there.
Yet Free Quebec is a high-tech industrial power and completely self-sufficient.
Its people strongly dislike magic and generally share Chi-Town’s belief in human supremacy. These common attitudes were among the primary reasons Free Quebec joined the Coalition States.
But Free Quebec is fiercely independent.
That independence has repeatedly caused friction with Chi-Town.
One major dispute concerns Glitter Boys.
Free Quebec refuses to disband its Glitter Boy forces and replace them completely with standard Coalition robots and power armor. At the time of Tarn’s account, Free Quebec maintains approximately two hundred Glitter Boys, with another forty operating in the field.
Free Quebec also embraced bionic augmentation much more quickly than Chi-Town would have preferred.
Other disagreements involve Coalition policies toward mutant animals and Juicers.
Free Quebec considers mutant animals an abomination and refuses to use them. There are no Dog Packs serving Free Quebec.
Juicers are another matter.
Although Quebec has grudgingly complied with Coalition demands to stop creating them, its leaders apparently see nothing inherently wrong with Juicer augmentation.
Small villages and farming communities surround the fortified city and live under its protection, adding another fifty thousand people to the population. Roughly ninety percent are human.
Farther north lies enormous forest wilderness occupied by Wilderness Scouts, trappers, and a handful of sawmill communities.
Travelers generally find Free Quebec hospitable, particularly when they come to trade goods or purchase supplies.
Education presents an interesting contrast.
More than ninety percent of the wilderness population is illiterate.
Inside the city, however, approximately seventy percent of the population can read, and about half are educated professionals or skilled workers.
Technologically, Tarn estimates Free Quebec is somewhere between twenty-five and forty percent behind Chi-Town, although she admits that nobody outside the Coalition leadership really knows the full extent of Chi-Town’s secret technological resources.
Free Quebec’s university and library are considerably inferior to those of Chi-Town.
But ordinary people actually have access to them.
Education is much more available to the average citizen, and propaganda is substantially less oppressive.
Tarn goes so far as to suggest that Free Quebec possesses something approaching a free press and an informed population.
Unsurprisingly, Chi-Town dislikes this.
The ruins of old Quebec City have meanwhile become a rough trading settlement known as Old Bones.
Approximately sixty thousand people live there, mostly hunters, furriers, merchants, and farmers. About three-quarters of the population is human.
Old Bones also contains Body-Chop-Shops and even a couple of magic shops.
It is a loud, dirty, rowdy place filled with music, dancing, gambling, shouting, and illicit entertainment. Yet Tarn notes that even Old Bones does not quite descend to the level of squalor found in the Chi-Town Burbs and some other border settlements.
All races are permitted to visit and conduct business.
Although D-Bees and practitioners of magic occasionally disappear.
There is a reason Free Quebec tolerates the place.
It secretly controls it.
Most ordinary businesses really are independent merchants simply trying to earn a living. But many of the illegal establishments, thieves, and black market operations secretly work as intelligence assets for Free Quebec.
Old Bones is effectively a giant information-gathering operation.
Adventurers arrive carrying rumors, information, artifacts, and stories from distant regions. Free Quebec listens carefully.
Anything sufficiently valuable can eventually find its way into Coalition hands.
Free Quebec also watches Lazlo.
It considers the magical nation a growing problem but does not believe it possesses enough military power to defeat Lazlo in a direct war.
For now, the policy is neutrality.
As long as Lazlo leaves Free Quebec alone, Free Quebec will leave Lazlo alone.
At least for the moment.
Then Erin Tarn finally turns toward Atlantis.
The legendary continent has risen from the Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda and the Azores.
Tarn tried to visit Atlantis three separate times.
She failed every time.
The Bermuda Triangle was too unstable, and her guides considered the journey suicidal. On her third attempt, Tarn was so determined that she waited nine weeks for conditions to improve.
They never did.
What she can describe firsthand is the Bermuda Triangle itself.
It is a triangular network of ley lines crossing the Atlantic Ocean, connected by three nexus points. One lies off Florida, another near the submerged island of Puerto Rico, and the third lies northeast of Bermuda near Atlantis.
The ocean within this region glows with an eerie pale-blue light both day and night.
Supernatural phenomena occur constantly.
The entire Bermuda Triangle functions as an enormous dimensional gateway, opening and closing unpredictably.
Tarn has personally watched the sky abruptly change from normal blue to green, yellow, violet, and red, almost as though the entire region had suddenly shifted into another dimension.
Rifts appear without warning above the ocean and in the sky.
Sometimes violent storms accompany them.
Sometimes the sea remains perfectly calm.
Sea monsters are common throughout the Atlantic, particularly around Atlantis and inside the Bermuda Triangle.
Atlantis itself is believed to possess enormous concentrations of magical energy. Some claim it exceeds even England or North America’s Magic Zone.
Tarn is skeptical.
As far as she knows, nobody has enough reliable information to make that comparison.
The inhabitants of Atlantis are equally mysterious.
D-Bees certainly live there.
But Tarn does know one name.
Splugorth the Terrible.
Whether Splugorth rules the entire continent is unknown. Tarn has heard that “Splugorth” may actually be the name of a race, with Splugorth the Terrible being one member or ruler among them.
The beings are described as enormous humanoid giants, approximately twenty feet tall, possessing a pair of powerful arms and eight tentacles.
Their appearance is terrifying.
More frightening is what they do.
The Splugorth capture humans and virtually any other life-form they find interesting, including supernatural creatures, and sell them into slavery.
Splugorth the Terrible apparently operates an enormous transdimensional slave trade.
Slave barges accompanied by armies of D-Bees raid settlements and entire cities.
Tarn has personally witnessed one of these slave forces moving through North America.
Days afterward, she and her companions retraced its route.
They discovered towns and villages destroyed.
The inhabitants were gone.
Two things about the Splugorth frighten Tarn above everything else.
They appear to possess absolutely no compassion for other forms of life.
And they have developed Techno-Wizardry beyond anything humans understand.
That combination makes them extraordinarily dangerous.
Across the Atlantic lies England, Wales, and Scotland, which Tarn describes collectively as a Realm of Magic.
No other place she has visited possesses as much magical energy as England.
The entire island resembles North America’s Magic Zone.
The energy is so intense that Tarn herself could physically feel it.
Pre-Rifts British civilization has almost completely vanished.
Rather than rebuilding technological civilization, many humans and D-Bees have deliberately turned toward magic.
They have embraced a philosophy centered on harmony with nature.
The new Druids have developed extraordinary forms of magic that allow them to manipulate natural forces.
They can influence rainfall and temperature.
Homes can be magically grown from living trees or enormous mushrooms with trunks wide enough to form buildings.
Settlements protect themselves using living walls of thorns and trees.
Tarn personally witnessed one city defend itself from monstrous D-Bees by causing a forty-foot wall of stone to erupt from the earth.
The attackers fled.
Agriculture has changed as well.
Some crops grow within magical fields protected by abundant faerie folk. Even crops raised through more conventional farming methods can grow three to five times larger than normal.
Despite all this magic, the human population remains small.
Tarn estimates perhaps four hundred thousand humans throughout the island, accompanied by another four hundred thousand D-Bees.
Most live in villages containing only two hundred to five hundred people.
Settlements containing as many as three thousand inhabitants are rare.
Ireland is even less populated.
Druids live there as well, but Tarn found the island unsettling.
She could never explain why.
Perhaps, she admits, it was only her imagination.
France also contains substantial ley line activity and numerous magical locations.
Politically, the territory has fragmented into approximately a dozen significant feudal kingdoms that frequently war with one another.
Technology ranges from pre-industrial levels to roughly the early twentieth century.
Tarn estimates approximately four million humans and two million non-humans live there.
Spain and Portugal contain considerably less magical energy than France or England.
Spain has approximately two dozen known nexus points, with a similar number found in much smaller Portugal.
Their populations and technological development are roughly comparable to France.
Beyond those regions, Tarn describes most of Europe as wilderness broken by villages, outposts, and relatively uncommon cities.
Even where technology or magic is advanced, survival remains difficult.
Many kingdoms rely upon champions or protectors in much the same way as the communities Tarn described earlier in North America.
A challenger seeking control of a settlement may confront its champion directly.
The victor takes control.
Such battles are not automatically fought to the death. Banishment or destruction of the defeated champion’s robot or primary war machine may be sufficient.
But when emotions or political stakes become intense, the contests frequently become lethal.
The Slavic nations and Russia are enormous wilderness regions dotted with occasional ruins and villages.
Technology is generally primitive.
Their populations are unknown.
Germany and Scandinavia present a different picture.
They suffered terribly during the Time of Rifts but have rebuilt.
Germany’s New Republic is roughly equivalent to Chi-Town as a regional power, with approximately five million humans and another one and a half million non-humans.
Unlike Chi-Town’s concentrated fortress, however, the New Republic is sprawling and filthy.
Advanced medicine, cybernetics, bionics, Juicers, and Crazies are common.
Juicers and full-conversion Borgs are especially prevalent.
The eastern regions are heavily industrialized, while western areas concentrate on advanced technology and research.
Amsterdam has become a major cultural, educational, and entertainment center with approximately three million inhabitants, predominantly human.
It is allied with the New Republic and relies upon Germany for military and economic support.
Denmark remains devastated.
Norway and Sweden, however, are relatively densely populated and technologically advanced, roughly comparable to Germany’s New Republic.
Then Tarn’s survey becomes much less detailed.
Her information about the rest of the world is fragmentary.
India is predominantly jungle, with little human civilization and even less technology. Rumors claim savage, cannibalistic D-Bees inhabit the region.
China is believed to have become a playground for demons and supernatural monsters.
Its human population, once measured in billions, may now number fewer than sixty million.
And that population is apparently still declining.
Most adventurers avoid China entirely.
Japan was devastated by tidal waves and volcanic eruptions that destroyed its great cities and killed millions.
What remains is described simply as a quiet cluster of wilderness islands.
Africa has once again become mysterious wilderness, largely unknown to the outside world.
Egypt and the lands surrounding the Nile contain tremendous magical energy.
The ancient pyramids appear to mark locations of magical significance, and stories claim that one of Earth’s largest and most powerful ley line nexus points or Rifts exists somewhere in the region.
South America is now known as the Land of a Thousand Islands.
The Amazon River has become larger than ever, with dozens of new branches breaking the continent apart.
Much of the landscape consists of swamp, rainforest, jungle, or mountains.
Only scattered pockets of civilization remain.
Brazil has become almost entirely forest inhabited by primitive tribes.
Argentina is the major exception.
Several cities and competing kingdoms survive there, along with recognizable advanced technology.
Glitter Boys exist.
So do Juicers and Crazies.
Technology roughly comparable to the twentieth century survives in some areas.
And then Tarn simply admits the limits of her knowledge.
She knows virtually nothing about Australia or many other parts of the world.
Finally, she turns her attention upward.
Outer space has become critically important precisely because humanity can no longer reach it.
Space travel is impossible.
Even placing satellites into Earth orbit cannot be done.
The most common explanation is that one or more automated Pre-Rifts “killer” space stations or satellites remain in orbit and destroy anything attempting to leave the atmosphere.
Tarn does not necessarily believe that explanation.
Scientists at Tolkeen proposed another possibility that she finds more convincing.
Earth may be surrounded by orbital debris.
Even tiny particles moving at orbital velocity could tear a spacecraft apart.
If enough debris were deliberately placed into counter-orbit, even grains of sand could create an almost impenetrable barrier around the planet.
The debris might have been placed there intentionally by one of the old nations immediately before the Time of Rifts.
It might have resulted from an accident.
Or it might simply be another consequence of the Rifts themselves.
Whatever the cause, Tarn believes some kind of lethal debris field may surround Earth.
And its consequences reach far beyond space exploration.
Without satellites, there is no global communications network.
Continents cannot communicate easily with one another.
Even communities separated by comparatively short distances may have almost no reliable information about each other.
Tarn believes this communication barrier is one of the principal reasons humanity has remained trapped in the post-Rifts dark age for so long.
People still do not possess an accurate understanding of what is happening in China.
Or Mexico.
Or even much of Canada.
Without satellites, communication depends upon terrestrial broadcast stations, relay systems, fiber-optic cables, and physical messengers.
Only the Coalition States and a handful of major cities possess the resources necessary to create substantial communications networks. The Coalition itself maintains an impressive broadcasting and telephone system within its territories.
Smaller settlements must rely upon directional radio or couriers.
Messengers transport written communications, audio recordings, video recordings, and verbal messages using ground vehicles, aircraft, horses, or simply their own feet.
A message may require hours to arrive.
Or days.
Or weeks.
To Tarn, it resembles accounts of the old American frontier and the Pony Express.
Magic offers some alternatives.
Ley line transmissions, teleportation, magical flight, and other supernatural methods can sometimes move information remarkably quickly.
But those methods have limitations of their own, particularly because many depend upon the location of ley lines and Rifts.
The conclusion of Erin Tarn’s survey is therefore not another monster, another kingdom, or another magical catastrophe.
It is isolation.
Humanity once possessed the ability to communicate across the entire planet almost instantly.
That world is gone.
For the time being, the age of instant communication is over.
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That is the end of the History & Lore from the core book. Hope you enjoyed it. I tried to make it readable and digestible for people.