III: The Risks & Themes of Frontier Scum’s Setting

November 12, 2023

What is this:

An in-depth explanation of choices made in fleshing out the setting of the ENnie Award-Winning game: Frontier Scum. I was hired on to write the setting for the main book awhiles back, and I was hired on additionally to write the scenario for Tides of Rot - a splattercrawl adventure module set within Stubbshead County.

This outing exists to serve as reference material for anyone wishing to understand the choices that I took and the risks I understood when writing the setting. It can and may be used to flesh out your own creations for the world; to convert projects to the setting, or to be discarded entirely for anticanonical purposes.

It exists also so as to preserve a record should the notes I have posted elsewhere cease to be as we live in an age of rotting social media infrastructure.

Notion:

Western fiction sits almost eternally at a crossroads between nostalgic childishness and the atrocity of reality, occasionally intermingling but seldom in a way that addresses the deep scars and horrors of the era it seeks to present. It is, even when in other permutations (see Space Western, Weird Western, etc), often guilty of embracing rugged individualism, feckless jingoism, colonialism against native populations, and deeper issues of manifest destiny mentality which make the work contemptible to modern sensibilities. The rot of these evils can be subtle, it may even be so subtle so as to not compromise the work until the time of hindsight comes to see it fester; but always the rot does its evil in a way that is a disservice to the work and to the time period.

As a person who has some amount of academic background in the subject, and who is from upbringing and background which might lean into what I shall say, I will postulate that a “western” is at its core a genre about man’s finite position in the world; about isolation forced upon them by society or by nature, and about the fragility of being; all too often these things are made present by way of exploitation.

For Frontier Scum, the goal was to write a setting and attempt to contend with that. While also keeping ever present in mind that the “western”, as a period in history, is a period of soul-crushing atrocity; slavery, genocide, cultural annihilation, language death, and all other such evils that are seldom represented in ways that grant them the full weight of their evil.

It was a matter of trying to answer a question of if one can write a “western” which neither dwells in these specific evils while also not pretending such a thing could not or would not occur; and if the creation of such a setting is an appropriate thing to do.

To attend to this as best as I could, many risks were taken. For summation they were as follows:

1. Leaning into adjacency.
2. Steering away from “weird west”
3. Issues of erasure/cultural ambiguity.
4. The coda of character for sake of repeating/playing off above stated themes.

 The first two sections will be of a broader use to many than the latter two points, but I think all of it is worth speaking on. It was and is heavy work, and it is not beyond reproach. What was done for Frontier Scum was done with intention and with thought; for weal or woe; and by human hands which make many a mistake.

Elaboration:

I. Adjacency, or This is Not America.

The Lost Frontier is not America. It is not an alternate America. It is, by design, a world that has reached the end of its Homespun Era and is knee deep in the throttling chokehold of its middle Industrial Revolution period (coal is established, gas/oil is newer). It is a setting that exists to contend with the broad invalidation and ego death of wide populations whose skills and talents are no longer of any use because they can be replicated by machinery - and as a result, the means of providing for oneself, for granting a sense of purpose, for leaving a legacy behind - are being gobbled up by the Incorporation out of Covett City.

It has been described as an anti-capitalist setting; and this is correct - albeit I feel perhaps too optimistic. It is a setting where choosing to engage in the capitalist mechanisms; the robber baron mentality, is to ensure others suffer and die so you might see a sliver of a silver shilling more.

It is a conscious choice to engage with the invalidating mercantile endeavors of the world–so much in that, if you choose to flee from them (rather than fight against them), you will end up isolated because the wheels of modernity spin ever onward and are greased by the blood of the many.

To flee this is to save yourself from being crushed, only to then die of exposure behind the treeline in the dark and the cold. Thus the lawless nature of being a scum comes easy; it is the natural reaction of a person beset by cruelty to either give into despair or to act in cruelty as provoked by the paradigm. You begin play as an outlaw with implied marks of the cruelty you’ve done and that has been done to you; wanted for acts both illicit and legitimate; and from a background that speaks not to a life lived as one who abides by laws of civility - but as someone who existed within hardscrabble professions which saw you little joy and even less pay. You, outlaw scum, are disposable because society says you are disposable - because society says you are a criminal, and because no one man can change the course of history; at least near as you can tell.

By intention, the setting locations established in the opening spreads are there to give you guiding points of what this world might be like; but the sins which see you isolated, made finite, made fragile, and always exploited - are all clearly on display.

Gougen County and Covett City exist to represent the ‘back east’ type of vignettes you might get; with implied vibes to place it as the bastion of ‘civilization’ in the Lost Frontier. It is a Boss Tweed era NYC in the tarry swamps of the Everglades, a Canberra consumed by industrial London mechanisms, a New Orleans that exists like a festering cyst that spreads ever outward. Coventry and gouging are obvious invocations. This is the realm of capitalist supremacy; this is what you flee from, this is what invalidates you, this is what will ruin the world; and it is systemic to the point that were you to kill the Trust, someone else would come in tomorrow. It is the cancer of shareholder capitalism, where all dreams and ideas exist only to be consumed and regurgitated in facsimile at a dishonest price. It is what killed the trade your family once had.

It cares only about the future. And as such, it dooms the world.

Stubbshead County and Slackgaff-by-the-Sea exist to represent the idealized/idolatrized ‘back home’ type of vignette; but you can never go back home, and home is an unkind place because it is forever shackled to its past. It is British coal country, Ireland during the famine and the Troubles, the American Northeast during quibbling divides between those with old money ties and the unwashed masses who have dared to act in solidarity - to unionize- and to be gunned down by the same people who clutched their pearls at the implication of violence. This is the realm of belligerence, of failures of state and seated governments rife with corruption; of the failed belief that ‘someone in power will save us’ and of what occurs when you appeal to authority rather than seek solidarity with your neighbor. It is a place where if people could care for one another, could care for the future, for the world their children’s children will inherit - things might be better. But it will not be like that, and it cannot be like that; as calamities such as the Winter Famine of last year, allow those with power to make scapegoats and patsies - and people, especially those who live in fear and despair, will seek a simple answer to complicated problems and run with it to their ruin.

It is stuck in the past. And as such, it is doomed.

The Dust Barrens, with Fort Gullet and Palace; exist to represent the libertarian nightmare of a civilization ruined for sake of power rather than mutual good of the citizenry. It is every failed state, every upstart junta playing at politics, every mob rule where might makes right because the people in charge dwell only in the present and don’t give a damn once their number is up. Nature here is the quintessential desert; but with a Dust Bowl era sense of emptiness; the lands here are barren because of what people did. You’re free here, but only as free as the number of bullets in your gun - and you have to sleep sometime. And even if you’re free, you’re not eating without working for it; by violence or toil, with no hope for recourse or camaraderie with your peers. It is the land where dog eats dog, where if you die you’ll be stripped for your boots and any pound of flesh that might be worth a damn.  

It cannot see beyond the present. And as such, it can deal only in doom.

Carcass Country is proof that the earth can survive mankind, that it doesn’t need mankind on it. It is every bit of haunted woods a la the Blair Witch and the Evil Dead; it is a place where you never feel alone but always feel isolated - observed by predatory eyes. It is the devilish reminder that you will not find some warm embrace in returning to nature; that the world is as vicious and cruel as mankind can be in their invalidation of you. But even here the Incorporation seeks purchase; the unstoppable force of mankind’s avarice up against the immovable object that is all the things one cannot dare to know about the natural world.

Carcass Country is a place out of time; it is primeval, it is hunger and violence; it is timeless in its evil.

Sickwater Oasis, the Allshallows Canyon, the Scree Knives and such exist more to play off specific zones. The wretched hive of scum and villainy which knows what it is and isn’t going to lie about it; the threshold hellmouth into the unknown; the isolation of being close to the heavens but feeling nothing but empty; etc. They’re all on the edges and periphery of the Big Nothing; an endless expanse that isn’t worth looking into or giving a damn about because there’s nothing to it.

Dreckgullard’s Desolation and Dalliance are meant to lean into a few other items of the era that are atypical to considerations usually held. Their locations were inspired to lean into events such as the Donner Party fiasco, the race to reach the South Pole, and the Ross expedition. It is the Turrakana Peninsula by way of Ellsworth Land in a bad Rocky Mountain winter that just won’t break. It is the race to conquer the big empty white nothing at the bottom of the world, to claim an empty glory and to claim ownership over an abyss. If you could see what it was worth, you would keep it to yourself.

It is a timeless place. Unflinching. Unbroken. Unexploitable in any meaningful way because mankind would have to kill the world, kill the cold; to get their greasy hands upon what riches may lay buried beneath the ice and snow.

All these places exist so as to extrapolate on themes and considerations of that era. You could play into Regency era nonsense in Stubbshead County as easily as you could run the Battle of Ballingarry or the Battle of Blair Mountain therein.

These are places that exist less as “Fantasy America” and more as an “exaggerated theme” applicable to an implied time period which is commonly associated with the broad strokes of Americana; once one sorts through all the self-congratulatory pageantry.

II. Malice vs Strangeness

Frontier Scum is not a “weird west” because the “weird” within that subgenre is something that can be reliably anticipated to happen because the nature of reality is not mundane. Frontier Scum is not a game of being a wizard on horseback, shooting necromantic spells from a gun forged out of the devil’s pelvis. It is not a game where you will be engaging in the murder of indigenous religious/cultural entities for want of fun and profit. It is a game where terrible things happen because the only true fundamental conceit of reality is that bad things will happen in ways that are far worse than you could previously anticipate.

Why are the dead on the rise in Dredge-upon-Rock? Because that is the worst possible thing that could happen to some of the worst possible people you might ever have the displeasure of knowing, and because nobody would believe you if you told them the truth about it, and nobody would care because it isn’t happening to them. And even then, if you survived it all, if you walked away with your soul intact from the corruption of the Rot - nobody would believe you weren’t embellishing. Even if everyone knows the world is unkind and often horrific, they know you’re a liar - because they never went through anything like that; and were you to try to prove it; the world would be horrible enough to leave you at peace; scrambling to prove your trauma were true.

The world is horrible, not weird. It scars you, it changes you, it acts maliciously at you; but that isn’t strange. That is the nature of things. Anything that can go wrong, is liable to go wrong in a cascade of horrors. Why is the Organ Rail the way it is? Because it speaks to man’s inhumanity to man in building a cancerous carceral system in the rotting heart of a place that man was not meant to intrude upon; and because you’re bad enough individuals to see it for what it is and still be there to rob it.

Having had the opportunity to work on several ‘western’ genre properties by this point, I’ve never had much love for the ‘weird west’ because it acts as a power fantasy in a genre that I hold works best as a disempowerment fantasy. It also is too often, as a subgenre, coded in a way which celebrates manifest destiny and westward expansion without recognizing the human cost upon the native populace or even the people making the trek. If you can slay a spiritual entity of the Penobscot but you can’t put a bullet in the Archangel Michael, you’re leaning into a narrative of whose faith is ‘real’ and whose faith is the realm of make-em-ups.

In conversations with Karl during the kickstarting of Tides of Rot, I asked him about the nature of the “acid” portion of an “acid western” as I knew the intended desire was not that of a “weird western” but having his specific insight would bring further clarity to the subject:

“To me the acid western is primarily two things: Acid Western as a commentary on how shit we treat the world and each other (a lot of it fueled by capitalist values). The genre was partly named so because it was hippies making these movies to show a different Old West. Acid Western as a bad trip, the journey’s start where everything is shit but mundane and then escalating to the absurd and fantastical. The realization of the PCs that when they get back to “reality” other people are gonna go about their mundane business just as usual but the PCs world view is changed by their experiences. The former informs the morals of the stories told while the latter informs the vehicle to deliver those morals. At least that’s how I view it.

In a way each adventure is an Acid Trip, but when you come down it’s still the same mundane world. The Weird Western has the weird as a constant”

In terms of advice, it follows coda and allows for extrapolation which is very present within Tides of Rot. The ‘weird’ is not a constant, but the ‘bad’ and ‘malicious’ is. People are cruel and crude but all often by way of being apathetic and uncaring, the land is stuck in vicious mechanisms, and what you find outside the saloon as you go from one town to the next through adverse wilderness will not offer you a free lunch. It is ‘rugged individualism’ without the libertarian western idealization; it is ‘rugged individualism’ because the world hates you, nobody believes you as deeply as they should, and aside from your peers you truly are alone in this great big expanse of filth and malice. Rugged like a pair of boots can be rugged; right before they’re roughshod and worthless.

For the sake of building the world, for populating the endless frontier of Frontier Scum, think of it like this. In a weird western, there are monsters in the woods because monsters are real. In Frontier Scum, in an acid western, there is a monster in the woods because that is the least reasonable thing anyone wants to deal with and it is sure to make everything so much worse.

The acid western knows that nothing nice is liable to happen, there is no taxonomy, no sense of control, just spiraling wickedness that will intersect and destroy the lives of people who won’t be able to believed about what they saw. There are no ‘giant spiders’ on the Lost Frontier, but people will tell tale of a “Sunken Hill Skittler-Man” which is absolutely a trapdoor spider the size of a mule that wears the corpses of pioneers on its rump when it moves from hole to hole on the surface.

If you called it a giant spider, you could kill the fear in it. If you call it a “squatch” rather than a Watcher in the Woods, or even a Bigfoot, you kill the weight of the story and the ages upon it. And that is far too nice for what the people of this world deserve, especially the player characters.

III. Erasure & Exposure

To reiterate for clarity - just because it is not America, does not mean that it does not occupy the same mental space as the America of the implied era. It is, at its root, born of a colonial core and meant to invoke symbols born from this conquest. It is hard to write about an era, born from the prospects of its past, and to do so in a way which pretends any such evil did not occur - that the setting in which one is playing with now is a safe thing, a clean thing, or a good/pure/untarnished thing.

Is the Lost Frontier constructed upon the genocide of an indigenous people? By design, no. I am not of any Native American tribal lineage, as such it felt that it would be cruel, disingenuous, and vile so as to present a group with clear real world parallels and then consign them to vicious cullings. It felt of a different sort of disingenuous to also present such a group as though they were present, doing perfectly fine, and were the lone bastions of decency upon the ruined expanses. That is not my narrative to tell and given that Frontier Scum (for all the thought I may have sought to put into it) exists as pastiche of themes meant to isolate and destroy the sense of safety; I feel as though I would have taken far too great a risk in even trying my hand at it.

It is the same issue of speaking towards the issues of the Black American in an era that reverberates upon the Civil War, Reconstruction, or Jim Crow Law periods. Though I have some degree of scholarship in that intersection due to it having been a focus in part of my undergraduate studies; the broader narratives, themes, and issues at play run the risk of recreating real world horrors rather than playing off them in parallel. Of note, those familiar with the history of Black U.S. Marshals in the Indiana Territory will find parallels played with - as the thematic root of individuals forced to choose between suffering now or suffering later whilst aiding the mechanism of their oppression, is one that is broadly universal to the genre (likely due to the mass erasure of many Black lawmen in history/the genre) and felt something one could safely reorient by changing the nature of the oppressor from the supremacy of the State, to the feckless greed of Capital.

This all noted; choosing consciously not to present any sort of nationality or ethnicity ran its own risks. It is a challenge to write with regards to cultural groups, giving them respect and purpose within a paragraph of setting material each (at best); when what notably will matter to those playing/running the game is how they exist within the current paradigm of the game world. The lack of presentation can create erasure by omission; and this is a risk that felt safer to take than to present and to do so crudely.

A disclaimer and statement of intents, as we do have in the book, is nice to have; but there is nothing we can do if a bad actor wishes to perform an atrocity with the book. To remove cultural implications makes it harder, if only by a step, for an individual to take the work and make something heinous. Of course, to not acknowledge that there are certain aspects of cultural coding within the work (primarily by way of names) would be folly - and said names are worthy of explanation.

The major name of note in that regard, is Melanchton P. Murrsom the head of the Trust, the governing board of trustees for the Incorporation; and the purpose of that name was to lean into the great man branding narrative which one can find across America - especially during the rise of the nouveau-riche; where an appeal to something archaic, traditional, and erudite, would create a sense of mystery but also of foundations. One is more likely to give deference to someone who sounds like they came down from Olympus than they would to a dirt farmer from Idaho.

Most other names, as a means of presenting implication of culture/origin/background (as found on the 3d66 table on Page 12) are meant to be gender ambiguous, half-nonsense, and to sound almost ‘right’. Charl Odyang, Takota Moska, Stacob Scotum - they almost sound like names, and with hope the image those names conjure in your head are of people who have features and visages befitting a ruined age where too much is asked of them; rather than an immediate cultural coding. This does not necessarily make it good, or correct; but it was/is/remains a risk taken.

And of course, to clarify and to put it out there with some degree of authorial authority - if you so desired to feature the likes of underrepresented, long harmed, and historically oppressed entities/factions/people of this era; by all means you should choose to do so. Nothing about this setting should imply that only “white educated men from New England” should make all the rules. It is my hope that the setting implies “greedy, educated, self-absorbed assholes from that county” make all the rules; and you should scorn them for having the audacity to do that; given all they took from you, given all they would take from you, and given how little they care about anything beyond them.

But to put a pin on it, it was a matter of coda that no person/organization/group as presented in the small setting portion of the book be presented in any positive light; and to present historically harmed groups in a negative light would have been casting harm recklessly. Erasure may be read in the work by omission, but this was the risk taken. It is not America, it is not a realm of white colonists - but it is built off the bones of that imagery; and so all that can be asked is you do what best you can with this knowledge and make the Lost Frontier fit your vision - while hopefully maintaining also the disclaimer we put at the start of the work.

As a final note on this topic; there was also thought made to consciously avoid the issues of utopianism within pastiche; which is its own form of erasure and tonal shift. Wherein the boundaries of cruelty born from the imagined world are not applied to a group that suffers in the real world, and thus by making said group clean, safe, pure, and happy; they are in turn infantilized. It may not be a universal principle, but as a queer individual who is of the generational perspective shift of having had much of my queer experience defined by hardship; to present something as being safe and devoid of well documented suffering reads as erasure to me. But I will always concede that times can change, and that perhaps there will be a day when that is no longer the case; but as we are writers/designers/artists of our time and precedent, to put a positive focus on it rather than to not acknowledge it within the world; puts the onus of good behavior (i.e. not being a wretched human being) on the one running/playing the game.

As an author I cannot dictate the means in which the game is played or what evils may be done with it, I can only seek to safeguard the work through stated intent and thought process as best I can. When faced with all the potentialities of harm that may emerge given the genre, I would like to think I made better choices than others have yesterday, and that others will make better choices than I have tomorrow.

Or as I wrote quite a while back when someone asked on the topic:

“But none of this is also to say you cannot, if you desire it, make the setting your own. Frontier Scum’s setting is written more around the basis of theme than history. Reckless expansionism, late capitalism, industrialization, exploitation, union-busting, despair under an endless sky, dust bowl Calvinism, colonialism in spite of the world itself denying mankind, and a godlessness to the deep isolation one feels because trust, joy, and tomorrow are all not promises but rather baiting hopes. Thus finding a way to factor in various groupings of the era in a thematic vibe that makes them fit, and lets them be their own thing/adjacent thing, rather than a point of dissonance or fodder, is up to you. There’s certainly ways it could be done, especially if you have a background in those cultural spheres; but as a non-First Nation writer/designer, I do re-iterate it wasn’t my narrative to tell, let alone to render down to themes which could read as an uncharitable stereotyping (much as how Covett City is NY/Chicago stereotyping capitalism, Stubbshead is labor movement/industrialism era UK stereotyping, etc.)”

IV. Rage Spirals, Greed Consumes.

And thus with all that addressed, to now get to the thematic core of Frontier Scum with regards to the player characters. Given the nature of the era, the places you are from, the invalidations of your being, the root operating instinct pulling at the heartstrings of a player character is likely to be born of rage and greed. Were you a functioning member of ‘society’ you would not have a bounty on your head and a gun at your side; you would not be engaged in such wanton violence; you would be placid, pacified, and quite possibly happier.

But you wouldn’t know the heights of joy in such a life; and in such a life you might just as easily know the rock bottom of despair. Rage is built upon emotion, and the Trust, the Incorporation, most antagonistic forces in this world do not act upon emotion - they act upon greed. Greed is pragmatic in its avariciousness. It might send you tumbling over a cliff for one coin more; but its far more likely to poison a town because shacking up with the Incorporation is a way the individual can destroy the many for personal enrichment.

You are scum, pulled between the desire to exist and the issue of existing requiring you to suffer grave indignity and often work towards/for the agents of your own further oppression.

To coda: greed is when you kill off your emotions to justify your every action; rage is when you kill off anything that wouldn’t justify your emotions. Both forces are villainous and create only ruin in their wake; but in the short term they might make things better, more just, more fair, more comfortable. This is not a good or kind world; if you rise above it today, in a generation your kindness will be undone and something fouler will have shit upon your grave. Your name, your image, your legacy will be tarnished, rebranded, and used to justify every atrocity someone greedier or more ragefilled than you performs.

Of course this also ignores the Z-Axis of this binary; which is your finite and pathetic mortal existence. You are less than a sand flea in an uncaring universe. Rage may drive you to action, greed may drive you to pleasure; but your mortality is what tames those better angels and fouler devils down - because you will die. And you will not die a dignified death if you live the life of scum upon the Lost Frontier.

You will die gut shot, brain splattered, devoured by buzzards, of thirst in the dust bowl desert, of hunger in the endless frozen desolation, or simply beaten to death in a back alley. A life ended in a hospice bed, surrounded by friends and family, is an opiate dream to chase - to lead you down a primrose path of rage and greed, of diminishing returns on your morality (skewed as it may be), until someone else puts you down and begins their own spiral into such self-destructive means.

Consider the epilogues for Escape the Organ Rail; how you spend 10,000 silver and still end up mostly miserable or upon a new tier of villainy. Your best laid plans and expenses go up in smoke, or you find yourself a slumlord or working ‘honest work’ as though you could ever put all you’ve done behind you. Even when you win, you still need to lose; not because victory should be snatched away from your hands but because the world is out to get you - because of who you are, because of what you do, and because the only way out is to bow your head and go back to being a ‘productive member of society’ who is unworthy of being a player character by malus of their non-importance

Thus, if you want a legacy other than violence and despair; untarnished by greed and rage, it will be a legacy defined only by others with equally fragile mortal lifespans. Legacy is having two friends who will raise a glass to you, years after your death, because they wouldn’t be alive today without your foolishness. You will fade, you will die, you will suffer grave indignity and inflict all such cruelty upon others.

But make no mistake, you will die and most folk won’t have even noticed you were gone. A guns blazing shootout to die in a blaze of glory just means your corpse is too peppered with holes to be recognized, and you’ll find no comfort in the cold, hard, godless earth of your potter’s field.

Endnotes:

These were my thoughts broadly when thinking on the setting/working on the setting. The importance of everywhere being shit in its own unique way; to the point that being an outlaw, being scum, is the logical choice of how one lives if they wish to have ever grasped at a sense of liberty versus the systems and themes of a universe that does not care about your existence.

You’re not a punk, because that might imply some greater class consciousness or beliefs. You’re scum, because you trusted in something until it burnt you or cast you aside, and all that’s come from it is the revelation that man is a beast and to act a beast is the only thing mankind deserves in turn.

Violence is the recourse against other scum, against the bounty killers, against the Trust carpetbaggers and suits who took the farm or made you invest in something that didn’t pan out, or who just left you carrying the bag. You’re a person in a bad circumstance, and the only way out of it is through it - if you can get out at all.

You’ll probably just die instead.

Frontier Scum is not America, but it is cut from a cloth of a same pattern. It is not a canvas upon which one is meant to replicate real world atrocities, but it also should not pretend as though that the materials which allowed its themes to exist could not have occurred. It is a balancing act between what is truth, what is palatable, and what people wish to engage with. Lord knows, I would make it the most morose and depressing setting had I the means to do so; so as to speak to my tastes and to also languish in the weight of collective sin that it is to enjoy something which all too often makes farce of real atrocity.

Indulge in this knowledge or cast it wholly aside; these are just the thoughts which guided me to write a few pages of prose and then a scenario elsewhere. It is what guides a lot of my thoughts on Beyond the Pines, given its relation to the core setting but in a more magnified deep cut of cultural/geographical intersection.

I am a proponent of the anti-canonical; carve this world up to your liking. I’ll not be so disingenuous to say that “actually every character in this is Bihari” but that I view the make-up of the acid western presented therein as an eclectic motley of colors, creeds, and ethnicities - all broken under the weight of a hateful system that cares only for its own enrichment at the cost of a thousand cuts and some very personal pounds of flesh.

Concessions:

I wrote most of this document over the course of several months, some of the hardest months of my life. I do not say the words I have said above to defend the risks taken, but rather to acknowledge that thought was put into why said risks were taken. At the end of the day, any harm, erasure, or shittery falls upon my shoulders - I was hired on to write, to know, and if my ignorance cast harm out upon others, I must accept my part in that.

This is also something of a general overview of how I deal with the topic of sensitivity editing/cultural consultation; which I have always treated as a form of risk management while also trying to make things applicable in the sense of coda, theme, and authorial intent being preserved as best I can whilst whittling away any unclean edges. There was much back and forth on topics with Karl during the writing of the setting, as well as Tides of Rot, and though it is an imperfect thing (as all art is), I will say that I am proud of the work I had done.

It is always a point of personal pride to be able to ramble on about a period, about topics, about things you know and to be heard. Even if all the risks did not pan out as one might hope, I did my best to not engage in them with any intentional recklessness. But analysis paralysis is a flaw I also hold, and such that I’m sure I missed things, could’ve done things better etc ad infinitum.

To put the long thing short:

This is me just explaining my thoughts on Frontier Scum’s setting.

I almost died a few times during the last few months and all these thoughts have been kicking around in brain pan since… July or so. Work is long overdue on Beyond the Pines. But life takes priority sometimes. Often unkindly.

• Brian Yaksha, 11/12/2023