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There had always been those who naively believed that hellstone could, in some way, in some novel form, actually be tamedâcould be brought under control, made safer or more convenient, be âdomesticated,â as the case may be. And there have always been opponents to that idea. When Eleanor Greer invented the process that would later go on to be cemented as the standard process for refining hellstone for safe use and safe shipment, the President of the Mining Guild at the time, a man by the name of Arn Goldman, would, allegedly, tell anyone who would listen for more than a minute or two, that Greer was a fool for trying: âitâs no coincidence,â he is recorded as having said, âthat hellstoneâs the very same color as blood. Anyone who doesnât take that as a sign is stupid enough to deserve whatâs coming to âem.â
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Nowhere to go but down.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (eyes) [00:05:09, 00:26:00], references to cannibalism [1:54:50]
Now, whatâs deceptive about a sleepy little town â which, though Iâve argued before that Ruinâs Gate was far from, but for the sake of poetry, letâs say the sentiment stands â is that, sleepy as they might seem, that doesnât mean there isnât always something going on under the surface. Trouble brewing out of sight. Pieces moving on chess boards in back rooms. Plans hatching, plots thickening, deals being made in the dark. And in Ruinâs Gate, in those days, there was plenty of dark to go around.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Reunions and reconsiderations.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (eyes) [2:01:00]
Meanwhile, in the writings of Confessor Leviticus to her final congregants, this pilgrimage is characterized somewhat differently. She speaks of the pilgrimage not as a promise, or even as a journey, but as a kind of fortification, a taking up of arms. This should hardly be surprising: the visions granted to Leviticus by God were filled with this kind of martial imagery, and she seems to have seen herself as a kind of warrior or soldier, rather than a shepherd or a leader. But the idea stands, nevertheless. The pilgrimage isnât so much about making oneself closer to god, but instead about enacting a service for the people of Antarras, undertaking a transformative journey wherein those strong enough to make the journey are also deemed strong enough to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: The soul of Antarras.
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In The Early Saints of Antarras, Apostle CelĂ©ne Osgoodâwho would go on to later undertake her own pilgrimage and become Confessor Psalms, the noted Evangelistâwrites of the sermon given by Confessor Joshua upon returning from their pilgrimage. The pathway, Confessor Joshua is said to have declaimed, is not holy because it is the precise pathway Confessor Genesis once took, but because of the footsteps of those who followed him. The act of commitment undertaken when an Apostle sets out on that path is simultaneously an act of contrition, of devotion, and of serviceâto the town or community one comes from, as well as the one they will go on to serve in Godâs name. It is that act that makes the pathway holy, and the meaning it has accrued as others have taken it, as feet have bled and skin has burned and prayers have alighted on the wind. To walk the path, Osgood writes, is to make a promiseâa promise that is not upheld until the Confessor who returns from the journey devotes themself to the service of those not strong enough to walk the path themselves.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: The pilgrimâs path.
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The origin of what have come to be known as hellbeastsâdistinct from the native animals found on the planetâhas also been debated by historians of Antarras. Where the line between animal and hellbeast falls is not arbitrary, but neither is it universally agreed upon. Are the hellbeasts endemic to the planet, or are they, like us, invasive, coming to Antarras from somewhere else, like that unknown place the church calls the Burning Beyond? Do they evolve, the way fauna does, or change at all according to their environment? And, if so, what were they before they became the monsters that haunt our very nightmares?
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: A colossal emergence.
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The first hellstone mutations that appeared, in the earliest groups of settlers, were in fact less likely to appear on the miners and more likely to appear on those who handled the pure, unrefined hellstone after its removal from the minesâcouriers, bankers, or those scientists who first worked to develop the refining process that would come to be standard. The image of the mutated specter, a potent and lingering phantasm of anxiety in the mind of the Antarran settler, didnât become the norm until much later, when external pressures to meet new quotas forced the miners to stay underground for longer and longer shifts.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Something moving in the Ruin.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: drug use (0:09:30)
One canât help but wonder, thinking back on the early days of Antarras, just how and why the staple institutions ended up with the influence they did. Could it have turned out another way? Could, for instance, a different church have found purchase in the hearts and minds of the early settlers? Could a different corporation from Earth have gotten here first, before Creon Construction, Communications, and Co.? How different would life on Antarras have looked, if just one decision had been made differently, just one change in the way things were when it all started? Realistically, there ainât much use wondering that kind of thing: the world weâve gotâs the one weâre stuck living on today. But one canât help but wonderâŠ
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Promises youâd best intend to keep.
Anamnesis by Samantha Leigh: https://blinkingbirchgames.itch.io/anamnesis
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Funerary traditions on Antarras vary by town. The early settlers brought with them a range of belief systems, cultural traditions, and dispositions towards death, so in the earliest days, there were as many cremations as there were burials, and almost as many mourning practices as there were settlements cropping up on the planetâs surface. Eventually, most of the planet settled into the sameâor at least similarâgeneral traditions, though there were some smaller settlements that held out against the planet-wide preference for cremation and kept well-tended cemeteries of their own dead nearby to town. But for most, superstition won out against any Earth-based cultural beliefs, and the dead were usually burned for fear that what was buried might not always stay that way.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: An act of remembrance.
Anamnesis by Samantha Leigh: https://blinkingbirchgames.itch.io/anamnesis
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Youâd be hard-pressed to find anyone who was alive that doesnât remember the day the sun didnât rise. Youâd be even harder pressed to find anyone who could agree on what to call it. The eclipse, the great cloud, the long, dark night. No one wanted to talk about it, when it happened, so no easy name ever came into common parlance. Everyone had their own way of thinking about the darkness outside, and locked alone and scared in their homes, they took to thinking of it however they might.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: The search begins.
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What to do, with the truth? Itâs a question as complicated on Antarras as it was through the history of human civilization on Earth. What to do with the truth when itâs more dangerous than a lie? When it presents a risk you might not be willing to take? Do we have a moral obligation to share the truth at all costs? To spare the feelings of those who might be hurt by it? To inform those who might not have otherwise known? Personally, I have always believed the latter: the truth at all costs. On a planet so hostile, when all we have is each other, it seemed necessary in a way that life was allowed to be more nuanced on Earth.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: A much-needed catch up.
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Forgive an old reporter just a moment for a brief asideâa diversion from the story, sure, Iâll grant you that, but one that I think it very much needs. Because the thing the stories like this about Antarras miss, sometimes, is that there werenât good guys and bad guys, not really. Heroes and villains are things of fairytales, of bedtime stories, and when stories about Antarras get told, theyâre all too often the fanciful sort. The kind made to convey a particular message. No one's immune to this, and I'm not saying I'm any better. But the thing that gets forgotten, in the midst of all of that, is the part where, as much as we argued, as much as we fought, we were all just people, anyway. And people get hurt. People get mad. People donât always act their best. But when you tell a story where you stop treating some of them like people, you miss the heart of what it was really all about.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Is this really where you meant to be?
I Have the High Ground by Jess Levine: https://jumpgategames.itch.io/ihthg
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CONTENT WARNINGS: violence, discussions of death
Though the original settlers did, for a time, use their own ships to ferry the hellstone they first found back to Earth, the Companyâs intercession soon shut down any private or personal spacecraft in the airspace over Antarrasâat first through violence, and then, as their first major demand in the Ostenberg Agreement, as a matter of policy. When you really look at the maps, at the paperwork, the Company doesnât have jurisdiction over all that much land on the planet; what it has is the sky. Because when the people buying hellstone are a month by ship away, owning the sky is all you really need to do.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Debts paid.
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In his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that âany sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.â
He was almost right.
Unfortunately for Mr. Clarke, he had it backwards. What he should have written was that any sufficiently sophisticated magic is indistinguishable from technology. In fact, few are aware of just how many of the technological developments seen in the second half of the 20th century were the result of magical interference, and thatâs at least in part because there are organizations in place to ensure that they donât.
Organizations like the Forensic Department of Paranormal and Demonic Activity â a top secret private organization dedicated to studying, containing, and preserving the secrecy of rogue magical effects on the world. Utilizing a well-studied paranatural ability known as "Redaction" to maintain their confidence from the rest of the world, the Department has kept the existence of magic a secret since its founding.
But with the advances of magic-inflected technology now growing at an astronomical rate along with the approach of the turn of the 21st century, will it be enough to keep the truth from getting out?
The Forensic Department of Paranormal and Demonic Activity begins this June for all Patrons at the $1/month tier and above. Back us on Patreon now: https://www.patreon.com/unexploredcast
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CONTENT WARNINGS: desecration of corpses, body horror
It isnât as if we ever properly understood death to begin with. Humanityâs spent exactly as many years telling stories about what death means and what comes after as it has dying. Wars have been fought and kingdomâs toppled over differences of opinion on the matter, and the mysteries that lie beyond that unknowable act are one of the first and most powerful of human fears. Some say the only thing about it we know for certain is that everything dies, but here on Antarras, even that seems like it may be less empirical than it seemed on Earth.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: To dust you shall return.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (1:34:35-1:35:00)
Of course, back on Earth they told stories about dreamsâprophetic ones, ones with deep significance and all kinds of meanings, dreams that revealed the deepest anxieties and worries that might plague the inner recesses of somebodyâs mind. On Antarras, though, there wasnât the luxury for that kind of thing. Dreams, on Antarras, some would say, were more vivid than those on Earth: darker, stranger, and yet all the more real. When they had meaning, which they almost always did, that meaning didnât come in metaphor. No teeth falling out, no moving as if through water. Instead, that meaning was all too real, and all too obvious. Less a symbol and more a warning.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: A nightmare made real.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: gore and descriptions of severe violence (0:35:37, 0:39:50)
The paradox of hellstone has always been this: itâs plentiful on Antarras but too valuable to keep; itâs rare on Earth, where they have the resources to experiment. Itâs so useful as a power source that it gets used up faster than the time it would take to truly understand it. And so that little red miracle that saved the people who first fled to Antarras has remained far more of a mystery than the businessmen, the scientists, and the miners might like. Just what might hellstone be able to do, if we put it to the test? What other miracles, what other wonders or horrors could be at humanityâs fingertips, if we managed to use hellstone just right?
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: A disturbing truth.
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Justice isnât a word that has much meaning on Antarras. At least, not in the long term. While each town might have been built up with its own best intentions, in the end practicality wins out over idealism every time. Any Company Marshal or local Sheriff makes the decision they think is best, and more often than not, whatâs best is resolving an issue expediently so that everyone can move on and get back to the harder work of living in a place like this: surviving.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: A murder in the city.
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CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (0:27:00-0:30:00, 1:34:00), drug use (0:40:00-0:42:00)
Scarcity has always been the name of the game on Antarrasâour time on this planet has practically been defined by it. As much as the prospect of a new home among the stars seemed to offer the promise of opportunities beyond those limited few left on Earth to the early settlers, the surplus of opportunity on Antarras was always matched by a scarcity of other things: food, safety, answers. With each one, the people of Antarras made do; new ways to grow food, new ways to protect themselves. Humanity learned resilience on Earth, the saying goes, but it perfected it on Antarras. But the most dangerous scarcity of all, the one most necessary to stave off against the encroaching darkness, was hope. Despair, on Antarras, after all, is not only a mortal sin, but a death sentence.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Building hope.
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Aside from the paths scouted between Antarrasâ sparse collection of towns, and the maps kept by the Minerâs Guild, all too much of the planet remains unexplored. This reason is no small part of why the Buzzards do such good business: wander off just a hair in the wrong direction, and you might find yourself in unexpectedly dangerous terrainâand not just because of the landscape.
In fact, early settlers passed down the firm belief that the planet was impossible to explore in full. Not because of its sizeâas the planet is, in reality, no larger than Earthâs own moonâbut because time and space, they alleged, didnât always seem to work the way you wanted âem to.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: Parting ways.
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To attempt a taxonomy of the creatures the locals call hellbeasts would be a futile task: the monsters that made their way out of the Ruin had no rhyme nor reason, no morphological consistency nor internal sense. They had the form, from the start, of something out of nightmares, and warped from there, in all manner of ways. Any attempt at cataloging them, or classifying them, would end up in a far muddier understanding of the practical information at hand than just listening to the names people took to calling them and going from there. Not to mention, anyone who got close enough to try was more like than not to wind up dead.
This week, on Ruinâs Gate: A town in need of saving.
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