Drifters First Pages

Once again, this is not complete, but it is close (proofed, not edited, requiring some tweaks). Here is some info on the Hy Plains Drifters! Hope you like it, feel free to post comments either way

From an outsider's perspective, the nomadic Hy-Plains Drifters may look like nothing more than barbaric raiders, like blood thirsty marauders who take all they want and who leave only carnage and death at their heels. Certainly, elements of their nomadic lifestyle and their warrior caste society lend credence to that description, as do the horrific stories told by anyone lucky or cursed enough to survive a Drifter assault. There remains, however, an unexpected, storied past and a complex cultural foundation beneath the ties that bind these warriors of the Wilds together.

Despite their nomadic and ruthless vagaries, the Drifters trace their ancestry to men and women who were incarcerated during the time of the Big Push… and Drifters venerate that lineage. They do so both in their voracious resistance to the old world orders that castigated and persecuted their ancestors, through their will to destroy, and in their remembrance of those sacred individuals.

The Hy-Plains Drifters tribes of the Year Zero are all common descendents of one tribe, a massive tribe that endured a great splintering at the end of the Push. Once known as the Iron Bars, the division of this tribe changed the life on the plains irreparably. As time progressed, many of these original tribes further fractured into ever-smaller groups, yet each tribe vigorously follows the Drifter code and lives life in an astonishingly similar manner, although there is room for creative interpretation and digression from tribe to tribe.

Though often dubious and perhaps even mythologized, significant members of a tribe will invariably be able to trace familial derivation from generation to generation, and so on. The most prestigious can identify an ancestor among the oldest, most distant forefathers from the splintering of the Iron Bars, as an atavistic claim to perversely noble lineage. Though nearly impossible to prove, Drifters often use this factual inconvenience to imagine ancestry in ways that seem apocryphal at best. Nevertheless, ancestry remains a potent ideological cudgel for the aspiring Drifter warrior.

In step with the veneration of ancestry, each nomadic tribe is woven together in an intricate network of familial loyalties combined with an intuitive worship of brute strength. While generally fractured and splintered by nature, a motivated leader will understand and work quite diligently to create these complicated patterns of familial or tribal alliance and to sustain loyalty through a rewards system of carefully shared spoils. Thus, any worthwhile leader must always win, and always continue to do so as the first principle in the Drifter code. Failure is often devastating, both for the leader (who is almost always immediately deposed) and for the tribe, which would be lucky to remain coherent through any significant, sustained calamity. Strength, in this sense, is invaluable, but it is oddly matched with some shrewd element of devious cunning and rude political practicality that exists among the ranks of the Drifters.

To a Drifter tribe, there can be no true death while one’s bloodline still lives, and Drifter warriors will often memorize massive and detailed chains of lineage in order to honor those that came before them among the warrior caste. Only in the pure violence of battle can a warrior unlock more knowledge of ancient ancestors, with an elaborate oral history of feats and behavior used to determine what historical (or neo-mythological) persons they may add to their line. It is common for a tribe to call a number of kings, generals, khans, and outlaws members of their bloodline- with nothing more than a vague perception of that character in mind. Accomplishment matters. Violence matters. Although knowledge and literacy are not commonly respected among the tribes, Drifters are always hungry for the telling of heroic feats from ages past, with authenticity taking a backseat to epic scope of the narration, and to the rich, evocative characters in that tapestry.

In motion, a Drifter band acts like a plague of locusts on the land, an analogy taken either from the plains they now call home or from half-remembered lore that they have grown to admire in peculiar ways, a subtle influence reflected in Drifter language. Young Drifters are often called “locusts” for their thinner stature, lust for loot, and the manner in which they swarm the battlefield with little regard for life, theirs and others. These warriors are occasionally called "grubs" as a pejorative, but for the most part they embody the Drifter disposition of massive movement and violence with the combined will to consume.