Rampart Falconers
Written by: Coupe
Every settlement out in the world, from villages of olde to monolithic sprawls, is built around food. No food, no people. Simple, right chummer? For folks like us who live in one of Raleigh's more technically-civilized parts this is a no-brainer, since you can just head out to the stuffer-shack and grab your preferred snack of flavored soy-substitute, but out in the urban jungle, in places like the Concrete Forest? You've gotta get a little more creative than that. The Rampart's vertical-farming is an inspired piece of work, but they're still not quite self-sufficient in their protein, despite their work on insect-based livestock. Which means when they need enough meat on the table to avoid malnutrition, they get it the old-fashioned way, through hunting. Pretty much everyone who lives in the barrens is a subsistence-hunter to some degree, but the Rampart's Falconers have gone as far as to make it into something resembling tradition. Despite their relative adolescence as a group they're a distinctive bunch, even among the more colorful inhabitants of the Concrete forests, wearing garishly dyed furs and intricately carved skulls as helmets, the kind of things that usually attract the wrong kind of attention in Barrens. But every time they go out with their handcrafted muskets and cobbled-together drones acting as spotters, they always come back in one piece with a generous haul of coydogs, city deer and on occasion some kind of paracritter I've never heard of but according to our team's foodie, makes for pretty great curry.Structure
The Falconers operate under a sort of loose clan-based structure, with the older and more experienced barrens-residents at the top leading groups of younger hunters, often called 'Falconlings', or so I heard.
Public Agenda
The Falconers' duty is first and foremost keeping the Rampart fed by way of hunting the wildlife that made the abandoned Concrete Forest their home. On top of that, they also make sure that the residents of the rampart are up to scratch on more traditional means of survival, in case they have to leave their tech behind for whatever reason. Finally, the Falconers are among the first line of defence between the Rampart and the other decidedly less friendly residents of the Concrete Forest, acting as reconnaisance and making hit-and-run attacks on approaching threats.
Assets
Owing to the unreliabilty of scavenced equipment, Falconers strive to produce as much of their own gear 'in-house' as possible, to ensure that repairs and replacements are always within the Rampart's means. Weapons are primarily crossbows and black-powder muskets (made to be compatible with modern accessories, should the opportunity arise), armor consists of boiled leather and ring-mail tunics, and their characteristic 'spotting drones' are almost entirely scrap-built and made as simple as possible.
History
So the weird thing is, nobody's actually sure where the ideas and traditions behind the Falconers came from. In fact, the 'first' falconer was long-dead before the Rampart was even a thing. So the story goes, a bunch of Rampart scavengers were sent out into the northern outskirts of Raleigh - back where there was parts people would call Barrens or Z-zones before the Concrete Forest was even a thing - and they came across an abandoned banking building that still had its vault-doors intact and closed. The scavs thought this might be a chance at something big, so they spent all night burning a hole through the top of it with thermite to see what's inside.
All night? I know bank-vaults are tough, but Rampart scavengers always had a surplus of thermite. Wouldn't it take them like, a couple hours tops?
Sure, if you don't mind risking the whole building catching alight and lighting a big roman-candle for the go-gangers to find you. Gotta be subtle when you're far from safety, omae.When they finally broke through, they didn't find the stacks of gold and stock-certificates they were hoping for. Turned out, the vault had been converted into a safehouse/bolthole by someone else, and their skeletal remains were still sitting at a dusty old desk, musket in hand. Alongside a bunch of hand-made survivalist tools - including a makeshift smithing kit and chemlab - they found a dozen or so books detailing the dead guy's descent from living "on the grid but off of it" to becoming a full-blown survivalist as the sprawl around him turned into barrens-territory. The actual stories were mostly just amusement to the scavs, but for every few pages of paranoid rants about "big corp and big psych", there was a few nuggets of well-and-truly creative and practical means of eking out a decent living in the parts of a sprawl that civilization had abandoned, even showing some talent in advanced (but primitive) metallurgy and gunsmithing.
Before you ask, we've already appropriated scans of some of his writing, and we're posting it up here. <LINK>The Scavs decided this was a good enough haul, and took as much of the vault's interior home with them as they could. The Rampart's powers-that-be immediately set to work deciphering the useful from the useless, intermingling their own tech and skills with the ones detailed out in the collection of demented literature they'd come across. Their first few attempts at applying the newfound knowledge were crude compared to what they had found, but it was still a substantial step-up from what a lot of them knew, and even the more experienced barrens-residents learned a thing or two. The mysterious survivalist and his words went from a joked-about attraction to something that the Rampart was showing legitimate respect and reverence to, maybe not to the extent of old Volkmar himself, but enough that the folks were starting to feel like they had to pay something back for what they'd learned from him. It was eventually decided on that they'd start to intergrate some of the survivalist's peculiarities and quirks into the Rampart's culture, to sort of keep him living in spirit. It started with imitating slang and making accessories mimicking what they'd found on the corpse, but it wasn't long before a subculture was forming around the old survivalist's way of living. When the Rampart's tech-heads managed to cobble together a working copy of the survivalist's own 'Falcon' roto-drone, the veteran hunters and scouts of the Rampart founded the Falconers in semi-officiality, begining what's looking to be a long tradition of passing down old-world knowledge to the Concrete Forest's newest generations of vunerable SINless.
"In respect to the hunt."
Founding Date
2076
Type
Geopolitical, Band
Alternative Names
Rampart Hunters
Demonym
Falconer
Government System
Anarchy
Location
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