The most common is the missionaries who walk, often alone, along the outskirts of the zone, preaching to those who would listen, and offering advice, aid and an often extensive knowledge of medicine. There are all kinds of religious fanatics to be found in the Zones. Isolationists often serve as a kind of good samaritan group (to the extent that there are "good" people in the Zones), putting up a perimiter around the zone and preventing people from getting in, all the while conducting excursions into the heart of the zone to save those unlucky who have gotten past the perimiter and gotten themselves trapped. Often ex-military or ex-STALKER, isolationists believe that the zone should be kept in the state that it is in now, although they do it for the sake of people, not for the sake of the Zone (as opposed to ecologists). The antithesis of ecologists and isolationists, Anarchist factions believe that the zone is a natural occurance, which should be free for all to explore and use. They fight against STALKERs, military grunts, anarchists, and so on. In rare areas where zones are situated near urbanized areas, the military keeps the zone's violence from spilling out into the surrounding countryside.Įcologist factions can either be former STALKERS, scientists or religious groups who seek to preserve the zone's mysteries. Large coalitions of STALKERs often fight one another to ensure that their own guild controls as large a share as possible, of the local trade.Įven though no state's armed forces conduct harvesting operations, they often set up shop around the larger zones, to conduct customs business and so on. HUGE quantities like in Dune aren't needed, a 2-10-man team with some kind of vehicle is the standard STALKER-team setup in my setting.ĭue to red tape, nations and states cannot conduct Spice (let's just call it Spice, I don't want to bore you with huge amounts of detailed fluff) harvest themselves so it's up to individual entrepreneurs (let's just call them STALKERS) to do the harvesting. In my setting, the zones are all on Earth (which is a huge post-apocalypse scrapyard), and the resource is vaguely Spice (as in Dune)-like. We have a post-apocalyptic zone (or several zones) where high-tech equipment works sporadically at best (at least afaik, that's the reason for there not being more vehicles in the game), and this zone contains some kind of resource that other, more civilized parts of the world want, and which they cannot get any other way. So the question I'm posing is: What factions are likely to crop up in an environment similar to the exclusion zone in STALKER?
This is for my homebrew SF post-apocalypse RPG, but it could turn out to be useful for anyone running anything resembling STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Ok, the thread title might be a little misguiding.