Overview
The Yukon Data Fortress, a sprawling, heavily fortified complex deep in the northern wilderness, is where the Techbro Covenant controls the remnants of global data and cryptocurrency. However, it has become more than just a repository for information—it is the new gold rush. The surrounding areas, nicknamed the "Digital Klondike," attract desperate survivors and tech scavengers, all seeking their fortune in the digital mines of lost data, hidden code, and long-forgotten cryptocurrency wallets.
This mix of high-tech dystopia and gold rush chaos creates a tense atmosphere where opportunity and death walk together.
Klondike Themes
Digital Gold Rush:
The frozen Yukon, rich with hidden data caches from pre-apocalypse days, attracts prospectors as gold did. Some brave the wastelands searching for old servers, lost crypto wallets, and encrypted treasure troves that could make them rich if they can decrypt the information or access forgotten digital currencies.
Rival prospectors and data miners operate in the wilderness, many working for various factions or freelance. Much like the Klondike rush, many end up penniless or dead, but the promise of striking it rich keeps them digging.
Lawless Frontier Town Vibes:
Around the Data Fortress, settlements have sprung up, reminiscent of the gold rush boomtowns. Often frozen and dilapidated, these settlements are home to mercenaries, tech scavengers, hackers, and outlaws. Like Klondike towns, these areas are rife with saloons (cyberpunk-style bars), underground fighting pits, and data-trading black markets.
The lack of central law means justice is often brutal and swift, handled by mercenaries or self-styled "Data Sheriffs." Vigilante-style justice prevails, with bounty hunters pursuing digital criminals who steal data or cheat in digital mining operations.
Tech Prospecting:
Instead of panning for gold, the people here engage in data panning: scavenging old data servers, satellite cores, or pre-apocalypse servers frozen under the tundra. Specialized tools, like cybernetic implants and data mining rigs, are required to extract and process valuable digital assets.
Digital claims: Just as gold prospectors staked claims on rivers, individuals and factions staked digital claims in old, abandoned servers, crashed satellites, and underground data vaults, competing for access to lost information.
Cryptocurrency Rush:
The central economy is based on pursuing crypto-gold, or rare and encrypted pre-apocalypse cryptocurrency wallets. Some prospectors spend their lives trying to crack these encrypted wallets, hoping to find the code to unlock vast wealth.
The Covenant-controlled economy centers around these digital currencies, rewarding loyal subjects with crypto-credits for services. However, they hoard the most valuable digital wealth in the Core of the Data Fortress.
Cold Frontier Survival:
Harsh winter conditions plague the prospectors who live outside the Data Fortress. They survive through old-fashioned hunting, scavenging, and high-tech survival suits. Many wear rugged cybernetic enhancements to deal with the cold, such as thermal implants or rebreathers that filter out the frozen air.
Makeshift cabins and tents dot the tundra, where tech-driven prospectors huddle around digital heaters in the wilderness, hoping to dig up the next big find. Life is cheap out here, and the isolation often leads to madness, betrayal, or freezing to death in the vast wilderness.
Key Factions in the Digital Klondike
Tech bro Covenant Ruling Class:
These oligarchs rarely leave the Core, controlling the entire complex with AI-driven security and robotic enforcers and often sending an Avatar to meet with the outside war. They exploit the digital gold rush for their gain, charging exorbitant fees for access to tools, technology, and data caches. They also hold the keys to the last vestiges of the internet and use it as leverage against other factions.
They have a Governor stationed in the fortress, a cold and calculating technocrat who maintains order and oversees the crypto-economy and data mining operations.
Digital Prospectors:
Independent prospectors and scavengers live in constant desperation, searching for pre-apocalypse digital caches and cryptocurrency wallets. Some operate solo, while others band together in Mining Syndicates—loose, often lawless groups that split finds among their members.
Crypto-Runners: These tech-savvy individuals are skilled at decrypting old codes, hacking into abandoned systems, and retrieving valuable data. They are seen as the elite among prospectors, but their knowledge often makes them targets for Covenant-backed bounty hunters or rival miners.
Outlaw Data Cowboys:
Much like outlaws of the Wild West or Klondike bandits, these individuals refuse to play by the Covenant’s rules. Instead, they hack into systems controlled by the Covenant or other prospectors, stealing valuable data or information. They are hunted mercilessly but continue to operate in the fringes, striking deals with rogue AIs or using illicit tech.
The most infamous figure is "The Yukon Ghost," a hacker who has successfully infiltrated the Data Vault multiple times and distributed small fortunes to the poorest of the prospector camps, becoming a Robin Hood figure.
The Cold Clergy:
A strange cult has formed around the idea that the last vestiges of pre-apocalypse data represent divine knowledge. They believe the servers and data stored in the Data Fortress contain the secrets to eternal life or even the means to reverse the apocalypse. They live in monastic isolation on the fringes of the Digital Klondike, scavenging tech to pursue their goal of accessing the Data Vault.
Locations of Note
Black Ice Barrens
Inspiration: The treacherous, frozen wilderness around the Klondike region
Description: This desolate, frozen wasteland surrounds the Yukon Data Fortress and its associated settlements. The Black Ice Barrens are known for deadly storms, temperatures cold enough to freeze flesh in minutes, and strange digital anomalies that warp reality. It’s rumored that the Techbro Covenant conducts secret experiments in this wilderness, creating unpredictable and dangerous phenomena. It doesn’t help matters that Glitch wolves and other digitally enhanced monsters plague the region.
Features:
Digital Anomalies: Strange distortions in the fabric of reality, where the virtual world bleeds into the physical. These anomalies can be dangerous, creating glitches that warp space or summon hostile digital constructs.
Secret Covenant Research Labs: Hidden underground, these labs contain the remains of failed experiments, including cybernetic creatures, rogue AIs, and strange, glowing "black ice" formations that can disrupt nearby electronics.
Plot Hooks:
Anomalous Zone: The players are hired to explore an area of the Black Ice Barrens where strange digital anomalies increase. They must survive the harsh elements while unraveling the source of the disturbance—possibly a rogue Covenant experiment gone awry.
The Frozen Lab: The players discover an ancient Techbro Covenant research facility buried under the ice. Inside, they find evidence of horrific experiments on both humans and AI constructs, and they must decide whether to shut it down or use its tech for their gain.
Eldorado Cyber-Mines
Features:
Collapsed Tunnels: Parts of the mines have caved in, but persistent miners keep digging, hoping to uncover untouched data vaults.
Underground Databases: These hidden vaults house massive amounts of digital currency and pre-apocalypse information, guarded by physical traps and defensive firewalls.
Plot Hooks:
The Digital Gold Rush: News spreads of an untouched vault deep within the Eldorado Cyber-Mines, leading to a mad scramble between factions, prospectors, and the Techbro Covenant. The players must first navigate collapsing tunnels and dangerous rival miners to reach the treasure.
Firewall Guardians: An underground faction of miners stumbles upon an ancient AI that once controlled the data mining operation. The AI offers the players vast wealth if they agree to help reclaim its dominance over the Eldorado Mines, but it may have sinister intentions.
Klondike Crypts
Inspiration: Ancient mines turned into crypts where the unlucky died seeking riches
Description: Deep beneath the ice, long-abandoned crypto-mining facilities from before the apocalypse have been repurposed as catacombs for fallen prospectors. These freezing tunnels are filled with broken mining rigs, decaying bodies of tech scavengers, and discarded digital remnants. It’s rumored that the Covenant also uses this place to bury dark secrets—old data banks that are too dangerous to recover or failed AI experiments that are best forgotten.
Features:
Dead Data Vaults: Abandoned server farms rumored to contain corrupted or dangerous data, including rogue AIs and encrypted military protocols.
Algorithmic Wraiths: Haunting the crypts are data ghosts—people who uploaded their consciousness into the digital grid before the apocalypse, now trapped in corrupted servers, angry and confused.
Plot Hooks:
The Ghost Vault: An eccentric scavenger hires the party to explore the Klondike Crypts for a lost server farm containing priceless crypto wallets. However, the vault is guarded by a hostile rogue AI and the digital ghosts of those who perished here.
Buried Secrets: Rumors swirl that the Techbro Covenant buried a Crypto Core beneath the crypts—one that knows the truth behind the apocalypse. The players must navigate the dangers of the crypts and retrieve the AI before it falls into the wrong hands.
New Dawson (Hub City)
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Inspiration: Dawson City, the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush
Description: New Dawson is the main settlement outside the Yukon Data Fortress. Built on the bones of old Dawson City, it’s a chaotic sprawl of temporary shelters, scavenged materials, and makeshift tech hubs. Prospectors, hackers, and fortune hunters gather to share information, trade in salvaged tech, or sell their services. Neon lights buzz over ramshackle structures as data miners flood into VR taverns after long days spent scanning the ice for data caches.
Features:
Data Saloons: VR bars where miners blow off steam, making deals in the virtual space.
Hack Markets: Black-market traders sell and buy encrypted data, hacking tools, and specialized cybernetic gear.
The Frosted Fist Arena: A brutal, no-rules combat pit where fighters enhanced with scavenged cybernetics battle for crypto-credits.
Plot Hooks:
The Crypto King: A mysterious figure calling himself the "Crypto King" has rigged the markets in New Dawson, controlling the flow of encrypted wallets. Desperate prospectors hire players to overthrow his influence or steal his secrets.
· Digital Drifter: A prospector stumbles into New Dawson, raving about a massive digital treasure he uncovered in the wilderness, but mercenaries kill him before he can finish his story. The players must unravel the mystery and locate the data vault before others.
Whitehorse Haven
Inspiration: Whitehorse, a key city in the Klondike
Description: Whitehorse Haven is the largest functioning city in the region, located south of the Data Fortress. Once a trade hub, it is the last semblance of civilization before the icy wilds. Its once-bustling streets have become haphazard marketplaces for tech gear and old-world relics. Refugees, digital nomads, and failed prospectors settle here, hoping for one more chance to make it big. The city is watched over by a corrupt council of mercenary leaders who enforce strict rules to keep the peace while exploiting the people.
Features:
Mercenary Council: Comprised of the region's most powerful warlords and mercenaries, they maintain order in Whitehorse Haven but take a steep cut off all business dealings.
The Glacial Exchange: A massive market housed in an old city square where scavenged tech, pre-apocalypse devices, and digital currency are traded.
Plot Hooks:
Council Corruption: The players are hired by a resistance group looking to expose the Mercenary Council’s corruption, or perhaps they are brought in by one council faction to topple a rival.
Coded Whispers: A dying informant reveals to the players that an old-world spy satellite containing valuable intelligence crashed just outside Whitehorse. The players must find and secure it before rival factions in the city do.
Yukon Data Fortress
The Data Fortress is a massive, cold metal structure looming like a glacier over the harsh tundra. It is divided into different layers:
The Outer Zone: Known as "Prospector’s Row," a lawless, makeshift city of scavengers and prospectors who live in ramshackle camps around the fortress, like Klondike boomtowns like Dawson City. Here, desperate souls try to hack into the tech haven or mine old satellites and servers buried in the ice for lost crypto data.
The Middle Ring: Heavily guarded and fortified with AI-controlled drones and automated turrets, the Middle Ring acts as a buffer zone for the elites who control the flow of information. Private corporate security keeps unauthorized individuals at bay.
The Core: Deep within lies the Data Vault, an underground cold storage server farm where Covenant’s most valuable digital assets and the remaining internet are stored. Access is restricted to the highest echelons of the Techbro Covenant.
Yukon Slipstream
Inspiration: Yukon River and historical transportation routes
Description: The icy Yukon Slipstream is a frozen river used by data smugglers and cyber-pirates to transport stolen tech and encrypted data caches. Along its path, old ships and digital barges lie frozen in the ice, and many abandoned mid-escapes when the temperature dropped. It’s a risky but vital trade route, and anyone who controls the Slipstream holds power over smuggling operations and trade between settlements.
Features:
Frozen Shipwrecks: Old ships that carried data servers or cargo, now abandoned and frozen in the river, hold valuable digital treasures but are guarded by automated security systems.
Slipstream Pirates: Organized criminal factions patrol the Slipstream, using fast, retrofitted snow cruisers and cybernetic enhancements to board and steal from other ships.
Plot Hooks:
Race for the Prize: A massive, encrypted data server, once used to control government satellites, has been spotted in a frozen barge along the Slipstream. Various factions, including pirates, mercenaries, and the Covenant, are racing to retrieve it. Can the players beat them to the prize?
Slipstream Raiders: The players are hired to defend a cargo ship carrying valuable data from Slipstream pirates. However, mid-journey, they discover that saboteurs may have infiltrated their crew.
Other Plot Hooks
Corporate Espionage:
o A rival faction has sent in cyber-mercenaries to infiltrate the Data Fortress, looking to steal one of the Covenant’s most valuable AI systems or data servers. The players are caught in the middle as the line between outlaws, prospectors, and the Covenant blurs.
Frozen Reclamation:
o After a thaw in the permafrost, an old military bunker has become accessible, revealing a potential treasure trove of data and weapons. The Techbro Covenant, along with various prospectors and outlaw gangs, race to claim its contents before it falls into the wrong hands—or something awakens in the bunker that was meant to stay buried.
The Lost Digital Vault:
o Rumor has it that an undiscovered pre-apocalypse data vault is deep within the permafrost, far from the Techbro Covenant’s reach. It is said to hold invaluable information, possibly military codes, weapon schematics, or the key to a dormant AI that could rival the Covenant's control.
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The Yukon Ghost:
o The players are hired by the Covenant or an independent prospector faction to track down and capture the Yukon Ghost, who continues to disrupt operations in the Digital Klondike by hacking into the Data Fortress. The Ghost knows something far more valuable than digital gold—an encrypted secret that could bring down the Covenant.
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