Makers and Marques of the Wasteland

In a world where a good idea outlives the hand that drew it, the maker's mark matters more than the maker. Gear travels the wasteland as blueprints, transferable designs that any skilled crafter can build from, and the current catalog runs to close to six hundred of them. Scattered through that catalog are recurring names, the marques, each stamped across a coherent family of goods. A marque is a promise about what you are holding: buy a blade under one name and you know it will be serrated and cruel, buy armor under another and you know it will be heavy enough to hate carrying. This compendium is a working guide to those names.
  The major marques are known by their specialties. Some are makers of arms above all: Toothpiq for serrated and barbed close blades, Heavycraf for heavy two-handed and industrial weapons up to the chainaxe, Bigol for oversized gear that runs from overlapping plate to a chain gun to a personal zeppelin, and Daline for finesse dueling and the bucklered style. Others clothe and armor: OOPH in heavy defensive plate and room-traps, GOAT in rugged hunting and riding gear, Street Noble in fine ensembles that dress a person up while doing quiet work. The naval and mercantile trade has Angry Anchor, whose work ships, harpoon kits, and riot shields betray a shipboard origin. The stranger corners of the catalog belong to Paradigm, maker of print workshops and knowledge gear; to Green Light, with its brawling knuckles and grim graveside utility; to Moulen, whose blades and camouflage carry a cabaret's sense of theater; and to Dr. Ottoman, whose whole line is medical kits. Four marques carry articles of their own and reward the detour: Helscape, the necrological-hazard engineers; Freeiron, the self-reliance gear of freed Irons; Candlepin, the Baytowne gang's bowling-pin bludgeons and boat kit; and Glitter Gulch, the racing circuit that put its name on vehicles and guns.
  Beneath the major names run the specialists, each tuned to a single niche. O Faithful outfits armed pilgrimage, from a wasteland hauler to blessing vestments to an anti-psionic bulwark, and its older catalogs even hid a compartment behind the word "security." Steelpaw makes everything for the hands: gauntlets, pickpocket mitts, an unbreakable shield, and an absorber that answers a psionic strike. Wildwind assembles the ambush hunter's kit, machete and repositioning knife and a cloak that beats a watchful eye. Sosweet arms the bodyguard and quietly serves the fixer, its clay mold able to copy the key to any lock a thief has already picked. And Slappi trades in duelist novelties, a riposte offhand, a scatter revolver, brew-negating knuckles, and a snap-trap that only a ranked Murder Inc hand knows how to retrigger.
  Marques move goods, but value moves on notes, and a few named currencies cross the whole network. The Trade Note is the broad workhorse, backed by the Trade Union. The Blood Note is stranger, secured not by goods but by binding obligations of honor, a debt written in something harder to default on than coin. The Greenhouse ARK is a relic still in circulation, the once-dominant note of the ARK Society, now spent mostly as a courtesy at a tenth of its old worth. And the Ottoman ABC passes hand to hand without a confirmed issuer at all; a working rumor lays it at the feet of the Ottomans, but the record does not yet vouch for it. Between the marques and the notes, a person can read the shape of the wasteland's economy: who makes the tools, who guarantees the value, and whose name you trust when the thing in your hands has to work.