Shambletown
From a distance, Shambletown looks alive. Figures move through the streets. Doors swing open and shut. The shapes of people drift between buildings in the slow, purposeful way of residents going about their day. It is only closer, when the smell arrives before the details do, that the truth becomes clear. Every resident is a corpse. The shambling dead fill the streets of this abandoned settlement in such numbers that the town appears populated by the living, a grotesque mimicry of the community that once existed here.
The town sits on a dead-end street off the Pale Horse Pike, about twenty miles inland of Aysea. It was once a small but thriving community. Now it is a necropolis that refuses to stay empty. The Fallow Hopes sent crusaders to cleanse it twice. The first time, they scoured every building and burned every body they could find. Within a year, the undead had returned to fill the streets again. The second cleansing was more thorough, and the town repopulated within months. A rumor persists that the zombie population always equals the exact number of living residents the town held when the outbreak began. Whether that is true or coincidence, no one has stayed long enough to count.
Something draws them here. The cause is entirely unexplained. More troubling, the town has begun attracting increasingly fearsome and bizarre undead variants: Bursters, Embers, and even Goliaths have been sighted in its streets, as though Shambletown itself were arming for the next attempt. The Fallow Hopes are planning a third crusade, their most thorough cleansing yet, and they intend to burn the entire town to the ground. Scavengers and explorers have been buzzing with plans to pick the ruins clean before the match strikes, but none have publicly claimed success. Shambletown remains the single worst wrong turn a traveler can make on the Pale Horse Pike. Some of the corpses staggering through its eerie streets were travelers who made just that mistake.
The town sits on a dead-end street off the Pale Horse Pike, about twenty miles inland of Aysea. It was once a small but thriving community. Now it is a necropolis that refuses to stay empty. The Fallow Hopes sent crusaders to cleanse it twice. The first time, they scoured every building and burned every body they could find. Within a year, the undead had returned to fill the streets again. The second cleansing was more thorough, and the town repopulated within months. A rumor persists that the zombie population always equals the exact number of living residents the town held when the outbreak began. Whether that is true or coincidence, no one has stayed long enough to count.
Something draws them here. The cause is entirely unexplained. More troubling, the town has begun attracting increasingly fearsome and bizarre undead variants: Bursters, Embers, and even Goliaths have been sighted in its streets, as though Shambletown itself were arming for the next attempt. The Fallow Hopes are planning a third crusade, their most thorough cleansing yet, and they intend to burn the entire town to the ground. Scavengers and explorers have been buzzing with plans to pick the ruins clean before the match strikes, but none have publicly claimed success. Shambletown remains the single worst wrong turn a traveler can make on the Pale Horse Pike. Some of the corpses staggering through its eerie streets were travelers who made just that mistake.
History
Shambletown was a small, thriving community before the dead took it. The details of its fall are unremarkable by wasteland standards; countless settlements have been overrun. What makes Shambletown unique is what happened after. The Fallow Hopes declared the town an affront to their faith and launched a crusade to cleanse it. They succeeded. Every undead inhabitant was put down, every building cleared, every corpse burned. Then, within a year, the dead returned. Not a few stragglers drawn by the noise of reclamation efforts, but the full complement, filling the streets to the same numbers as before.
The second crusade was more aggressive, more thorough, more determined to prevent a recurrence. It made no difference. The town repopulated with undead within months. Since then, the undead presence has only grown stranger and more dangerous, with increasingly powerful variants appearing among the shambling masses. The Fallow Hopes are now preparing a third attempt, and this time they intend to leave nothing standing. The entire town will be burned to ash. Whether that will be enough to break whatever hold this place has on the dead remains to be seen. History suggests it will not.
The second crusade was more aggressive, more thorough, more determined to prevent a recurrence. It made no difference. The town repopulated with undead within months. Since then, the undead presence has only grown stranger and more dangerous, with increasingly powerful variants appearing among the shambling masses. The Fallow Hopes are now preparing a third attempt, and this time they intend to leave nothing standing. The entire town will be burned to ash. Whether that will be enough to break whatever hold this place has on the dead remains to be seen. History suggests it will not.
Geography
The settlement occupies a dead-end street branching off the Pale Horse Pike, roughly twenty miles inland from Aysea. The road in is the road out; there is no other route, which makes approaching and retreating equally dangerous when the streets are full of undead. The buildings are standard pre-fall construction, the kind of small-town structures found throughout the Barrens, unremarkable except for their current occupants. The surrounding terrain is pine forest and coastal scrub, dense enough to muffle sound and obscure sightlines. The dead-end geography that once made the town feel private and protected now functions as a trap for anyone who wanders in without knowing what waits at the end of the road.
