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The wasteland’s changed, darlin’. New words, new sights, pages updated and stories stirred. Thought you knew it? Look again.
To the Dead Men, life and death are nothing more than the setup and punchline of a never-ending joke. They do not mourn, they do not fear. They laugh. Not because they are joyful, but because we are not. They are a grotesque parody of vintage carnival cheer: performers in sagging motley patched with flesh, bloodstained tulle, and bells that no longer ring but rattle. Their masks are carved from scavenged wood or even from their own mutilated flesh, stretched and sewn into permanent rictus grins. Paint is replaced with bruises, charcoal, and blood.
Despite their appearance as a chaotic, nomadic swarm, the Dead Men move with purpose. Wherever they travel, they leave behind scenes of slaughter staged like circus acts tightropes of entrails, bodies pulled from a magician's "hat," or victims torn apart before a silent, seated audience of mannequins. But they always return home. On one night each year: October 31st.
The date is meaningless to most of the wasteland. On this night, they converge at the Big Top, a massive structure cobbled together from ancient circus tents, rusting carnival rides, and the bones of the curious. This is not merely a base, it is a cathedral. A temple. Survivors who’ve seen the pilgrimage describe an unnatural silence: hundreds of them, walking in perfect unison, their laughter absent for once.
A kit found by an abandoned Dead Men camp. It's thought to be used to give members their permanent smile modifications.
And then, nothing. Not a scream. Not a sound. No one outside the Big Top knows what happens within. No one wants to. But by morning, they reemerge; more of them, louder, Worse. Something inside that tent changes them. One thing is known for certain the faction is growing. New clowns emerge all the time and every so often, someone claims they recognize one. A brother. A daughter. A lover. Gone missing months ago, now twisted into something new. And when these new clowns are born, they laugh like they’ve always been laughing. Like they never stopped.
A lonely clown puppet that was found with its sharpened 'hat' embedded in the chest of an unlucky waste lander.
SLASHSTICK
SLASHSTICK
(they/it)
No one knows who Slashstick was before. Some whisper they was once a third-rate comedian whose final act flopped on the eve of the world’s end. Others say they was a stagehand who made a deal with something behind the curtain. Whatever it once was, it’s not anymore.
Slashstick is the performance incarnate, their face carved like many others into an everlasting grin, mouth split from cheek to cheek, teeth filed into jagged shards, lips sewn open. its eyelids have been cut away, leaving twin orbs that bulge in an unending, and it never speaks. they moves with exaggerated pantomime, as though its limbs are pulled by a drunk puppeteer. Despite their silence, Slashstick commands with absolute authority. When it calls for attention, it doesn’t raise it's voice. They simply knock, two sharp raps on metal, bone, or the ground.
And all around them, from every throat, comes the Dead Men's refrain:
“Hooosh hare!”
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