The Reach
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"The wide, wild frontier. A sunless domain, but impossibly verdant – with gargantuan vines, cathedral-sized bronzewoods, and livid fungal archipelagos."
The Reach is the vast frontier of the High Wilderness that lies beyond the bounds of Albion, the British Empire's spacefaring domain in the 20th century.
The Final Frontier[edit]
Perhaps the only Sunless Sky; the Reach's Judgement died long ago. With its death, the plants of the Reach have grown wild, making the Reach a crowded and claustrophobic region of space. Despite the lack of a primary star, the area is still lit by ambient starlight.
While the Empire's great trading companies - Murgatroyd's, the Windward Company, and Leadbeater & Stainrod - seek to exploit the Reach's vast natural wealth, rebellious settlers have begun banding together and agitating for independence. This resulted in a divide between the Stovepipes, who seek to tame the Reach and bring it under Imperial control, and the Tacketies, who fervently oppose them. The Reach's main hub, New Winchester, is a hotbed of political intrigue and conflict between these factions. The Reach is linked to the rest of space via a transit relay, an accelerator of sorts that transports locomotives "via a loophole in some cosmic mandate." Notably, the Reach is the only region with a relay to all three of the other regions.
Locations[edit]
- New Winchester
- Magdalene's
- Polmear & Plenty's Inconceivable Circus
- Port Avon
- Titania
- Carillon
- Hybras
- Leadbeater & Stainrod's Nature Reserve
- Lustrum
- Port Prosper
The Garden of Heaven[edit]
"The flora of the Reach is improbably fecund. Its seeds grow quickly, even violently, into crops that sustain London’s settlements in the sky."
The Reach is home to the most impossibly fecund and ebullient flora of the High Wilderness. Seeds from the Reach have become a commodity for those who want to build their own garden in the Wilderness, and greenhouse-engines trade seeds all over space.
But trading seeds does not come without its own risk. Storing them where there is no light or water might cause them to grow out of control and choke the locomotive in vines.
Bronzewood[edit]
"I took architecture classes back in Port Prosper. This stuff's hewn from trees thrice the size of an American redwood. They use dynamite to fell 'em. "
Bronzewood logs come from a massive species of tree found in the Reach. If you've ever seen a redwood tree in person, you'll understand just how huge a bronzewood tree is. Along with its size, its logs are dense enough that you need dynamite or a drill to hew them. The new British Empire has found many uses for this gleaming wood, ranging from cabinets to locomotive plating. Scrive-Spinsters are also made out of bronzewood, and the wood from their senior scrivener was used to make a pen for Her Renewed Majesty.
It is inadvisable to use bronzewood logs for fueling a locomotive, as they're dense to the point of inflammability. The heartwood is less resilient and can be burned, but it also has a tendency to spontaneously combust.
