The Undercurrent
A network of cells that cracks, broadcasts and shelters people who run. Every Legend hears its pirate voice before they meet a member.
Who they are
The Undercurrent has no one in charge. It cracks, it broadcasts, and it shelters people who run from the registry. Its cells share a broadcast, Nyx Static, and little else.
Each cell works from its own idea of what the movement is for.
Answer: Revolt
- Colour
- Glitch-green
- Ground
- Lowline
- Board
- The Confiscation Rolls, at the foot of the Static Antenna
- Ranks
- Static, Listener, Relay, Courier, Cracker, Signal
- Comic
- Pirate Signal
- Status
- Partly built The creator pick and the rep tiers run in the dev build. The rest is design.
Every wall is a leash, and breaking is freedom.
In the creator
In the dev build The faction pick runs in the development build.
The creator's second screen asks "Whose city is it?" The answers are Meridian, the Undercurrent, Scrapline, or Unwritten, which declines.
A pick gives you standing with that faction at its first tier, and nothing with the others. Standing has tiers for each faction, comes from quests, contracts, war and events, and is never lost, so one Legend can reach the top with all three. Almost nothing earns standing yet.
It also gets you the faction's banner, a shelf of its costume, and its channels and halls. Crews can mix factions, so friends on different sides still play together. The pick is set once, and the intake record is permanent.
A head start, not a rank.
Argument: What do we owe the signal?
Intake: A burner profile on a tower nobody licensed. No form, no desk. Somebody tells you a thing instead of assigning it, and being trusted is audible.
Ground
The Undercurrent works in the open in Lowline, a sunk and tangled district that Meridian cannot secure without shutting down half the city's comms. Its board, the Confiscation Rolls, hangs at the foot of the Static Antenna.
The antenna is a spike of rebar and salvage, and in the district's own telling it is taller than the district is deep. The loud hours run through the small hours of the night, and once a month the faithful gather for dead-drop night.
Below the deck lie the Warrens, where the Undercurrent's bazaar, the Deep Market, takes only Ciphers.
Ranks
Lowest first. The ranks are positions in a broadcast chain.
Relay. Somebody who passes things on and is trusted not to open them.
The argument inside
The Relay exists to hide people, the Cut wants the registry broken now, and the Under hunts the ghost signal and says it should be listened to. Nothing in the network can settle which of them is right, because nothing in it sits on top.
The three cells
| Cell | Creed | What it runs |
|---|---|---|
| The Relay | Shelter first. Break a wall only when someone is behind it. | The shelter network, the Confiscation Rolls and dead-drop night. |
| The Cut | Break it now. Every wall is a leash, and hesitation is complicity. | Cracking jobs, sabotage and registry work. |
| The Under | The signal should be listened to, not obeyed. | Ghost-signal hunting and unsanctioned deep runs. |
Nobody in the Relay will say the word cult. Everybody in the Cut has said it at least once, at volume, and regretted it.
What it offers a player
Designed Vendors, war doctrine and deployables are the game's design.
The vendor sells software, Programs and appearance variants of a Surge. They are side-grades, and nothing here is raw power. Its Deadband doctrine is on the war page.
A Licensed Legend earns standing here faster. The cell's lines to them are written to sound hurt.
Partly built The standing screen carries a title for each tier as client content.
The story
Designed Faction questlines and side stories are written and not built.
The first act begins with the broadcast itself. You catch the signal, as everyone does, and get pulled into a cell. You learn to crack and you free your first Legend. Then you find out what freeing a Legend can cost the Legend.
The relationship at the centre is with the handler who vouched for you.
| Side story | What it is |
|---|---|
| The Confiscation Rolls | Free Legends from a lockup, one manifest at a time. |
| No File | The cell cannot crack a Cleanskin, distrusts you for it, and comes to rely on you for the same reason. |
| The Curator's Price | A deal with the Curator costs an ally's location. |
| Kill the Mascot | Sabotage Halcyon's billboards until it becomes a duel. |
| Anchor Point | Meridian keeps triangulating the broadcast node, and you keep relocating it. |
What the others say
Toward Meridian the Undercurrent feels grief disguised as contempt, because most of its members have family inside the Combine. Toward Scrapline it feels envy: Scrapline has what the cell wants, which is people who show up.
They're not monsters, they're a filing system with a canteen. That's worse to fight.
Ferro's answer is a rota and a funeral. It works. That's what I can't forgive about it.
