Gear of the Shatterlands

The world did not end clean. It tore, burned, and shattered into a thousand hungers. What remains is not order but salvage—whatever you can scavenge, barter, or pry from dead hands. To walk the Shatterlands without tools is to invite a short and pitiful end. The smallest thing, a tin cup or a length of cord, may buy another day beneath the sun. A blade is not just a weapon; it is the means to strip bark, dress wounds, open cans, and fend off things that should have died long ago.

Every scrap of gear carries history in its rust and wear. Some pieces are born of the wastes themselves—patched cloth, bottles blackened by fire, jagged knives filed down from road signs. Others are remnants of the fallen age: stamped steel, tempered glass, or plastics that refuse to rot. Rarer still are the things that whisper of higher craft, objects that feel too fine, too strange to belong in the hands of the desperate. Whether scavenged from a ruin or pulled from a corpse, each find is chance stacked against chance.

Loot tables remind us of this randomness, the roll of fortune that governs survival. A traveler may stumble upon a cache of rations where another finds only broken glass. Judges should not treat gear as mere accounting, but as story: the tension of a pack too light, the relief of finding a bandage at the right moment, the bitter laugh when the dice cough up nothing but spoiled food. Scarcity is the soil where Afterglow grows.

Weapons are no different than boots or blankets. In the Shatterlands, a pistol is as ordinary as a length of rope. Guns, blades, clubs—these are tools of survival first, murder second. Ammunition may be scarce, barrels warped, but the principle is simple: those who walk armed tend to walk longer. Explosives, meanwhile, are a rarer breed—reckless instruments of fire and noise, more likely to level a wall than win a fair fight. To carry one is to wager against fate itself.

This chapter lays out what can be found, traded, or fought over: the humble utilities, the poultices and patches that keep the body alive, the simple weapons that never go out of fashion, and the firearms that echo the old world’s excess. All of it stitched together into the patchwork of survival.