Re: Reference Information
Posse,
Following is a kind of summary about the Combine and the Black Hats. It's from a Templar ("Jo", who narrates the Wasted West Sourcebook) so there's definitely a moral slant there, but accurate enough:
THE COMBINE
Some day, I imagine all the “good guys”—the
Templars, the Schismatics, the Law Dogs, and
whoever we can draft into an army—are going
to wind up fighting Throckmorton’s unholy
machine.
As I said in the Wasted West, the Combine
was founded by General Throckmorton, a
former Confederate prison commander. After
the bombs, he liberated his prisoners and
equipment, added them to his own troops, and
headed out of the remote Rocky Mountain
prison facility. There’s some debate about his
early goals, but he wound up taking over
Hellstromme’s old automated factories on the
outskirts of Denver. His techs got the things
going again, and soon it was churning out
automatons, raptors (flying automatons),
warbots, and weapons. To this mechanical army
he added a couple of thousand waster scum and
gave them booby-trapped vehicles and weapons
(so they couldn’t wind up in enemy hands).
These are the so-called “Black Hats.”
Publicly, Throckmorton says it was the war
that tore our nation apart. No scheisse, Sherlock.
He claims that only by ignoring the antiquated
ideas of nationalism can we heal the people.
Thus he created the “Combine,” meaning he
wants to combine all the people into one group.
I wonder if he actually thought about what a
“combine” is to a farmer. You know, it’s one of
those big threshing machines that chews up
everything in its path and jams them into little
uniform cubes of hay. Whether he meant it or
not, the Combine was a perfect name for his
“new world.” His Black Hats and automatons
chew up everything that gets in their path and
adds the survivors to their movement.
“Liberated” settlements must pay tributes of
food, salvage, and ghost rock to Denver.
Throckmorton uses the Black Hats as
expendable scouts. Platoons of them cross the
West causing trouble and demanding tribute to
see who’ll pay and who’ll fight. My guess is
Throckmorton uses the Black Hats to find out
who’s really going to resist him when his robot
army finally pours out of Denver. Remember,
Black Hats are just wasteland scum
who’ve joined up because they like the
work. They weren’t Throckmorton’s
original soldiers, and I haven’t met one
yet that actually gave a crap about
whether the world was reunited or not.
They just want free guns, food in their
stomachs, and a license to push folks around.
Fortunately for us, that means there usually
aren’t hordes of reinforcements rushing to their
aid. You have to be careful though, because
individual Black Hat lieutenants sometimes
make deals with other platoons nearby. Twenty
of those suckers are bad enough. Forty is a
nightmare, especially when they’re all spraying
lead on full-auto ’cause they don’t have to
scrounge it like the rest of us.
Our outlook on the Black Hats is fairly
bloody. If we cross their trail, we do what we
can to take them out unless we’ve got
something better to do.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:09, Sun 29 Apr 2012.
