[INTEL BRIEFING: THE MERCHANTS OF HOPE] SUBJECT: The Corporate Ghosts: A Guide to Your Owners
In The Bastion, hope is the most valuable commodity, and the megacorporations are the only licensed dealers. Each one has built an empire on a manufactured promise, a beautiful, gleaming lie that offers a way out of the cold, the fear, and the static.
They are the architects of your desires. Understanding the dream they sell is the key to understanding the nightmare they profit from. This is how you survive them, how you work for them, and how you bleed them dry.
The Old Guard
These are the original gods of the cage, their foundations sunk so deep they are inseparable from The Bastion itself .
Aurora Industries
- Street Nickname: The Warden
- The Promise: Stability. The promise that the walls will hold and the lights will stay on.
- The Gutter Truth: Aurora doesn’t sell safety; they sell dependency. They own the Grid, the infrastructure, and the very ground beneath your feet. They are the landlords of the entire prison.
- Roleplay Hooks: Their sheer size is their weakness. Factions thrive by smuggling contraband past bribed inspectors, running illegal power taps off the Warmth Grid, and hijacking their cargo shipments. Aurora often hires deniable assets (you) for “off-the-books” sabotage against competitors.
Zenith Biotech
- Street Nickname: The Gene-Merchants
- The Promise: Purity. The promise of a perfect, healthy body, free from the taint of the Amber Blight.
- The Gutter Truth: Zenith profits from the disease, not the cure. They created the very definition of “purity” that the Vaulted cling to , while their clinic, Apex Trauma, harvests the genetic data from every patient who walks in the door.
- Roleplay Hooks: Zenith’s R&D labs are a goldmine for criminals, trafficking experimental gene-mods and combat drugs . They are the sworn enemies (and secret suppliers) of the Sanguine and frequently hire mercs for “unconventional sample acquisition”; or corporate-speak for kidnapping people with interesting mutations.
Dynamic Evolution
- Street Nickname: The Prospectors
- The Promise: Progress. The promise of a new frontier and a second chance for humanity on a reclaimed Earth.
- The Gutter Truth: Their motto is “Not Evil, Just Accurate”. They are cold, calculating risk assessors who see Earth as a high-yield asset rich with anomalies. You are not a pioneer; you are an expendable sensor package sent into the mine .
- Roleplay Hooks: DE is the biggest client on the black market for anything Rift-related. They will pay a king’s ransom for a live Riftspawn, a pure Lode artifact, or an unfiltered Echo-Shard captured by a Mnemonic .
The New Age
These are the focused predators, the specialists who have carved out their own essential, vicious markets in the shadow of the old guard .
Alterscape Corp
- Street Nickname: The Dream Merchants
- The Promise: Bliss. The promise of an escape from your own mind – a curated dream, a synthetic emotion, all for a price.
- The Gutter Truth: Alterscape has weaponized desire. They sell addiction, packaging it as therapy and entertainment to keep the population numb and compliant.
- Roleplay Hooks: Their entire business is a black market. They are in a cold war with the Mnemonics – Alterscape sells clean, repeatable fantasies, while the Mnemonics trade in raw, unfiltered, and dangerous truth.
Waz Tech
- Street Nickname: The Chop Shop
- The Promise: Power. The simple, brutal promise that with their tech, you will be the one who walks away.
- The Gutter Truth: Waz Tech is an amoral arms dealer that profits from every conflict in the city. They sell to the Civil Authority, and then they sell illegal, upgraded versions of the same tech to the gangs the CA is fighting .
- Roleplay Hooks: Their “lost” shipments are a constant source of high-end gear. They use street gangs to “field-test” unstable prototype weapons, and their vaults are the number one target for any crew planning a high-stakes heist . They are the patron saints of combat-focused Runners.
Bad Industries
- Street Nickname: The Jokers, The Glitches
- The Promise: Chaos. The promise of a beautiful, unpredictable glitch in a system that is trying to crush you .
- The Gutter Truth: They are “narrative mercenaries” and agents of chaos; a decentralized, cult-like collective whose motives are always in question .
- Roleplay Hooks: They are the ultimate deniable asset, hired for the weirdest jobs in the city — spreading memetic viruses, orchestrating “performance art” heists, or beta-testing dangerous bio-fashion . They have strong ties to radical Mnemonics and are the primary source for the cutting-edge aesthetic mods favored by the Neko tribe.
[TRANSMISSION END]
