Scenario Overview
Clearwater was my attempt to turn a roleplay anthology into something players could actually walk through: a company town gone missing from maps, a contaminated landscape that weaponized memory and geography, and a steadily awakening horror that felt industrial, folkloric, and deeply personal all at once.
It was also one of the most satisfying pieces of lore I have ever run because it let me blend writing, mapping, teaser media, event pacing, player investigation, and mechanical world-editing into one whole. I got to build locations, alter rules, use live mapping and brush tools like little scraps in a sticker book, and make a game world behave like a haunted document.
Clearwater was a company town under Bastion Metals until the plant shut down and the town was left to rot. Decades later, outsiders arrive for their own reasons and find bodies rising from beneath the factory — flesh hardened with metallic deposits, wires worked into preserved skin, and a fog-bound town that seems unwilling to be remembered, but very willing to keep them.
Walkthrough-Style Lore Breakdown
I wanted this page to feel a little like those old game guide books: the kind that pretended to be practical, but ended up full of atmosphere anyway. So here’s the cleaner version of Clearwater’s spine, with the kinds of headings I’d actually use if I were explaining the scenario to someone who wanted the whole ugly thing laid out.
Where Clearwater begins
Bastion Metals buys the land in 1894 and roots itself there as a mining and smelting company. By the late 1920s, the town’s expansion pushes too deep. Miners report sulfuric groundwater, strange iridescent stone, sickness, and the sense that the place is wrong. In 1932, a labor strike ends with dozens of workers killed and buried in secret beneath the factory. Bastion shutters abruptly soon after. Clearwater starts dying before anybody admits it.
What wakes it back up
Ridgeway acquires the poisoned site and launches Project Vitalis, hoping to create living, self-repairing metal. Instead, their bacteria begins hybridizing organic tissue. Workers are disposed of. Graves pile up. The aquifer stays tainted. The town is officially abandoned, but that never really means empty.
Mining, smelting, deep-earth sickness, labor violence, and the first buried dead.
Material science hubris, sealed shafts reopened, new damage piled on top of old damage.
A water-purification lie over a bio-reactive metal disaster. The broth after the bullion cube.
The vanished film crew, Elliot Kane’s rewrite spiral, and the town trying to tell its own story.
Stillness as protection, silence as condition, and the congregation erased by listening too closely.
The Worm, the Milkman, the Drowned Choir, the Whispering Pines, missing streets, missing names.
Developer Notes
On player writing styles
One of the most rewarding parts of Clearwater was that it could hold very different kinds of writers without breaking. Some players wrote two sharp sentences. Others hit the 2000-character cap and chained messages like live horror fiction. The setting supported both because discovery was environmental and cumulative instead of locked behind a single “correct” style.
On building fear
I did not want Clearwater to just be “zombies, but spooky.” The better scares were almost always environmental first: fake detours, wrong houses, fog pockets, radio bleed, a body where one absolutely was not yesterday, or the sense that the town was revising itself faster than the players could map it.
On using the game itself
Live mapping and brush work were half the fun. I loved using them to create little impossible details: prints in mud, signs that shouldn’t be there, sticky object placement, roads that felt newly wrong, and all the small spatial lies that made Clearwater feel more authored than randomly abandoned.
On spoilers and payoff
Because this lore has already been run once, I don’t mind being direct here. Clearwater was always built to reward investigation with uglier and uglier answers. Even when the explanation became industrial rather than mystical, I still wanted the place to feel cursed by the sheer density of human wrongdoing soaked into it.
Media / Announcement Archive
A place for the lingering website, discourse, archived bits, and whatever else still survives online.
open websiteThe official announcement trailer used when opening applications.
watch teaserThe corrupted broadcast bleed from one station into another — one of my favorite atmospheric bits.
listen hereThe found reel / lost footage angle that helped widen the town beyond its industrial history.
view b-rollThe lone surviving newspaper copy; whether authentic, staged, or something in between.
The scenario map and the actual shape of where all this happened in-game.
Landscape Gallery
I wanted a place specifically for the environment, because Clearwater lived and died on its spaces: the roads, the docks, the lighthouse, the ruined homes, the church, the factory, the strange little object placements, all of it.
Good spots here: town overview, factory zone, lighthouse, St. Ezra’s, special map gimmicks, warped roads, bunker/cave builds, or any of the places you’re proudest of.
The Rusted
The Rusted were never meant to feel like normal zombies with a coat of paint. They are corpses rewritten by a manmade bacterium that rebuilds tissue as metal. Slow, extremely tough, inconsistent in form, and increasingly intelligent in the worst possible ways.
Some look almost polished. Others are a walking scrapyard. Some have rebar through the body, some wear smooth metallic shells too tight where skin should have been, and others look like the process stopped halfway through and left them stranded between body and object. They do not need a single “correct” form to be recognizable.
They don’t move like anything alive. Slow, uneven, with a dragging weight behind every step — like something being pulled through mud or rusted chains over concrete. They smell like hot pennies, burnt oil, damp soil, and rot. Touch them and your hand comes away with grit: rust, filings, black dust so fine it gets into everything. Most don’t talk. Mostly, they stare.
After...you return?
One of the things I liked most about Clearwater was that the ending was not a victory screen, it was an understanding. Players could struggle, discover, fight, signal, flee, loop, drown, vanish, become cyclical, or get taken by things much larger than themselves — but the actual truth was simple: this was always a story about how you died.
There’s no true calendar in Clearwater anymore. The foghorn sounded long ago for the last real arrival, and after that the town simply kept going. The light is thin. The days smear together. You eat things you shouldn’t. The weather never changes enough to mark time. Some days feel like hours. Others, years.
The Rusted do not always hunt. Sometimes they only repeat themselves. One folds laundry. One waits in the diner. One sketches on a chalkboard. But they learn. They listen. They begin to say names. They begin to mirror. The closer you get to death, the more familiar they become.
There is no healing here. Only waiting. Only progression. The water is already inside you. The bacteria already knows how to wait. It lingers in your lungs, your blood, your thoughts. Headaches become visions. Rashes become convulsions. Your body starts choosing rust over self.
You do not make it out. Not really. Maybe you are taken by the horde. Maybe you try the boat and get taken by the Clearwater Worm. Maybe you become part of the same cycle that caught everyone before you. Maybe you leave behind only a blurry image, a cabinet photo, a mention in a redacted report, a lost post online with no replies.
Clearwater was never a place you were meant to find. You came because something let you. And once it did, that permission became the trap.
Lost to the water
A spot to mention the characters who tried to escape by boat and were claimed in the dark instead.
Lost to the loop
A spot for the cyclical deaths, the ones who never really left the town’s pattern at all.
Lost to becoming
A spot for the players who greeted the inevitable, or were overtaken by infection and change.
Pico-8 / Little Clearwater Toy
Need to make this.