#deathlands

Eighteen of these Richard Prince Eden Rock (2005-06) paintings are selling at Christie's in Feb. 2026. He imagined them as scenes in a post-apocalyptic movie set in St. Bart's, and based them on the cover art of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel series called Deathlands. So a real stretch.

Okay. So the thing with the Hound playbook is the trained hunting pet, right? You get a cool animal companion. So the thing I’m noodling around with is what kind of animals you get in Doskvol. Given, you know, the whole cataclysm, destroyed sun, collapsed/reformed ecosystem thing. The main ones mentioned are usually various sea creatures, rodents, birds, and then the domesticated goats and chickens. Severosi have horses, and presumably dogs are a thing given the name of the class, so hounds are still a recognised concept. The ‘aliases’ sections also mentions vixen and frog, so again, recognised concepts. But, you know, I’m not really feeling a dog or a rat?

And then, since I was noodling around the Hound anyway, I was looking at the Survivor special ability, the one that enables you to survive the poisonous miasma of the deathlands and subsist on the strange flora and fauna there. Strange flora and fauna, huh? And the faction entry for the Deathlands Scavengers also mentions that they have ‘hunting grounds to feed on the few strange animals that survived the cataclysm’ as part of their turf.

So. The deathlands have strange animals. Normal animals that turned weird, maybe? So how about a Hound with a strange, fucked-up deathlands companion?

How about a mink? A semi-aquatic mustelid that feeds primarily on fish, frogs, rodents, birds and eggs, all things that are mentioned as surviving, so they’ve still got a decent food chain. Plus the Dosk river is right there as a habitat. But a fucked up mink, because deathlands. Something mutated and strange. So let’s give it void-dark fur. Let’s give it a couple extra legs, so we’ve got a six-legged climber (and swimmer) of a creature. Let’s give it weird eyes, with a bit of an electroplasmic sheen. And let’s give it way too many teeth. Rows and rows of needle-like teeth, like with sharks, so whenever it loses a tooth the next row just gets pushed up to replace it.

So we’re going for a theme of deathlands, here. A Hound with the Survivor ability and a deathlands animal companion. So let’s go all in on that, then.

Heritage will be Severosi, because deathlands nomads. Let’s make her second generation, she grew up in Duskwall. There’s a note in Deep Cuts that there’s an imperial naval base at Thorn in Severos where the Navy is prone to making up excuses to ‘arrest’ native Severosi to use as press-ganged labour. That’s what happened to her parents, and how she wound up growing up in the naval bastion that is Doskvol.

And history is going to repeat itself. Because her background is going to be Deathlands Scavenger (Labor), and it’s going to be as a result of ‘mercy’ at Ironhook Prison. Now, the option to become a scavenger is usually offered in lieu of execution, because those are the only bastards desperate enough, so whatever she went down for, it was enough to earn the death sentence. And I think it’s going to have been murder. And I think, given the city that’s in it, it’s going to have been murder of an Imperial officer. A naval officer.

I think she tracked down and shot the bastard that press-ganged her parents. The guy whose name was on the arrest order. And then she got caught, and she really should have been shot in her turn for it, but she is Severosi. Deathlands native. So why not use her? Why not send her out to scour the deathlands on behalf of the city, and eventually die for it as nature intended?

Her enemy, I think, is going to be Casta, the bounty hunter. Because Casta was the one who caught her. Casta was the one who got her sent down.

And her vice, purveyor and saviour is going to be Sister Thorn at Gaddoc Station. Because yeah, her heritage is Severosi, but she was raised in the city. Duskwall born and raised. She had no experience out there. It was Sister Thorn and her Deathlands Scavengers who saved her, who taught her, and who she now goes out of her way to help in return. Her vice is Obligation, and I think a lot of how that expresses itself will be helping Thorn train other poor sods in how to survive the deathlands.

Because it turns out she was actually good at it. Maybe the deathlands are in her blood, and she’s a hunter by instinct and personality from a standing start. With just a bit of training and someone to show her the ropes, she got very good.

Enough to make a friend of a strange creature out there, a void-dark plyer of the haunted river.

Enough to earn her way (again, with Thorn’s help) to a pardon. Enough to be allowed back into the city, her own woman once more. Enough to ply her talents within the barriers once more.

She’s a hunter. We’re going to lean our Action Dots in that direction. She’s got two in Hunt and one in Survey from Hound. We’ll give her one in Skirmish from her heritage, she always planned and aimed to hunt and kill someone. Then one in Attune for her background, because you don’t survive the deathlands without it. And for her two free dots, we’ll put both into Prowl. Because she is, so much, a hunter. So a total of two Hunt, two Prowl, one Survey, one Attune, and one Skirmish.

Now then. Only her friend, look, name and alias to go.

For her friend, let’s say that she met Melvir, the physicker, through the Deathlands Scavengers. He’s got experience patching up weird injuries.

Her look …

She’s very tall. An absolutely towering woman, north of six feet, which probably made it that little bit easier to track her down after that one murder back then. She is a lean, gaunt, towering shadow of a woman, with snarled grey hair, and dark, hooded eyes that watch the world from hollow sockets. She’s got a rifle slung across her back, permit courtesy of Sister Thorn, and a strange … fur? Draped across her shoulders. An ink-dark creature that lifts its head to bare two hundred bloody teeth at anyone who gets too close.

Deathlands (2003)

My rating: 4/10

There’s something oddly comforting about dusting off an old paperback series and diving back into a world that once gripped your imagination. For me, that world is Deathlands. Yes, I’ve started re-reading the series once again — all thirty-four of the ones I still own, stacked like relics of the apocalypse on my bookshelf. The first time I tore through them, I was hooked by the sheer mix of pulp…

I’ve been sketching ideas for a new campaign set in the radioactive ruins of America, and what better system to use than Atomic Highway: Post Apocalyptic Roleplaying by Colin Chapman? The rich and rules-light V6 Engine of Atomic Highway is perfect for recreating the gritty, survivalist tone of the Deathlands series, where scavengers and survivors struggle for resources and fend off raiders and…

I still remember the first time I stumbled onto Deathlands and picked up the initial book, Pilgrimage to Hell. The vivid post-apocalyptic world that sprang from its pages was unlike anything I’d read before, a gritty, radioactive landscape filled with deadly mutants, ancient technology. With bands of survivors battling for control. The book pulled me in instantly, and I was hooked. I read the…