#hinterlands

Jonathon Gregory Bick

Senior Environment Artist @ Rockstar Games

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The small timber village became a military outpost in the Puget Sound War [...], [and] soon evolved into a trade gateway, with timber tailings and other industrial trash from Henry Yesler’s mill used to fill in the marshlands [...], atop which migrant laborers raised tents and shanties [...] now working to feed raw materials into the furnaces of the Second Industrial Revolution burning in the East. [...] The first nationwide strike ripped across the country’s railways in 1877 [...]. Meanwhile, young financial conglomerates rose after the city-devastating fire of 1889, linked openly to local government [...] in the kind of symbiotic public-private relationship that would become a hallmark of the Gilded Age. [...] [L]ocal elites rebuilt [...] downtown [...] from scratch, hosting the tallest building on the West Coast alongside other new constructs [fueled] with money gleaned from the supply chains linking eastern capital to Alaskan gold. [...]

Over the next century, Seattle would see new sequences of boom, bust, and reinvention. Military investment in the region during the First World War secured the city’s ship-building industry and expanded Boeing from a small lakeside hangar into a massive war contractor. [...] Across Washington state, capital had first poured into the “Third Industrial Revolution,” founded on electricity, chemicals, and massive hydropower projects [in the 1930s] [...], then into the “Fourth” wave of petrochemicals, nuclear, and, in the case of Seattle especially, aircraft and missile technology. Each was followed by periods of dramatic decline [...] paired with rapid financialization and, finally, re-orientation around the new industrial cluster [...]. Today the city - again rebuilt [...] - is seen as one of the primary beneficiaries of the “Fifth” Industrial Revolution in information technology, outshone only by California’s Silicon Valley. [...] The digital was increasingly thought of as somehow "immaterial," sustained by intellectual labor more than physical toil [...].

Silicon Valley myths of [...] "immaterial" labor disguise a more gruesome dynamic in which growing segments of the global labor force are being deprived even of the basic brutality of the wage, instead forced out into growing rings of slums, prisons, and global wastelands. [...]

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Perched alongside a downtown business corridor [...], Seattle's Great Wheel seems to peer out over [...] [the] prophesied “cooperative commons,” an infotech metropolis abutting the beauty of an evergreen arcadia. But travel below Seattle’s cluster of infotech industries and the image appears much the same as that of a hundred years prior - a trade gateway, squeezing value from supply chains by selling transport and logistical support. The southern stretch of the metropolis bears little resemblance to the revitalized urban core of the city proper. Instead of the “cognitive labor” of Microsoft, it is defined instead by the cold calculation of companies like UPS, founded in Seattle when the city was one link in a colonial supply chain built first for timber, then Alaskan gold, then World War. [...]

In south Seattle, this logistics empire takes the form of faceless warehouses, food processing facilities, container trucks, rail yards, and industrial parks concentrated between two seaports, an international airport, three major interstates, and railroads traveling in all directions. Meanwhile, the poor have been priced out of the old inner city, moving southward [...]. [T]hey can be found staffing the airport and the rail yards, hauling cargo in and out of two the major seaports, loading boxes in warehouses [...]. And, beyond them, the shadow stretches out to Washington’s rural hinterlands where migrant laborers staff a new boom in agriculture and raw materials [...] - and further still into America’s long-depressed interior, where the Great Wheel meets its opposite: Memphis, the FedEx logistics city, watched over by a great black pyramid [the infamous Bass Pro Shop pyramid]. [...]

Every Seattle is capable of creating an eco-friendly, “cooperative commonwealth” tended by apps and algorithms only insofar as there is a Memphis that can provide human workers to sort the packages, a Shanghai to build the containers that carry them, and a Shenzhen to solder together the circuits of the machines that govern it all.

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Green-House | Valley of Blue from Hinterlands (2026)

The Revantusk Tribe

The Revantusk Tribe is a small but resilient faction of forest trolls dwelling along the southeastern coast of the Hinterlands. Unlike their more aggressive cousins in the Amani Empire, the Revantusks have survived through cunning diplomacy, not brute force. Though once nearly wiped out during the Troll Wars, the tribe has endured through hardship, betrayal, and exile.

Once a minor player in the Amani Empire, the Revantusk tribe suffered devastating losses during the Troll Wars, which forced them to retreat from the high elf territories. When the Second War began, the Revantusks joined Zul’jin’s pact with the Old Horde, hoping to reclaim their ancestral lands. However, the war’s disastrous end left them isolated and few in number.

While other forest trolls turned their backs on the orcs, the Revantusks retained a quiet loyalty to the Horde—even when doing so made them enemies of their own kind.

Years later, Warchief Thrall began rebuilding the Horde based on shamanistic traditions and honor. The Revantusk tribe, still clinging to survival in the wilds of Lordaeron, saw hope in Thrall’s vision. Though wary of repeating old mistakes, they admired the new Horde’s principles.

Choosing pragmatism over blind allegiance, the Revantusks declined full membership but agreed to a pact of friendship and mutual aid. This decision placed them in direct opposition to the other forest troll tribes, who viewed Thrall’s Horde as weak and unworthy.

Revantusks are defined not by strength, but by resilience and diplomacy. With limited warriors and few resources, they focused on trade, negotiation, and reputation to maintain their place in the world. Among trolls, they are considered outcasts—but to the Horde, they are trusted allies.