The Citadel
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Basic Information

The Citadel is a planned community in Benewah County, Idaho which is supposed to be run on the principles of Thomas Jefferson's Rightful Liberty. The project page warns:

"Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles."

Especially noteworthy are the planned defensive measures:

"The Towers and Curtain Wall providing the town's primary perimeter defense will be inaccessible to tourists. Each Tower will house condos. The wall sections between Towers will be the location for many of the larger homes. By looking at the Artist's Concept (left) you can see that housing will be well-removed from tourist foot-traffic. The Perimeter Road follows the Curtain Wall.
Each neighborhood within the walls will have lower defensive walls, dividing the town into defensible sections/neighborhoods. Each neighborhood will have similar housing for visual uniformity and aesthetic appeal."

The primary employer of this community will apparently be a firearms manufacturer. A map of the community is also included, which prominently showcases the defensive walls and towers (although the school compound apparently does not have any exits).

Sources

Game and Story Use

  • In an After The End scenario, The Citadel could be a lone oasis of civilization after everything else has been overrun by zombies.
  • Alternatively, thanks to the map this can be used as a ready-made crazy cult compound which the PCs will have to infiltrate.
  • For those who expect a more Randian end to things, this would seem to be the sort of place that the Big State would make great efforts to destroy either by lawfare or by a media blackwash followed by an overt paramilitary assault and massacre of the occupants.
    • Working on the cult angle, an obvious tactic for the State to use would be to contaminate the water supply with hallucinogens - a trick that may have been tested somewhere else already...
  • Combining the two previous ideas PCs could be sent to infiltrate a "crazy cult" only to find that they are actually lining a community of basically harmless countercultural types for a massacre.
    • This would play well as one of those campaign opening adventures wherein the PCs find out that not only are they living in a dystopia, but that they are on the wrong side and part of the problem.
    • The key is to make sure that the PCs cannot derail your plot - however hard they try, they cannot actually prevent government paramilitaries murdering the inhabitants. Any attempt to prevent the killings or to save the victims simply puts the characters into the "on the run" section of the campaign whilst even complete compliance and participation in the murder only delays their fall from grace.
    • This can lead to reputation based fun afterwards - to the mainstream media, the PCs then become fugitive cultists/terrorists (and attract any smears that were used to justify the massacre), whilst to the resistance they are still stormtroopers that took part in the massacre … making it hard to obtain help from either side.
    • For added RP value, play up any values dissonance between your PCs and the inhabitants of the fictionalised citadel - this should leave the players with some kind of moral dilemma as to whether they can justify killing people just for being "bigots". Hopefully the answer is "no", but with some people you can never tell.
  • Note that this "citadel" would seem to serve almost the exact opposite purpose to a traditional citadel.
  • Hopefully the firearms manufacturer will have an ammunition factory attached otherwise, come any significant trouble, it might as well make golf clubs.
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