The world ended the way everybody remembers it. What came after was years of scatter and drift, small camps and short lives, and no law at all. Every survivor walking today came through that, and nobody talks about all of it.
Then last winter happened, and it was bad enough that the towns still standing did something the county had never managed before: they met, and they agreed on terms. The terms were painted onto the water towers so that nobody could ever claim they had not seen them.
That agreement is the Knox Accord. It is one summer old. The paint is barely dry, and it has never yet survived a real test.
The terms
The Accord is short on purpose. It was written to be painted, not filed.
- A marked town is protected ground. No killing inside the marks.
- Grievance inside the marks goes before the town, not the gun.
- Beyond the marks is the wild. Enter and you have agreed to it.
- Medicine moves free. No toll, no seizure, no ransom on medicine. Ever.
- Break the terms in a marked town and the town answers - together.
The fourth is the one outsiders find strange, and the one no Accord citizen will agree to soften. Nobody explains why.
How the marks work
The painted water tower is the Accord's signature, not its signal. It is a ceremony rather than a billboard: you do not see it coming from a distance, you find it when you arrive, the way you find a courthouse.
What actually tells a survivor where the terms hold, before they ever reach a town line, is two things.
The Accord loop on 100.0 FM ends every cycle with the Reading of the Towns: the roster of marked towns, recited plainly. Anyone with a working radio knows exactly which ground is protected. This is how the county actually navigates.
Hand-copied paper maps with the marked towns circled in green pass from trader to trader, and every town wall has one nailed up.
At street level the marks are close-range and practical: green bands painted on the road signs and fence posts at the town line, and the terms painted large at the main ways in. You cannot walk into a marked town without passing the words.
The paint is maintained. A faded town-line mark is a warning that a town is dying.
Inside those, the wild's rules apply even between the buildings. The Reading of the Towns never says their names, which is its own kind of naming.
Who enforces it
The Accord has no army, no police and no capital. Enforcement is the towns themselves: watch rotations, a trial council, and the one sanction the new world can actually afford, which is exile to the wild.
It is not a government. It is a promise that has held for one summer. Everyone who repeats its terms does so half in hope and half in superstition, the way you do not say a losing streak out loud.
Groups and factions
Groups make the map feel lived in, and they concentrate power, which is why they have limits. A faction can hold seven members at most, and it is applied for rather than declared. A good application explains what the group believes, what it wants, and what it needs from new members.
Faction wars belong in the unmarked places, or between groups who have agreed to fight. Stacking three allied factions into a war party of twenty-one is treated as a loophole, because it is one.
This era starts with no factions at all. Every one that exists by the end of the season will have been founded by somebody who is reading this now.
The rules, in full
The terms are the fiction. The rules are what staff actually enforce, and they are published in full before you join anything.
Come and play in it
The Discord is open now. The game server is not, and there is no date announced yet.