Blackpine Covenant
The civilian councils govern the towns. The Savages command military defense. Kruetzu must answer to the councils for every requisition.
THE MEAT LOCKER CODEX
Blackpine is a siege world. Its last fortress runs on cold ammunition, hot blood, and orders carved into steel.
FICTION NOTICE These characters, ranks, factions, worlds, equipment and events are invented for this GameStash story. This is an unofficial, unlicensed science-fantasy game with no affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement from any existing franchise. Familiar names represent fresh fictional roles in this setting.
Forged under bombardment.
The JackPine Savages began as an emergency defense covenant on Blackpine, a cold forest world whose industrial towns grew around ammunition mines. When its charter fleets withdrew, lumber crews, foundry workers and stranded soldiers defended the roads together. Kruetzu united these rival settlements at an underground cold-storage depot. They kept its old name: the Meat Locker.
Years later, the covenant’s towering armored warriors became the JackPine Savage Marines. Their blue plate represents the winter sky; red panels remember the price of evacuation; black joints mark the soil they refuse to abandon. Their chrome pine insignia is forged from the casing of the first shell fired in a settlement’s defense.
The Chrome Oath is stamped inside every breastplate, where a dead Marine’s replacement will find it. Its three articles: keep the shelters supplied; preserve the route home; return for the last crew. Kruetzu keeps two tallies: enemy materiel destroyed and workers returned to the fortress. A foundry without workers cannot cast another shell. A victory without another shell is a pause before extinction. Human crews sleep beneath the same bombardment as the Marines; their bunks are narrower, their shifts longer, and their names just as permanent on the casualty rolls.
The Savage Companies
Pinewatch screens the forests, Chromehand maintains the arsenal, Redwake escorts convoys, and Lockerguard holds the fortress. A company can lend squads to any threatened shelter.
Chainblade doctrine
A Marine’s primary weapon is a powered chainsaw called a pinebreaker chainblade. Shoulder rocket pods break hard targets; the blade clears wreckage and fights at close range. Equipment is repaired rather than discarded.
The Withdrawal of the Charter Fleets
Blackpine once exported ammunition by the megaton. Its charter masters counted production quotas from orbital counting houses while the surface settlements dug ore, felled ironwood and fed the furnaces. When the Ragetooth fleet emerged from the dead shipping lanes, the masters evacuated their counting houses first. The last transport left with payroll records, furnace patents and three empty battalions’ worth of officer billets. It left no interceptor screen.
The first rain of scrap rockets struck Pinewatch during a shift change. Factory whistles continued sounding after the power went out because steam was still trapped in the pipes. Kruetzu, then commander of a depot security company, ordered the gates opened to the workers and the charter-appointed overseers disarmed. By morning, stolen requisition seals were stamping fresh orders. By evening, the Meat Locker had a defense perimeter. On the third night, the orcs learned that cold-storage doors make excellent blast shields.
The Making of a Savage
The towering Marines are survivors of Blackpine’s brutal augmentation program: reinforced skeletons, redundant circulation pumps and armor interfaces installed under field conditions. Gromm calls the program “a machine shop pretending to be a hospital.” Kruetzu calls it necessary. Both know the rejected candidates’ names. There are too few qualified armorers to produce fresh suits, so every plate is salvaged, welded and inherited. Chrome seams mark repairs rather than decoration.
Blue is the factory primer that endured the cold. Red is the identification paint used to keep artillery crews from firing on their own giants. Black seals the joints against ash and chemical snow. The chrome pine is a survivor’s mark cut from a spent casing. Enemy blades have gouged half of them beyond recognition. The Savages keep wearing them.
The Iron Articles
No battery abandons a loaded magazine. No officer orders a withdrawal without a numbered fallback line. No Marine burns a crew’s ammunition stock to win a personal duel. A broken article earns labor on the wall without powered armor; deliberate sabotage earns a firing squad. Kruetzu does not call this mercy. He calls it a fortress that still exists tomorrow.
Kruetzu’s command staff.
Kruetzu
A former fortress commander who welded the Blackpine settlements into a single defense covenant. A siege commander with a butcher’s patience, Kruetzu measures a plan by ammunition consumed, ground denied and crews still fit to fire. He commands the JackPine Savages from the Meat Locker.
Kruetzu’s rise began at Gate Nine, where a charter colonel ordered the depot sealed with two thousand workers outside. Kruetzu broke the colonel’s command seal with the butt of his chainblade and put every available loader on the parapet. He still carries the shattered seal on his belt. He distrusts beautiful plans, detests wasted shells, and personally inspects the night batteries. His Old Growth blade has three replacement motors and a tooth broken on Gruk’s first boarding ram. He refuses to replace that tooth until the warlord is dead.
Signature: the Old Growth chainblade and twin Crownrack shoulder launchers. Weakness: he will risk the command reserve to retrieve a missing crew. Campaign role: supreme command of the final fortress defense.
“The Locker closes when the last of ours is inside.”
Jet
Kruetzu’s deputy for operations and orbital coordination. Jet grew up interpreting broken weather beacons; now he can turn incomplete signals into a battlefield map. He prefers speed, clear orders and a reserve plan that fits on one page.
Jet commanded the Redwake diversion at Lastlight: three empty transports broadcasting the signatures of an evacuation fleet. The orcs followed their engine noise into a pre-sighted interception corridor. Two transports returned as slag. The third still flies as a supply tug. Jet’s humor is abrupt, usually delivered while rewriting a casualty estimate. He quarrels with Kruetzu over reserves and with Rumple over fuel allocations, then works both men’s figures into the next operation. His command lens carries a crack from a blast he insists missed him.
Signature: a chrome tactical lens and Redline command rig. Friction: his bold diversions must leave Gromm a safe casualty route. Campaign role: convoy routes, airlift corridors and the Chrome Signal Ridge operation.
“Give me a signal and I’ll find you a way out.”
Gromm
A stocky dwarf medic and veteran mercenary attached to Kruetzu’s small command unit. Gromm arrived on a paid convoy contract, but stayed when the evacuation turned into a siege. His salt-and-pepper hair, black rectangular glasses and steady hands are familiar sights beside the reload line. He treats humans and Marines with the same stubborn care.
Gromm was born in a contract-mining hold beyond the orbital graveyard. He served as a mercenary breacher before a shattered wrist forced him to learn surgery from the surgeon who rebuilt it. His medical kit now contains bone clamps, ration alcohol, industrial sutures and a short-barreled carbine. Payment is still due on his original contract; he records the debt beside every patient he saves. His triage rule is ruthless: stabilize whoever can be saved, mark whoever cannot, then return to the living. He argues with Kruetzu over augmentation losses and wins just enough arguments to remain indispensable.
Signature: the Iron Ledger triage book, a field medical satchel and a compact salvage carbine. Strength: keeping wounded crews alive with improvised medicine and a mercenary’s practical judgment. Campaign role: field triage, the new medbay upgrade and the Mercy Run through Spore Fen.
“My contract covers a job. My oath covers the people.”
Dutch
The senior field NCO who turns officers’ plans into positions the crews can actually hold. Recognizable by his black ponytail and weathered chrome chevrons, Dutch drills reload teams until they can work through smoke and dead comms.
Dutch earned his chevrons in the Sawtooth retreat, dragging a seized ammunition sled through an artillery trench after its driver was killed. He is a demanding instructor whose reload drills continue during bombardments. He checks every chamber by touch when smoke blinds the crews. Officers learn quickly that an order passed through Dutch emerges shorter, clearer and sometimes corrected. His battered squad beacon has transmitted more fallback coordinates than most command rigs. He distrusts ceremonial salutes; hands belong on equipment when the sky is falling.
Signature: a battered field chainblade and a squad beacon. Strength: keeping inexperienced Lineguard steady under fire. Campaign role: battery crews, signal details and ground-defense readiness.
“Slow hands, clean load, fast shot. Again.”
Rumple
The Meat Locker’s senior enlisted adviser and keeper of the magazines. Rumple knows which crate contains usable parts, which sergeant needs sleep, and which impossible requisition can become possible after a quiet word with the foundry.
Rumple runs the Bone Rack like a prison yard with better inventory control. Crates have serial numbers; loaders have shift numbers; officers requesting ammunition have explanations due. His black glasses are scratched by casing fragments and his harness carries more stamped requisition tags than medals. He once supplied three isolated batteries by loading parachute crates into a captured orc launch rail. Two crates burned up. Nine arrived. He calls that a successful delivery and keeps the scorched manifest nailed over his desk.
Signature: an overloaded ammunition harness and a dry sense of humor. Strength: recovering equipment and improvising supply drops. Campaign role: parachute crates, ammunition stocks and crew welfare.
“If it fits in a crate, I can probably get it to you.”
The crew behind every shot
Human infantry, loaders and artillery operators are the fortress’s working heartbeat. They run between magazines and missile pods, serve the field guns and mark safe routes. In the game’s exaggerated comic scale, a JackPine Marine stands 3½ times their height. Orc ground raiders stand slightly under half a Marine’s height.
Kit: olive-and-black fatigues, flak helmets, red unit strips and chrome tools. Doctrine: a small crew’s work gives a towering Marine a reason to stand.
“One more crate. One more family through.”
The established field team
Captain Mara Voss reports to Jet and directs the six-shelter evacuation line. Engineer Torren Vale reports to Jet and works beside Gromm, maintaining the relays and pulse capacitors. Sergeant Rhea Flint commands the road-defense squads under Dutch’s field authority. These earlier campaign characters remain part of Kruetzu’s larger command rather than replacing it.
The Meat Locker.
A buried refrigerated ammunition warehouse became Blackpine’s command fortress. The name was earned twice: first by the depot’s original cargo, then by the casualty chambers cut into its unused vaults during the winter siege. Its insulated vaults keep propellants stable; its cold corridors became barracks, workshops, mess halls and evacuation shelters. The nickname survived every official attempt to rename it.
The Cold Spine
Kruetzu’s central command hall links Jet’s signal pit with Gromm’s medical station. A chrome pine beacon stays lit whenever a crew is still outside.
The Bone Rack
Rumple’s ammunition galleries feed the missile batteries through narrow supply corridors. Loader teams call each fresh rocket “another rib for the Rack.”
The Thaw Yard
Dutch’s training ground and the field-artillery park. Damaged armor comes here for repair before it returns to the wall. Civilians and soldiers share the neighboring ration hall.
Fortress upgrades: Chrome Burst warheads, Redline interceptor engines, Deep Magazines, Watchtower Radar, Orbital Capacitors, Supply Airlift, Blast-Wall Armor, Field Repair Crews, Pod Autoloaders, Gromm’s Field Medbay and Blast Stabilizers. Refits are organized into three six-option tabs: Weapons, Fortress and Support. Additional tracks include Tuskbreaker Charges, Rapid Firing Racks, Siege Bulkheads, Last-Light Reserve, Drop-Zone Beacons and Scrap Recovery Teams. Emergency Pine Aegis purchases restore armor to surviving shelters. Parachute supplies deliver Twin Launch, Overdrive, Nova Warheads, ammunition, repair kits, pulse cells and salvage.
Inside the Siege Machine
The Cold Spine is a command corridor lined with firing tables, dead signal operators’ nameplates and pipes that shake whenever the wall guns fire. Jet’s crews chart incoming vectors on glass screens repaired with wire. Below them, the Bone Rack stores missiles in chilled stacks. Rumple’s loaders wear numbered brass keys chained to their wrists; losing a key locks an entire magazine until the audit is complete.
The Thaw Yard is where cracked armor is cut open, shell-damaged vehicles are stripped, and survivors report for the next shift. Gromm’s field station occupies an old inspection bay. Its doors are painted green so wounded Lineguard can find them through red emergency lighting. Beside the medical bay stands the Black Wall, a slab of discarded armor bearing the names of the missing. Names are struck through only when a body or a living soldier returns.
The fortress has one hidden weakness: its refrigeration plants share a coolant trunk with the pulse capacitors. Overcharge the defense grid and ammunition temperatures rise. Shut the grid down and the upper batteries lose their sky-clearing pulse. Vale spends most of the campaign forcing this failing system to do both. Every upgrade is another compromise between immediate survival and the next mechanical failure.
Airborne Requisitions
Care packages are loaded into reinforced cases wrapped in olive canopy cloth and steel webbing. Yellow chevrons mark ammunition; green crosses mark surgical supplies; blue coil seals identify pulse cells; rust-orange wrench stamps mark recovered machinery. Rumple paints the temporary warhead boosters with oversized warning stripes because he has already lost one loader to a badly labeled crate. Drop-zone beacons extend the useful life of those boosters by guiding crates clear of the hottest wreckage.
Small figures. Essential work.
The Lineguard handle rifles, missile loading and artillery while armored Marines patrol the fortress perimeter with chainblades and shoulder rocket pods. Their training stresses predictable routes: carrying live ammunition through a firing lane is forbidden, even when a battery calls for another shot.
The animated ground crews, artillery firing and Marine patrols bring the defense line to life. Orc raiding packs occasionally rush the ground line, carrying riveted scrap rocket tubes. Three Lineguard machine-gun nests support the patrols. A single Marine is the usual sight; pairs are uncommon and a three-Marine patrol is rare. These encounters appear in their own perimeter viewing strip beneath the missile controls. Crews and Marines always win these background skirmishes during normal play; an overrun can appear only when the final surviving shelter has one armor point left. These scenes reflect the campaign without applying additional shelter damage. Tactical ammunition, repairs and supply effects follow the game’s explicit upgrade and wave rules. Between assaults, Rumple restocks magazines and Gromm’s repair teams tend surviving shelters.
One hundred waves. Twenty chapters.
- 1–6 · The Blackpine Breach: Voss answers the first distress call.
- 7–12 · Red Snow Protocol: Vale exposes stolen guidance systems at Frostline.
- 13–18 · The Chrome Oath: Flint holds the foundry that arms the defense.
- 19–24 · Under a Broken Moon: the swarm’s real target is discovered beneath Nightglass.
- 25–30 · The Last Pine Standing: the Scrap Crown falls and Rootvault is sealed.
- 31–34 · The Tuskbreaker Convoy: the evacuation road survives a ramship assault.
- 35–38 · Spores over Stillwater: Sporebelly turns ammunition into a spreading threat.
- 39–42 · The Chainmaw Crossing: a saw barge threatens the transport bridge.
- 43–46 · Thunder beneath the Pines: Stormtoof weaponizes the weather relay.
- 47–50 · Blackroot Never Kneels: refugees clear Lastlight as Gruk’s dreadnought collapses.
- 51–55 · Orders from the Meat Locker: Kruetzu recalls the companies; Dutch defends the supply road from Bellowforge.
- 56–60 · Gromm’s Iron Ledger: Rumple’s false manifests lure Rotjaw Ark into the depot defense grid.
- 61–65 · Jet across Dead Air: a signal detail defeats Sundercoil and reconnects the batteries.
- 66–70 · The Meat Locker Holds: the command unit bring their crews together against the Ironroot Siege Engine.
- 71–75 · The Glassfang Mirage: crystal reflections hide a raider fleet.
- 76–80 · Gromm’s Mercy Run: the dwarf medic escorts the wounded through Spore Fen.
- 81–85 · The Furnace Tide: Dutch holds the volcanic evacuation piers.
- 86–90 · Beyond the Broken Sky: Jet navigates an orbital graveyard.
- 91–95 · The Chrome Pilgrimage: the Scrap Cathedral stalks Iron Canyon.
- 96–100 · The Last Locker Light: the entire crew holds against Gruk’s Last Crown until dawn.
Gruk and the scrap captains.
Gruk Ragetooth commands the enemy orc coalition, a fleet held together by captured engines, trophies and louder threats. Every hull is a workshop argument made airborne: tusked prows, riveted plates, checkerboard panels, exposed exhausts and green crews who believe a bigger engine solves any problem.
Their rockets, splitter craft, iron-jaw shells, bombers and drill ships become more dangerous as the campaign advances. Tuskbreaker favors speed; Sporebelly breeds escorts; Chainmaw weaves across the line; Stormtoof launches drill salvos; Blackroot combines those tactics. Bellowforge, Rotjaw Ark, Sundercoil and the Ironroot Siege Engine turn the ruined fleet back toward the Meat Locker. Beyond them wait Glassfang, Bogmother, Kiln Kraken, Cometjaw and the Scrap Cathedral, until Gruk welds his surviving command decks into the Last Crown.
The Ironjaw Riveters
Gruk’s oldest clan welds enemy gun barrels onto its own jaw armor. Their ramships advertise every conquest with a new tusk on the prow. Tuskbreaker and Bellowforge compete to smash the Meat Locker gate first; neither accepts the other’s version of what happened at Ashroad.
The Sporegut Brood
Sporebelly and Bogmother breed their ammunition inside fungus-choked cargo bays. Captured boilers keep the spores warm. Their crews wear stolen medical masks as trophies and attack field hospitals to capture the equipment that makes more of their foul warheads.
The Chain-Eaters
Chainmaw’s wreck crews strip bridges and quarries for saw teeth. Their raiders carry cleavers cut from conveyor blades. Glassfang hires their fastest pilots, paying in chrome plates and captured engines, then hides their ships among the desert’s reflected suns.
The Storm-Scavengers
Stormtoof, Sundercoil and Cometjaw prize generators above gold. Their ships crackle with stolen weather machinery. They fire drill pods not merely to destroy a target but to punch into it, drag away its power plant, and use the plant against its former owners.
The Furnace Mob
Kiln Kraken commands floating furnaces built from refinery platforms. Its raiders prefer guns that throw burning scrap. Their soot-black hulls carry green handprints, heat shields nailed over heat shields, and enough exposed plumbing to steam an ocean.
The Scrap Cathedral
An armored procession of welded command towers whose captains preach that every enemy fortress belongs to the loudest claimant. Its bell is a captured fuel tank beaten with a crane arm. Gruk tolerates its rival warbosses because its holds are full of expendable boarding crews.
Gruk’s Last Crown
Gruk is a tactician beneath the bellowing: he watches reload intervals, follows coolant plumes and attacks the road crews that keep a battery alive. His lesser captains think the Meat Locker contains an ancient superweapon. Gruk knows it contains the workers, workshops and chilled magazines needed to rebuild his entire fleet. He wants the fortress functioning. That is why his final command ship carries breaching drills as well as bombs.
The Last Crown is assembled from the failed hulls of his own captains. Welded command bridges rise around a furnace core; severed antenna arrays form its crown. Its engines surge in short, violent bursts, then its gun decks spill escort rockets through the gaps. When Gruk’s raiders rush the ground line they roar “WHAAAAAAAGGHH!” loud enough to drown out their own officers. The Savages answer with motors, chainsaw teeth and the next loaded rocket.
Orders carried through the fire.
Gate Nine · Kruetzu’s first order
The first shell struck the yard crane and folded it across the road. Workers crawled beneath the hanging load while the charter officers argued over whose seal could open the depot. Kruetzu stopped the argument by wrenching the emergency wheel off its mount. “Gate open. Magazines to the wall. Officers who object can explain it outside.” Dutch posted rifle crews between the wrecked crane’s legs. Rumple began counting rockets. By the time the first green raider reached the perimeter, the depot had become a fortress.
Spore Fen · Gromm’s account
The hospital convoy lost its lead crawler in water that looked solid until it swallowed the tracks. Bogmother’s escort pods burst overhead, raining burning fungal husks into the reeds. Gromm cut a jammed restraint from a wounded loader and passed the man’s rifle to the patient beside him. “You can stand. He can shoot. Both of you are leaving.” He advanced knee-deep behind the crawler’s armored door while a JackPine Marine used its chainblade to clear the reeds. The convoy reached the relay with seven fewer vehicles and every surviving stretcher. Gromm entered the vehicle losses in the Iron Ledger. The dead went on a different page.
The Last Locker Light · Jet’s final signal
The Last Crown filled the low sky with engines. Jet’s range screens showed so many overlapping returns that Vale shut off the automatic tracking and handed him a grease pencil. Rumple’s final care packages drifted between falling wrecks. Dutch put exhausted loaders back at their racks, one hand on a fresh magazine and one eye on the last shelter light. At the gate, Kruetzu heard Gruk’s boarding mob before he saw it. He keyed the squad channel once: “Fire until the racks are empty. Then make the empty racks useful.” The first sunrise beam caught the chrome pine on his shoulder as his chainblade reached full speed.