Harden Family
The Harden Family (Chuck and Sharee parents, Micah and Agatha children) are a family of scavengers who have arrived in Rivertown hoping to find a safer living environment.
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The Hardens lived in a small town between Rivertown and Sauklund, trying to scrape together an existence with a small group of survivors. Poorly equipped, the group struggled to produce food to support themselves. The Hardens and two other families were bitterly criticized for having children given their current plight and a rift formed between those with and without children.
Over three years their village had been raided on two different occasions from roving bands of maurauders from the south, most likely roaming north from Sauklund. Each raid cost the community dearly and, in the spring of 2113, they suffered three more attacks in rapid succession. Three families fled by mid-summer, and the largest concerted attack came in late September when most of the villagers were killed or driven off and the attackers squatted in the homes they vacated. The Hardens stayed in hiding for two days before sneaking off to Rivertown, hoping to find a more secure community to support them.
The Hardens are optimistic to the point of being naive. Chuck and Cherri were children when the world fell apart and they share a strong belief that the survivors can build it back up to what it used to be. They saw having children as the ultimate act of defiance to the gloom mongers insisting that they were all biding their time before they met death through starvation or violent means.
The Hardens believe in old fashioned values of hard work and loving thy neighbor. They believe that the outbreak of violence is a temporary reaction to such an enormous change in the world and people will soon be returning to their senses. They come to Rivertown in hopes of spreading this message and working with others to begin to rebuild society.
The Hardens have no primary residence but roam Rivertown Central looking for a good place to settle down..
The Hardens are long on love and caring and have a few other abilities. They all possess basic horticulture skills to grow vegetables and know a little carpentry. They possess a single gun that Chuck uses to hunt, and Cherri dresses and cooks the game. All four families members know how to read and write and have a good understanding of world history and the major political events of the last century. Chuck and Cherri write and share poetry and encourage their children to do the same.
The Rivertown Compendium draws from the much larger Rivertown Chronicles, a wide assortment of personal narratives and catalog entries of people, places, and things.