Scavengers are an entire class of people who survive by sifting through the rubble and remains of Rivertown.

History

Before the superflu Greater Rivertown was home to nearly two million people. Disease, rioting, and sweeping fires destroyed most of the city and its inhabitants, leaving a handful of survivors to scrape together an existence in the ruin of the city. The current number of scavengers in the downtown area is unknown but small, likely numbering in the hundreds.

Scavengers are generally viewed as outside threats by fledgling communities such as New Bottsford, where their scant resources cannot handle even a small growth in population. The MPD has a policy of hostility and aggression towards scavengers, with all guards under a standing order to arrest and incarcerate any "trespassers" downtown.

Common characteristics

Scavengers tend to be loners or run in small groups no larger than two or three people. Some scavengers seek out others to trade goods while others have a more aggressive stance, seeing other wanderers as competition or even prey to be robbed.

As a general rule, they also tend to be very wary of strangers. In the months before society's collapse, the city became awash in both firearms and drugs (most notably rundown) as citizens attempted to protect their possessions or find temporary release from their anxieties. As a result many scavengers are armed but untrained with their weapons and/or under the influence of narcotics, a dangerous combination.

Scavenging is an inherently dangerous lifestyle and those who have not adapted similar characteristics do not last long in Rivertown.

Common skills and abilities

Successful scavengers are resourceful, always alert, cautious, and observant. The most obvious locations for goods, such as groceries and convenience stores, have long been stripped of anything worthwhile, yet the city still harbors deep pockets of provisions often in difficult to reach locations, either behind locked doors, buried in the rubble, or in the burned out skeletons of buildings. Good scavengers intuitively assess a situation's risk-to-reward ratio and act accordingly.

Longer-term inhabitants of Rivertown become mindful of other important considerations such as the timing of MPD sweeps as well as the changing seasons. For example, scavenging becomes far more dangerous during winter and finding insulated shelter becomes mandatory. Knowledgable scavengers stock up for winter hibernation and set traps for wild animals, most commonly the feral dogs that roam the city, as a food source.

Inhabitants who have not learned these skills will eventually perish from cave ins, falls from height, starvation, exposure, or murder.

Primary residences

Scavengers rarely spend more than a few nights in the same location, preferring the safer strategy of constant relocation. As such scavengers tend not to accumulate much and carry what they own, lest another scavenger encouter their cache. Indeed, the discovery of such caches is a boon for scavengers.

The exception is the winter months, when most scavengers spend longer periods in an established location. Like other predators in the animal kingdom though, some scavengers choose not to stock food for the winter, preferring instead to find a well-provisioned location and kill the person dwelling there. As such, late fall and pre-snow winter becomes a very dangerous time in Rivertown.

Present

The longest-term residents of Rivertown have noted a marked increase of scavengers in the downtown area, migrating to the city from the west and south. A larger population means more competition for the city's limited resources, but opportunists have noted that people immigrating to Rivertown often are better supplied than many of its inhabitants. These newcomers, often from rural areas or small towns, have little time to acclimate to the harshness of life in Rivertown and meet grisly fates.

As the MPD strengthens their hold on all resources east of the river, the sense of fear among scavengers has been replaced by a simmering resentment that's well on its way to a rolling boil. Guerilla attacks on MPD guards, a long-standing feature of downtime life, appear to be on the rise, resulting in blanket retaliations from the more well-equipped forces, a negative arrangement for both sides of the conflict.