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The Antagonists:

The WARPATH protocol—its full title Worldline Anomaly Realignment - Post-Apocalypse Temporal Hopping—was uncovered in a secret pre-Collapse U.S. government bunker in the Niagara region. By the time the site was breached, the Great Lakes Homeguard had already seized the lion’s share of its supplies and intelligence, leaving the New Euro Federation only scraps to sift through. Even so, the truth was unmistakable: the old U.S. government had prepared a contingency built around Artifact-based technology and experiments in time travel.

But revelation alone could not save anyone. The stores hidden inside the bunker were nowhere near enough to sustain the Great Lakes Homeguard through the coming ice age. The choice before them was mercilessly simple: move south, or freeze and starve where they stood.

To most, the promise of time travel was too absurd to believe—one last cruel joke from a dead world. Only the most committed among the Great Lakes Homeguard chose to stake their lives on it, abandoning the north and beginning the long march toward southern Nevada. In time, they shed the “Great Lakes” from their name. From then on, they were simply the Homeguard.

As they pushed into the rapidly cooling Sierra Madre, they intercepted communications from an unexpected source: the Russian GRU. Somehow, the GRU had survived the impossible. They had crossed the frozen Bering Strait, bled themselves through the glacial Yukon, and emerged from the dying world with just enough strength to keep moving. From the crumbling remains of the New Euro Federation, they too had learned of WARPATH.

What remains of the GRU is on its last legs. Its survivors have endured some of the worst punishment the expanding Arctic could inflict, yet they cling with fanatical loyalty to a homeland now thousands of miles beyond their reach. They see themselves as greater than their predecessors, the Soviet KGB, and have embraced a near-religious need to prove that they are stronger than those who came before them—and failed. Acting on the little intelligence they possess, the GRU has set its course toward WARPATH. Their purpose is clear: go back in time and grant their recent ancestors a clean slate, free of the Artifact they believe doomed Soviet supremacy.

The Homeguard has fared little better. The journey south bled them white, and the pursuit of WARPATH—along with bitter divisions over the very idea of time travel—has reduced them to shadows of what they once were. Those who remain are the truest believers: men and women convinced that the timeline can still be forced back toward American exceptionalism, back to a world before collapse, before ruin, before the end. Armed with what they know of the past, they intend to stop their forefathers from ever obtaining the Artifact, no matter the cost, and in doing so save what is left of humanity from this broken future.

For those still desperate enough to believe the world can be fixed, WARPATH offers only one path forward: a cold, dust-choked desert road lined with fading signs from the old world—warnings against photography, warnings of trespassing, warnings of the dangers of a nearby munitions testing range.