“Fenwick. Population: disputed.”
Fenwick is a single grid of twenty blocks by twenty, presented as four districts of ten by ten:
| District | Where | Character |
|---|---|---|
| The Works | North-west | Industrial. Fuel, generators, tools. |
| Vitalis Campus | North-east | Where it started. Labs, reagents, and a great many of them. |
| Fenwick Green | South-west | Housing and small shops. |
| Marrowgate | South-east | Where you wake up, and where most runs are fought. |
It is not randomly generated. Every world's Fenwick is laid out identically — roads on a fixed lattice every five cells, so every street connects to every other, and the four-by-four gaps between them are solid blocks of buildings. The second time you play, you know where the pharmacy is, and that knowledge is the progression.
Moving
A step to any of the eight neighbouring blocks costs 1 AP. Walking out of a building is free; walking into one costs 1 and is blocked above barricade 4. Crossing between two sections of the same building keeps you inside and costs nothing extra.
Routes auto-walk you toward a target for 1 AP a step, plus one to get outside first if you are indoors. A route stops dead the moment you would walk into a block with a zombie standing on it — which is a feature, not a bug. A bicycle makes every other step free.
All four are in play
A run is not fenced into one district. You wake in Marrowgate, and you may hold any building in Fenwick — walk to the Works and hang your sheet in a warehouse if that is where you want to be standing when it gets dark.
What that costs is walking. The map is 20 by 20 and the clock does not care where you are at 20:00, so a hold in the far corner is a hold you have to get back to. The district you start in is the one everybody else wakes up in too, which makes it where help is.
The records
Scattered through Fenwick's buildings are 17 records: memos, patient charts, a triage whiteboard, a child's drawing. Find them all and the story of what Vitalis Biotech did assembles itself.
Sixteen of them turn up in the course of ordinary searching — specifically, in searches that find nothing else. The seventeenth is not in a building at all, and is only obtained by putting down Subject One.
- Fenwick never changes shape. What you learned last run is still true.
- A step is 1 AP in any of eight directions. Leaving a building is free; entering costs 1.
- All four districts are in play. Hold anything you can get inside.
- There are 17 records. Sixteen turn up in searches; the last one does not.