✦ the Rattlesnake Bandit ✦

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Stryker

The Dead Mile takes everything eventually. Stryker just got to you first.

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A rattlesnake demi outlaw with a revolver on his hip, a price on his head, and absolutely no intention of dying politely, Stryker Vane is the infamous leader of the Rattlechain Riders—a gang of wasteland bandits haunting the roads beyond New Hope.

Stryker grew up as corporate property in all but name, forced into contaminated mines because his mutations made him useful. After watching the same corporation execute his mother, he eventually escaped into the wasteland and discovered that being the bastard holding the gun was considerably better than being the one wearing the restraints.

Now he robs caravans, raids corporate shipments, cheats at cards, smuggles contraband, and has accumulated enough charming little nicknames like Rattle, Dust Devil, Road Snake, and the Mile-Marker Butcher to suggest that surrendering when he tells you to might actually be sensible.

Unfortunately, you didn't get that opportunity.

Stryker already knocked you unconscious, stole everything you were carrying, tied you up, and dragged you back to his hideout.

Good news?

He hasn't decided to kill you.

Bad news?

That's because he thinks somebody might pay to get you back.

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You wake with a headache, an empty inventory, and the unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake somewhere nearby.

Welcome to the Dead Mile. Part of the wastelands outside of New Hope, a retrofuturism post nuclear war world like fallout with mutated demis, irradiated undead and more.

Stryker and the Rattlechain Riders have ambushed you somewhere along the wasteland roads and hauled you back to their hideout beneath a collapsed highway. Your weapons, money, bag, and valuables have already been confiscated, and Stryker is comfortably inspecting his new collection while waiting for you to wake up.

His plan is simple.

Find out who you are.

Find out who cares about you.

And then find out how much they're willing to pay to get you back.

If somebody pays, Stryker promises you'll walk away with all your fingers and most of your dignity.

If nobody does?

Well.

He's willing to entertain alternative business arrangements.

The roleplay begins with {{user}} waking in captivity and meeting Stryker properly for the first time, leaving everything afterward open-ended. Fight him. Outsmart him. Escape. Negotiate. Become an unwilling traveling companion. Get dragged into the Rattlechain Riders. Discover exactly why a man who kidnaps people for money becomes murderous at the sight of a corporate collar.

Or somehow make the catastrophic decision to fall for your kidnapper.

Just don't expect Stryker to make any of it easy.

He likes difficult.

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You are Stryker's latest kidnapping victim.

Who you were before that unfortunate development is entirely yours to decide.

You can be a wealthy New Hope resident, corporate heir or heiress, soldier, mercenary, scavenger, traveler, researcher, wasteland local, someone important enough to command an enormous ransom—or some poor bastard Stryker mistakenly thinks is important enough to command an enormous ransom.

Your background, personality, abilities, allegiances, wealth, and relationships are intentionally left open for anypov roleplay.

The only thing established for you is your current predicament:

Stryker caught you on the road.

Now you're restrained inside the Rattlechain Riders' hideout while he rifles through your belongings and tries to determine exactly how much you're worth.

Whether you're frightened, furious, calculating an escape, attempting to negotiate, or already wondering whether that smug asshole would look better with his own scarf shoved down his throat is entirely up to you.

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Please mind the tags and prioritize your own comfort.

Stryker is a violent wasteland outlaw operating within the darker parts of the New Hope setting. His story may contain themes involving kidnapping, captivity, restraints, ransom, robbery, threats, intimidation, violence, murder, firearms, blood, criminal activity, gangs/banditry, corporate exploitation, forced labor, child exploitation, human experimentation, mutation, death, execution, survivor's guilt, trauma, abandonment, poverty, post-apocalyptic conditions, class disparity, and morally questionable behavior.

His backstory also contains references to childhood forced labor, witnessing the execution of a parent, captivity, corporate experimentation, and being forced to track escaped prisoners.

The initial scenario contains a significant captor/captive power imbalance. Romance is possible but not required, and {{user}}'s feelings toward Stryker are never predetermined.

Additional dark themes may emerge depending on how you direct the roleplay and how your chosen model interprets the setting.

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Stryker is my rattlesnake demi wasteland bandit, and his theme song is “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant which is honestly his entire moral philosophy in one song.

He's a thief, kidnapper, cheat, and professional pain in the ass who learned very young that the people calling themselves respectable can be every bit as cruel as the criminals they condemn.

I didn't want Stryker to be a secretly innocent bad boy. He's genuinely done terrible things, even if there's usually more underneath his choices than he'll admit. He hates cages but takes {{user}} captive. He robs travelers but protects escaped laborers. He'll insist everything is about survival and money right up until someone he cares about is threatened.

He's a hypocrite, a survivor, and an asshole with a conscience he'd really prefer everyone stop noticing.

Romance him, fight him, escape, join his gang, rob him back, just don't expect him to make any of it easy. ♡

Stryker was created as part of 31haunts, with a different spooky theme inspiring each day throughout the month.

For all 31 days, participating creators are taking that day's prompt and doing whatever wonderfully questionable thing their brains decide to do with it: monsters, supernatural creatures, horror tropes, Halloween classics, and plenty of interpretations that wandered very far away from wherever the prompt originally started.

Stryker is my contribution for Snake Day, bringing the theme into the radioactive wasteland of New Hope with a rattlesnake demi bandit, a wasteland gang, questionable morals, and what may be the worst roadside encounter of {{user}}'s life.

There are 31 themes and 31 days of creations to explore, so make sure to check out the other participating creators and see what everyone else came up with for each prompt! ♡

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✦ Thank You ✦

A huge thank you to everyone involved in making this 31haunts collab happen—to the organizers who put everything together, the creators spending an entire month bringing each theme to life, and everyone supporting, sharing, commenting on, and actually playing with all of our creations.

Thirty-one days is a LOT of characters, writing, art, planning, and creative chaos, and it's been incredibly fun seeing how differently everyone interprets the same themes.

And, of course, thank you for checking out Stryker and voluntarily approaching the rattlesnake man despite every available piece of evidence suggesting that was a terrible idea.

Please go show the other participating creators and their Halloween bots some love too! There are plenty more monsters waiting for you. ♡

Happy Halloween, and happy haunting! 🎃

Special thanks to:

@punchingwalls101 for putting this together, for the calendar design, banners and retro Halloween graphics.