The Northern Flats
Wind is the dominant sensation — cold, damp Pacific air funneling across the flat seabed, carrying salt, rust, and the mechanical whine of salvage equipment. The smell is wet sediment, corroded metal, and the ozone hint of exposed electrical infrastructure not yet stripped. Sound carries far across the flats — you can hear a cutting rig a kilometer away, and voices travel in ways that make distance deceptive. At night, the dam's red lights paint the western sky.
You dig up the past and sell it to whoever is buying, and you try not to think about what it means that the ground you sleep on used to be the bottom of an ocean.
Pre-Collapse Identity
Open water — the northern reach of the bay where ferries once crossed to the Smelter and the Gateway. The Smelter-the Gateway Bridge carried commuters over this stretch of shallow bay. Below was mud, oyster beds, and tidal currents that hadn't changed in ten thousand years.
Current Character
The northern bay floor. Shallower than the Deep Dregs — thirty to fifty feet below the Rim rather than eighty — this area was some of the first bay floor to be settled after drainage, which means the settlements here are older, more established, and only slightly less desperate. The old the Northern Crossing Bridge pylons march across the landscape like concrete monuments to a world that had water here, their spans long since collapsed or salvaged but their bases too massive to dismantle. Salvage operations pick through exposed seabed infrastructure — old pipes, cables, foundations of structures that were built on fill and are now twenty feet above the surrounding terrain like islands of concrete in a sediment sea.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Flat exposed seabed, shallower and more windswept than the Deep Dregs. The reduced depth means the Rim walls are lower here, and on clear days, some natural light reaches the floor — a luxury the Deep Dregs never sees. The Golden Gate Dam is visible to the northwest, its red warning lights blinking on the horizon. Wind funnels through the gap between the Perimeter highlands and the Free Quarter Hills, bringing Pacific moisture that makes the northern flats damper and colder than the southern bay floor. Salvage machinery — cranes, excavators, cutting rigs — dots the landscape like mechanical wildlife.
Corporate Presence
Ungoverned, with Ironclad scavenger operations picking through the exposed infrastructure for salvageable metal, cable, and pre-Cascade hardware. Nexus maintains network relay infrastructure that routes signal across the northern bay. Neither corporation governs; both extract. The scavenger communities that live here operate on informal barter economies that no corporate ledger tracks.
Key Locations
The Bridge Pylons (former the Northern Crossing Bridge foundations — used as market posts, landmarks, and improvised fortifications), the salvage fields (open seabed excavation zones where pre-Cascade infrastructure is stripped for materials), the dam sightline (the northwestern horizon dominated by the Golden Gate Dam's mass and warning lights).
Sub-Sectors
Nine sub-sectors spread across the northern bay floor — shallower, windswept, and dominated by salvage operations picking through what the drainage revealed.
The Rock
12.3 km²
The old island fortress rises from the bay floor like a concrete fist — its cellblocks intact, its reputation undiminished by the decades since the water receded. Nobody lives on The Rock by choice. The structure is too exposed, too visible from every direction, too haunted by the weight of what it was. But its elevation and sight lines make it invaluable as a landmark, a meeting point for negotiations that require neutral ground with no cover for ambush, and occasionally a prison again when someone needs to be held where escape means crossing kilometers of open bay floor under surveillance from every settlement within line of sight. The concrete is crumbling. The fear is not.
Landmarks
- The Rock — Iconic fortress ruins — still feared, still isolated.
Factions
The Platform
11.3 km²
An artificial island built on bay fill — an elevated platform standing above the surrounding bay floor like a stage. The flat, engineered surface was designed for military purposes that ended decades before the Cascade, and now serves as the northern flats' most organized settlement. The elevation advantage is modest — ten meters above the surrounding sediment — but in the Dregs, ten meters of high ground is a strategic asset. Salvage operations stage from here, trading crews resupply, and the platform's old infrastructure provides a foundation that the sediment settlements can only envy.
Landmarks
- The Platform — Artificial island on the bay floor. Strategic position.
Factions
The Listening Posts
12.9 km²
The Listening Posts occupy this sub-sector — surveillance outposts at the bay margins where the Dregs meet the Rim's shadow. Whoever operates them changes; the posts themselves persist, their antenna arrays scanning frequencies that most settlements pretend not to notice.
Locations
Factions
The Wind Field
20.4 km²
Twenty square kilometers of open bay floor — the largest single sub-sector in the northern flats, featureless sediment stretching toward the Golden Gate Dam's red warning lights on the horizon.
The Oyster Beds
13.1 km²
Exposed seabed pocked with old oyster bed formations that create an uneven, treacherous surface where vehicles bog down and foot traffic follows memorized paths.
The Pylon Colonnade
11.3 km²
Windswept flats where the old Northern Crossing Bridge pylons cast shadows across empty sediment, their massive bases too heavy to salvage, too imposing to ignore.
The Rim Gradient
10.7 km²
Eastern margin where the bay floor rises toward the Rim — salvage crews work the transition zone, pulling cable and pipe from the exposed gradient.
The Wet Flats
11.5 km²
Shallow sediment flats prone to standing water after rain, where temporary camps appear and dissolve with the weather.
The Cold Reach
16.1 km²
Sixteen square kilometers of northwestern bay floor, where Pacific wind funnels through the dam gap and the cold drives all but the most desperate settlers south.