Rules

A salvage crew works a collapsed warehouse two days east of the rail line. Their truck is a 1970s flatbed that has been rebuilt so many times that no panel matches. This morning the crew found something under the concrete, and for the first time in three years, the foreman is nervous about the drive home.

Ideas to pull from this one

• Build the truck from any 1960s to 1980s civilian kit, then add welded patch armor, mismatched wheels, and a hand painted crew name on the door.
• Add a claim mark stenciled on the hood, the sign that this crew registered this dig site.
• The cargo is a Module, crated and strapped down like it's worth more than the truck. You decide what it does. A faint green glow through the crate slats is optional and powerful.
• One crew figure riding on the bed with a fire extinguisher, because nobody knows what a disturbed Module might do.
• Weather the truck hard but keep the engine area clean. These people ignore paint and worship maintenance.

That armor kit on your shelf, the halftrack or the Jeep or the six wheeler, already lives in the right mechanical era. In Longlight, old military vehicles didn't die. They got bought, traded, and put to work hauling grain and pulling stumps. Your finished build only needs a second life written onto it.

Ideas to pull from this one

• Paint over the military insignia with a slightly mismatched color, the way a farmer would, and stencil a settlement name or route code over it.
• Add civilian cargo, fence posts, feed sacks, a water tank, strapped down with obvious care.
• Put a Foundry rebuild plate on the engine deck, the riveted mark that says a guild brought this machine back.
• Replace one wheel or hatch with a part that clearly came from a different vehicle.
• File it with a field note about who owns it now and what it hauled this morning. The note does as much work as the paint.

A Courier stops at a crossroads marker at dusk. Mounted on the post is a Sliver, one of the small fragments that still glows. It has marked this junction since before she was born. Tonight it looks dimmer than her logbook says it should, and she has to decide whether to report it.

Ideas to pull from this one

• This is a base, a post, one figure, and one tiny light. A whole story in four inches of ground.
• The figure's pose carries everything. Checking a logbook against the light tells the story with no words.
• Try the glow as paint first, pale green dry brushed onto the surfaces facing the Sliver. A real LED is the advanced version, not the required one.
• Add tally marks or route bars carved into the post by years of passing Couriers.
• The ground tells the era: a cracked pre-Silence road with a well worn dirt path beside it.