Bench reference · ten groups

Paint, Posture & Field Cue

Placeholder intro. This page will explain how to read a group on sight: the paint they wear, the cue they leave behind, the way they carry themselves, and the ground they call home. Written for the bench, so a builder can pick colours and stencils without leaving the workspace.

GPF

Global Protection Force

Paint & palette: White over mid-gray with safety orange chevrons at nose and tail. Markings are stenciled, never freehand. Codes in block letters, survey date small on the door. Clean paint over honest miles.
Field cue: White, gray, and safety orange, clean stencils, survey tripods, sealed tool cases, and service trucks with unknown-purpose bodies.
Common posture: Helpful on the road, strict at relic sites. They will share water, maps, and repairs. They will not share what is inside the service body.
Best contact: Approach in the open and slow, lights on if you have them. Expect your name to go in a ledger.
Registry mark: Branches around a wireframe globe with a machine form inside. The stencil version is a circle with three lines and a leaf on each side.
Home ground: Depot: old highway maintenance yards. Chain link, a quonset shed, a fuel point, a radio shack, a flag. Tools on shadow boards, vehicles in a washed row, a wall map growing pins and string, and always one crate nobody will discuss.

SCR

Scrapers

Paint & palette: No two panels one color. Bases are whatever primer was cheap, meaning red oxide, zinc gray, or surplus green. Names go on freehand and proud, and hazard stripes are painted by hand on crane tips and cable drums.
Field cue: Patchwork clothes, welded armor, cranes, winches, hand-painted marks, scavenged crates, road dust, and improvised excellence.
Common posture: Varies by crew and by hunger. Most will trade. A few will shadow you for a day to learn who you are before they wave.
Best contact: Never touch a marked claim. Hail from the road. Offer news before you offer goods.
Registry mark: None shared, and that is by choice. Crews paint their own names. A claim mark is a circled X with initials and a date.
Home ground: Camp: a ring of trucks with tarps stretched off the crane booms, a cutting bench, a fire, and usually a dog. Salvage sorted immediately into crates and coffee cans of bolts, with a clean-stock box riding in the boss's truck.

SIG / MAP

Signal Corps

Paint & palette: Weathered work grays and greens, kept dull, with the three-bar mark repainted fresh in white or black even when nothing else is. Runner rigs and map wagons carry one bright route band around the front fender so a stop keeper can spot them at distance, with route tallies in white, one bar per finished circuit.
Field cue: Antenna farms, guy wires, vacuum tubes, crank generators, handwritten range logs, and on the road map tubes, waterproof satchels, motorcycles, horses, survey poles, and stamped route cards.
Common posture: Friendly but busy. A tower keeper's first loyalty is to the broadcast schedule, not to you. Their runners and mapmakers are neutral by trade, and harming one makes enemies in every town on the route.
Best contact: Never climb a tower uninvited. Knock at the shack. Flag runners at posted stops only, never at speed, and never touch a satchel or a map tube even to be helpful. Arrive with dry batteries, tubes, wire, or a corrected route note and you have a friend for life.
Registry mark: Three short bars over one long bar on poles, doors, and tower legs. Runners and mapmakers add an arrow with a dot at its tail: the dot is home, the arrow is the route.
Home ground: Station: a shack at the foot of a tower, guy anchors, generator shed, antenna farm. Inside, a log desk, a good clock, a chalkboard schedule, a cot, tubes in labeled boxes, and the glow log on the wall in one hand for years. Down the road, a waystation in a rescued gas station or old post office: route board, stamp desk, pigeonhole shelves, bunk room, spare parts for common bikes, a horse rail and a repainted milestone outside.

WLD

Wildkin

Paint & palette: Tenders run faded forest green, canvas tan, unpainted timber, and oiled leather, nothing bright and nothing reflective. Reclaimers run the same greens gone ragged with char black, and their clearest color is green paint slashed over orange chevrons.
Field cue: Tenders: canvas, wool, field notebooks, botanical markers, quiet paths, and fences that guide rather than forbid. Reclaimers: cut survey stakes, saplings planted in a roadbed, thorn rings on posts, and corridor crews riding with axes they hope not to need.
Common posture: One faith, two wings. Tenders are calm, patient, and immovable, and will feed you at the gate and still turn you back at the fence line. Reclaimers do not talk first, and infrastructure is the target.
Best contact: With Tenders, stay on marked paths and ask before you cut, dig, or drain anything, because they notice. With Reclaimers, none advised. If you find a felled tree squared across a corridor or a ring of thorn cut into a post, turn around and report at the next depot.
Registry mark: Tenders paint a single leaf above a straight line, small and low. Reclaimers cut a ring of thorn, drawn as a circle with outward ticks, at the edge of what they have taken back.
Home ground: Post: a timber cabin at the preserve edge, often turf roofed, with cold frames, a fenced nursery, and a cellar of labeled seed jars. Watch platforms in the trees, boardwalks over wet ground, machine panels rebuilt as bird boxes and bat roosts. The Reclaimer wing keeps no recorded ground, only camps that move.

THN

Thornbands

Paint & palette: Char black and salvaged cloth, with no uniform and no fleet. Nothing is painted to be admired.
Field cue: You will not cue them. Cue their work instead: scripture on doors and overpasses, candle stubs at a crossroads, and gatherings that stop when you arrive.
Common posture: A cult, and they act like one. They believe the Silence was the reckoning and that a second coming is near, so argument does not reach them. Travelers are rarely the target unless they interrupt a rite.
Best contact: None advised. If you find scripture chalked fresh on a wall or a rite in progress, do not watch, do not photograph, and report at the next depot.
Registry mark: Hand-cut signs and chalked scripture left where they want it read, dated to the day of the Silence.
Home ground: None recorded. What the Registry maps instead is their work, and the towns that clean up after it.

FND

Foundries

Paint & palette: Works black and deep gray above, oiled steel below, with soot as a finish coat. Guild marks in brass paint, and a riveted brass rebuild plate on everything they restore. Chalk marks everywhere, because chalk is how the Belt thinks.
Field cue: Brick factories, steam cranes, machine shops, soot, brass plates, and clean floors where precision matters.
Common posture: Businesslike. Work is the language, and they respect anyone who respects the shop floor.
Best contact: Enter by the office door, not the rail gate. Touch nothing in motion. Bring broken things. They enjoy a puzzle.
Registry mark: A crossed hammer and caliper.
Home ground: Works: brick mills with rail spurs, row housing under the stacks, a guild hall with the hammer and caliper over the door. The pattern shop hangs wooden casting patterns like art, and off it sits the locked long bench where the treatment is chased by lamplight.

RLG

Rail League

Paint & palette: Locomotive black and oxide red with white timetable lettering. Rolling stock carries route names bigger than any group mark, because on the line the route is the identity.
Field cue: Watches that work, posted timetables, lamp signals, coal smell, and crossing gates that close before you hear the train.
Common posture: Punctual, friendly at stations, humorless on the line. A schedule is a promise, and the League does not break promises.
Best contact: Buy passage or book cargo at the station board. Never walk the rails. Never flag a train that is not already slowing.
Registry mark: A wheel on a rail, drawn as a circle sitting on a line.
Home ground: Yard: roundhouses, water towers, coal piles, section shacks down the line, and a station house where the timetable board is the biggest thing on the wall. The clock over the door is the one machine everyone trusts.

SHW

Showfolk

Paint & palette: Dark paneled trucks with the show's name painted big and proud, gilt lettering where they can afford it, string lights, and a screen that folds out white as a sail.
Field cue: Posters going up a day ahead, instrument cases, a generator trailer, children following the truck, and a town that suddenly remembers a song.
Common posture: Welcome nearly everywhere, and they know it. A show crew trades in attention and leaves before it wears out.
Best contact: Book a night through the Keeper. Pay in fuel, food, or film stock. Never touch the reels.
Registry mark: A film reel, drawn as a circle with four spokes, chalked on the waystation wall with the date of the last show.
Home ground: Winter quarters: an old fairground or theater where crews repair reels, trade films, and teach apprentices. Half workshop, half rehearsal, with paint drying on new show lettering and a screen patched like a sail loft.

STL

Stillfolk

Paint & palette: Whitewash, gray wool, bare timber, and lamp black. Chrome gets painted over. Nothing shines that does not have to.
Field cue: Whitewashed fences, lamp light after dark, tools without engines, and a quiet that feels chosen rather than empty.
Common posture: A plain life by choice, not a cause. Kind to travelers, cold to salvage. They will feed you at their table and ask you to leave the scanner in the truck.
Best contact: Ask at the gate before entering. Bring nothing that hums. Do not sketch, survey, or record without permission.
Registry mark: None, and that is the mark. Stillfolk erase marks rather than make them. A freshly whitewashed site code is their signature, and the Registry treats fresh whitewash as information.
Home ground: Village: whitewashed buildings, no wires, lamp-lit windows, orchards planted over things the town would rather not name. Semaphore towers stand on the sight lines. The quiet is not poverty. It is policy.

KPR

Keepers

Paint & palette: No livery at all. A dark coat, clean hands, and the ledger wrapped in black oilcloth are the whole uniform, and the town would consider anything more to be showing off.
Field cue: A worn coat, clean hands, a ring of keys that opens less than it used to, and a ledger wrapped in oilcloth.
Common posture: Quiet authority. A Keeper cannot force you to leave, but every door in town follows their lead.
Best contact: Ask for the ledger. Sign it honestly.
Registry mark: A closed ledger, drawn as a tall rectangle with one line down the center.
Home ground: Archive house at a crossroads: part library, part print shop, part inn, and the press smell reaches the road before the door does. In town, the ledger house holds a counter, a key board, survey plates hung like photos, a warm kettle, and the Registry copy chained to the desk.

Archive note

The Keepers and the Stillfolk are polite in person and unforgiving in principle. Stillfolk believe some things deserve to be forgotten. Keepers believe forgetting is how the world broke. When a Stillfolk town whitewashes a site code, a walking Keeper will come and repaint it, and both will be courteous, and neither will ever stop.

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The Road The ten factions