Trade Runner isn't a story about good versus evil. It's about two forces that can't coexist—and the wasteland caught between them. Before we could write a single mission, we had to understand exactly who was fighting, and why they couldn't stop.
Everything traces back to one event: the massacre of the Happy Valley mining settlement. It fractured the world into the people who survived it and the conglomerate that ordered it.
Rebels & Runners
The rebellion is a network, not an army—trauma-fueled survivors, smugglers, pathfinders, and defectors working in the shadows. United by the shared pain of Happy Valley, they aim to disrupt supply lines and dismantle the Guild’s executive network from the inside.
Erika drives it on sheer obsessive resolve, hunting the super-agent who erased her family. Ali—former administrator of Happy Valley and nephew to the Grand Achat founder—defected out of guilt after the Guild’s execution order. Mia keeps their pre-invasion tech alive; Pox knows every secret tunnel in the wasteland. They have nothing but each other.
The Traders' Guild
Their opposition is the off-world conglomerate that regulates every extraction contract and commerce route with brutal efficiency. High-threat enforcers and camouflage active-suit technology let them secure company assets and quietly erase non-compliant operations.
Sef, the CEO, ordered the Happy Valley massacre to block asylum agreements and silence reports of a Hive Mother beneath the sand mines. Poul Naroda—the Invisible Hand—executes her will under coercion, hiding a deep vulnerability over his dying sibling. Viana hunts defectors before they can compromise operations.
The rebels have nothing but loyalty. The Guild has everything but loyalty. That asymmetry is the whole war.
A Personal War
What makes the conflict work is that it’s personal, not ideological. Every enforcer has a reason to obey. Every runner has someone they lost. Nobody in this world is fighting for an abstraction—they’re fighting for the people the other side took from them.
That’s the engine of Trade Runner. Keep watching this channel as we open up more of the roster in future dispatches.