Rich the Razor v2
The desert frontier of No Man’s Land has a reputation as a place where anyone can make a name for themselves. A place where surnames and past exploits do not matter, and the ambitious chase their dreams under an endless blue sky. But the romance of this reputation has been challenged many times, never more than during the Railroad War. It was true that the figures who rose high during the war were men and women of ambition, but their success was often paved with brutality. Hewg the Huge sacked cities, Rex the Red slew all challengers, and hundreds died in petty power struggles. However one name stands out for its reputation for brutality: Rich the Razor.
Rich was present in Dodgetown on the day the railroad worker’s strike turned violent. When Rex the Red, the greatest outlaw in No Man’s Land at the time, led the sacking of the city, Rich was among the most destructive and gleeful of the rioters. It was during the sacking of Dodgetown that he was first identified, as numerous survivors recalled or bore wounds from his distinctive spiked quicksteel whip. The Railroad War had begun, and Rich’s rise to infamy with it.
When he departed the city, Rich took a handful of fellow rioters with him, the core of the gang that would go on to terrorize the frontier. This gang would swell in size over the course of the war, including names near as infamous as Rich’s, such as the Laughing Samurai and the Blue Tolmikan. Victims impaled on razor-sharp spikes became their grisly calling card. While other players in the Railroad War fought to take control of the desert, decide the fate of the railway, or to settle old grudges with rivals, Rich delighted in chaotic violence, attacking targets almost at random. If he had a grudge, it must have been with every man, woman, and child in No Man’s Land. Those warlords who sought to harness the outlaw’s destructive impulses quickly regretted it; Rich would happily accept an alliance only to sack the city he was hired to defend, or burn the caravan he was hired to escort. Money appealed to him only in so much as he would loot before burning.
In the final days of the Railroad War, when trade in No Man’s Land had all but ground to a halt, Rich the Razor set his sights on the so-called “last caravan” a collection of refugees fleeing the frontier for the safety of Sandport to the south. A day’s ride from the town, Rich and his gang, now over a hundred strong, caught up with the caravan. The thirteen samurai hired to guard the refugees stayed behind to ensure their escape. In the fight that followed the samurai were slain, but not before a quicksteel mace bashed Rich’s head in, ironically leaving a spike impaired in his forehead. The outlaw was unconscious for several days, but ultimately created a pair of quicksteel horns to cover the disfigurement, which he wears to this day. The Order of the Peacekeepers, which now protects the towns of No Man’s Land, was inspired by the sacrifice of the samurai who stopped him.