I’ve hemmed and hawed for a bit over just how I should start this trip into the Land of Cotton, but it all boils down to how I’m not much of a writer. Reckon that’ll be clear enough before too long in any event.

Dirty Bird and Smokey Joe did an ok job of giving some of the high points of the region, but I’m going to clue you in to some of the specifics. Tidbits of info that might help you survive just a little bit longer.

As an example, ever wonder why Tuscaloosa and Birmingham are still separate cities even though B’ham should have swallowed T-town up years ago? Might have a lot to do with coal mines.

The area between the two cities was lousy with coal and, unfortunately, methane. At about the turn of the century there were a couple of occasions where these things blew up, caught on fire, and/or otherwise made a lot of people’s lives miserable while ending a few dozen lives. Corps have really come a long way, ain’t they?

Then late in 2017, after the Ghost Dance cowed the US, the drek really hit the fan. By this time, there were a few hundred kilometers of tunnels dug out in the area from Brookwood (just east of T-Town) to Summiton (a bit west of Birmingham). Most of these varied between 2 and 4 kilometers underground with as many as two dozen levels in the larger parts of the Blue Creek coal seam.

Here it might do well to point out that to keep these things from blowing up too terribly often, you’ve got to continuously pump out the methane and cover everything with rockdust to keep the coal dust from building up from dangerous levels. These mines had mostly been abandoned for around five years as South American coal was massively cheaper to import, so it goes without saying that neither was rockdust freshly applied nor was methane pumped out for quite some time.

Construction had just completed on a massive smelter that was going to use nearby Holt Lake for cooling. This was generally considered a good thing as jobs are typically always welcome. Enter a couple of ecoterrorists who styled themselves as Choctaw. They called themselves Hush and Tali. Not only was this plant and the resulting thermal pollution something they patently did not like, but they also figured they could do “their part” in fighting the white man as well. Why let the fact that they had almost as much Choctaw blood running in their veins as I’ve got martian blood get in the way of some good righteous smiting?

No one is exactly sure what happened, but it happened in a big way. The popular theory is that one or both of the two were awakened and that they used spirits to stir up all of that coal dust and methane that had been undisturbed for so long, then all that was needed was the smallest of sparks…

The explosion was tremendous, registering on seismographs as a 3.2 as far away as the University of Tennessee up in Knoxville, Tennessee, some 480 kilomters away. Many of the mine shafts and tunnels collapsed, creating chasms in the ground above them. Some places the elevation changed by over 80 meters in a matter of moments. The smelting plant was entirely destroyed, as was much of Brookwood, and well, pretty much everything that was along around a 100 kilometer long corridor some 60 kilometers wide. The accumulated methane shot out like jets from the various access shafts that dotted the area for almost three weeks. The land became little more than jagged cliffs, blind drop offs, and other terrain that defy anyone to attempt to cross, much less build on. This part of the state is now known as Coal Canyon

Surprisingly, even to this day, we’re still probably not done seeing cave-ins and sink-holes. Coal can smolder, and for a very long time. No one really knows exactly where the fire is, but the people who know about such things claim it’s most likely still going on. Old geological surveys put the Blue Creek Coal seam at somewhere around 800km long. God help us if it drops one of those biological research facilities in downtown Birmingham. Those idiots always have some world-ending plague sitting around.

And like any other drek-hole imaginable, it’s never so bad that you won’t find someone who’ll live in it. Some metahumans took refuge in the accessible parts of the mines when the discrimination got to them badly enough. From the stories, there are some families that have lived down there for going on three generations, even opening up some of the previously collapsed areas. Mainly it’s orcs and trolls, but you get a sprinkling of dwarf and the tougher (or more desperate) humans and elves. The resulting groups tend to be very clannish and protective of their boarders with the largest enclave being a group of trolls that call themselves the “Jimmy Number Fives” or Fivers, for short after the name of the mine entrance they inhabited, Jim Walter No. 5.

Currently, their leader goes by the name Saban, but if rumor is to be believed, he’s on pretty shaky ground because this isn’t quite the bad old days and not everyone likes the idea of hiding away, making random raids on shipments that travel nearby Interstate 20-59. Some want to move up in the world, no matter the cost.

Well chummer, that’s all I’ve got for you tonight. Remember, when you dance with the devil, make damn sure you’ve called the right tune.

See that mess? That's kudzu. It's been a bane of the South for quite a while now. Originally, it was brought over by railroad companies to control soil erosion because it's a fairly hardy plant that can grow on the steep slopes of the hills they made.

This was all well and good, except that in some parts, kudzu took off like wildfire. The mix of soil, sun, humidity, and rain found in parts of the Deep South provided a perfect new home to this nefarious vine. It's not uncommon for kudzu vines to grow at a rate of 26cm a day, meaning it can quickly take over an area, slowly choking out other plant life's access to sunlight and hastening the deterioration of man-made structures. The frost each winter brings kills off the vines which new growth quickly overtakes creating a mess that's nigh impossible to walk through, at times forcing any who make the attempt have to wade through up to a meter's worth of tangled vines.

To further compound the problems caused by this plant, kudzu is a royal pain to kill. The vine portion of the plant grows out of a drekkin' huge root. In areas that have been infested for some time, it is not uncommon for them to be well over a meter in length and weigh in at 75-100kg. The vines generally grow out of one area of the main root called the rootcap, and that is what must be entirely destroyed to actually kill the plant. Notice how I said entirely? If small fragments of the rootcap remain intact, it will grow back. Killing the vines can work, if you're willing to come back and do the same thing every year for the better part of a decade. Did I forget to mention that these roots are generally deep enough and can lay dormant for long enough that most herbicides are entirely useless? And that it's not uncommon for a good half dozen of these roots to be in an area around the size of what's in the picture?

Now you know why it's not shocking to see road crews with flame throwers while you're riding the roads of the CAS.

In the hills of eastern Tennessee, back just a few years before the Awakening, the locals decided to try a slightly different approach: goats and llamas. They fenced in areas taken over by kudzu, and just let'em at it. Not sure how well it worked for them, but it sure as drek ended up causing problems for people in the southwestern reaches of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

You see some kudzu, like so much other stuff, ended up gaining a touch of magic during the awakening. The awakened varieties are easy enough to tell from the regular sort through mundane senses because their leaves have an iridescent sheen, as compared to the matte light green of the regular sort. For the mundane sorts, the only other noticeable difference is that the vines will writhe as you're walking through them, making it more difficult to travel through. If it is near a point of naturally high energy, it will grow at as much as twice the rate of normal kudzu, and its vines are not killed off by frost or freezing weather.

There's a lot more of a problem for the awakened. Firstly, the sheer mass of astrally active life in one place makes astral perception more difficult. Depending on just how infested the area is, this can range from a minor nuisance to almost being nigh on blinding. Secondly, remember that huge root? In the normal plant, it stores carbohydrates so that in lean or extreme conditions, it can survive for quite a while. The awakened variety works in a similar manner, but it also stores magical energies. It taps into not just the natural background magic of the world, but also that of any workings and magical creatures that are in its midst. So all magic that passes through or happens in one of these fields of kudzu is robbed of some of its strength. It seems as though if you can stay around 10 meters away from the plants, this has no effect except on effects that must pass through its area of effect. Another affect of note is that astral travel though an area infested by this vine is impeded, much the same way as physical travel is. Spirits are not happy at all about being forced into such an area. Finally, the arguably most dangerous characteristic of awakened kudzu is that if it absorbs too much magic too quickly, the roots will explode. Apparently, shortly before the explosion, the aura starts rapidly shifting colors.

Duke's parabiologists have taken a keen interest in the awakened kudzu's possible uses. Beyond attempting to discover the possible mechanisms for absorption of magical energies, a lot of interest is focused on how ingesting freshly cut portions of the plant can restore an adept's vitality, but this is sometimes comes at the price of losing agency. Effects are much weaker with the leaves and vines than the root itself, but there is definitely a cumulative effect with the lower potency parts. This property seems to go miles to explaining the odd behavior exhibited by certain animals that live in and off of these awakened kudzu patches, but I'll talk about them another time.

All in all, it's just another part of living in the South. Those lucky fraggers out in west Texas and Oklahoma don't have to deal too much with this stuff, but back east of the Mississippi? We're lucky to have room to walk.

Attempting to move through regular kudzu on foot will halve your movement rate and give penalties to any agility tests (at least a -1 to dice pool and most -3--depending on how thick the kudzu is for a given area). Additionally, finding anything in kudzu of either variety will be more difficult (GM's discretion penalty, based off of the size of the object, but keep in mind that even just in moderate coverage finding something like a dropped rifle will be hard if you moved away from it).

The awakened variety might be a bit on the complex side. It is more difficult to move through (I'm thinking about 1/4th movement rate and -2 to -4 dice pool penalties for agility tests). 1/2 movement rate for astral movement through infested area (10 meter radius from plant), penalty to astral perception based off of level of infestation (not entirely sure how to set this up in a decently easy way to use, along with the plant blow up portion). When entering the plant's active radius, magic users have to perform an opposed test against the (thinking number of major roots present maybe?) and they take an amount of drain=to the number of net hits of the plant. This repeats every hour in which the character remains in the effected area/exits and reenters. Any spell cast within the plant's effective area manifests as one force lower (so to get a force 3 manabolt, you've got to cast it at force 4) and all spirits that come into the area lose a point of force. Magical items such as foci function at their force-1 while in the affected area, but no permanent change is made; however spirits do permanently lose force. If the drain caused by the plants, added to the force siphoned off of spirits and spells, is greater than some number I've not thought about long enough to nail down, the root explodes, releasing the magical energies.

Eating a whole leaf can reduce drain by one point. Each point regained in such a manner compels the character to mindlessly attempt to acquire and attempt to eat the most powerful magical item that the character knows about for one minute, heedless of the current situation (which if there is no known astrally active item would mean that the character would start gorging on the leaves, adding to the amount of time they are compelled). To resist this effect, make a will test (3). Each success reduces the amount of time the effect lasts by 20 seconds. Eating any portion of the root will remove all drain suffered by the character with the side effect of making the compulsion last for five minutes. To resist, use the same method as before. All portions of the plant lose all effectiveness 1 hour after being cut.