VagrantsReport

English：Vagrants　·　Factions

The drawer the game keeps its poor people in. It is not an organisation and it does not appear on the faction list; what it holds is starving robbers in the desert, thugs picking fights in bars, and the meat shields the Reavers drag around.

The Vagrants are not an organisation. The game does not list them among the factions, because this one is "not real" — like the Drifters, it is a category rather than a group, holding people whose situations rhyme: the poor, the hungry, and the ones somebody else owns. They cluster in the United Cities, mostly in the north of the Empire.

Who is on the roster

That last one needs a note: the ordinary Swamper Non-Gang belongs to the Swampers; only the weaker variant is listed on the Vagrants' roster.

Starving Vagrants: the cheapest prey in the desert

Starving Vagrants are the most common members of this faction and among the weakest enemies in the game — every attribute and weapon skill sits between 0 and 10. They wear [Shoddy] armour (5% chance of [Standard]) and carry things like the Horse Chopper, Staff, Spiked Club, Iron Club and Iron Stick, over rag shirts and rag loincloths.

They are a small step above Hungry Bandits: slightly better gear, and some of their weapons have an edge, which makes them slightly more dangerous. The step is not big enough to change the outcome.

What actually defines their position is not their combat value but their price. Manhunters and Slave Hunters single them out precisely because they are easy to take and easy to sell — and the player does exactly the same thing: knock them out, carry them to a Slave Shop, about 400 Cats each. It is the smoothest money in the early game.

On their origins the wiki offers one inference: these are most likely the outcasts squeezed to the bottom by the Empire. That the Empire treats poverty itself as criminal tendency is set out more fully under United Cities and Slavery.

The half that sits in bars

The other half of the Vagrants are not out in the wilderness but sitting in bars. These Bar Thugs are randomly named characters in several variants, each with its own dialogue and its own use:

There is one more thing worth knowing about bar thugs: their bounty chances are not low. The man picking a fight with you in the bar may happen to be a cheque.

Who does not attack them

The Vagrants sit at relation 0 with three factions, meaning neither side starts anything: the Rebel Farmers, the Anti-Slavers and the Empire Peasants. Those three names in a row are themselves a statement of social position — all of them outside or at the bottom of the imperial order.

Every other faction gets the default relation of -10.

Two things that get confused

Vagrant Camps do not belong to the Vagrants. The shack camps out in The Great Desert and Heng are owned in the files by the Empire Peasants; what squats in them are people too poor to get through a city gate, with the occasional Rebel Farmer mixed in. Similar name, different owner.

There are two sets of "Bar Thugs". The game also has a formal faction called Bar Thugs, but it contains exactly one character, the Swamper Bar Thug, and only in Shark. Every variant in the table above hangs off the Vagrants instead. Both turn up in the same bar in Shark, and the only reliable way to tell them apart is the name.

One world state: they get the Ark

The Vagrants own no settlements — with one exception. Ark, the capital of the Reavers, falls to this faction under a specific world state: once both Valamon and the Crab Queen are dead or imprisoned, the Ark becomes a place squatted by vagrants, with the throne room converted into a canteen.

That is probably the only time this faction moves up in the world.

See also

• Drifter
• Reaver Slave
• Slave Shop
• Slavery
• United Cities
• Empire Peasants