The Voodoo BrothersReport
English：The Voodoo Brothers · Characters
Ponk and Screamer the False, the two skeletons holding the Tower of Abuse. They have been decapitating their own kind and rebuilding them into selfless puppets for a thousand years.
The wanted poster describes two frauds posing as healers and "ancient voodoo practitioners". What the Voodoo Brothers are actually doing, in an old laboratory tower out in Venge, is running a production line: taking still-conscious skeletons apart into puppets with no self left in them. It has been running for close to a thousand years.
The poster and the reality
The same poster has hung in the taverns of the United Cities and the Holy Nation:
A pair of exceedingly clever and cruel frauds, wanted for gross malpractice after posing as medical and "ancient voodoo" practitioners in several cities.
The bounty is 20,000 Cats a head. The warrant misses the point entirely — the civilised world sees two quacks and not what they are really doing: the tower is stocked with packs of headless skeletal thralls, released into the wilderness to hunt down passers-by[V1 0:00:36].
The game never explains where the "voodoo" nickname came from, but one commentator finds it apt: they turn the bodies of their own kind into will-less, obedient walking dead, an image that overlaps closely with the zombie legends of real-world Haitian Vodou[V1 0:00:36][V2 0:14:21].
The two brothers
Ponk
Ponk is a P4 MkII skeleton. In Kenshi that model is all but exclusive to high-ranking units — General Hat-12, General Jang, the Head of Agriculture, and Cat-Lon himself are all P4s. These chassis are structurally fragile (torso durability of only 150) but learn science and crafting skills far faster than ordinary models, and are generally taken to have been designed for command and research.
By his companion's account, Ponk spends most of his time at a research bench. He carries a Meitou-grade Holed Sabre.
Screamer the False
Screamer is a Screamer MkI skeleton, equipped with a Meitou-grade Heavy Polearm. His name is itself a clue: the game files contain a character who was never implemented — General Screamer the True, a MkII chassis meant to sit at Cat-Lon's side as the Empire's most trusted right hand[V1 0:07:47]. His specifications are superior across the board: max-crafting armour, a Meitou naginata, combat stats at level 80.
In other words, the one alive in the game is a counterfeit modelled on a prototype that never existed in the world. Following that thread, one line of speculation holds that the False was built by Ponk's own hands in his derangement, an imitation of the court he once served — put a "General Screamer" at your side and the Empire still stands[V1 0:07:47].
He is also the weakest Screamer MkI in the game, and the only one with a bounty on his head.
Humans get through a few lasers and think they're invincible…
The Tower of Abuse
The Tower of Abuse stands in Venge, the headquarters of the Thrall Masters faction and an ancient tech laboratory besides. It reliably holds ancient science books and an AI core, plus two skeleton repair beds free for the using — assuming you have cleared out everything else inside first.
Roaming inside and around it are packs of "Thralls" and "Weak Thralls": skeletons decapitated and reprogrammed, without armour, carrying ancient or skeleton-smith weapons, and attacking anything alive on sight. They are the concrete evidence of a millennium of Voodoo Brother output.
Strictly speaking the entire Thrall Masters faction consists of enslaved skeletons, attacking travellers on the orders of the tower's two masters. They fight almost anything that moves, with one exception: the other mechanical factions in the region — including the skeleton legion of the Second Empire exiles — with whom they coexist peacefully[V3 0:06:15]. That relations table is a clue in itself: the Thrall Masters do not treat the old Empire's rank and file as enemies.
As long as either Ponk or Screamer lives, these thralls keep respawning endlessly across Venge, the Grey Desert and The Eye. Only once both are killed or imprisoned do the Thrall Master patrols stop spawning altogether.
Thrall conversion: what the game actually says
Before piling on the speculation, it is worth marking out what can be confirmed. On thrall conversion, the game reveals exactly one thing: the process involves removing the skeleton's head, and once the head is gone the body still functions and still perceives its surroundings — it has simply lost free will and become an automaton that can be directed[V2 0:12:41].
Everything else — how many steps the process takes, what equipment it needs, how much of the subject is left — the game does not say. The only circumstantial evidence comes from Agnu: his head is still attached, yet he has been tortured for nearly a thousand years, and his voice module has been destroyed. One line of reasoning argues from this that a "will-breaking" stage precedes decapitation, and that destroying the voice module may be part of it; but the game offers no details, so this step can only be counted as a reasonable guess[V2 0:13:13].
Where they came from
The game never states the Voodoo Brothers' origins directly. What follows is the mainstream reconstruction the community has assembled from available evidence — it is not official lore.
The reasoning hinges on a chain of interlocking questions:
- Where did the thrall conversion technology come from? Nowhere in the game besides the Tower of Abuse is there a second facility with this capability, nor a second faction that knows the technique. Not even Cat-Lon's own stronghold in the Ashlands has one. That points to a single source[V1 0:05:03].
- It cannot be First Empire technology. Had the First Empire held it, they would have used it to suppress the skeleton uprising, and the Empire would never have fallen.
- Which leaves the Second Empire. And the individual who holds this technique while matching the high-ranking P4 profile points to Ponk — the imperial leadership (General Hat-12, Head of Agriculture General Jang, Cat-Lon himself) are uniformly P4, and so is Ponk[V1 0:05:03].
The inference drawn from this is that Ponk was the "thrall master" who carried out mass thrall conversion in the late Second Empire[V1 0:05:03]. The extended version of the story runs: Cat-Lon, sinking into paranoia in his later years, concluded that the Empire's true enemy was free will itself, and handed the conversion work to Ponk, a product of the medical branch who had discovered how to erase a skeleton's self without killing it. The workshop was placed in Venge — where the orbital death ray sweeps continuously, no living thing comes close, and nobody arrives to mount a rescue. Damaged soldiers were sent in first under "special repairs", later upgraded to "modification and improvement", and so they vanished batch by batch.
And after the Empire dissolved, Ponk did not stop. Some accounts have him ostracised by his own kind, others that his location was simply never exposed; either way he went on executing an order nobody was giving any more, until memory bloat dragged him into madness as well — until, in his confused cognition, he conflated himself with the sovereign he had served, began replicating a legion of his own, and built with his own hands a counterfeit "General Screamer" to keep beside him.
One version tells the ending more coldly still: the Voodoo Brothers were originally just two skeletons Cat-Lon assigned to a task, and over a thousand years their CPUs degraded until the duty itself set like concrete into a compulsion. The one who gave the order is long gone, and they are still hunting their own kind, still decapitating, still building thralls — for no purpose, simply because it is the only routine they have left[V2 0:14:21].
The one that was never taken apart
In a cage on the tower's upper floor sits Agnu — a Second Empire security skeleton on whom the conversion failed completely. He has been held for nearly a thousand years, and has neither been turned into a thrall nor broken down.
Beside a production line that has not stopped in a thousand years, he is the single returned item.
Tactical notes
- Both wear [High] grade armour (30% chance of [Specialist]), with weapons from the "Cross" workshop.
- The two Meitou-grade weapons (the Holed Sabre and the Heavy Polearm) are among the main reasons to attack the place, along with guaranteed ancient science books and an AI core.
- As long as one of them survives, the tower's non-unique inhabitants and supplies respawn once the player has been away for a while — which makes the Tower of Abuse a farmable source of income.
- The tower is full of cages, making it a popular place to train Assassination and melee skills.
- One odd detail: neither Ponk nor Screamer carries a first aid kit, yet if the player locks themselves into the cage at the top of the tower, they will still bandage your wounds — regardless of race.
See also
Video citations
- The Origins of Agnu and The Voodoo BrothersHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
- History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | Gangs and Bandit CrewsCivilizationEx