The Redrum Boys are the outlaw gang that, until today, owned Palace.
Palace is the loathsome pinnacle of civilization within the western Dust Barrens’ arid hills, but no kinder for its station. Once a proud city-state, now little more than a crumbling labyrinth of collapsed mines, battered buildings, and broken dreams. Homesteaders, exiles, bushwhackers, and deserters abide by the code of the borderlands, where laws are lacking, only honor among thieves ensures cooperation, and rights are settled by gunfights. Incorporation carpetbaggers have often attempted to enforce land claims, but acquisitionists rarely survive their encounter with the Redrum Boys, an outlaw gang who see themselves as masters of the fledgling breakaway state. They leave a few alive, stripped of all but their clothes and a pound of flesh poorer for their efforts, to tell the tale to other would-be capitalists.
They control everything around here (or they did). The mayor and the sheriff are in their pockets, effectively puppet figureheads. As CK used to be a Palace law-man himself, he's familiar with the RBs. The RBs are sworn enemies of the Incorporation, and to give you an idea of who the Incorporation are...
Covett City rises from the tarry swampland: a slag-slathered behemoth, a hive of factories and steel skyscrapers that pierce the heavens and blight the earth. From plush boardrooms atop the tallest tower ever built reigns the Trust and their miserly master, Melancthon P. Murrsom. The city swells, bloated by the teeming and exploited masses living and dying by the whims of the Incorporation. This foul profiteer collective leers over the Lost Frontier, avaricious as a buzzard above a field of ripe corpses. Not a single soot-blackened coin is spent in Covett City that they do not profit from. They rule the Incorporation, and the Incorporation rules the modern world. Every building in the city, all industries, all ideas any dare to dream are theirs to lease and to plunder. Any enterprise—be it coal mine, haberdashery, or crocskinnery—is coerced, indebted, subsidized, and bled dry by their Incorporation. All manner of earthly, artificial delights are crafted in their haven of hedonism and endless consumption. This city, Covett City, this factory capital of the world is subjected to countless, untold atrocities and experimentations, both industrial and technological, that ensure the Incorporation’s monopoly and supremacy. Everything can be made here, no tradition is safe from facsimile or counterfeit, and anything not found in stores can be ordered bespoke from an indentured artisan and delivered by debt-shackled courier. To ensure the endless material hunger metastasizes throughout the Lost Frontier, roiling trains shriek through Cathedral Station like knives in a swine.
The Redrum Boys have kept the Incorporation at bay for years, but now that Marshall Knapp, de-facto ruler of the next city eastward — Fort Gullet — has signed his city over to Incorporation ownership, the Incorporation are able to legally ship train-loads of soldiers and equipment into the Dust Barrens, and have decided to take Palace by force, partially as an act of retribution against the Redrum Boys, partially because they want those lands, and partially at the behest of Knapp himself, who has his own ambitions to expand his control of the Dust Barrens.
