Quick Overview
The Venture Company pursues commercial extraction through industrial camps and machinery. In the Stonetalon Mountains, its woodcutting operations have made engineering and control of the forest matters of open conflict. Competition over inventions and employees draws rival goblins into efforts to steal its plans and disrupt its leadership.
Full History
The Venture Company's presence in the Stonetalon Mountains is built around the conversion of woodland into industrial resources. Its machinery gives that work a scale beyond the labor of individual cutters. The Super Reaper 6000 stands at the center of a contest over the company's engineering: an enormous woodcutting machine whose plans are valuable enough to draw the attention of competitors. Control of the forest and control of the knowledge used to exploit it have become closely connected.
The company's workforce crosses racial lines. Gerenzo Wrenchwhistle, a gnome, directs work that the displaced goblin Ziz Fizziks resents. Fizziks formerly worked for the Venture Company but has since been hired by Sputtervalve. He wants the new employer's confidence and offers his knowledge of the old operation as a way to earn it. He cannot safely retrieve the plans himself because Gerenzo wants him dead, so he asks an outsider to take them from the machine's operators. Corporate rivalry has become personal enough to require armed intervention.
The dispute continues beyond the blueprints. Gerenzo remains a target because his leadership sustains the operation. The struggle therefore reaches the workers carrying technical information, the machines reshaping the landscape, and the specialist supervising them. The Venture Company is more than a solitary inventor's workshop. Its local power depends on a functioning industrial organization, while its enemies look for the people and knowledge on which that organization relies. Stonetalon's forests are the ground on which those competing ambitions meet.
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