Warida

Warida - all the fun of war, none of the drudgery!

— Weekend Warriors ad

Formarly known as Florida, a state of the defunct United States, Warida is a chaotic warzone filled with madness, mayhem, and poor decisions. No, wait! Don't go - it's changed, I swear! Warida gets its name from its designation as an Economic Free Warzone, a place where everyone can go to get their war on. Here, war isn't just legal, it's monetized.
From bored executives to frustrated office drones looking to blow off some steam, come to Warida to enjoy the scenic view, diverse wildlife, and the rich target environment.

Warzone Incorporated

As an Economic Free Warzone, different rules apply than in Megacorpolis or its satellites. All kinds of corporate rules and laws are more or less waived in favor of a more quick-and-dirty approach to things. Once inside Warida proper, everything goes, from murder to theft to warcrimes. Biological weapons? Sure! Neurotoxic gas? Why not? It's only because there aren't really any nukes around anymore that they aren't used, either. If you've got it, flaunt it before someone does it to you. If you're asking yourself: why would anyone go to a place like this?
The answer, of course, is money baby!
There is something deep within men that yearn for adventure, for glory, for something exciting. Warida serves that primal need for doing stupid things for the sake of adrenaline and excitement, providing a playground where real war* with real consequences. An entire economy has sprung up to support/exploit this basic concept, from off-shore hotels to mercenary companies, but most of all: streamers, the lowest forms of life, and gamification.
There are about 17 on-going (not to mention finished ones) reality TV type shows going on at various state of organization, from completely unplanned to crafted experiences that regularly get griefed by other tourists. Countless streamers head into the warzone in search of likes and subscriptions, and are quite literally willing to kill for it. There's an entire sort of game-esque system arranged around it by corporations cashing in on the zone, where people can register to form parties or guilds, participate in planned events, and all other kind of nonsense that'd be funny if it wasn't for the artillery fire.
Besides that, you have movies, games, music, merch, and much more. Warida has something for everyone, at least if that "something" involves live fire. The only law is the one enforced by other tourists, which shifts and changes with every year. Right, we're in a sort of SAW movie-esque season, with lots of gruesome traps and horrible torture.
A small city of boats and platforms have sprung up on the waters around Warida to house all these combat-tourists or give them a place to recover. There are workshops for vehicles, shops for weapons and ammo, tailors that'll make your body armor really pop on the screen, and corpse-retrieval services if your buddy died in there. That doesn't even mention the countless mercs that loiter around to be hired as bodyguards or strikeforces for people with means. There's even an entire sub-economy centered around catering to protesters who come to Warida to rage against the inhumanity of the warzone... From a safe distance.

The Warzone

Since its pre-disaster days, Warida has shrunk by about 20,000 km^2, give or take. It's a consequence of rising oceans, eroding coastlines, government incompetence, and heavy artillery shelling. Unlike most of the continental US, Warida is only mildly irradiated (or so the ads say), and remains able to sustain a vertible cacophony of violent wildlife and inbred cannibals. The primary landmarks more or less remain, alternating between destruction and rebuilding depending on the season. In general, Warida is Florida diminished, but with a few points of particular interests to tourists.

The Magic Killdom

Persisting beyond death, the Magical Kingdom of the dead corporation is now a popular arena for family-friendly warfare. Mascot themed murderers are particularly popular here, with tourists forming factions based on fandoms and arguing over shipping to the point of slaughter. With it's fake castles and still-active rides serving as great set-pieces or sniper perches, the Killdom is ever-green in the eyes of viewers and publishers.

Plus, the ruins of Orlando give people a taste of that urban warfare and scavenge-for-supplies-fantasy

It's the most up-to-date part of Warida, with much of the destruction being cosmetic tha anything else. Every down season, it gets touched up, rides replaced, and mascots scraped off the pavement. It has that grungy kind of "broken down post-apocalyptic" vibe where things still inexplicably works... Because what's better than a firefight on a freakin' roller coaster?!

Evergreys

Thanks to climate change, excessive pollution, and brutal war, the once-vibrant and rich Everglades have been reduced to a grey, unpleasant wasteland. This sad monument to humanity's hubris and lack of long-term thinking is a great place to have high-speed boat chases or host high-stakes survival games. It smells like a wet gym sock filled with raw sewage that's been shoved off your nose, and visibility is usually down to about 10 to 20 meters due to the thick, acrid haze. Almost everything has died and rotted, replaced by air-dropped concrete blocks and prefabs structures, jutting out of the dead landscape like teeth from a corpse; which also decorate the Evergreys in various states of decay and impalement.

Despite all that, corps regularly top up the Evergreys with various wildlife, tweaked to survive at least long enough to maul someone. Rumors say that the next season will be "cybernetic monster"

The theme here is very much the biological nightmare, survivalism, and gritty horror. It was the site of the run-away success "The Grey" reality show, where people were dropped into the Evergrey in a scavenger hunt type of competition that descended into mud-covered camo and cannibalism in pretty quick orders. That's become a proud tradition to this day, and is a popular destination for people who vastly overestimate their capability for guerilla warfare and survival skills.

Kennedy Space Center

For a more high-tech vibe, tourists can instead go to the old Kennedy Space Center, one of the few places inside the Warzone with reliable electricity. This alone makes it a centerpiece in many battles, and whatever gang of murderous tourists that can claim it earn prestige, prizes, and a big fat target on their back. Fighting here isn't quite constant, but close. Everyone wants a piece of the space pie, and sometimes the place is split up between plenty of smaller groups that all vie for control.
Things aren't improved (or are, if you think about the ratings) by the corporate tendencies to try to claim the place themselves when they want to do some warring. Failing that, or when the show needs a boost, they hide a bunch of advanced toys scattered around the center for scavengers to find (something that has never backfired on them ever).

Maim-ami

With only about half of the former capital of Warida reduced to rubble and tears, Maim-ami is the place to go for the most exciting, high intensity warfare experience anywhere in the zone. From brutal, room to room clearing to drive-by with boats and more, Maim-ami has something for everyone. Like other urban environments in the warzone, game and show corps seed the place with goodies hidden all around the place, growing deadlier as the season or game goes on.
Naval combat has been especially popular as of late, with a sort of sea-people versus landlubber game going on. It would be generous to call most of the watercrafts "ships", usually slapped together with random pieces of whatever's around by people with very little idea of what they're doing. Even ships provided by corps or show-runners follow this sort of broken aesthetic, so it doesn't clash with the warzone. Still, the more you can make your ship stand out, the better your odds are of becoming a fan favorite with predictably garish result. Sometimes, tourists will even put their guns down to have a sort of fashion show contest with their boats.

The Others

Besides that, there's a few that are less important in this season of Warida: Fronteir, but that might change with the whimsy of the audience.

Fort Slaughterdale

Not actually a fort, to the disappointment of many tourists looking for safety. Similar to Maim-ami, but smaller, with lots of roof-to-roof patchwork bridges going on across canals and a real culture of sneaky ambushes.

The Pillages

Formerly a great place for tourists to go hunt for supplies, the former Villages has more or less been leveled by artillery fire in the exciting conclusion of "Wild Fire!", sold on all your digital platforms. Buy a piece of an artillery shell used to destroy it!

Not-So-Clearwater

Clearwater is unique in that is the only place in Warida that houses what people call a non-player faction: the Cult of Scientology. Instead of fleeing to Megacorpolis with the rest of humanity when the end seemed nigh, they've turned their Flag Land Base into a vertible fortress. As such, they are not citizens of Megacorpolis and aren't really considered people. Generations of inbreeding, living in pollution and filth have not been kind to them, and their E-Meters have detected a drastic increase in parastic alien ghost-spirits.
They're planning to do something about that, which will make for great TV.

Palm Breach

In a not-so-tragic twist of fate, Palm Beach (now Breach) did not survive the end of nation-states. Most of it is a series of craters from successive bombings and nuclear detonations, leaving even less of value than when it was whole.

Off-Shore

Outside the killing zone, Warida's waters are ringed by by a small, floating city that cater to the tourists heading into the war. Some use old aircraft carriers as a base to build their business off, while others expand from islands. There are hotels, stores, tourist hubs, nightclubs, and everything you might need to have a nice vacation.

WARMART

Hosted by a subsidiary of Centurion Arms & Armor on board of two carriers tied and welded together, WARMART is your one stop shop for all things killy. Although there are weapon and armor stores scattered across Warida's offshore city, WARMART is the premier destination. Like any good tourist traps, the prices are high and the amount of trinkets on sale staggering.
Centurion rents space to other independent outfits and corps onboard the WARMART to sell their stuff, too. So if you aren't there to buy or sell, there's plenty of work for enterprising individuals to find in all the industrial espionage and corporate skullduggery.

Paradise Bluff

The Bluff are a series of hotels and entertainment districts, guarded by high walls to safeguard against errant artillery or gun fire. It is carefully cultivated with artificial reefs and beaches, not to mention spectator towers that let you peek in on the action. Besides that, Paradise Bluff has some state-of-the-art and highly experimental medical facilities, making the Bluff the place to go when you really need to recover. Get a (new) leg up on your competition, flesh or chrome!
Second to that are the mental health facilities to help tourists work through all the things they saw (and did) inside the Zone. If what you did was especially egregious, there's specialists to help you justify it, too.
Because of this, a large chunk of the tourist-population here are recovering from whatever happen to them in the Zone. This, liberal amounts of drugs and alcohol, makes the beautiful Paradise volatile... Especially when tourists who clashed in the zone run into each other. These vendetta-style brawls make for popular online videos.

The Game Hub

The Hub is the beating heart of the entertainment biz in the zone. In stadiums or bars, people can watch video or streams of the going-ons in the zone, keep up with the shows, or follow individuals as they rise and fall on the scoreboards. It's also where most of the staged events are planned from and executed, serving as a sort of starting point for all kinds of shenanigans. The atmosphere is somewhere between a carnival, a casino, and a major sporting event, but with watching people.
Behind all the glitz and glamour is an extensive logistics and administrative network that makes everything running. Every bit of data from the zone is collected, analyzed, and modified in case it isn't quite what's needed. Then, it's beamed out on regular broadcast centers across the hub, or streamed to whatever device you want it to. Each big stream-package have their own subscription, and compete fiercely to steal talent and starpower from each other.
Putting the Game in Gamification, the hub is where war is turned into entertainment. Its where words like "player guilds", "levels", and "builds" gets tossed around. There are all the trappings of an MMO, from regular quests and bounties, to rewards for regular attendance and achievements. Because of that, its also where tourists meet and talk shop, make connections or plans, and set up to backstab each other.

The Big Cheese

With so much potential profit on the line, corps of all kinds flock to Warida for their slice of the bloodsoaked pie. From arms dealers to gameshow organizers, here are some of the most important ones.

Centurion Arms & Armor

Killing is our business and business is good for the Centurion corporation. As the premiere warmonger profiteers, they sell everything from ammo to artillery, boats and butchery. They aren't the only armsdealer in Warida, but they are by far the biggest and have by far the shiniest toys... And a pricetag to boot.
Customization is big business, too. There's not enough to just kill someone if you want to look good and get those please-like-and-subscribes, you have to look good doing it. Centurion offer a wide-ranging service of weapon, vehicle, and armor customization that draw inspiration from the most predatory of gaming microtransactions. Here, Centurion is one of the smaller outfits on the Warida market, but growing.

Rescue and Retrieval Services

It's not uncommon for tourists that things might've gotten out of control and wish they could just get out of there. For a price, they can! The Rescue and Retrieval Services will launch operations to extract living tourists, retrieve dead ones, or collect equipment left behind. On the lowest tier, they'll send footsloggers in to get you, but the price list goes from there to tanks or helicopters.
RRS sub-contracts the worst work to independent mercenaries, and keep the safer, more profitable work for themselves. They also use dynamic pricing for their services, meaning prices usually just go up and up as a retrieval goes on.
Another popular service is pre-extraction, sort of like a life insurance. It places a digital mark on the tourist that others can see, letting them know that there's a bounty for capturing them instead of killing them. This exciting new service have created an entire new layer of gaming experience for tourists, and source of profit.

Moto Construction

With all the explosions and reality shows going on, the interior of Warida is in a constant state of falling apart. Its only the well-paid efforts of Moto Construction that keeps things together-ish. A mix of stage-hands and wartime reconstruction crew, Moto heads into inactive parts of the warzone to rebuild or remake buildings that are destroyed or no longer popular. They help the various streams construct setpieces for their shows, fortification for events, and everything in between.
Moto's other business is for-profit prisons, so you can guess who gets sent into the warzone.

Authenticity Inc

The spider at the center of a vast web, Authenticity is the entertainment provider in Warida. They're the one who organizes all the various streams, welcomes travelers into the game, and broadcasts all the choice bits of gore. Through countless subsidiaries, they run quests, handle metrics, and all the rest of it. After slowly consuming every other rival in Warida, they sit at the undisputed top of a pile of corpses.
Authencitity is behind a good chunk of the reality shows that take place inside the zone, too, but are forced to share that space with established studios from Megacorpolis. When rival film crews run into each other in the zone, the fighting is just as fierce as that between tourists.
One of the most important part of their business is audience participation. Through their KillSwitch service, connected to everything that goes on in the Zone, people can help or hinder tourists of their choice. From airdrops to airstrikes to random lootboxes, next to anything here is available at escalating price points. With a motto of "integrated entertainment", the KillSwitch brings power to the people, when they really shouldn't have that.

Right Now

Business is thriving in Warida, with more tourists coming in than ever. Games and movies back in Megacorpolis have ignited a fresh new lust for glory and mayhem in mostly young men. More people mean more weapons, more ammo, more medical emergencies, and all that means more money for the corporations. And more money means greater spectacles, more bloodshed, and more war.
Corporate espionage and lawfare is at all time high, and the body count is rising inside and outside the zone. Back in Megacorpolis, merch, movies, and games are being released at a staggering pace to capitalize on the moment, just adding to the frenzy.

by Florida!

Turning Heel

Fame and infamy are the true currencies of the Zone. Tourists who earn enough of a rep can get by on just their name, or earn themselves a good bounty from others tourists looking to take that crown from them.
Still, the benefits (and subscriber count) that comes with being a bad guy is enough to encourage a thriving sub-culture of absolute scumbags who become villains for the cameras. These Heels roam the Zone with the express purpose of getting people to hate-watch them, no matter how many warcrimes it takes.

And that's why they call it "the Geneva Suggestions"

On-Going Shows & Their Horrible Consequences

The only thing better then waging war is watching someone else do it for your entertainment. There are always things going on inside Warida, and cameras are always ready to catch the carnage in such high definition that you can practically see the light leave their eyes as they die.

The Last Chance

Seasons: 23
Episodes: 144
Status: On-going

12 prisoners, one chance at a pardon and a cash prize. Last Chance is one of the oldest, longest running series and has been part of Warida since it became a thing.
As such, its had its up and downs, trying different gimmicks and rules every reason. After a few really shitty ones, the series is getting a breath fresh air and picking up in the ratings again.

Intern Wars

Seasons: 1
Episodes: 5
Status: On-going

The breakout hit of the year, Intern War pits 100 interns from various corporations against each other, nature, and every other tourist in a battle royale.
With some big names putting their intern on the line, corporate meddling and audience participation have been at an all time high, making the firefights all the more entertaining

Pro Versus Noobs

Seasons: 2
Episodes: 24
Status: Finished

PvN, as it's called by fans, puts a number of tourists in two teams, and task them with finding and defeating the 'Pro'. The Pro in question is some sort of special forces type soldier.
Season 1 saw the horrific and slow slaughter of both teams by Mac "Killflayer" McConnor, a veteran mercenary both heavily armed and augmented.
It got so bad that in episode 8, the teams were allowed to request reinforcements at the cost of various penalties, but to no avail. It turned Mac into a celebrity, and he's quit merc-work to instead star in movies and shows.
The Noobs won in season 2, when the last two noobs managed to incapacitate and torture to death the pro. That seemed good enough, and the show was finished.

Outbreaker

Seasons: 3
Episodes: 28
Status: Cancelled

Proving that no one ever learns anything from history, Outbreaker spread a fresh kind of contagion every season. The idea was to really ramp up the whole survivor and horror aspect.
It was met with sort of middling reviews until seasons 3, where the Slice of Life megacorp unleashed the [REDACTED] virus, causing [REDACTED] to rise beyond counting and [REDACTED] the so-called scarlet king.
There were no survivors.

Rumors are that there is a remake in the works.

High Score List - Kills

1. Rin2N3rDs
2. Solannies
3. RuneSkye
4. BrilStorm
5. Chi-Mo_87
6. Dr. Amézing
7. Ab-SIN-The
8. SH_Samurai_CC
9. Dracotrius
10. Pete

High Score - Warcrimes

1. xX_S1AY3R_Xx
2. Srg Killflayer
3. [REDACTED]
4. ---LINE----
5. BaronOfEth
6. KingJackOfSolomon
7. RizzPowder
8. AzurePixie99
9. TrisTheNeckRomancer
10. face2cow

Pursuit: Warida!

Seasons: 1
Episodes: 10
Status: Finished

Another spin-off from the popular "Pursuit!" show, it has a team of hunters try to find and capture or kill a single prey. Hunters don't have to work together either, so backstabbing and treachery is plentiful.
It only lasted a season due to poor ratings. Once it wrapped up, the survivors decided to stay in Warida as tourist-players.

Events

Sometimes, you just need to shake things up. Colloquially known as "events", these are when the corps that run things change the rules. Most of the time, there's a warning and time to prepare (or bail), but not always.
In the past, events have been things like encroaching poison gas that cut off areas of the zone, random artillery fire, or the release of huge monsters that tourists had to fight.
And of course, every Event is an excuse for a new set of equipment to be sold and streamer rewards to advertise.

Absolute Apocalypse

Seasons: 4
Episodes: 8
Status: Hiatus

The most expensive spectacle ever devised in Warida is the Absolute Apocaypse series. The concept was simple: A real war, winner takes all. Countless tourists, interns, and mercenaries took part in butchering each other for the camera.
But giving everyone tanks and rocket launchers isn't exactly cheap, and series have been on hiatus for a long time. Most believe it's just a matter of time before it's cancelled (which would probably be best for everyone).

Through The Eyes

Seasons: 6
Episodes: 54
Status: On-going

Through the Eyes follow individual tourists in their journey into the warzone, documenting their triumphs and struggles. Although the show is advertised as being raw and real with no outside outside interference, truth is the film crews meddle a lot.
Season 4 changed that and allowed none of that, and it was a total disaster. As a result, TTE is still struggling to regain its footing with some extreme shenaniganery.

High Score - Cannibalism

1. CruxMagica
2. Deadlian
3. SteveTheNotYeti
4. KWOLFE_888
5. RavenousRevYera
6. Cat&CaroCannCombo
7. EdeNOM
8. ERROR_USERNAME_NOT_FOUND
9. CWhoLouC
10. Srg. Killflayer

Warcore

Both a fashion and a style of music, Warcore was born from the heart of Warida. Its a glorious celebration of warfare, gaudy and over the top.
In fashion, it incorporates pieces of armor, shell-casing, and other artifacts of war - not to mention lots of camo. Necklace of teeth or such is considered a bit much, but some on the more avant-garde end of things are considering it.
In music, artillery and gunfire are part of the tune. The whizz of bullet, the roar of explosions, all that good stuff become the core which the rest of the song is centered around.
No surprise, but Warcore is very popular with Merckies and their ilk.

by Techware Australia

In other words, there's been no better time to visit Warida!
Book your trip today and get 15% off your first weapon purchase!