Loading the Canon: Reavers

In the original series, Reavers are presented to us as a kind of "Boogy Man." They were dangerous, primal, violent, madmen who attacked colonies out of the Black, raping and killing (not always in that order) anyone that got on their way. They showed up just often enough in Firefly to add some genuine tension without being overused, as so often happens with Zombie class baddies. And yes, Reavers fill the same role as Zombies. In any case, they were all batshit insane and were far more likely to try and eat you than anything else.

Serenity gave us the origin of the Reavers and, as a bonus, an explanation as to why River Tim was an emotional basket case.

As a violent enemy goes, Reavers are great for terrorizing a small ill-equipped colony. From what we see of them, they're violent and aggressive and scary to look at, and fight like berserkers. They favor melee over ranged combat so they can kill you up close and personal, but do use ranged weapons - usually of the makeshift variety. In fact, I don't think we ever see them using "normal" ranged weapons. Reavers seem to like thinks like sawblade and rebar launchers over guns, which actually makes sense given their resources.

Reavers, as an enemy though, have a number of logical problems.

First: Serenity established that the Reavers are the result of an adverse reaction to a chemical agent known as G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, which was dumped into the atmosphere of the colony world Miranda as part of an effort to pacify the population. It's established that 1/10th of 1% of the population reacted badly and went batshit insane, while everyone else basically died.

Miranda's given a population of 30 million people, which would leave us with about 30 thousand Reavers. That's not actually a lot of people. For comparison, Flagstaff, Arizona, best known for a university and two astronomical observatories, Lowell and a US Naval Observatory, has a population of about 60 thousand. Being Arizona, they probably have more guns than the Reavers do too.

The Reaver population, incidentally, is about the same as two Divisions of soldiers.

Second: With the exception of one guy, in one episode, there doesn't seem to be a way to make new Reavers. From the episode Bushwhacked, Mal states:

"They made him watch. He probably tried to turn away, and they wouldn't let him. You call him a survivor? He's not. A man comes up against that kind of will, the only way to deal with it, I suspect, is to become it."

While this gives us a (mostly implausible) way to make new Reavers, it doesn't seem like they'd ever keep up with the inevitable attrition. And attrition would be inevitable. It's stated a number of times that Reaver boats "run without containment," which is tantamount to suicide. Add to it a very violent life, the fact that they self mutilate, which will lead to infection and all the complications that come with it, and your initial population of Reavers is going to be dieing off.

Third: Reavers are not soldiers. While a few boatloads swarming a small frontier town will make a royal mess of the town and leave a lot of dead bodies in its wake, assuming the town's not armed like Player Characters, Reavers are going to be no match for a unit of professional soldiers. They're Berserkers. They swarm and fight hand to hand. They don't have a lot of ranged firepower. And they want to take their targets alive so they can eat them.

The fear factor Reavers have comes from their reputation and appearance, not from them actually being unstoppable killing machines. Where a GM could say that exposure to the Pax was the equivalent of some kind of super soldier serum, there's nothing anywhere in the series or BDM to support that. They're just crazy people. Violent, self-mutilating, crazy people.

Fourth: I have to state this as a question, unfortunately. But why don't Reavers attack each other? The Pax made 99.9% of the people exposed to it get so mellow they pretty much just lay down and let themselves die. The rest went hyper-violent and started killing and eating people. We can logically assume that the Reaver's first targets were the other colonists on Miranda, who were just kinda lounging around waiting to die anyway.

But when they're gone, what next? The implication from the show is that somehow all the remaining Reavers on Miranda got together and moved into whatever boats were laying around, and turned into packs of raiding mobs who never appear to fight each other.

Huh?

Fifth: Also a question. How have they managed to maintain their ships when they're all batshit insane and don't really have a steady supply of parts? Maybe somehow the Reavers act like Care Bears with each other, but that still doesn't explain how they keep their boats in the air. Considering the few times we encounter them in the series they don't take their prize as salvage, where are they getting the bits? In Serenity it seems their boats are all cobbled together from spares they've salvaged from their kills, which makes sense. But why are they hanging out in orbit, in ships running without containment on their reactors, when there's a perfectly good planet right next door? Which, incidently is at the ass end of the 'verse with no shipping traffic?

Huh?

I could go on, but you get the point. From a logical perspective, the Reavers are a terrible long term enemy. In a game set somewhere between 6 and 20 years after the events of Serenity, there shouldn't be many left. We only have 30K to start with, and there was a space battle at the end of Serenity which the Alliance obviously won. That leaves what must be a large fraction of the Reaver fleet destroyed, with the remainder scattered across the 'Verse.

Part of the Miranda Incident, as I tend to call the broadcast in Serenity, was spreading knowledge about the Reavers across much of the 'Verse. That means the Alliance is probably no longer denying their existence, and something is almost certainly being done to remove the threat they represent.

Now, in the SecondLife stories we're participating in, Reavers have been an ongoing menace with a number of explanations as to why we're still seeing them. There's some plot threads that actually involve why there's more of them, none of which can actually be considered canon.

In spite of the Reavers being rather flawed, they're still a major baddie in our stories. So how to we reconcile it?

We can (and probably should?) leave much of the 'society' of the remaining Reavers unexplained. They never explained it in the movie or series, and we don't need to have it explained to work with it in-game. They don't kill each other, and they can somehow keep their boats in the air. Fair enough.

Where did the replacements come from? There's no canon explanation, but we could go with the ones presented in-story: that the new Reavers are somehow the results of further experiments with derivatives of the Pax. Why would someone experiment with the Pax and end up with more Reavers? Good question. But it is a functional explanation for something we have in the story.

Bottom line? Reavers are part of the Firefly/Serenity mythology and we accept them as such. They do make good enemies for a pickup firefight, and the players like 'em. So, logical or not, Reavers it is.