leaderhead background text

[Jabie]

16. Santa Destroy (No More Heroes)
... (Out of ideas, but have a very special request for #20
20. Jubilee (Fall from Heaven) (Please, please give me this one easter egg! ¡Por favor!)

17. Lave (The name of the first planet in Elite)

18. Central Cavern (The first room in Matthew Smith's seminal Spectrum classic, Manic Miner)

19. Meier (Do I really need to spell this one out?)

 

[KillerClowns]

And now, I would like to actually finish off my list.
17. Tristram (Diablo)
18. Azeroth (Warcraft)
19. Aiur (Starcraft)
I am truly ashamed of producing a list with only no Blizzard references, so I amended this near unforgivable error.
EDIT - Oh, wow. Ninja duel time?

 

[davidlallen]

Meischen is a dice/bluff game for two or more players. I'd point you to an Internet reference but I can't find one. So, here's the rules in brief...

Any suggestions for a gamer-related reference which is less ... obscure?

I had made a nice flag for Peter's civ, Fortress City, based on a graphic like the "rook" chess piece. Probably I can recycle that name/flag somewhere else. But I think "Lost Boys" and the Peter Pan tie-in takes it in a slightly different direction. Any suggestion for a civ name and related flag which covers gamers? I am tempted to use the wizard logo shown in the TSR wikipedia page. But that may be too obscure for most people.

 

[Jabie]

How about....

*****

“Whatever you’re holding in your right hand, drop it.”

A piece of moulded plastic fell to the ground.

“What’s that?”

The boy looked down at the dice. One.

“A critical failure. You've failed your reflexes save.”

“Wha..” Too slow. Karl flew up into the air, a rope firmly tied around his left leg. His gun dropped harmlessly to the ground.

 

[Jabie]

But I think "Lost Boys" and the Peter Pan tie-in takes it in a slightly different direction.

Don't think in terms of whimsy, think Battle Royale or Lord of the Flies. Peter represents regresion and a return to innocence in a brutal world, but that's not necessarily a good thing.

Incidentally, JM Barrie was a Freudian. In the pantomime, the actor who played the children's father was also meant to play Captain Hook. If Stein were Peter's father, you've got a little nice tragedy arc...

 

[Jabie]

Here's one for Mick. The theme is liberation...

*****

Mick smoked a cheap cigarette, looked out over the South Pacific and considered his options. There weren’t many and most of them looked pretty bad. The States were out, Feds had him pegged there. Probably same for Western Europe, thanks to Interpol. Eastern Europe looked promising, til you figured that it lay somewhere between Sicily and Russia and someone was bound to overstay their welcome.

China looked dicey, good opportunities if you had the contacts and could get out before the inevitable revolution. Too many unknowns, language problems too. Africa was a basket-case, South America wasn’t much better.

He could rat out, if he ever found a cop that wasn’t on the take, avoided becoming the latest meat in downtown Tokyo slum-stew and didn’t end up starting a new career as a prison punch-ball. No, that damn Snakehead had him over a barrel, and he knew it.

Six months moving freight. New life, new opportunities. Meet a nice fella, Cinderella? He tried to quash a sensation of guilt. Best not to think too much about the cargo, selling their sweat and dignity. The land of the free could cost you more than you could owe.

And the cargo had gotten really odd recently. It used to be poor, earnest faces willing to trade one bag of misery for another, but nowadays Mike saw more and more unexpected guests. Same desperation, just in nicer clothing. Something big was going down. Try not to worry about it.

And then the sky turned the colour of a nicotine stain, and Mick had a whole new set of options to consider.

 

[KillerClowns]

Here's one for Mick. The theme is liberation...

I love it, although it is a bit on the short end. That could have been your intention. I feel you could expand on Mick's background, or what happened after "the sky turned the color of a nicotine stain." On a side note, that is a brilliant way of putting it.
I like the tone of Mick's potential entry, and if you can't expand it without sacrificing it, then leave it as it is.

 

[Jabie]

I love it, although it is a bit on the short end. That could have been your intention. I feel you could expand on Mick's background, or what happened after "the sky turned the color of a nicotine stain." On a side note, that is a brilliant way of putting it.
I like the tone of Mick's potential entry, and if you can't expand it without sacrificing it, then leave it as it is.

Mick is essentially as much as prisoner as the slaves in the cargo hold. For Mick, the Scourge represents liberation. Mick is free from his Yakuza Waka Gashira, the slaves in the cargo hold are free from working in sweat-shops (or worse). By ending the piece just after the Scourge the reader is left to decide how Mick reacts, again reinforcing the overarching theme.

Will Mick learn from his mistakes and take the path of his redemption or will he go back to what he knows and implement the Slavery Civic? That's up to the player to decide...

I think you could be right about the brevity of the piece, but I'm not sure where I could end the text without losing the tone. It's possible the start might be expanded with Mick being "trapped" into criminality from some reason, but that runs the Da Vinci Code risk of unnecessarily spelling things out to the reader.

Here's a stab at a fourth paragraph (after "and he knew it" and before "six months moving feight"), which hints at poverty, resentment and an unstable family life...

********

Yep, he'd been all over the world. Different wallpaper in the can, but the same sh*t in the sewers. Despite all the flags and colours, people were the same. Haves and have-nots. Couldn't have the rich without the poor. Mutually dependent, each hating the other, like rowing parents. Ying and Yang. Least the orientals were honest about it, which is why he'd originally come here, offering his services.

 

[davidlallen]

I like this, but I also thought it was a little short. I agree the ending would be hard to extend. But, more could be added at the beginning, such as a conversation between Mick and a subordinate/victim/customer.

 

[KillerClowns]

I like this, but I also thought it was a little short. I agree the ending would be hard to extend. But, more could be added at the beginning, such as a conversation between Mick and a subordinate/victim/customer.

I'd honestly say you could put it in as it is right now, but if Jabie comes up with anything else, be ready to add it in.

 

[KillerClowns]

UU Suggestion time.
Fortress City: Space Marine (replaces Guardians)
No, not real Space Marines. Power-mad nerds playing the part with real guns. Peter's soldiers are the best trained in the game, and Peter's main advantage is the raw strength of his military; every footsoldier comes packing Drill I, City Garrison I, Combat I. I'm thinking of adding another free promo to his Guardians, specifically City Raider I, to seal the deal and make his Space Marines second only to Utes in pure versatility.
Graphically, for starters, you could use an actual space marine from a futuristic mod, but if any brilliant artists want to lend a hand, I'd love to see something that looks like a nerd's attempt to recreate sci-fi armor from post-apocolyptic scrap metal.
EDIT: Even if you don't go for the Space Marine idea, I still believe making Peter's speciality footsoldiers goes great both with his trait mix and his background. In the latter case, it seems fitting that a people led by someone who played one too many FPSes would be really good footsoldiers; not as well organized as Viktor James' men, perhaps, but crack shots with incredibly good morale and a reason to kill as many as possible... cake.

 

[Jabie]

I'd honestly say you could put it in as it is right now, but if Jabie comes up with anything else, be ready to add it in.

*Blushes* If I ever get my act together, write that book of short stories and get published remind me to send you the ISBN, KillerClowns.

David, you wanted an older and more worldly woman. Here's a first stab. For reasons which will become readily apparent, she should have the Protective trait.

***********

Ding Dong Bell

Martha checked her dress in the wing mirror one last time before walking up the drive to the house and pressing the doorbell. The woman who answered carried an air of professionalism. She was rich, driven and probably viewed children as a lifestyle accessory.

“I’m here about the job.”

“Do you have any experience?”

Twenty years, thought Martha, momentarily considering how quiet her house sounded now. She produced a certificate from her handbag. Mrs Williams eyed her suspiciously.

“I’ll put you on a week’s probation. Jeremy! Lucy! Come meet your new nanny.”

Pussy’s in the well

“Nanny,” said Jeremy, as he voraciously devoured his ice-cream, “look at the funny clouds.”

Martha gazed upwards. It was as if someone had pulled the plug from the bath and the clouds were draining down the plughole.

“Jeremy. Get inside. NOW”

Who put in her in?

“We did this,” ranted the man on the television. His eyes were puffy and his makeup ran as he wept in front of the camera. He openly drank from a bottle of scotch, but if there was a director in the studio, he showed no sign of caring.

“We did this, all of us. Just a little more. Pleeease. This is my last one. But it never is it? I’ll give up when I’ve got a wide screen telly, when I’ve bought that new suit, when I’ve got that new kitchen. And we can keep on taking and taking and what’s worst is we’d do it over again and again if we had the chance. And who gives a toss if some poor kid in the third world broke his back making it, at least it was cheap, at least I didn’t have to pay much. Only now it’s time to pay. We’ve pissed off the dead and now they’ve come back to haunt us and things are gonna get an awful lot worse and if anyone’s still watching I suggest you save yourself trouble and beat the rush.”

Martha didn’t reach the remote control in time before the screen went red. Lucy didn’t stop crying for an hour.

Little Johnny Thin

“What the hell did you do to her?” Martha caught sight of the half empty bottle of milk and the can of weed-killer on the kitchen table.

“It’s for the best. She wouldn’t...”

But Martha never learnt what Lucy wouldn’t. Mr Williams slumped to the floor.

Who pulled her out?

The biker had pointed a gun at Jeremy. That was his first and only mistake. He didn’t even see the wrench ‘til it was too late.

Martha looked up the motorbike up and down. It was looked serviceable. It had a couple of hundred miles left in it, maybe more if she was lucky. As she strapped Jeremy onto the back, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She no longer recognised the face staring back at her.

Little Tommy Stout

“Treat her right,” the old timer told the refugee, as he tilled the fields, “and Mayor Martha will make you one of the Family. But don’t you dare try to cross her...” He looked out over the grain fields at the scarecrows, flapping in the winds like forgotten children's dolls.

 

[KillerClowns]

@Jabie: Nice. Really nice. Suitably dark; I'm not so good at that sort of thing. And you saved me the trouble of having to triple post, to boot!
Anyways, I am really, really tired of having those unpronouncable Zulu names for Kingtown. So I came up with a few, pulled randomly from memory and/or out of nowhere. There's no particular pattern; I simply came up with names that had a noir sound to them, and could actually be pronounced by lazy Americans. I did arrange them (Kingtown aside) from most urban (at the beginning) to most apocolyptic (at the end), to represent the colonists gradually accepting the new shape of the world.

1. Kingtown
2. Easy Street
3. Fat Cat Lane
4. Hardscrabble Road
5. Devil's Alley
6. Hell's Kitchen
7. Fat Al's Diner
8. Old Farm
9. Greasy Spoon
10. Pit Stop
11. Casino Town
12. Hicktown
13. Dirt Road Crossing
14. Nameless Tavern
15. Abandoned Mill
16. Nowhere
17. Weathered Rock
18. The Wastes
19. Scorched Fields
20. Despair

 

[davidlallen]

@killer, thanks for the list. I've put it in. I'm pretty sure you know enough about XML to fix up your local copy of the mod?

The remaining "default" city names are for Children of the Fire/Tinker, Nighthawks/Brian, and Centurions/Ares. Tinker and Brian also don't have backgrounds (since I want more of a biker background for Brian). The Ares names aren't horrible, since the leader background is kind of Roman. So I guess when we fill in Tinker and Brian the rest of the names will go.

Given all the discussion recently about building useful units out of junk, I'd really like Tinker to have a junkyard as his base. We can toss the name "Children of the Fire" since I don't have any cult-ish artwork to go along with it.

@jabie, that's great. Let's discuss about how to fit it in. I had requested the older woman type background for a LH which C.Roland was working on, but I haven't heard back from him in a few weeks, so I am not sure if that is still going on.

We have Debbie available without a background. I have assigned her "Guild of Steel" and a white flag, but we could move that around. Also it would be possible to use the Halloween Jane leaderhead if we moved Halloween Jane's background and names to somebody else (even a man, since it started out as Jack rather than Jane.)

Do you have any thoughts on civ name, flag, and city names for Martha? The rhyme is easy enough to google, but I guess it's British or at least as an American, I'd never heard it. Somehow I got Winnie the Pooh stuck in my head but I don't think Winnie or Tigger would be very inspirational on a flag

 

[Jabie]

Ding Dong Bell is a British nursery rhyme dating back at least to the Elizabethan era. Variants of it appear in Shakespeare. It counterplays both innocence and cruelty and felt perfect for the piece. <RANT> Incidentally, is anyone else concerned about how mursery rhymes and skipping songs are being replaced by advertising jingles? </RANT>

The television presenter is drawn from a mixture of Dancing with tears in my eyes by Ultravox and the character Howard Beale from the movie Network. On a side note, the "I don't have to tell you things are bad..." speech ought to be considered for the flavour text for the Radio tech.

Martha is a biblical name. It's a fitting name for someone as (perhaps jusifiably) over-protective. Her civ should be called The Family, which strikes just the right level of domestic cosiness with sinister undertones.

Hallowe'en Jane can easily be switched back to Hallowe'en Jack. That's the original name of the character from Diamond Dogs anyway.

I've a loose idea for your Junkyard King character. He'll probably be called Ray and have a background not entirely disimilar to The Rocket, which you can find in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

 

[davidlallen]

The Tinker background concept sounds right.

I am thinking of using Halloween Jane's LH for Martha, then renaming Brian to Halloween Jack. That fills in one more background. If we get a junkyard background for Tinker, then the only remaining LH background missing is Debbie, Guild of Steel. Anybody familiar enough with the actual Fallout games history to give a background based on Brotherhood of Steel?

I am still stuck on city names for Martha as a nanny type. I have gone a little "cutesie" for Brandi already. So I don't want Disneyland city names for Martha. How about names of *scary* places from fairy tales? I can't think of any offhand.

 

[Refar]

I am somewhat familiar with the original Fallout BG, but i am not sure, if a BoS Background will actually fit, since the mod does not go very much with Fallout BG and lore overall, while the story here refers to very specific events and such.

Here's a more or less complete overview:
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Steel

 

[Jabie]

The Ray Bradbury Story Homecoming springs to mind, encapsulating family, isolation, otherness in a family setting. Names reminiscent of shadow and decripitude:

Homecoming Lodge
Ice Palace (In a Desert!?!)
Schwarzwalde
Brocken
Walpurgis
Coraline
Slytherin
Mordor
Ascupart's Grave
Dunwich
Mould
Burnt End
Fester

 

[Refar]

Now where you have good BG / Personality for most leaders, it is probably time to start thinking of a better presentation, than just putting it in the Pedia...

Maybe putting it in the "Rebirth of Man" screen... Or perhaps in a extra pop-up window at games start...

Also - if addtional material becomes available - am thinking something simiar to Alpha Centauri (i think you told you didn't play it...): At certain points / events in the game (Like for example first battle vs. some planetary creatures, certain techs on the path to victory, some other events as well)... So at these events a window would pop up, presenting some related story / converstion or something from the leaders life, giving some more BG on his/her person, or progressing in some Planet Related BG story...

(You wouldnt get all / the same popups every game - depending on how th egame went and what victory you moved for.)

 

[davidlallen]

I'd like to insert the Martha background with city names. She's a former nanny, how about place names from childrens' tales, but not "cutesie" ones. So far I can only come up with a couple: Emerald City as the capitol, and Heorot (from Beowulf). Other ideas?

Also, if we get together art and a background for Tinker, as a junkyard guy, I might call the civ "Junkyard Dogs". I was thinking of types of old cars as the place names: Edsel, Cadillac, Firebird, etc. Maybe #20 would be Pacer What are some other good car-related place names?