leaderhead background text

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?
I can't really think of any actual place names from fairy tales let alone those which aren't cute. So I've broadened it a little bit and here are a couple names that are simply fairy-tale-inspired and a little dark.
  • Grimm
  • Black Forest
  • Lost Sheep
  • The Well
  • Big Bad Wolf (not particularly good, but something wolf-related seems appropriate)
  • Behind the Curtain
 
Junkyard king, as requested...

******

“How long have you known?” asked Ray, his calloused hands gripping the chipped mug.

“How long have you got?” Tink replied. Steam drifted in the air between them.

“Not long, Tink, Not long. So much to do, so little time.” Tink thought he heard a slight trace of regret in Ray's voice. “Did you ever have any doubts about how things have played out?”

“Sometimes... but I think you did the best in the circumstances. Convincing all the kids that you'd built a rocket and you were going to fly them to another planet was a stroke of genius. Where did you get that idea?”

Ray gazed at the bookshelf. It was filled electrical and mechanical manuals. Tucked in the cracks was a dog-eared Bible, a tatty Shakespeare folio and the yellowing pages of an old Science Fiction novel.

“I think I read it somewhere once. I just wish... I just wish I could have saved more of them.”

“You saved everyone you could. There wasn't much time. You've said it yourself. Frankly I'm amazed at everything you managed to hook up here. Sounds Systems, Video Screens. Oxygen Recyc. Nutrition Bays, Water Reclamation Plant. You really know your stuff.”

Ray smiled on fondly. “You’re not so bad yourself. When those speakers went on the fritz last month, I thought we all go mad from the noise.”

“Don't remind me,” Tink shuddered and made a mental note to destroy every Drum and Bass CD he found in the new world. “But I'm only any good ‘cos you took the time to train me. I think we’ve got a good chance when we go outside.”

“I’m sorry Tink, but I don't there's going to be a We much longer.” Ray tried to radiate his trademark confidence, but the struggle played heavily on his face. “I've done the calculations, Tink. The radiation should have dropped to a safe level in six months time, but we both know I've only got enough pills for three.”

The old man cursed inwardly. He had to stay topside too long, didn’t he? Had to ignore all the warnings, stay a little longer. No-one was coming, but he knew better in his arrogance. And now he had a very personal reminder of a world long dead.

“I've left instructions as best as I could for how to fix things up. It's going to be a hard trial, but if you can fix the speakers you can fix anything, Josh.”

Tink knew Ray was serious; he wouldn’t have used Tink’s first name otherwise.

“What are you going to do?”

“What am I going to do? Spend the next three months training you up the best I can, then I’ll make my peace with the Maker, go outside, sit on the top of my little mountain of junk and gaze down one last time on the Promised Land.”
 
Looks good. How about a 50's style Flash Gordon rocket for the flag? Could we get away with SF planet names, which are easy to come up with, for the city names? I can't find planet names associated with Bradbury specifically, but easy ones are Vulcan, Tatooine, etc. The text has junkyards in it, but space is more strongly implied, so maybe "Junkyard Dogs" is the wrong civ name. Any thoughts on that?

Still hunting for fairy tale names - not cutesie, for Martha's cities.
 
Still hunting for fairy tale names - not cutesie, for Martha's cities.

There aren't many city names that occur in fairy tales, at least not many that I can think of. Fairy tales seem less concerned with actual place names, and instead tend to take place in generic settings that evoke an easily imaginable mood. These are the best fairy tale-esque names that I could come up with when racking my brain (and I tried once before with little success). They come from literature/film, and aren't necessarily pure fairy tale locales.:
  • Emerald City (The Wizard of Oz)
  • Hamelin (The Pied Piper of Hamelin)
  • Wonderland (Alice in Wonderland; not an actual city, but the name for the land as a whole)
  • Fantasia (not a fairy tale, but rather a 1940s Disney film featuring animations set to classical music in a fantastical world)
  • Narnia (The Chronicles of Narnia; another land name rather than city name)
  • Never Never Land (Peter Pan; another land name)
  • Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood)
  • Candyland (I can't think of any specific fairy tale this comes from but it seems a common place for children to imagine and hope to visit; again, another land name)
  • Lonely Tower (always some princess, maiden, or Rapunzel wannabe in need of rescue hidden away in one of these)
  • The Dreaming aka Dreamland (The Sandman; yeah, another land)
  • Avalon & Camelot (King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table)
  • Mermaid Cove (The Little Mermaid - There is no mention of Mermaid Cove, but it sounds better than saying Copenhagen Harbor where there actually is a statue of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid)
  • Jack & Jill Hill (Jack & Jill nursery rhyme)
  • Gnome Hollow (These little guys must live somewhere when they aren't busy making shoes for cobblers in the middle of the night. Why not slumber in Gnome Hollow where they are safe from the light of day? Which reminds me of a "real" hollow I didn't invent...)
  • Sleepy Hollow (The Headless Horseman legend)
  • The Dark Forest (Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Peter and the Wolf, etc.; A very common fairy tale location)


Not a great list, but there's a couple in there that aren't bad. Maybe it'll help trigger some ideas for others.

Spoiler :
As seen on a shirt for toddlers:
Miss Muffet's got some freaky hairy spider after her, some other chick lost her sheep and it probably got eaten, Humpty's head got cracked open and they can't fix it, this big mean wolf wants to get the poor little pigs, and now you want me to SLEEP?????
 
Looks good. How about a 50's style Flash Gordon rocket for the flag? Could we get away with SF planet names, which are easy to come up with, for the city names? I can't find planet names associated with Bradbury specifically, but easy ones are Vulcan, Tatooine, etc. The text has junkyards in it, but space is more strongly implied, so maybe "Junkyard Dogs" is the wrong civ name. Any thoughts on that?

Still hunting for fairy tale names - not cutesie, for Martha's cities.

SF Planet names or authors sounds pretty cool to me and a 50's style rocket fits in well. There's also a Moses / Exodus parallel which can be drawn, maybe the Civ could be "The Last Exodus" or, combining dodgy 50-sounding SF names with Biblical analogies, "Exodites"

One of Bradbury's most famous novels was The Martian Chronicles (aka Silver Locusts), so Mars (or Mars Prime) might fit it well. Other than that:

Vulcan
Tatooine
Minbar
Centauri
Hyperborea
R'yleh
Yuggoth
Degobar
Gor
Arboria
Hoth
Medusa Cascade
 
Here's the status as of version 10. There are 14 leaders, 12 have good backgrounds. For one of the new ones, Martha, I was only able to get up to 13 city names, "non-cutesie" names from children's stories, like Emerald City and Narnia. I'd like to get up to 20. But all the other vanilla city names are gone.

Stevie (new age, tie dye) and Debbie (Guild of Steel) are the two who are missing backgrounds.

There is a new leaderhead almost done at this post, who could have a background and replace any of the existing ones. I am hoping that ekmek will succeed in making a "hockey mask" type LH to replace Ironhead.

You can see the current status in a spreadsheet at this link.
 
Stevie...

***************

One day the world stopped. No one knows when, no-one knows why. Just like a run-down watch. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick... and stop. But a lucky few people fell onto the cusp. Between the tick and tock, they survive in a shadowed existence, hoping that no-one would notice. They usually divide their world into Before and After. They don’t say before and after what; they don’t need too. And most people have many Afters and only one Before. But for Stevie there is only one After and many Befores.

She wears a cracked crystal pendant around her neck. She knows it’s important somehow. She doesn’t know why. She recalls the orange hues it made on the day the day when all the voices spoke only silence. She tries to remember, but the past becomes a peacock’s tail. Iridescent greens and electric blues, subtly shifting to blacks and yellows. A panoply of minutiae. Tears never cried, laughter at jokes without punchlines.

And she’s hoping that they’ll set the exam on the Chi-Squared test and not the Normal Distribution. And she’s taking the goats to be sold in the market. And she’s enjoying the plush velour and relaxing with a Bourbon whilst the bath is running. And she’s hiding beneath the kitchen table because Daddy’s had too much to drink. And she’s climbing up the tree to look at Jessica Roberts in the garden next door, gripped by the first stirrings of love. And she’s old and tired and wonders what life would have been like if she’d say Yes to Tom. And she’s worrying whether or not she left the gas on...

Sometimes, if you open your mind too wide, you might never close it again.

And then the others came. The different ones. The ones with too many fingers. The ones whose eyelids blink vertically. The ones who can smell what you ate last Wednesday from a hundred paces. All the ones with no other place to go. She welcomes them all.

And every day she wears a different feather in her hair. Another ghost to remember, another life to live. And, occasionally, when the day is hard and long, she likes to go and feed the pigs. Weary and heavy-laden, she strokes the swine and dreams of cliffs in Palestine.

*******

A hippy who had meditated on a crystal (or tripped on LSD) at precisely the wrong moment. A society of mutants.

Unique Unit: Moreau - a nightmarish mutant mixture of animal and human. Should have Rad immune.

Flag: A CND symbol superimposed on an eight arrowed star of Chaos.

Cities: Probably reflect the past. E.g. Nostalgia, Memory, Previous, Former, Regret...
 
Final one then. I've never played Fallout, so I've no idea whether the Brotherhood of Steel is some kind of reference. I've also had to change Debbie's name to Trudy, for reasons which may not be obvious at first:

******

"...Following the onset of the Scourge a number of eschatological cults appeared. Although some of these cults were led by vainglorious madmen who genuinely believed their own self-deluded prophecies, many more were led by charismatic charlatans, preying on the weakness of those around them.

One notable character from this timeframe is Trudy Jensen. As is the case with most historical figures in the dark times that followed the Scourge, the precise details are sketchy. A recently recovered copy of her CV shows that she held a BSc (Exon) in Mine Engineering from Camborne School of Mines, that she was of Danish extraction and that her hobbies included electronics and conjuring tricks.

Jensen first came to prominence after the Miracle of Worlds End Harbour. The details of the occurrence are well recorded in many documents and records and it is beyond the scope of this analysis to record more than the briefest facts. Suffice to say that the missile was eliminated before it struck it's target. A number of eye-witnesses report that the missile was struck by lightning, although there is very little evidence which can be found to support this theory. The best weather forecasts at the time show that the nearest build of atmospheric pressure sufficient to produce the required lightning strike was more than 180 miles away. A more palatable alternative is that the missile detonated due to an error in it's timing system.

Jensen claims to have been personally responsible for the destruction of the missile headed towards World’s End. The full story is lost to the mists of time but Cecil Raff’s famous painting of her calling forth the lightning has struck a popular chord with many viewers. It is, however, this author’s belief, that this paints far too simplistic a vision of the events.

Those that believe Jensen’s account of the events agree that her story begins with her discovery of her dying father on Worlds End beach shortly before the Scourge. In one biography, Jensen’s claims:

“I had always known I would find him upon that beach, nine steps from the final battle. He was wounded beyond repair and I began to weep for him, but he would not bear to see my tears. He told me that I was his daughter and that I must continue his work against the wolf. With his dying breath he presented me with his most potent symbol and I knew exactly what was expected of me.”
New Edda, K L R Fulz

The corpse was burnt on a pyre a few days later, but a chance photograph taken before the funeral remains. The photo shows Jensen weeping over her father. The image of Jensen is somewhat unfocussed, but her father – or the man she claims to be her father - can be seen clearly. He is red headed with a full-beard. His complexion suggests that he is probably of north European origin. His body is muscular and well-toned, but there are numerous deep gashes in his side. These wounds would seem to be consistent with those found on the body of sailors who have been attacked sea serpents.

This presents us with the first of many tautologies: Jensen claims that she found the body before the Scourge, but the Serpents which plagued the high seas were products of the radioactive wastes in the waters. The best of estimates of our biologists place the existence of such creatures at least ten to fifteen years afterwards. Furthermore the size of the wounds suggests that the creature responsible for the damage was of a significant order of magnitude greater than those found today.

Close examination of these pictures reveals another clue. The unnamed subject in the photograph is wearing a pair of weathered boots, as might be found on some older sailing vessels. Scrutiny of this image under an electro-microscope has revealed a partial name (..ria Mor...) sewn into the lining of the boots. The origins of this name have puzzled linguists for some years now, but the presiding theory accepted by most academics is that this may have been one of the many fashion labels that existed prior to the Scourge.

The question also remains as to where the mysterious figure was washed up from. One of the more outlandish fallacies is that he was employed on a Scandinavian warship which was engaged in a conflict with timber smugglers working for the Naglfar crime syndicate. Whilst this theory does account for his complexion and general physique, the premise breaks down under close analysis of the facts. Even the least conservative estimates – based on the logs of the GPS signals which were beamed to satellites prior to the magnetic pulse that eliminated their feed – place the nearest warship sixty leagues from the coast... clearly far beyond the distance where he might be expected to wash up on World’s End beach shortly afterwards.

Indeed there is no evidence at all that the figure washed on a beach at all. In the chaos that followed immediately after the Scourge, it would not be difficult to locate a corpse, though the distinctive wound markings do seem a little more difficult to replicate.

Let us move onto Jensen herself. Many of the powers she is claimed to have held can be mimicked, either through simple prestidigitation or else via electronic devices. Her gauntlets, for instance, upon which electricity was meant to play, can be simulated using equipment found in any modest electrical store from the time. The crows which perched upon her shoulders could have been trained after the Scourge. And her trademark weapon, which was said to return to her hand upon striking her foes, can be recreated through the suitable application of magnetism.

It is also germane to recall that Jensen had experience in the field in the field of media manipulation. In a radio interview with legendary Disc Jockey Re:Near, Jensen states:

"...Mum used to be a secretary in an advertising firm. I guess I was always destined to be a bit of a loudmouth..."
Voice of the Badlands – The Early Interview Tapes

With a gift for self-promotion, it seems not only possible, but highly probable that Jensen weaved a Nordic Mythology around herself in the hope of providing some means of control over events. It has already been proven that even in the best of times, men tend to conform to the common standards of those around them. How much easier then would rumours spread in a world of panic and turmoil, where many are desperate for leadership.

Despite these flaws it would be unfair to castigate Jensen as a greedy opportunist. Her early victories over the raiders and savages of the times united people behind her and provided a solid base of popular support to lead them onto greater glories. Indeed, in a world without staples, scruples or safety, Jensen provided those around her with perhaps the most precious resource of all: Hope.

Source: ENDTIMES: A studied analysis of the tribes, warlords and mythologies that emerged after the Scourge By Allan Davids

******

So either she's the reincarnation of Thrud, the daughter of Thor or else she's damn clever and using the ancient Norse myths as a means to galvanise her people. I figured I'd drawn on quite a lot of Christian themes in some of the other backgrounds, so went for Ragnarok this time round. I hope you appreciate the "nods" to some of the people who contributed to this project.

Cities: Anything Nordic. Valhalla, Asgard, Aesir, Jotunheim, Yggdarsyl....

Flag: Use the Viking one.
 
Hi guys,

I personally really like the Brotherhood of Steel, I've written one background for them already, I changed the Leaders name to Guld Master John Maxson, who was the original founder of the Brotherhood of Steel, an old world army general. I could potentially re-work it and make it Guild Mistress Debbie Maxson, the daughter of the recently deceased general who took over his mantle to lead their people forward into this brave new world.

1st draft of background

>Before the Scourge General John Maxson was the Commander of a Military Defence Installation codenamed Lost Hills. During the build up of global aggression Maxson discovered plans laid down by the Government detailing their plans to secure for themselves a refuge against 'catastrophic circumstances' and abandon the population to whatever fate befell the nation.
Upon learning this information Maxson declared Himself and the forces under his command as deserters and distanced himself from the Government. He then began the task of gathering as much of the civilian population and local resources inside the MDI then sealed the doors.
As the bombs fell and the world ended Maxson had begun to train and organise the people under his command, He sort to form an Order of High Martial and Moral standards. Drawing from Military, Warrior, Chivalric, and Monastic codes and doctrines Maxson created an Order known as The Guild Of Steel and was named Guild Master by the men and women he led.
As the radiation levels began to drop Maxson and the Guild prepared to bring order to chaos.
 
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