Moe Lane

Tigers of the Poisoned Claws

[The Day After Ragnarok]

City: Clemson, South Carolina

Population: 500 free citizens, 1,000 slaves

Controls: Clemson and area around it

Government: Machine

Problem: Serpent Cult

Heroic Opportunity: Arcana

City Aspect: Twisted and Scientific.

Clemson superficially was able to weather the Serpentfall well enough, being up in the mountains (by South Carolinian standards, at least); but it still got thoroughly saturated with venom-tainted rain and snow, and the stuff took root in the soil.  The savants at the agricultural school tried their best to purify their food and water, and for a while it seemed like they had succeeded. In reality, the effects were simply delayed, and proved more insidious.

Shrouded Charlotte

[The Day After Ragnarok]

City: Charlotte, North Carolina

Population: 4,000/24,000

Controls: Charlotte and outskirts

Government: Machine

Problem: Monsters

Heroic Opportunity: Mercenary Work

City Aspect: Secretive

When people think of the Serpentfall, they have this image of a two hundred wave of water crashing its way across the east coast of North America, obliterating everything.  Which is what in fact happened, in a lot of places. Alas, a lot of other places died more painfully. Like, for example, Charlotte, North Carolina: it was sufficiently above the crest of the tsunami to avoid immediate drowning, but the combination of refugees, lack of food, horrible sanitation, and the first outbreaks of monsters proved fertile ground for typhus, and a horrible local version of influenza.  The entire region is still considered to be a dangerous plague zone, which keeps a lot of people away.

Princeton Army Air Force Forward Base

[The Day After Ragnarok]

Location: Princeton, West Virginia

Staff: 30, 800 Dependents/Civilian Staff/Support

Commander: Lt. Ruth Tolley Gwinn, USAAF

Runway Size: 2,000 feet

Capacity: 5 planes (Piper J-3 Cubs)

Elevation: 2,400 SF

Sky Fort Skillman

[The Day After Ragnarok]

City: Skillman Airport, Ewing, New Jersey

Population: 500

Controls: Fort Skillman and environs, plus the skies above

Government: Strongman

Problem: Monsters

Heroic Opportunity: Technology

City Aspect: Fortified and worried.

It was blind chance that Major Chester Harrigan (USAAF) was able to get all of his current force of Grumman torpedo bombers into the sky before the tsunami hit; and it was a matter of geography that Skillman Airport itself was just barely above the wave that devastated the East Coast.  Most of the rest of New Jersey got erased. And what the wave itself didn’t kill, the new monsters tried their best to.

Shipping Control Authority

(Replenishment Fleet, American Combat Elements)

(SCARFACE)

[The Day After Ragnarok]

HQ: Manila, Philippines

Bases: Pearl Harbor, Manila, Palau, Santo, Tarawa

Commander: RAMD Donald Beary, USN

Forces: 45-70 ships, various tonnages; 10,000 civilian/military, all ranks

On paper, the Shipping Control Authority Replenishment Fleet acts as a replenishment service for post-Serpentfall American combat elements in the Pacific.  In reality, Rear Admiral Emory Land has effective control over USN logistics in that theater, and Rear Admiral Beary is decidedly not subject to Land’s orders.  This suits both admirals perfectly well, as Admiral Beary is only a logistics officer these days by the most flexible standards.

Puerto Ultimo

[The Day After Ragnarok]

Location: Puerto Rico

Population: 750,000

Government: Despotism

The Serpentfall devastated Puerto Rico, of course.  San Juan and the other cities on the north coast were obliterated; Aguadilla and Mayaguez on the west, merely hammered and half-destroyed.  But the mountains protected the cities in the south, and the Puerto Rican colonial government under Tugwell successfully relocated to Ponce on the south coast, which is now the ‘provisional’ capital.  Rexford Tugwell remains colonial governor, mostly because the US Naval units at the Roosevelt Roads naval base (itself a consolidation of surviving American military units in the Caribbean) unquestionably back his rule.

The Glamorous Hutton Sisters Gang

[The Day After Ragnarok]

Grand Junction, Colorado — or, possibly, Grand Junction, Greater Utah, assuming that the folks running Salt Lake City ever get tired of the status quo — is arguably the easternmost outpost of the USA north of Texas.  Which basically means that you can send a letter from Grand Junction to California and get a reply, five times out of six. But good luck trying to get help, men, weapons, money, and sometimes even attention from the West, though.  The town’s on its own.

Goshen

[The Day After Ragnarok]

City: Goshen, Connecticut

Population: 200

Controls: Town and Outskirts

Government: Despotism

Problem: Serpent Cultists

Heroic Opportunity: Arcana

City Aspect: Mystic and Dangerous

About the good only thing people in Goshen could have said about the initial Serpentfall was that the tsunami didn’t come close to flooding the town.  Connecticut and the East Coast shattered under the wave, anyway: the town had a shortwave radio and a reliable generator, which just meant that they got to listen to the world fall apart until the radio operator finally smashed the set and hanged himself.  There were a lot of suicides, that week. Almost too many to keep the town from just falling apart completely.

Sons of the Little Sahara

[The Day After Ragnarok]

Oklahoma is the marcher land between Texas, and the horrors of the High Plains.  About the only good thing that you can say about the state now is at least it rains more often — but even then, flooding is a constant problem, and it’s not smart to drink Serpent-tainted groundwater for too long.  So Texas moved the population of the state south, placed garrisons along Route 66 using what troops it could spare, and generally contents itself with maintaining a watchful peace on its northern border. The Texan state government has no interest in expanding further in that region, and certainly cannot spare enough resources to maintain even the pretense of the rule of law, north of the Double-Six.  Indeed, some Texans argue that the border should be even further south; if it wasn’t for the fact that Texan control over Los Alamos might be endangered by the loss of Route 66, those arguments might be better heeded.

Deadly Angels of Chickamauga

[The Day After Ragnarok]

At the time of the Serpentfall, Fort Oglethorpe (located in Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee) was a major training command for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).  In the confusion of the state governments of Tennessee and Georgia collapsing, not to mention the burning of Chattanooga itself, contact with the fort and its forces were lost; most people assumed that the facility was overrun by somebody, or something.  That happened all the time in the Poisoned Lands, after all.

This assumption proved incorrect in late 1947, when a scouting party of Konfederates from Birmingham looking to a way to bypass Cullman and menace Huntsville directly were ambushed, wiped out to the last man, and their severed heads flung back into the staging area from whence the party had set out.  Each head had been branded with the rough outline of an angel; and that motiff continued with lost scouting party after party until the Konfederates retreated a few weeks later. Things got dire enough that Grand Dragon Momyer even sent up a Konfederacy trainer to scout the area — only to almost have it shot down.  Whoever these ‘Angels’ were, they had access to bazookas as well as decapitation knives.