Princeton Army Air Force Forward Base
Continue reading 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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Easily enough for a The Day After Ragnarok Poisoned Lands Gazetteer. I should really talk to somebody about submitting it, once they start doing TDAR again. I think that it would go over well.
White Shadows of Lima
City: Lima, Ohio
Population: 13,500/90,000
Controls: Northwest Ohio
Government: Machine
Problem: Cultists (Klan)
Heroic Opportunity: Technology
City Aspect: Imperialistic and Corrupt
Lima, Ohio is poised for greatness, or at least conquest. It made it through the Serpentfall with an ‘Emergency Committee’ that largely now operates as feudal overlords for their territories; the Committee members have so far managed to avoid internal squabbling via the judicious use of conquest. It’s the smallest serious Mayorality in Ohio, but it’s got the most advanced forces. Lima has both a battalion’s worth of actual Pershing tanks (from the Army Tank Plant in town) and what passes for a strategic reserve to operate them (the region had extensive oil wells, and the Committee moved early to secure them). This has been enough for the Mayorality to consolidate control over a reasonable amount of Northwest Ohio. The Committee is careful to avoid butting heads with Cleveland to the east, and has negotiated with both Cincinnati and Dayton to secure its southern border. The Committee believes in patience: there will be plenty of time later to ‘re-establish control over the State of Ohio,’ a policy which is genuinely popular with the subjects of Lima.
