The New Concord
City: Concord, NH
Population: 8,100/73,000
Controls: arguably, New Hampshire
Government: Democratic
Problem: Monsters
Heroic Opportunity: Bounty
City Aspect: Fortified.
New Hampshire actually weathered the Serprentfall remarkably well. Manchester and Nashua were wrecked by the tidal wave, but the state capital of Concord was above the floodline, and new Governor Charles Dale was in town and able to coordinate relief efforts effectively. The last few years have been incredibly hard, but Governor Dale can still truthfully claim that he is the legitimate and legal governor of New Hampshire. Dale was re-elected in an honest election in 1946, and will likely be re-elected again in 1948; interestingly, New Hampshire also plans to vote for a US President in the same election, despite the fact that the entire Poisoned Lands stretch between them and what’s left of the USA.
Virtually every person left in the state accepts Dale’s authority; the only exceptions are the poor unfortunates still in the coastal part of New Hampshire. And most of them are frankly mad. But the real problem for Concord and the rest of the state is Massachusetts, which has become a breeding ground for every sort of Serpent tainted monster imaginable. Giant mosquitoes and flies, mutated arthropods, gargantuan crabs and lobsters; even the humble chameleon has grown huge and dangerous on Serpent venom.
The human-derived monsters of Massachusetts are no better; the ghouls of Boston are stronger (d10 Strength), and show an unfortunate ability to remember how to use and maintain cobbled-together guns. What fully human denizens that still remain are not much better, as they are uniformly vicious, paranoid, murderous; some are possibly even cannibalistic. In other words, there is no longer any justice left in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, save what a man brings with him.
Governor Dale is thus trying to create a League of Towns to defend against incursions from coastal Massachusetts: he mostly recruits from surviving towns in Vermont and western Massachusetts, where the higher elevation provided refuge for survivors. Concord also recruits heavily for ‘salvage teams’ who are not averse to shooting as many monsters as they can during salvage missions. The monsters come back, though. They always do.
Question regarding the header to these write-ups: What do the two numbers in population mean? My guess is (military size)/(total population), but I thought I had seen at least one write-up with the first number significantly larger than the second.
Basically, that’s how many people each Mayorality has: the first number are the people inside the walls, and the second shows how many farmers and isolated settlements they control. Population in the Poisoned Lands, post-Serpentfall, ranges from 1% to 30% of pre-Serpentfall population, so in this case Concord did rather well in both cases. In fact, NH technically has actually retained statehood and could thus have its votes count in the 1948 election! …And won’t that cause wrinkles in the game world, which is why I wrote it up that way.