City Life

[MAX BAX]

Hello all. I am interested to understand the intricacies of setting, so I have some questions.

1. Please compare city names with their real prototypes. Is it correct that Traitor's Gate is D.C.? And what about India (especially Forbidden Caves)?

2. Why the names of the cities exactly as it is? What motivated the author to call them this way? Interesting as the view of the Dioxine, as well as the community. I understand that Boneyard is hommage to fallout series, but what about Tower of Souls or Halls of Madness?

3. To be honest, I can not imagine the everyday life of the inhabitants of city, named like Halls of Madness. Have you ever thought about something similar? It would be interesting to know your opinion about such aspects of setting.

PS: Sorry for my broken english.

[BetaSpectre]

The stories would be interesting as lore background, but I imagine traitor's gate refers to politicians being corrupt surrendering to the Aliens.

Also the names might only be what the gals name them based on the past history. Like Hope for their original base, and despair for where they lost something?

[Solarius Scorch]

In the first draft they weren't necessarily the biggest cities on Earth, they were major mutant settlements - often located in ruins of pre-war human civilization and not necessarily close to the general population centres, like national capitals (which gals do not have much interest in).

How much this is canon, I don't know, but I'd love to hear more as well.

[BetaSpectre]

I think researchable lore surrounding these cities would be interesting for world building.

[MAX BAX]

BetaSpectre, to be honest, I've had similar associations. At vanilla game countries tend to come out of the project, but... the Gate...
The first association that the aliens had transdimensional teleportation technology. Moreover, there are indirect indications on it in the setting (Iron Tribe main city etc).

What about other cities...

Forbidden Caverns is associated with alien base from Enemy Unknown/Within. There were massive caverns with platforms hanging over the void. By the way, it would be very interesting to speculate what exactly happened at GHOSTGATE region.

Halls of Madness... maybe a kind of alien Hypno-Devices "Disneyland" for loyal collaborators from the Sirius Cult?

Nightspyre... it reminds City-17 Citadel from HL2. And Dark Eldars Comorragh, you know where it from.

The "hope" and "despair" sounds situable for Dominion's dark cult, but the Tower of Souls? Probably, it's a "psychoactive" place with powerful psi-radiation level and, most likely, with a specific source of such radiation. And perhaps this is a kind of Hall of Fame, where "lives" holographic images of the fallen heroes, or something like that.

[Scorrpio]

One thing not to forget is that planet is largely devastated with a whole lot less people than there used to be, and major cities have been primary attack sites.  Population is more spread out rather than urbanized, and fixed geographic points are rather places with unpleasant history than population centers.

[MAX BAX]

That seems to be true, but the factions periodically organize pogroms at places, marked on the map.

[nrafield]

That seems to be true, but the factions periodically organize pogroms at places, marked on the map.

Yeah, that's a leftover from original X-COM where terror attacks targetted cities that are on the map. So considering them as major mutant cities seems to be more plausible.