Interesting Place Names

The rule book mentions, incidentally in examples, a few interesting place names: The rag-wastes, the burn flats. And, of course, there's the famous Hatchet City.

I wonder: What interesting place names have you had at your table? Holding names, regions, bunkers, whatever. Let's share.

We had a hardhold set up around an old drive in theater called "Now Showing..."

Temple of a Thousand Sins: hocus temple in an old water tower. Not very sinful to be honest.

The Mirror Waste: glass desert with many calm pools of reflecting water. Beautiful but still radioactive.

Welcome to: a hardhold in the swamps runs like a giant BBQ-party that just keeps going. My favourite part was the Wheel of Justice which the hardholder rolled when someone was caught doing a severe crime. We simulated it with a D6:

1: legs cut off and thrown to alligators
2: outlawed in 10 minutes
3-4: hard labour and some lashes
5: lose a limb and roll again
6: free dinner and a night of hard partying!

The hardholder rolled so many 6's he actually went bankrupt and started rigging the wheel.

Naming Holds is one of my favourite parts of MC-ing Apoc World. Here are some of my favourites.

Outpost 86 - An old oil rig in the middle of a desert. Need to climb the ladders and stair along the sides to gain access.

Pigeon - Used this a couple times but players always avoided it. Dunno why.

Crow's Town - Used this name a bunch.

Lights - A town with a working wind generator and christmas lights and other various bulbs used to light it up at night. aka "Blow Town"

Maiden - My personal favourite as it was my Hardholder's Hold. A cruise liner moored in a swamp. Got it's name from the signs on it that were announcing it's Maiden voyage.

My favourite part was the Wheel of Justice which the hardholder rolled when someone was caught doing a severe crime.

Also, this is amazing!

My favourite part was the Wheel of Justice which the hardholder rolled when someone was caught doing a severe crime.

'You know the rules in Barter Town! Break a deal, face the wheel'.

We had town at the base of Mt. Rushmore that went by "Four Faces."

Carneville, a nonoperational cruise ship that served as headquarters for a band of raiding cannibals.

When we play, I map what the players see and do on a huge piece of water color paper. Between sessions I take it home and add color and finer details, which includes place names.

The hold the players look out for is called Hopeton, because one of the players is a touchstone. The marshes they discovered in the early days of the game is Doghead Marsh, after a now dead warlord. The luxed out holds north of them are collectively called The Shattered Jewels. The center of town is just referred to as The Clock Tower because it is the dominant strategic position. River Witch Alley is where crews of cannibal pirates used to hunt before the players murdered them all. Zuto's Sword is the name of an island where important character growth occurred, a player switched from Faceless to Hocus there and left their sword stabbed into the ground kinda like the sword in the stone.

I really enjoy naming things after the players and their deeds.

The Valley of the Dead - A closed off valley with strange people living in it. Some of them are known to have died before but they have no memories of that. They drink a pink goo that bubbles from the ground in the valley and waste away within a month without it.

The valley houses an automatic cloning machine that operate according to a mysterious program. The clones use slightly different amino acids for their metabolism which are supplied by the pink goo.

"The Dug-out"; Fortified settlement build around a baseball diamond...local watering hole is the "Bull-pen"

"The Heap"; Ruins & junkyard directly outside the Dugout. Looks like a large town hit by Tsunami debris…A really-really Dangerous place… the salvage gets better the deeper you go. In the heart of the area is a massive crashed Air-ship of the golden age.

"Stone-wall"; Walled city of sin in the wastelands

"Black-Bone"; Nasty little town run by a gang of slavers/cannibals led by Wolf

"The Slops"; Derog. name for the slums of a larger city

"Coin-Town"; the local market

"Fugee town"; Squatter camp outside the wall. The residents (refugee's) are barterless and desperate. Mix of folks from all around. Small time traders, peddlers, murders, workers, whores, junkies, the crippled and the sick, and....cultists…
Got the idea from the "Fugee's" in Children of men.

HankleVonCrankle

 

My game had "Dam Big" - the mostly-intact but gummed-up remnant of the Hoover Dam. They never did find out what kind of critters lived in the cloudy lake behind it, since they spent most of their time dealing with the scum of "Lost Vision," the remains of Las Vegas, not far away. In hindsight, I should have just called it "Lost Wages," since I don't think I ever hit the right note with the town.

The hardhold of Colonel is called You Sir Force's Pendleton, and the two symbols of the local god You Sir Force, which can be seen in many places in the hold, are a single white star on top of a stripe of bacon, and pieces of cloth showing one quarter sky and three quarters bacon, therefore he must be a god of sky and bacon, so he is prayed to for rain and good pig hunts.

I ran a short sort of experimental few sessions. The PCs lived in The Oasis, named after what used to be a restaurant named after an actual oasis. Nearby was a smaller hardhold named Rock Town and, further away, one named The Tank.

A ways out of town, there was a place called Ippin Dep, which is known for being a nice place to score some serious jingle, but is also rumored to be cursed. Before the apocalypse, it was a Shipping Depot.

I've played with:

Alison's Alley - a fortified housing block
Bargers - don't mess with them, they work the toxic river

The Luxor - the decadent and dying Vegas casino of the same name
The Garden - where the Maestro'D set up shop
The Pits - where the refugees wound up
Mom's Place - not somewhere you want to be
Terminal 2 - the remaining part of an airport

Silo 54 - an empty missile silo
Silo 39 and Silo 58 - neighbors

Gannison Island - in the middle of a swamp

The Hull - half an oil tanker, now a rave party with rooms up top

The Windmills - huge sections of incomplete windmills on a mountain ridge
Vally Camp - a trading post
The Mine - just what is says

Gover Mitney - the rest-stop along Governor Mitt Romney highway, most of the letters rusted or shot away