I've been trying to come up with my own plot and factions for a project of mine – Fallout:Anchorage. Due to my idiotic perfectionism I have five unfinished drafts and have barely made it out of the starting area for the sixth, but there is one faction that has survived through a couple of drafts despite my habit of discarding ideas if they have any sorts of flaws I couldn't work around immediately. Granted, this one is pretty much going up the stairs to the chopping block, but I thought I could share it with you fine people.
UNI
When the bombs fell, a group of University of Anchorage Alaska professors and undergraduates got stranded in a more remote location of Matanuska-Susitna Borough (why they were there is a WiP). Between young, healthy and sharp students and professors who were quite intelligent themselves and managed to control the youngsters due to the authority they had initially and their experience as pedagogues, this particular band of survivors kept kicking for a quite a while, even expanding as some of the other survivors they'd meet making the cut and becoming part of their band. By chance, they happened to wander back into Anchorage at the perfect time: soon enough after the bombs that most of the city wasn't looted, but late enough that the radiation in Anchorage was no longer a lethal threat.
Anchorage at that time was chaotic. There were no original inhabitants left alive in the city and various monsters roamed the streets. Many survivors had come to Elmendorf-Richardson Joint Military Base north of the city and looted its armoury, only to die later in Anchorage at the hands of the mutated creatures and/or radiations. Thus, our little survivalist band didn't find many guns there, but they were smart enough to collect any manuals they could find and secure a couple of ammo benches. As the band included some more violent students and wastelanders, they managed to make their way to the actual university and fortify themselves there – mostly because they couldn't think of any other place in Anchorage they'd rather settle in. This new settlement, Uni, made a living scavenging in Anchorage and selling the spoils to other survivor bands and emerging settlements.
One of the youngest lecturers at the time the bombs fell was Samuel Milner. He had extensive knowledge of mechanics and electronics and, due to his flexible personality, managed to adapt to the post-nuclear world where they needed to improvise and jury-rig a lot. He endeavoured to make Uni more than a scavenger settlement, but also a place where some of the old world tech they'd acquire would get repaired, maybe even new items would be constructed. Between him and the other university staff who encouraged the members of the band to make use of the many books in the university and learn about medicine,agriculture and the more practical sciences, Uni became something of an expert settlement where many knowledgeable people lived.
As word spread of a settlement in the ruins of Anchorage – meaning that the city was no longer a radioactive death trap, other, more violent survivors decided to come and have a go at the scavenger life. While Uni was well-fortified, their survival depended on scavenging the city, and something had to be done about all of the fighting that broke out in the ruins. One of the students rose to the occasion – John Blair, a former philologist who had shown a lot of talent when it cam to guns and tactics. He was more or less given free reign of the armed forces of Uni, with the more scientifically-inclined people preferring to not take interest in the violent affairs. This division in the community would later come to define them.
As Uni grew, it took in the more promising wastelanders. The knowledgeable residents tutored them in the sciences they found to be useful in Post-Apocalyptia. However, some of these newcomers would sometimes leave the settlement and either found successful communities around them, or become great assets to existing ones, allowing them to grow in influence and power. This started to happen at the same time when Uni and other survivors had cleared Anchorage of most of the useful leftover items,to the point that what salvage was left wasn't really worth the blood that would be spilled in the ruins daily. The people of Uni turned their eyes towards the wasteland and, upon seeing these former Uni residents make such an impact on other survivalist communities,decided to make a profit of it.
Decades after the bombs,Uni became the settlement that it is today: half-government,half-business. Present and new members that proved themselves sharp enough to be tutored in Uni would sign a contract with the faction's authorities that they would share their future earnings with the faction itself. Many of these professionals – the Students (a recognized class in Uni) – would remain in the settlement repairing old tech and putting together new, mostly make-shift items, some would go on 'field trips' to ruins of the old world out in the wasteland to gather more technology for the community process, and some would undertake 'working practices' where they would come to aid a settlement in exchange for food, lodging, and a sizeable salary apart of which they would use to pay off their 'education debt'. Those people of Uni that have chosen to be fighters – the Security –became guards, policemen, body-guards for students out on field trips and later even the army or special forces. A third class appeared in Uni – Maintenance – who were uneducated, non-combatant members who took up all the dirty jobs.
Though they remained in Anchorage, Uni more or less turned their attention away from the ruins, letting the survivors fighting there kill each other off. They sustain themselves by hand-crafting ammunition (though that's a small part of the profit), repairing tech they buy off of other settlements and selling it forward, and by the money their students on field trips and working practices make. Eventually, they even opened up'Faculties' – places in other settlements or the wasteland where they would offer their services – clinics, repair shops and so on.Security, in the meantime, continued to defend the Students and annihilate any hostile groups that would come too close to Uni for comfort. An elite group of Security (name to be determined) was established to infiltrate hostile groups and destroy them from within or hunt down any Students that defaulted on their contracts.
In short, Uni is basically the Followers of the Apocalypse if they were a business.They basically sustain themselves by using their knowledge (selling it to others and using it to manufacture primitive tech and 'tribal'medicine).
While Uni is split into three classes – Students, Security and Maintenance – only the former two have any real power, and they don't really see eye-to-eye,the Students preferring to look after themselves and increase their profits while the more worldly Security would like to offer their protection and maybe even free education to other wastelanders in exchange for a certain degree of influence over them. In other words,the Students want Uni to remain a business while Security wants Uni to become a post-war Government.
Seeing as how I'm still very undecided when it comes to what other factions would surround them in post-Apocalyptic Alaska, I cannot say for sure who Uni opposes or even what their role in the story would be... just an idea I thought I'd share with you.
