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2 Comments

  1. A fan of Thorf
    15 November 2020 @ 3:58 am

    Trollhattan?! In Alphatia?

    Reply

    • Thorfinn Tait
      15 November 2020 @ 9:12 pm

      It’s not really that surprising.

      Alphatia embodies the Scandinavian peninsula on the Jurassic Earth map.
      There is a real world city called Trollhättan in Sweden.
      Alphatia’s capital, Sundsvall, is also a real life city in Sweden.
      Aasla may well be a corruption of Oslo, capital of Norway.

      Incidentally, these three names were the first to appear for Alphatia in 1985’s M1 Into the Maelstrom by Bruce Heard. So they’re actually the oldest names associated with it.

      “Trollhattan” was used again in 1989’s GAZ10 The Orcs of Thar, also by Bruce Heard. That usage has caught some flak from readers over the years, as some view it as a crude joke linked with “Manhattan” — which in all fairness it probably was in GAZ10, which contained a lot of humour like this. Perhaps this is what you were referring to? But Alphatia’s Trollhattan actually came first, and in a product largely devoid of Bruce’s signature sense of humour.

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