In a way, this entire project started with Max. During college, a friend dragged me down to San Diego for a small Society for Creative Anachronism meet. When I was asked at the registration table who I was, and we got through the usual Alphonse and Gaston routine my real name typically kicks up and I finally understood that I needed to produce an SCA handle of some puckish sort, Maximillian came easily to mind, followed almost immediately by "the Vaguely Disreputable". The root of the Max portion was easy enough - from Maximillian Meen, the character played by Peter Falk in Blake Edwards' 1965 film, The Great Race
- but the rest was free association, although the "Disreputable" may have also have a subconscious Great Race link; Max's colleague, Professor Fate, has a line including one of the few appearances of the word "disreputable" in a major motion picture. Some of the characteristics of Peter Falk's Max did make their way into my mental image of the early Dance of Gods Max, although his iron bar wound up in the hands of Shaa, and even though my Max diverged fairly quickly and far, you won't go too far wrong from my own picture of Max if you imagine a squinty-eyed guy slinking around in a half-crouch.
A name like that pretty ardently demands more mileage, and as it was clearly not going to come through the SCA - that single afternoon was my sole encounter, I'm sure to my detriment - I started thinking about who would really own up to a name so clearly arch, and one thing led to another...
Haddo clearly has a bit of Yoda in him, although without the cosmic smugness, and a trace of The Shadow. I've always suspected that Yoda plays up the whole fractured syntax thing a bit much to cater to the rubes, and for his own amusement, and Haddo is obviously running with that principle as well, running over the next hill and out of sight occasionally. Wroclaw I've always pronounced as it's written, and not in the correct Polish pronunciation, which as I understand it is much closer to Bratslav. Come to think of it, Catastrophe's Spell did have a Polish edition - I wonder what they did with Wroclaw? (A visit to the archive later - while most of the personal names have experienced intriguing contortions, Wroclaw is still Wroclaw.)
And the Great Karlini? Well, there are some things it's better not to know.
