After Sundown 2nd: World At Night

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 30, 2014 3:01 pm

The World At Night

The world is a dark and lonely place. And it is full of monsters.

After Sundown posits several distinct nightmare worlds that one can travel to or be affected by, but the Earth itself is something of a world of nightmares compared to our own. Monsters out of horror inhabit this world, and the number of violent deaths is considerably higher than in ours (though still probably not as high as people think it is – all forms of violent death combined aren't as big a killer as cancer or heart disease are by themselves).

The Secret Histories

Then there are unknown unknowns: things we don't know that we don't know.

It is not simply that the world in After Sundown is our world with a generous sprinkling of monsters, it is a world in which there have been monsters for a very long time. Monsters have been around and doing things for longer than there have been historical records, and so while the high school history courses in this world teach similar subject matter to what they do in ours, supernatural creatures have been involved in actual events the entire time. There are secret histories which are perhaps closer to the truth. How this managed to be the case is not simple, because it happened over the course of thousands of years.

Before the Vow of Silence, there was the Tradition of Misdirection. This was the idea that it was totally fine to show mundane humans that magic existed, but in no way acceptable to let on how it actually worked. Even into Greek and Roman times, it is simply taken for granted in official histories that corpses walked, blood fell from the sky, heroes with divine parents shattered stone walls with their fists, and whole shiploads of soldiers were slaughtered by dragons. Earlier histories are even more mythic. The general opinion of modern scholarship is that these events didn't really happen and are rumors or exaggerations written down into historical records because of a lack of good fact checking. However, according to the secret histories, these events actually represent real supernatural events – with the supernatural creatures of the time spinning elaborate tales not to hide their powers, but to hide the way their powers worked. Herakles almost certainly was a real person with real super strength and near invulnerability, but he probably wasn't the son of the god of lightning. Based on the claim that he restored himself to life by beating Death in a wrestling match, monsters of modern nights conclude that the original Herakles was probably a vampire of some kind.

Supernatural creatures can indeed turn the tide of battle, and had even greater abilities to do so back when armies were smaller and lacked the powerful weapons of the modern world. Still, there have been supernatural creatures in every part of the world, and their presence on the field of battle has usually canceled out. The Aztecs brought Daeva to war, but the Spanish met them in battle with Troglodytes. There was indeed an elite unit of Werewolf women of the SS, but they were slain on the banks of the Volga by Soviet sympathizing Witches. Some secret histories suggest that some of the really remarkable upsets and devastating victories in the historical record may have been helped along by supernatural creatures choosing one side or another. Of course, if you go far enough back in time it was simply assumed that the mighty champions of armies and nations were in some sense supernatural. Seemingly no one at the time thought it strange that Achilles was able to bounce bronze spear points off his skin or that Cú Chulainn would transform into a giant monster while fighting.

Starting in the Dark Ages of Europe, and rapidly spreading through most of the old world, a concerted effort was made to destroy historical records and enforce the Vow of Silence. Human religious teachings of the period encouraged the burning of books and the slaughtering of sages, and the syndicates of the age made sure that records of the existence and weaknesses of supernatural creatures were expunged from tome and mind. At its height, the churches of Europe burned people who so much as suggested that Witches and Vampires were real. For a time, even the words for supernatural creatures were almost completely unknown.

Starting with the printing press, humans found ways to disseminate information faster than agents of the syndicates could destroy them. For a time attempts to double and redouble the burning of knowledge were made. The empires of the Americas burned and their histories of mundane and supernatural alike were turned to ash by the conquering European armies. But this ultimately proved futile, for every manuscript destroyed, two took their place. Dedicated groups of hunters sprung into being and as the age of reason dawned, the systems of science allowed human hunters to acquire enough serviceable information to take down many powerful elders. New strategies were clearly required.

For the last three hundred years or so, the Vow of Silence has for the most part been preserved through a more nuanced form of cover up. Information about supernatural creatures has been suppressed through primary secrecy, through the destruction of existent evidence, and through the deliberate spread of misinformation. Syndicates will work to keep a story from getting out in the first place, and if that fails they'll try to consign it to the memory hole, and if that fails they'll attempt to discredit the story or change the details in retellings so that it no longer points to real supernatural creatures. Over a thousand years after the Vow of Silence replaced the Tradition of Misdirection, a synthesis of sorts has been formed. Though it is still called the Vow of Silence in modern nights.

Even these more advanced techniques are breaking down in the 21st century. The syndicates cannot monitor the entire internet, nor can they track all the phone cameras in circulation. While some success has been had creating false flag videos purporting to show werewolves and demons that are easily debunked as fakes, there are cracks in the system. Enough humans know or suspect enough true information that groups of hunters are starting to mobilize once again. So far, the syndicates have successfully branded such groups as dangerous lunatics, but there is genuine fear that this is a losing battle. Different strategies are being employed in different areas and by different groups.

More creatures than ever before are withdrawing to rural and wilderness areas, keeping their magical nature and strange appetites away from prying eyes through simple isolation. And many others are flocking to the great metropolises, where people mind their own business and people don't think it's weird that their neighbors are weird. Some creatures have taken to infiltrating governments and media outlets to disseminate anti-magical propaganda, while others have taken to simply spreading rumors, innuendo, and lies to propagate irrelevant superstitious beliefs. All of these strategies have had mixed results, and there is concern that the lack of a coherent global strategy ultimately dooms the entire project.

How much does the government know? There is no such thing as a monolithic entity called “the government.” We live in a world where the president of the United States can find out about a controversial policy employed by a federal agency by watching the news. The truth is that the government is made up of agencies and those agencies are made up of people. People use policies to get other people to behave the way they want them to, and they know what is going on in their agency to the extent that other people tell them. To a first approximation, this often looks like the government is doing things in response to knowing things. But that approximation only holds as long as there aren't moles and traitors. And for the question of the supernatural, there definitely are those things.

The FBI as an agency doesn't know that there are supernatural creatures. There are people in the FBI who know about supernatural creatures. But most of those people either are supernatural creatures themselves, or work for one of the syndicates. And that means that when they learn something about the supernatural, they don't pass it up the chain of command. The truth is that the FBI does have special task forces to deal with supernatural crimes, but these task forces do not tell the director what they are really doing, and if their activities got on the news it would be the first that the president heard of it.

A World of Nightmares

Surprisingly, sometimes light does not dispel our fears. For there are worse things in this world than darkness.

The world is some forty thousand kilometers around, and there are ways in which each place is different. What follows is not an attempt to fully encapsulate the planet, but to give a starting idea of how parts of the world are viewed by supernatural creatures. Each continent (or subcontinent) is described in the loosest possible terms and a handful of places that are of special note over and above the major cities in them.

Africa

In a very real sense, all earth is pretty much the same age. But in a perhaps more important sense, Africa is much much older than any other place.

Most of Africa is considered “uncontrolled” by any syndicates. The Makhzen controls more domains than anyone else, and you might think that would qualify them to claim Africa as Makhzen territory. But they don't. Humanity evolved in Africa, and lived and died there tens of thousands of years before setting foot on any other continent. Humans lived only in Africa for longer than all of history can remember. And for at least some of that time, there were monsters in Africa. The humans in Africa are much the same as they are anywhere else: while they are physically closer to the birthplace of the first human, they are the same number of generations removed from that first human as anyone born elsewhere might be. But the monsters are not: When African monsters talk about “the old ways” they aren't talking about something from a thousand years ago or even five thousand years ago – they are talking about ways that existed before sharpened sticks or the mastery of fire.

There are places in Africa claimed not by syndicates, but by individuals. Individuals so impossibly ancient and powerful that they can challenge societies of monsters and mortals by themselves – and they do. No one actually knows how old the ancient terrors that stalk Africa's interior really are. Some of the ones active today were already old when the first written records of them exist, and they probably predate the invention of written records. Truth be told, the creatures themselves don't seem to know how old they are as some of them sleep for years at a time and in any case were around before the invention of calendars. The closest thing to a local syndicate that Africa had was the Laibon, a group of immortal sorcerer kings that were taken out by the Cauchemar in 1888 to consolidate the syndicate's hold on Nairobi.

Kukuana. There is a small slave-holding kingdom in south eastern DCR near the borders of Angola and Zambia. Trees here are cultivated to make a strong canopy over every village and no direct sunlight ever reaches the streets. Beneath the kingdom are quite extensive tunnel complexes, where slaves mine for copper, silver, and gems. While sadly Kukuana is not the only mining colony to employ slave labor in the region, it is the only one to be completely unknown to the mortal world. The area is covered by “The Voice,” a powerful Authority effect that seizes control of the mind of any extras that venture into it. Even supernatural creatures don't know who or what generates The Voice, nor how it is made or what the true limits of its range might be.

The Brass City. There exists a region of the Sahara Desert which is a bleed into the Dark Reflection. It is in As-Sahra al-Libiyah, and if you walk into it on foot from any direction, you will be taken to Limbo where there is a city made of Libyan desert glass and brass. It is ruled by an Ifrit and the inhabitants are Goblins and Demons. The entire city has a population of about twenty thousand, making it the largest Goblin city in the world. The bleed extends about ten meters above the dunes, meaning that the Brass City is invisible from the air (or space, it does not appear on Google Earth). Secret histories indicate that the city was probably built in the 12th century CE, but the Ifrit sultan claims that his kingdom is much older than that.

Ol Doinyo Lengai. This volcano is fairly typical for the demesnes of an ancient terror. The locals have been told that there is a god that lives in the mountain. There is a terrible ancient thing that hibernates for years at a time inside the molten core of the volcano. Periodically, and to no particular schedule, it emerges to gorge itself on humans and cattle. The creature doesn't attempt to communicate with any syndicates, but it is fiercely territorial and will emerge to threaten or attack other supernatural creatures that enter the Arusha region of Tanzania.

Asia

It is difficult to get Europeans to understand the scale of Asia. Things are simply bigger here than they are other places. Even people from the Americas are unnerved by the numbers involved.

The continent of Eurasia is so dramatically larger and more populous than other continents that by convention Europe, the Middle East, and India are counted separately and the remaining landmass still has more land area and more people than any others. Asia has the largest mountain, the largest plain, and the largest city. It has the largest number of humans and the largest number of supernatural creatures. And if you aren't from Asia, you still rarely hear about it – primarily because the supernatural creatures in Asia have so much to fight over that their conflicts rarely spill onto other continents.

The ratio of “things that happen that you've heard about” to “things that happen” is probably lower for Asia than it is for anywhere else on Earth. Some of this can be blamed on the numerous closed societies in Asia or the racism of the international media. But a big portion of this is actually the simple bigness of everything. Ultimately, 10% of all deaths in China are violent ones, which means that of the people alive today more than one hundred and thirty million of them will die a violent death. That is more people than actually live in all but nine countries in the world. With the absolutely staggering number of violent deaths that entails (about one violent death every forty seconds), it takes truly spectacular death tolls to be considered “newsworthy” in that country. It is not that any particular life is worth any less, or that family members do not grieve, but that the the sheer numbers cause the wailing of widows to be a continuous tone that the media does not bother to report. And if events within China are met with a shrug, the chances of them being taken up in discussion in foreign lands are slim. And while China is obviously the most extreme example of this phenomenon, the rest of Asia approaches that level of structural indifference.

Ergenekon. The Bumin Horde of Ergenekon was a syndicate based in Central Asia from some time in the 13th century CE until 1844. Their leader was Asena the Wolf Mother, and she preached a philosophy of the strong taking from the weak until she was slain by a Cauchemar Vanguard unit. The center of their feudal empire was “Ergenekon,” which was also called “The Valley of Iron” because of all the mining that the Bumin Horde was doing there. In the collapse of the Bumin Horde, the location of this valley was simply lost. No records remain in the secret histories of any syndicate, and if any living creature remembers how to get there they aren't telling.

The Delve. Several million people go missing in Asia every year. Many of them move and try to start a new life, many run away from their families, many get involved with drugs or psychiatric problems and drop out of contact with people in their lives. For most of Asia's missing people, no criminal actions are involved and yet the people involved are not “found” for years if at all. People vanishing without a trace simply isn't newsworthy unless there is some other detail of the case to make it so. The Shattered Empire maintains a prison near the China/Myanmar border which they keep full by kidnapping a thousand people a year. That's almost three people every single day, and they get away with it because they don't kidnap pop stars or beauty queens, they don't kidnap people from the same place twice, and they are willing to travel thousands of kilometers just to kidnap one drunk man staggering home late at night. The prison is called “The Delve” by the syndicates because the prisoners are forced to dig down until they are unable to continue. The Shattered Empire doesn't seem to be mining anything, just digging, but the brutal working conditions kill almost three prisoners a day. The World Crime League has objected to The Delve, but it's not clear what, if anything, they can do about it.

Plain of Jars. On the Xieng Khouang plateau in Laos, there is a field with thousands of giant stone jars partially buried in the earth. Some of them are “only” a meter wide, but others are large enough for several people to stand or sit upon. In the first century BCE, this was a massive Troll encampment, and they used the huge stone jars to make alcohol by fermenting fruits and blood. The Trolls attempted to conquer the Earth, but were defeated by iron weapons that they were unprepared for. The bodies of countless Lao warriors lie in these fields, and buried here also are the stone remains of the Troll army. The World Crime League patrols this region, making sure that no one allows the Trolls to revive themselves to once again raise their fists against the Earth.

Europe

While it does not have more history than any other patch of dirt, it does have more history books written about the history that it has.

Europe is small. Everything in Europe is small. The coffee is small. The distances between things are small. The countries are small. Europe has 16 countries in it that wouldn't make the top ten most populated cities in the United States. And that's not metropolitan areas, that's city limits. And when you look at the map and realize that several of the countries are defined by what lands some family or another happened to own in the recent past and ruminate on how insane that is, it is important to remember that until quite recently most of the world was like that. The rest of the world has had the national borders carved up by large empires and divided into pieces which are mostly large enough to gain real economies of scale. But in Europe, despite (or perhaps because of) centuries of the bloodiest wars known to humanity, every attempt to imperialize the borders has failed since the collapse of the Pax Romana in 180 CE. No generation has lived under a single map of Europe for nearly two thousand years. And from all this chaos and land redivision, it is tempting to think that there are fundamentally more differences between the Lithuanians and the Latvians or the English and the Scots than there are between the Ewe and the Yoruba or between the Thai Yuan and the Mon – but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Europe was the birthplace of the Covenant and a bit over a thousand years later it was the birthplace of the Cauchemar as well. Even in the supernatural world, the borders of Europe are neither clean nor stable.

Baltia. During particularly nasty storms, a rift opens up in the Baltic Sea that allows passage into the Gloom. Once across, there is a shadowed island covered with amber and leafless trees. There is a tower on the island, and a group of the Empties have some machinery and several boats on the Gloom side of the island. What they are doing there is anyone's guess. The Earth side of the island has a dock suitable for small and medium boats and a small shack managed by Valdis the necromancer, who is usually welcoming to visitors. Wisps congregate around the island and bemoan their fate at all times of the day and night.

Scholomance. Located in Romania, this lakeside villa in the mountains is the training ground of the dread Blood Knights – perhaps the fiercest warriors in the Covenant. Only the faithful and anointed are allowed entrance into Scholomance. Rumors of demonic pacts and strange goings on have dogged this place since it was created by Dracula in 1460. Certainly Hell Hounds and Dragons have been seen patrolling the grounds.

Prypiat. The Chernobyl Exclusion zone is the area around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of 1986. Extending nearly fifty kilometers from the blast site, people are still not allowed to go there. The town of Prypiat is inside the zone and was at one time a community of fifty thousand people. After the disaster, it became a ghost town overrun with strange plants yet curiously antiseptic with kitchen tables left as-is for decades. The borders between worlds here are incredibly weak, and if a person were to stand in one place, they might find themselves shifting into Maya or the Dark Reflection with no action on their part at all. Sometimes humans go into the exclusion zone and don't come out again because they are attacked by monsters from other worlds. Sometimes humans go into the exclusion zone and don't come out again on Earth because they shifted to another world and don't know how to get back.

India

You can't have 33 million gods without having a few monsters here and there.

India is the name of the subcontinental landmass which extends from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It is also the name of the biggest country in the landmass, both in terms of area and population. Just as “America” can refer to the continent of North America or the nation state of the United States of America. The nation state of India has two thirds of the people in the region living in it, so the regional and the national name aren't different and people just have to deal with that. India is incredibly crowded, having just 3.3% of the world's land mass and fully a quarter of the world's people. The region comprises eight countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and of course India), and the majority religion in all of those countries is Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism. Christianity, so prevalent in much of the world, amounts to less than 2% of the population of the subcontinent and is essentially insignificant as a cultural or political force. It should be noted that the largest single local religion (Hinduism) is similarly almost unknown in the rest of the world. 15% of the world's population are Hindus, and 97% of those Hindus live on the Indian Subcontinent.

On the supernatural end of the spectrum, India is largely a power vacuum. For several hundred years, India was under the control of a local syndicate called the Broken Wheel Society, but they were destroyed in the 19th century by the World Crime League. However, neither the World Crime League nor any other syndicate has managed to effectively take over all of the territory. The WCL holds more territory than any other syndicate, but most of the cities and almost all of the villages are, supernaturally speaking, essentially in a state of anarchy. The WCL wanted and attained some key trade routes and cities in the region, but in the last 180 years have lacked the manpower or the will to impose their way of life on the rest of the region. Many supernatural creatures in India live night to night without knowing that global supernatural creature culture is a thing that exists. For now, global media seems sufficiently content to ignore stories of vampires and forest monsters from the villages of India that these activities do not seem to endanger the Vow of Silence on a global scale. But its not at all clear how long that will hold.

The Kingdom of Prester John. In the 11th century, a group of Blood Knights from the Covenant undertook a black crusade to India in order to take control of “Christian lands” that they had heard of, apparently having something to do with the spread of Nestorianism in parts of India. This crusade was ultimately a failure, in no small part because the number of Christians was always fairly small and the Blood Knights were amazingly outnumbered by the local factions. They ended up withdrawing into a bleed into Maya and creating their kingdom there. The Kingdom of Prester John is a strange place that follows old anti-papal bulls but not new ones. The Blood Knights have also tamed the giant ants of the local Dreamlands and use them as riding beasts and beasts of burden.

The Oath Pillar. Before there was the Black Hand, there was the Broken Wheel Society. It was a syndicate that operated in South Asia and affected something similar to the Vow of Silence through mass murder. They worked closely with some mortal death cults, most notably the Thuggee. Gradually more and more of their territory was lost to the World Crime League, and in the early 19th century the World Crime League made a concerted effort to wipe them out on the grounds that they were bad for business generally and running the risk of creating a real global human effort to wipe out supernatural creatures specifically. In 1835, the Broken Wheel Society was defeated, and those who surrendered were allowed to live if they swore an oath to stop doing the “seven intolerable things.” This deal was sealed by having all the swearers press their hands into an iron pillar just after it had been cast. The pillar sits alone on a hilltop, and the hand prints of all the newly named “Black Hand” members are still visible impressed upon its surface.

Bhangarh. Located in eastern Rajasthan, the fortress of Bhangarh is a ruin. It was built in 1613 by King Madho Singh, and abandoned in 1618 after a local Witch named Scindia cursed the place over a disagreement about the sunlight to his garden being blocked. Every night, a shadow gate opens in the ruins and Poltergeists run amok until they are banished by the dawn. Humans are allowed to tour the place during the day, but no mortal is allowed on the premises after the sun goes down until the sun rises once more. The gate to Mictlan is in the heart of the fortress, and the Poltergeists swarm out of it the moment the last bit of the solar disc descends out of view. However, once it is open, creatures can travel both directions through the shadow gate – provided they can get past the Ghosts. Once in Mictlan, the palace appears as it did in the 17th century. Eerily silent, but the walls are intact on the other side rather than being full of broken bricks and cracking plaster.

Middle East

While the region has no geologic reality, its political and religious importance are as real as any social construct can be.

To most mortal humans, the Middle East is a region which is essentially defined by the spread of Islam. There are Muslims who live outside the Middle East, and there are people who live in the Middle East who are not Muslims, but the shadow of Islam looms large over every part of the Middle East. However, even a casual glance at a map of the Islamic world will show a considerable area in Morocco, Malaysia, Somalia, and Pakistan which are not in fact in the Middle East. The region is actually defined by the extent of the Assyrian Empire's sphere of influence in about 750 BCE – the period of the Makhzen's founding. Turkey to Yemen, Egypt to Iran, and everything in between. The fact that human newscasters today talk about a region defined by an empire nearly three thousand years dead as if it had modern political relevance is certainly interesting, and the interfering hand of the Makhzen is probably indicated on some level.

The Middle East is unquestionably the Makhzen's playground. Their European members broke off and became the Covenant, and their Southeast Asian members broke off and became the World Crime League, but the heart of the syndicate has stayed strong the entire time. Empires come and go, religions come and go, but the Makhzen remain. The Middle East currently has a reputation for being violent and war torn, but it wasn't always thus. Over the last couple thousand years it hasn't really had more periods of war and strife than Europe or India. However, right now the reputation is essentially spot on. Saudi Arabia may not be at war with anyone in particular, but almost one person in six dies by violence there – an amount of lethal injury not seen in 21st century warfare. The continuous strife and poor public safety is not only equivalent to a war without end, but to a war from the past when civilian casualties were much larger in number. The avals and inner circle of the Makhzen seem to be basically OK with this state of affairs. They view the purpose of the syndicate to be to provide wealth and protection to supernatural creatures, and whether mortal humans are dying in road traffic accidents is not their concern.

The Sands of Time. Deep in the dune seas of Oman there is a sink hole surrounded by a vortex of sand that always swirls into the dark pit. The hole never seems to fill and there is some kind of disturbance in the flow of time there. People standing within a few meters of the hole see strange things and appear to stop and skip fractions of seconds. It is uncomfortable to be there. However, an ancient Endala lives in the hole, balancing on her webbing and feasting on people and animals that get caught in the pit or thrown there as sacrifices to her. She has been studying the vortex for a long time and is able at times to utter True Prophecy. If sacrifices to her are of sufficient quality, she will tell her prophecies to petitioners.

Derinkuyu/Irkalla. The Hittites built a number of underground cities in Cappadocia, some of them extending a considerable ways beneath the earth. The underground city of Derinkuyu goes down 85 meters, making it the deepest underground city in the world. But that's just the part that humans know about, because there is actually a secret path and a hidden door that takes you deeper still. This path leads through seven increasingly impressive doors and opens up into the Troglodyte city of Irkalla. About seven hundred supernatural creatures live here in the darkness below the cavern city below the Turkish city of Derinkuyu.

The New Alamut. The original Alamut was a castle in what is now Iran that hosted the original Hashshashin until they fell with the castle to the Mongols in 1256 CE. The Hashshashin of modern nights are a drug addled death cult created by supernatural creatures in the 17th century based on the more fanciful depictions of the original movement. Their fortress is also called “Alamut,” but because the historical ruins of the old Alamut still exist, creatures outside the Hashshashin call it the “New Alamut.” It's primarily a smuggler's fort in the mountains near the Syrian/Lebanese border. They deal in drugs, humans, and weaponry and have a shaky relationship with the Makhzen. Many Hashshashin consider themselves to be members of the Makhzen, but it seems clear that many would like to replace the Makhzen inner circle with their own.

North America

The global hegemony is mostly set by the world's only super power, a fact that is unliked by almost every country in the world. Including the world's only super power.

When you talk about the countries in North America, people often stop at three: The United States of America, Mexico, and Canada. But while those three comprise the substantial majority of the population and land area of North America, there are actually 38 more countries and more than one fifth of the world's nations are in North America. Turns out there a number of countries in Central America (which is geologically part of North America) and really a lot of islands in the Caribbean. The United States of America comprises a majority of the population of North America, and North America comprises a majority of the population of the Americas. But while this superstar status leads some people to refer to the United States of America as “America,” it should be noted that the USA is still slightly less than a third of the population of the Americas. Also, the long form of Mexico is “The United States of Mexico,” so though even Mexicans normally mean the USA when they say “Los Estados Unidos,” that term is technically ambiguous.

The Cauchemar are the most powerful faction in North America, but they do not enjoy anything like hegemony. Ciudad de Mexico and points south are under Covenant dominion. San Francisco and the coast up through Vancouver are claimed by the World Crime League. Houston, Charleston, and Havana are kingdoms of the Makhzen. The New York area is divided among all the major syndicates. But from Boston and Montreal to Chicago and Kansas City, the Cauchemar are the biggest movers and shakers.

Frank Slide. On April 29th, 1903, 82 million tonnes of Turtle Mountain fell onto the mining town of Frank in Canada's Northwest Territories (now the province of Alberta). This killed 84 people in an instant and left the entire area a field of barren, jagged stones. The railroad and the highway both go through the area of desolation, but no one and nothing lives there to this day. Lingering long after dark is ill-advised, as an uncontrolled burst of Orphic power erupts there at 4:10 in the morning for several minutes every Wednesday. Bodies in the area when that happens rise as Zombies.

Centralia, Pennsylvania. Centralia was a mining town in the middle of Pennsylvania which was abandoned over decades following the veins of coal in the ground catching fire in 1962. The area gradually became more and more inhospitable as the ground heated up and poisonous gas seeped out of the ground. The entire area slowly descended into the Dark Reflection, and is now a nearly uninhabited ruin where just a scant few infernalists remain. The area became a bleed gradually, with activities by Goblins and Demons gradually increasing and the region becoming more and more inhospitable. By 1992, the US government declared the region uninhabitable, but even in modern nights not all humans have left. Visitors today see ruins mostly reclaimed by wilderness, but when the mists come (as they do with increasing frequency), they see ruins covered in ash and crawling with monsters.

La Zona del Silencio. In Durango, Mexico there is a road that leads into the Mapimí Desert and terminates mysteriously. Those who get near the end of the road find that their radios no longer work, and sometimes visitors are treated to strange sights. Some would-be explorers don't come back at all. The official story for the road is that the USAF lost control of a nuclear missile and they built the road out to the crash site in order to clean up the debris. Keep in mind that this is the story the government tells people to calm them down. The region is a bleed into the Dark Reflection, and car radios do not work there because while in the Shallows of Limbo the car is on the wrong planet to receive Earthly radio broadcasts. In 1970, agents of the King with Three Shadows performed a mighty ritual of power to strengthen the bleed in order to send a powerful Dragon and other forces to Earth. Members of the Cauchemar who had infiltrated the United States of America's military did indeed cut the invasion short with a nuclear missile, and then have a road built out there to facilitate destroying the remaining evidence. If approached with the appropriate keys, the road does not end in the desert, but instead continues into Deep Limbo where there is a ziggurat that the Cauchemar use as their forward base in the Dark Reflection.

Oceania

There are islands without number or name.

Oceania is not a continent in the same way that the other continents (or even sub continents) are. There are no agreed upon borders or contents. The Pacific Ocean is very, very large, and there is a lot of stuff in it, and so it is generally assumed that there should probably be a continent in there somewhere. This ambiguity extends not only to the limits of Oceania, but to the interior as well. There are islands that are on no map and more mysteriously there are islands that appear on maps but not in reality. The number of islands that no one lives on is large, but no one knows what that number actually is. Indeed, ambiguity is such that many of the countries in Oceania do not know how many islands their country contains. It's not that there are disagreements about which country owns one set of islands or another (although there is that too), it's that countries like the Philippines and Indonesia do not know how many islands are in the areas they claim and patrol. Small islands raise and sink in storms, and even if they did a perfect land mass census today it would probably be out of date within a week.

Population density in Oceanian nations is incredibly low by the standards of any inhabited continent. Partially this can be laid at the feet of the fact that most of the area of the continent is water upon which no house can be built (or at least, hold a static position if we were to include house boats). But even the region's largest island is largely uninhabited. While the Federated States of Micronesia are mostly filled with an uninhabited ocean, the interior of Australia is filled with almost equally uninhabited deserts.

Skull Island. Perpetually surrounded by fog, distant from all major trade routes, surrounded by treacherous rocks, and avoided by currents, Skull Island is an island that you really have to want to get to. It does not appear on mortal maps, but is mentioned in the secret histories. Several Kaiju live there, and there is a massive gate to Maya there that opens erratically. The surface of the island has been described as a “hellish jungle.” There is a permanent base of the Marduk Society on Skull Island, and it is unknown what they are doing there.

The Sunken City. The water levels of the Earth have not been static. Twelve thousand years ago, the world was in an ice age and the level of the ocean was almost forty meters lower than it is today. Oceania had dramatically more land then than it does now, and structures built during that period have been long ago claimed by the waves. North of New Zealand there was a set of megalithic structures that was built on the coast when the land extended much farther than it does today. And when the melting of the ice caused the ocean to claim this city, the children of Tiamat claimed it from the ocean. Deep Ones live here, beholden to no syndicate. Over the last several thousand years, the city has grown substantially, and the original cyclopean temple has been elaborated upon with eight additional wings made of basalt and glass. All Deep Ones are welcome in the Sunken City, but the residents try to get such visitors to stay and are very pushy about it. Other supernatural creatures are shunned and treated with close-mouthed suspicion and given the literal fish eye. Those who have visited and returned report that they have a piece of Tiamat, or perhaps Dagon, in the middle of the ancient temple complex and that they are growing something from it.

The Pacific Garbage Patch. There is a place in the Pacific where currents push things that have nowhere to go. North of Hawaii, there is an area of about a million square kilometers where the concentration of flotsam, pollutants, and sludge is noticeably higher than it is elsewhere in the sea. Garbage thrown into the sea might wash up anywhere, but if it doesn't it will end up floating around in the garbage patch until it decays. Plastics that take a very long time to decay will thus float in the garbage patch for a very long time. There is a similar effect with the ghosts of those who have died at sea. Those whose spirits have somewhere specific to go will try to get there, and those who do not will float aimlessly in the Gloom coterminus with the garbage patch – seemingly forever. The ghosts who have more on the ball have gathered flotsam and wrecks that have fallen into the Gloom and built a number of garbage fortresses in the Mictlan of the seas.

South America

There are no wars in South America. People are too busy killing each other to bother with wars.

While almost the entirety of South America is in Latin America (the Falkland islands arguably are not), there are a considerable number of people in Latin America that do not live in South America. While South America is an obviously meaningful geologic formation, its use as a political, cultural, or historical marker is more questionable. One simply cannot talk about Latin American politics and culture without talking about the two big countries: Brasil and Mexico. But of course, Mexico is in North America, not South America. Of the approximately one billion people who live in the Americas, a clear majority live in Latin America, while only two thirds of the people living in Latin America also live in South America. Confusing? Absolutely. It should be noted that cities in Latin America include the highest reported murder rates on Earth, with nineteen of the twenty cities with the highest murder rates all coming from that region. In part, this represents a willingness and ability of people in the Americas to report and track murders in the first place. Honduras boasts a homicide rate double that of the Ivory Coast (it's closest non-Latin American competitor), but actually less people die violent deaths there. The reported epidemic of violence gripping Latin America is real, but the truth is that there are comparable epidemics of violence in other parts of the world that are simply going unreported.

People live almost exclusively on the coasts of South America, and the east, west, and north coasts at that. The interior of the continent is delineated by the Andes and is filled with amazingly inhospitable deserts and jungles, and humans mostly don't live in those places at all. The reach of the syndicates is similarly limited geographically. The Covenant is dominant in most coastal cities of South America, with the Cauchemar being the main movers and shakers in Caracas, Maracaibo, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the Makhzen being the main players in Lima, and the World Crime League having a stranglehold in Medellin and nearly half of São Paulo.

The Cities of Gold. There are a total of seven secret cities in the Andes which have one or more buildings leafed in gold. Six of them are apparently Incan in construction, but the seventh is of an unknown architectural style. All of them are mostly made of concrete and stone, with the “city of gold” moniker being applied because buildings are faced with gold, giving the city a gleaming appearance. Two are named: El Dorado and Paititi, and if anyone knows the names of the other five they aren't sharing. Despite the presence of gold for the taking, few creatures go there. A palpable feeling of dread overcomes everyone who approaches any of the cities, with only the bravest able to even set foot inside.

The Arcanotower. The Amazon Rainforest is a vast jungle covering over five million square kilometers (3.7% of all land area on the planet), but is almost completely empty of human inhabitants. While millions of people lived in Amazonian settlements five hundred years ago, those settlements have mostly been claimed by the jungle and today less than half a million people live in the entire forest. And in a truly inaccessible portion of this jungle, the Marduk Society has been growing an Arcanotower. It's kind of like a tree and kind of like a machine, made of magic and steel and biological bits, and the Marduk Society has been growing it from a seed since 1991. It's currently about three stories tall, and what can be gleaned from the True Prophecies is that were it to be completed, that would be “bad.” It doesn't look like anything from Earth, but it's hard to get a close look as the area around it is guarded by Evil Plants. The Arcanotower is equally present in both the Dreamlands and the mortal world. Whether it was planted in a bleed or creates one as part of its function is known only to members of the Marduk Society.

Nazca. The Nazca Desert in Peru is a dry, windless plateau. The ground is reddish, but the reddish stone is quite thin, and with minimal digging the light gray earth below is revealed. Over the course of three years starting in the early 6th century, mystic diagrams two hundred meters across were carved into the ground. These symbols cannot be discerned from ground level, but from sufficiently high above they are extremely clear. The magic symbols are not particularly strong or numerous, but their immense size creates a region that is amazingly potent for the conduction of certain kinds of mighty rituals of vast power when the stars line align correctly.

New York by Night

I want to be a part of it all, in the city, county, and state of New York.

New York has perhaps the greatest claim of any city for being the center of the world. That's why everyone loves it, and that's why terrorists keep trying to blow it up. New York has a yearly GDP of well over a trillion dollars, making the city have approximately the total net worth of the entire Russian Federation.

New York is portrayed in songs and stories. In movies, TV shows, and radio plays. The New York skyline is perhaps the most recognized on Earth, and landmarks throughout New York are considered treasures by people all over the world. New York gets trade from all over the Earth and beyond, and it is said that there is literally nothing that cannot be acquired in The City. This is very nearly true; as things, people, and ideas are constantly flowing into New York. That The City never sleeps is something of a catchphrase, but it's an important cultural concept there. The subways runs all night, and so do nightclubs. There is no time of the night or day when you can't listen to live music or eat a slice of pizza.

And there's a cost for all this. People want to live in New York. And the market has spoken: rents are obscene. New Yorkers live in cramped apartments with no kitchen table, and they pay out the nose even for that. You're throwing down four digits to live in a cramped studio in Hoboken, and people are OK with it. Because people would seriously rather live in a tiny flat in New York than an actual mansion in Alabama.

City Statistics

New York is several things. It's the City of New York, it's the State of New York, it's the Five Boroughs, it's the Twelve Counties, and of course it's the Tristate Area metropolis. The Five Boroughs by themselves are more than 8 million people, with the entire Tristate Area encompassing more than twenty. Its sheer size leads to hilarious statistics: there are more Irish in New York than in the Republic of Ireland; more Jews in New York than in Israel. New York ranks number one in the world as a city that people would like to live in or near, and a goodly number of people have made good on that desire, more so than any city in history other than Tokyo.

New York has no dominant syndicate, and indeed many residents do not feel that they need a syndicate, on the grounds that local protection is provided by non-syndicate organizations such as cults or even disorganized gangs. The largest of the major syndicates is the Cauchemar, who boast about 2400 members (which ironically makes New York one of the largest Cauchemar cities on the planet even though they don't actually control the city), but the Cauchemar in New York sort of behave like two different syndicates and are more concerned with their own schism than they are with most other goings-on. The syndicate that can probably exert the most force is the Makhzen, with about 1900 members and an infernally disciplined regime. The richest syndicate in terms of dollars is the World Crime League, who are actually based across the river in what is technically New Jersey with about 1500 members. The Covenant is the smallest of the major syndicates in New York, with a total flock of about 1000.

The King with Three Shadows has a satellite fiefdom here under the iron and silver gauntlets of Baron Capac. They have about 600 magical beings in fealty to the Baron, but they are mostly Mirror Goblins, so it's not quite as big a threat as that sounds. The Shattered Empire has maybe 100 actual supernaturals, but they have nearly a thousand humans and ghosts in their weird local theocracy. The Marduk Society has a division in New York, and it appears that they have perhaps 200 actual men in black.

Because of the lack of total control by any syndicate, other forms of organization hold various territory. About 1500 supernatural beings are formally unaligned, but nearly half of them have allegiance to organizations that are considered cults everywhere else. All the cults maintain an independent presence, of which the largest is probably the Ulmi (at 120 members running their territory) and the smallest is the Chain of Coronis (with only a couple dozen). The remaining 800 or so “unaligned” are often members of various supernatural gangs that are relevant only within and around New York. The Morlocks, the Sharks, the Spiders, and the Jets are all gangs that have made a name for themselves to one degree or another. But not a few creatures have simply elected to stay loners and fade into the background of New York as other peoples' problems. It's not entirely clear how many of these “monsters of the week” there might be.

Supernatural creatures must also be on the lookout for local threats. The Special Threats Bureau has about 40 detectives in it, but their firepower is way in excess of what that would imply since they run joint operations with NYPD. The House of Murphy has about 30 supernaturals working for it in town. Significantly more mortals, many of whom have been indoctrinated into sorcery to become Cultists. The Blue Star Faction appears to have about 50 Triffid Soldiers, maybe 10 normal Earthly supernaturals, and perhaps a hundred armed human fanatics. More worryingly, no one has a guess as to how many Pods or Mantraps are running the show from their base(s) of operations.

City History

As the song says, New York was once New Amsterdam, a possession of the Dutch Crown. The city was so German that it nearly pushed German as the official language of the country (it failed by one vote). But years of Irish and Italian immigration followed by the harsh cultural reprisals against Germans during WWI have all but erased New York's German speaking past. Tonight, New York is the most multicultural city in the world, with more languages spoken than any other city on Earth (claims made by London and Toronto boosters notwithstanding).

New York was famously once the stomping grounds of the Manhattans, a tribe from whom the island gets its name. It was first visited by Europeans in 1524. New Amsterdam got its start in 1609 and was fought over by the Dutch and British starting in the 1650s and lasting for two decades before it was finally absorbed into New York as a British possession. This makes the city substantially older than the vast majority of permanent settlements in the Americas, and a good bit of the architecture gives that away.

New York has gone through numerous subway systems, with the first demonstration line going up (down?) in 1869. New York City ended up taking Edison's side in the battle between him and Tesla in the 1880s and to this day the New York MTA runs on direct current instead of the AC that everything else runs on. There are also numerous tunnels left over all over the place down there from various aborted or terminated projects. Like in Ghostbusters II. But it's not just old subways. The City has replaced its gas lines, water pipes, electricity connections, sewer outlets and much more on numerous occasions, leaving pipes, conduits, and access tunnels abandoned all over the place.

New York has been on the forefront of city planning and going back to the drawing board of those city plans in social as well as engineering progress. New York was already a major international metropolis when the modern concept of the Police and Fire Department were invented. And the scars of those early experiments are still clearly visible in the modern order. New York has gone through a past where Fire Fighters were rival gangs that fought each other over the right to put out fires and charge the victims for the service. New York has been through a past where order was maintained by having self interested armed gangs run protection rackets. The modern systems we are familiar with solved a lot of real problems, and New Yorkers take their civil servants pretty seriously as a result.

Power

No specific syndicate lays enforceable claim to New York as a whole. The city is simply too large, and it functions more like a series of cities or even a series of nations than a single metropolitan area from the standpoint of supernatural governance. There are enough supernatural creatures in the New York area that it is simply unreasonable to expect that even a long term resident know the names of even all the major power players of the sprawling metroplex. However, while one can think of the city as being divided into multiple domains, each under the control of a different syndicate (or cult, or in some cases coterie), it is difficult indeed to map the city out along those lines. A single city block may have the streets claimed by a branch of the Black Spot, while the offices in the building above are Makhzen territory and the subways below are crawling with the skulking members of the Church of Set.

Because New York is such an “every Werewolf for himself” kind of place, every major cult operates regions of actual control as if they were syndicates themselves. The Daziban have a vault on 42nd Street near 5th Avenue, but unlike in other cities, the area around it is treated as Daziban territory, and their rules apply as totally as syndicate laws. The codicier there is an Android named Susan Calvin, and she is rather mad with power. But the thing to remember is that that sort of thing just isn't rare. There are gangs that patrol individual regions and even just powerful individuals who refuse to acknowledge the authority of other groups. And with the balance of power so precarious, it is often not worth the attention of any of the larger groups to try to enforce their writ. Of course, sometimes a creature will push their luck too far and get an entire syndicate or even more than one to come down on them simultaneously. This was the case of “The Whisper War” where the Covenant, the World Crime League, and the Black Hand allied to take down The Whisperer in Darkness in 1933.

The Mayor's Office of New York City is astoundingly powerful, and the mayor personally wields as much social and economic clout as the heads of state of many nations. At any given time, the Mayor of New York is a major public figure on a national and even international scale. You probably can even remember some former New York Mayors like Giuliani, Bloomberg, or Koch. This is because the mayor is simply more important than the Governor of Alabama or the Taoiseach of Ireland. And so it is relatively unsurprising that the Mayor's Office constitutes its own supernatural group which acts as a miniature syndicate and operates under the auspices of the city government. This organization, which is called the “Special Threats Bureau” is headed up by a Nosferatu known as “Anchor” who is sometimes called “The General”. All supernatural creatures under his command rise rapidly to the rank of “Lieutenant Detective Commander” and are empowered to call in regular human police to enforce the mayor's will. Each new Mayor of New York City is brought in on the realities of the supernatural and the importance of the Vow of Silence by Anchor shortly after their election. So far, all of them have seen things his way.

The House of Murphy is a group of body snatchers and assassins who operate as an Irish alternative to the predominantly Italian Ulmians. They were originally a family of necromancers and ne'erdowells that was recruited into the Ulmi sometime in the 19th century, but Father Murphy got too big to accept taking orders from Venice and broke off, forming his own crime syndicate around 1914. They've been independent operators ever since, growing in power and reach and becoming justifiably feared. The leadership of the faction always passes to the eldest son of the last Murphy, even if that person is not a luminary. Indeed, the current Murphy head is merely a cultist who does paperwork. But he's really mean, and his little brother is a Khaibit who appears to be played by Ron Pearlman.

Wall Street is a force to be reckoned with even while hiding behind the veil of the Vow of Silence. While many supernatural creatures trade in public companies or appear to through the pre-arranged selling of stock on the “open market,” the fact remains that Forex as a whole is blissfully unaware that Vampires are anything more than a metaphor for what they do. And pretty much everyone behind the mask has agreed to keep it that way. The use of magic of any kind is by mutual agreement totally banned in the financial sector, and hunting parties are fast assembled to eradicate any monster that violates that rule. The bankers are simply too well connected in the mortal realm, and all rational magical creatures fear the kind of armed response those bankers could pull down if they panicked.

The World Crime League in New York runs their affairs from across the river in New Jersey, amongst a set of factories and refineries called “The Chemical Coast.” The local Captain is an albino Mi Go known as “The Swede” by people who respect him and as “The Swedish Chef” by those less favorably disposed. The local Quartermaster is a Golem made of brownish limestone and flint named Iztli. The WCL mostly does embezzlement and drug running through the ports to fund itself in New York. And it is pretty well funded.

The Cauchemar in New York have two separate social experiments going. One of them is a cult of personality inspired by Fallen visionary Amelie Goudarte. They hold inspirational meetings in the Long Island City Ice Pavilion and follow her 7 point plan for success. The other major faction is an informal set of meetings that occur at some apartments, cafés, and a record store around 7th Avenue and W25th. They call themselves such evocative titles as “Coffee Night,” “Taco Time,” and “The Upright Citizen's Brigade.” These loose knit meetings have no clear overall leadership, and have literally dozens of Demagogues, often with purviews that are seemingly quite limited.

Makhzen activities in New York have a tendency to take place on the 13th floors of buildings. Cayuga, the Daeva Prince of the Bronx has noticed that a lot of elevators in New York don't officially go to the 13th floor, thus leaving the possibility of renting out actual 13th floors and requiring special keys or button combinations to get there. The Prince apparently thinks this is awesome, because the Makhzen uses this setup all over town. The Mehtar Council meets in different locations on different days. Unusually for a Makhzen domain, the Bronx Domain has a couple of Asura in its Council.

The Covenant in New York have an insular and paranoid church whose cathedral is located underground in a now defunct area of a previous generation of New York's subway system. The Apolostolic Exarch is a Fallen named Vigo who stores people in paintings. Vigo wants his Priests to prepare their flock for a war that he believes is coming, a series of demands that have served to alienate the clergy from the flock.

Baron Manco Capac has a demonic fiefdom in Brooklyn. It's apparently associated feudally to The King with Three Shadows, and it is run out of a series of nominally abandoned buildings in Crown Heights. The Mirror Goblins and Spriggans at his command seem to not care a whit about accumulated filth, and the human residents are generally convinced that it is a series of meth labs. They are kind of right, in that the Barony does sell meth to finance itself with human dollars.

Port Ivory in Staten Island is host to a chapter of the Shattered Empire. They have a cult going called the Temple of the Rain Dragon, which they use to get ordinary people to worship what appears to be a Deep One as the prophet of the “Rain Dragon”. They move around and operate in secret, but their indoctrination of ordinary humans has left them with the kind of media presence that makes other supernaturals very nervous.

The Marduk Society has infiltrated the FBI field office in New York. Their offices are on the 24th floor of the Federal Building, and they have convinced the local Bureau chief that they are a top secret investigative branch charged with taking over any cases with the “X-” or “Fringe” designation. They also have some sort of bio labs off site, but their location is at least currently a successfully hidden secret.

The Blue Star Faction is a group of zealots who appear to work for Pods. Inductions are forced, and they appear ambivalent about taking casualties. They have contacts somewhere in Central Asia from whom they get weaponry and heroin which they use to finance themselves. Blue Star soldiers appear to not eat well or sleep often, but are generally highly motivated and frighteningly well armed. Some of their equipment appears to be otherworldly. The location where they actual convert people into soldiers is probably somewhere in Riverdale but its exact location is unknown.

Places to Go

Getting around New York is something of a trial. On the one hand, chances are good that wherever you're going isn't actually that far away – there are literally millions of people within a couple of kilometers of you at any time, and if you want to go to an Ethiopian restaurant or a Korean bakery, you can just do that. And yet, the island is just long enough that the place you're going could very plausibly be 5 or 10 kilometers away. People end up taking the subway a lot, and yet there are still places that the subway does not go. People would like to drive a lot of places, but there is nowhere to park. Actually owning a car is madness, and most apartments don't even have available street parking, so using cabs is considered respectable and normal. The average New Yorker takes so many cab trips that they won't even blink on sharing a cab with a total stranger. And most cab drivers won't blink at taking a weird monster across town. Werewolves in war form might not even be the worst they've seen that evening.

Mr. Wing's Antiques is a hub of sorcerous trading, and an excellent place to barter for magic or information. The place is just off Mott street in Manhattan's crumbling Chinatown, and there are some completely unrelated apartments upstairs. Mr. Wing does not take American Express (or any other credit card), but he is willing to part with mere historical relics for cash (especially White Lotus Hell Money) or kittens. Agree to proper feeding and care and putting down the right price, he might even sell you a Mirror Goblin.

The Central Perk is an upmarket and impossibly hip coffee shop in Greenwich Village where patrons can sit at tables, at the bar, or on the couch. The place closes at 11:30 and reopens at midnight as a Cauchemar meeting place. Meetings are informal, and supernaturals of all types and allegiances are invited to hang out, philosophize, or just kvetch about their lives.

Pearl's is a restaurant, bar, and nightclub that serves the tastes of decadent Asian businessmen and criminals in the front, and the even more decadent tastes of supernatural creatures in private rooms. The proprietor is a grotesquely obese and ancient Strigoi named Pearl. Supernatural creatures come because Pearl has a quite extensive collection of artifacts and prophecies in the basement and is willing to buy and sell magical goods and information. But they also come for the food, which is made to the exacting specifications of monsters. Pearl's staff are willing to literally bleed to make the perfect dishes for the establishment's pickier clientele.

It's the realm of horror, so of course there are alligators in the sewers of New York. Well, sort of. New York City has an archaic system of storm drainage called the Combined Sewage System. It is a single set of tunnels that receive effluvia from the sewage outlets of buildings and also receive storm water runoff from the street. This has several effects, most notably that these tunnels are incredibly gross, but totally traversable during dry weather. Also this means that during storms, all the water and untreated sewage mixes together and has to be stored in underground reservoirs to keep it from overflowing directly into the Hudson. And as you might imagine, these reservoirs do not cover the entire tunnel system, so after every major rain there's a bunch of untreated sewage popping out of the combined sewage overflow anyway. So yes, a rain storm sends poop into the water, and yes there are massive cyclopean underground structures that have brown waterfalls into voids and albino alligators. But the alligators don't technically live in the sewer pipes, they live in the Combined Sewage Overflow Reservoir. Tunnel dwelling supernatural residents call it the “Sea Sore” and get totally snooty if outsiders call it “the sewer”.

Nowhere better embodies the Yogi Berra quote of “No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded!” than Times Square. Traffic became such a nightmare that the Mayor's office shut it down to vehicular traffic altogether. The place is now a pedestrian mall, and getting a hot dog or kebab at Times Square is still a least a dollar more expensive than getting it elsewhere in town.

New York's Central Park is likely the most famous urban park. It's very large, and comes in at 3.4 square kilometers. It has its own zoo, more than one ice skating rink, and a famous carousel. Central Park appears in more movies than you can count, and wherever you live, you've probably seen parts of it. The park gets about 25 million visitors a year, which works out to about 3000 visitors an hour. Needless to say, wherever you are in the park, you're not actually alone. As such, Central Park really doesn't host much in the way of outdoors magic. When sorcerers want to do stuff amongst trees, they leave the boroughs and find a discrete place to do it in Jersey. Which is not to say that supernaturals don't do stuff around there, because they do. But they do it inside, either in the basement of the Natural History Museum (where the Church of Set keeps a magic golden tablet) or The Met (where the Hashshashin have regular meetings), or the Guggenheim (where the Rolnicy have some sort of laboratory). Central Park is considered a high value target to control, but actually fighting or using powers in Central Park is considered to be insane.

The Hot Lap Dance Club is, according to a number of reliable reports, the number one strip club on Earth. It was shut down by a paramilitary assault stemmed from a pissed off police commissioner attempting to suppress the owners (who are themselves high powered lawyers and liberal political activists). None of the charges stuck, but the damage was done, and the Hot Lap Dance Club now operates only unofficially in a shallow dark reflection of a Hell's Kitchen loft. The red, fire themed decor is particularly apt considering that is in fact in Limbo. Which means that whatever you think of the rest of the top ten list, the Hot Lap Dance Club is definitely not the best strip club on Earth, because it's not on Earth at all.

The Goblin Market is well accessible from an alleyway that is near the Brooklyn Bridge. Despite being a major entrance to Limbo, it does not seem to be part of Baron Capac's domain.

The building with the crazy gate in it from Ghostbusters is a housing cooperative at 55 Central Park West. And yes, it has a locked Shadow Gate in it. So if you do things right you can pull through a bunch of Poltergeists.

New York in Horror

New York is one of the two major centers of media production in the United States, and is probably second only to Los Angeles in terms of international media impact. As such, it's in a lot of movies, and a lot of them are very bad. But it's the centerpiece for Ghostbusters and that counts for a lot.

Gremlins only takes place in New York proper during the scenes at Mr. Wing's, with the rest taking place in a New Jersey Suburb called Kingston Falls. The second movie takes place in New York pretty much the whole time. This is as good a time as any to talk about the freneticness of life in New York, and how films portray this in terms of monster attacks. Whether it's a horde of ghosts in Ghostbusters or a horde of mirror goblins in Gremlins, New York is metaphorically overrun by things you have to deal with all the time, so having it actually overrun by monsters makes emotional sense. The place is so frickin huge that these sorts of things can actually be covered up later – Gremlins II pretty much takes place in one building, so despite the incredible carnage, that's something that might not make the news if creatures were pulling the right strings.

But it's not just little monsters that attack New York, indeed the city is second only to Tokyo in being threatened by giant monsters. Whether it's Groverfield or King Kong himself, New York is a classic giant monster target. Possessed of some of the most iconic giant buildings, New York is an ideal playground for the titans to scuffle in. That tree thing from Hellboy 2 or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man are classic examples. People feel small walking through New York, and nothing brings that out in people like taking on a 17 meter tall ape.

New York is also a good metaphor for isolation, perhaps ironically considering its status as the second most populous city on Earth. But that metaphor totally works, because everyone is aggressively aware at all times that there are millions and millions of people all around them and they literally can't share a thought with all of them – or even look them all in the eye before they die of old age. So New Yorkers have something of a “not my problem” field protecting them at all times. And that really works as a good source for horror. Many movies capitalize on that sense of social isolation to good effect, such as Rosemary's Baby or Cat People.

And lest we forget, New York is the template for a very large amount of superhero movies. Spiderman, Batman, and so on. Yes, Gotham is identifiably New York. Superheroics work well in the context of New York's constant rain of problems and total anonymity for the individual. That is: first there are 8 million stories in the naked city, and this story is just one of them; so your prospective hero never has to wait around for something to do, there's a monster of the week every week; and secondly people seem ugly when you're alone; and in New York you're totally a stranger. You could fight crime without a mask on, and people might still never figure out who you are.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Fri May 30, 2014 3:57 pm

Right, what's all this, then?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 30, 2014 4:08 pm

deanruel87 wrote:Right, what's all this, then?

Raw text from a draft of chapter 16.

-Username17

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Fri May 30, 2014 4:53 pm

I dig it. The blurbs on Africa and the other places are precisely what the first edition needed to make the world feel larger without sucking up a lot of wordcount. Are you planning on writing any more "X by Night" sections? I know those can get pretty long.

Why did supernatural society choose to start erasing evidence of their existence during the Dark Ages of Europe, specifically? That doesn't really seem like a period during which supernaturals would feel particularly threatened by humans or anything like that. Was it just a "Human society is now weak enough to allow us to do this, so we might as well do it"-type thing?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Fri May 30, 2014 5:47 pm

I guess you could tie the fall of the supernaturals to the Fall of Rome, when the Vow of Misdirection failed and mortals were no longer entirely afraid of the supernatural and found enough out to fight back, having patiently sorted through the lies and accounts and failed attempts to get what worked.

I wrote up a take on it once, for kicks, can't remember if I posted it, but here's the high points

Combined with the barbarian invasions, the political upheaval from Roman senators turning up with a stake in their heart, their head cut off, and a coin in their mouth, everyone lost.

The supernatural world at the time was largely segmented by type--werewolves didn't hang out with Mi-Go, androids weren't allowed at Witch parties--but they did keep in touch. When the shit hit the fan everyone got covered as a couple of infoleaks led to mortals knowing how to hurt werewolves and counter witches. In the wake of the Fall, the supernatural society had its first crisis, because they'd all been using the Vow of Misdirection to live as gods or demons among men. The meetings and conferences arrived at the Vow of Silence--no hints at what you are, don't flaunt it, keep your head down. All the branches of supernaturals had seen the power of the Mob, and in the wake of the Fall, a lot of supernaturals upped stakes and went to places where the mortals had never heard of mi-go or deep ones, for extra insurance. The enlightened self-interest at the time meant resident supernaturals welcomed outsiders of other types--the outsiders would be let in, but they could also be fighters if the locals turned, because the locals would not know how to hurt a golem or a Ventrue. This established the mixed population and the "us versus them" mentality that's endured in all the nights since: it doesn't matter what you are, as long as you're not a mortal.

The Fall of Rome was, past a certain point, egged on by the supernatural community, who hoped the isolation resulting from the breakup of Rome and its roads would give them the breathing space for damage control and to try to remove and fabricate a lot of evidence, and a lot of supernaturals learned the fine trade of stonecarving to replace a few things that couldn't be obviously smashed. It largely worked, and there's now no hard historical evidence that vampires, werewolves, or witches (the major types around Europe at the time) existed, and the rest of the world followed suit at a slower space--burning a library there, laying siege to a castle here, all to help turn solid fact into legend.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 30, 2014 9:09 pm

Blicero wrote:Why did supernatural society choose to start erasing evidence of their existence during the Dark Ages of Europe, specifically?

Well, historically it was during that period that it became a burning offense to admit in public that you believed in Witches. History previous to that pretty much accepts that magic happens and some people are part god or whatever. So in After Sundown that transition marks the change in strategy from spreading mis-information about what supernatural creatures are capable of to the big cover-up to pretend that supernatural creatures don't exist at all.

Whether that was a good idea or not is debatable, but it pretty much has to be that way if history textbooks aren't supposed to look markedly different.

-Username17

jadagul · Post by **jadagul** » Fri May 30, 2014 11:04 pm

Frank: in the Asia section you wrote "The ratio of “things that happen” to “things that happen that you've heard about” is probably lower for Asia than it is for anywhere else on Earth." I'm pretty sure you have this backwards, since right now it says that you hear about almost everything that happens.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat May 31, 2014 3:17 am

No, it's the right way around. Lets say there are 10 things that have happened, and you've heard about 3, so there's a 10:3 ratio of "things that happen" to "things that happen that you've heard about."

jadagul · Post by **jadagul** » Sat May 31, 2014 4:27 am

Prak: Right. And that should be higher in Asia because lots of things happen and you haven't heard about most of them.

When things happen in New York, you probably hear about them, because the media is all there. So maybe 10 things happen and you hear about 8 of them. That gives you a low ratio of 5:4. In Asia, more things happen and you hear about less of them, so maybe 20 things happen and you hear about 5 of them, which gives you a high ratio of 4:1. The ratio is higher in Asia than elsewhere.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat May 31, 2014 5:09 am

...right, which is what I said, but with different numbers. I was saying that Frank did write it the right way around.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat May 31, 2014 5:34 am

Prak: it totally isn't. You're doing some weird thing where you compare the components of the ratio to one another, which makes no sense. A ratio is just a fraction. The ratio of X to Y <=> X:Y <=> X/Y. A fraction can't be higher or lower than itself - you have to compare it to something else. Frank is comparing the ratio (i.e. a fraction) in Asia to the ratio (i.e., another fraction) in the rest of the world. And, as jadagul has pointed out, he has it backwards - if the ratio is defined as "things that happen":"things that happen that you hear about", hearing about less things than in other areas will cause the ratio to be higher than in other areas, not lower.

Or, more concretely:

If 5 things happen in New York and you hear about 4 of them, that's 5 to 4 <=> 5:4 <=> 5/4 = 1.25.

If 5 things happen in Asia, and you hear about 2 of them, that's 5 to 2 <=> 5:2 <=> 5/2 = 2.5.

2.5 is higher than 1.25, and so the ratio in Asia is higher than in New York, exactly because you hear about less things in Asia.

As a general rule, if you're writing a ratio in which one quantity is an interesting variable and the other is arbitrary/fixed, you should put the interesting variable first. That way when you talk about the variable going up, the ratio goes up, and when you talk about the variable going down, the ratio goes down. Both the people who would catch a ratio mistake (all dozen of them) and the people who wing it based on what they think lower/higher should mean in context get it right. Everyone wins.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat May 31, 2014 5:39 am

DSMatticus wrote:Prak: it totally isn't. You're doing some weird thing where you compare the components of the ratio to one another, which makes no sense. A ratio is just a fraction. The ratio of X to Y <=> X:Y <=> X/Y. A fraction can't be higher or lower than itself - you have to compare it to something else. Frank is comparing the ratio (i.e. a fraction) in Asia to the ratio (i.e., another fraction) in the rest of the world. And, as jadagul has pointed out, he has it backwards - if the ratio is defined as "things that happen":"things that happen that you hear about", hearing about less things than in other areas will cause the ratio to be higher than in other areas, not lower.

Or, more concretely:

If 5 things happen in New York and you hear about 4 of them, that's 5 to 4 <=> 5:4 <=> 5/4 = 1.25.

If 5 things happen in Asia, and you hear about 2 of them, that's 5 to 2 <=> 5:2 <=> 5/2 = 2.5.

2.5 is higher than 1.25, and so the ratio in Asia is higher than in New York, exactly because you hear about less things in Asia.

Me wrote:Lets say there are 10 things that have happened, and you've heard about 3, so there's a 10:3 ratio of "things that happen" to "things that happen that you've heard about."

you wrote:5 things happen in Asia

me wrote:Lets say there are 10 things that have happened

you wrote:and you hear about 2 of them

me wrote:and you've heard about 3

you wrote:that's 5 to 2 <=> 5:2

me wrote:so there's a 10:3 ratio of "things that happen" to "things that happen that you've heard about."

I'm really not sure where you're saying I'm wrong.

As a general rule, if you're writing a ratio in which one quantity is an interesting variable and the other is arbitrary/fixed, you should put the interesting variable first. That way when you talk about the variable going up, the ratio goes up, and when you talk about the variable going down, the ratio goes down. Both the people who would catch a ratio mistake (all dozen of them) and the people who wing it based on what they think lower/higher should mean in context get it right. Everyone wins.

So Frank technically did it wrong, but... everyone understood what the hell he meant, right?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat May 31, 2014 6:02 am

Prak wrote:I'm really not sure where you're saying I'm wrong.

This is consuming more time than it is worth. Go figure out if 10:3 is higher or lower than 10:7 and I'm pretty sure it'll click.

Prak wrote:So Frank technically did it wrong, but... everyone understood what the hell he meant, right?

If jadagul were pointing out a typo, would you say the same thing? Proofreading isn't a sin, you know.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 12:08 am

One way to write the correct form of the sentence might be:
The percentage of “things that happen that you've heard about” compared to “things that happen at all” is probably lower for Asia than it is for anywhere else on Earth.

In the Scholomance section, "the dread blood knights" should probably be "the deaded blood knights".

"15% of the world's population are Hindus, and 97% of those Hindus live in the Indian Subcontinent." should perhaps say on the Indian Subcontinent.

The Centralia section should probably read: "The entire area slowly descended into the Dark Reflection, and is now a ruin inhabited by a scant few infernalists remaining."

La Zona del Silencio is next. In the sentence "Members of the Cauchemar who had infiltrated the United States of America's military did indeed cut the invasion short with a nuclear missile, and then have a road built out there to facilitate destroying the remaining evidence.", have should probably be had, though have is technically correct. Perhaps you might want to also mention some of the the other times that nukes have been lost into nothing?

"While almost the entirety of South America is in Latin America (the Falkland islands arguably are not), there are a considerable number of people in Latin America that do not live in South America."

Brasil -> Brazil

"True Prophecies" uses caps in the Arcanotower section but not in the Sands of Time section. It should be the same in both places, and probably capitalized.

"Evil Plants" might want for a better creature category name.

OK is usually written as Okay, but you can ignore that.

Nice Susan Calvin namedrop.

Rosemarie's Baby -> Rosemary's Baby

No Antarctica? Surely there's some sort of magical goings-on there, even if there aren't many people. Probably a number of monsters can tolerate the cold better than humans can. Or perhaps there's also cold-specific monsters that you can only find there, and maybe their fangs are good to make stuff out of or something.

ETortoise · Post by **ETortoise** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 2:59 am

This is a pretty minor nitpick, but as a lifelong Brooklynite and Crown Heights resident I think Baron Capac's fiefdom should drop the North from the Brooklyn. The term "North Brooklyn" is typically associated with Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick.

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 4:26 pm

Frank, all of this stuff is really cool 9/10 makes the world(s) overall better.

Something I'd come across recently that I'd never heard of is The PANDO but when I came across it I couldn't help but think it might be some evil plant or a gate to maya or both. I'm sure you don't need help finding cool shit (I had to google a few of those things, like the lost missile story) but I found that to be really interesting.

One thing I've been curious about is what are elders supposed to have? There are none-stated in the book the closest thing I've come across was the break-down in the last thread about what I would take to kill dracula. That really peaked my interests, and I wasn't sure if the methodology is "Find a BBEG Story" then layer with powers till you have the creature you want. Has anyone actually made one?

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 6:19 pm

Lokathor wrote:No Antarctica? Surely there's some sort of magical goings-on there, even if there aren't many people. Probably a number of monsters can tolerate the cold better than humans can. Or perhaps there's also cold-specific monsters that you can only find there, and maybe their fangs are good to make stuff out of or something.

Lunar supernaturals have trouble with the poles. Which makes it an OK prison for immortal deep ones and werewolves. Kill them and freeze them in a large enough block of ice, and by the time they manage to break through you probably won't be around to care.

Those were some good editing catches, but consider ignoring things which are choices and not errors. Merriam-Webster is Okay with 'OK'.

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 6:42 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:
Lokathor wrote:No Antarctica? Surely there's some sort of magical goings-on there, even if there aren't many people. Probably a number of monsters can tolerate the cold better than humans can. Or perhaps there's also cold-specific monsters that you can only find there, and maybe their fangs are good to make stuff out of or something.
Lunar supernaturals have trouble with the poles. Which makes it an OK prison for immortal deep ones and werewolves. Kill them and freeze them in a large enough block of ice, and by the time they manage to break through you probably won't be around to care.

Those were some good editing catches, but consider ignoring things which are choices and not errors. Merriam-Webster is Okay with 'OK'.

Right I remember that "try not to get imprisoned there" line. Smart. So in cannon there could basically "the ice prison in the south". Alternatively, just a few badass supernaturals trapped down there waiting since the last ice age cold snap or longer.
I think that was around 1400 to 1600, there are a lot of popular movies and stories of that vein most notably "The thing" and probably hundreds of global warming cautionary tales since.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 7:08 pm

The PANDO is neat but if we're talking about cool ass plants and "naturally" occurring gateways to Maya I must confess to being a total ficus fanboy. You see, it's been established that aside from dreaming the quickest way to get to Maya is to head through a magical circle. And well, strangler figs envelop other plants, causing them to die and eventually wither away, leaving hollows that can end up looking like this from the inside:

So, yeah, don't climb up a tree hollow unless you're willing to risk a trip to Monster Island. Also, some figs have aerial root systems that can grow to size of full grown trees in their own right, like the Great Banyan of Kolkata. This allows various species of strangler fig to grow around all sorts of stationary stuff other than just other trees. So, maybe you shouldn't cut these suckers down willy-nilly, either, since uncorking the tree hollow might result in awakening an ancient vampire who was trapped by dryads for good reason. The part where the Hindu world tree was purported to be a fig tree is seriously just a bonus.

Tumbling Down · Post by **Tumbling Down** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 7:39 pm

Lokathor wrote:In the Scholomance section, "the dread blood knights" should probably be "the deaded blood knights".

Dread is a perfectly legitimate adjective.[/nitpick]

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 8:53 pm

Midnight_v wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote:
Lokathor wrote:No Antarctica? Surely there's some sort of magical goings-on there, even if there aren't many people. Probably a number of monsters can tolerate the cold better than humans can. Or perhaps there's also cold-specific monsters that you can only find there, and maybe their fangs are good to make stuff out of or something.
Lunar supernaturals have trouble with the poles. Which makes it an OK prison for immortal deep ones and werewolves. Kill them and freeze them in a large enough block of ice, and by the time they manage to break through you probably won't be around to care.

Those were some good editing catches, but consider ignoring things which are choices and not errors. Merriam-Webster is Okay with 'OK'.

Right I remember that "try not to get imprisoned there" line. Smart. So in cannon there could basically "the ice prison in the south". Alternatively, just a few badass supernaturals trapped down there waiting since the last ice age cold snap or longer.
I think that was around 1400 to 1600, there are a lot of popular movies and stories of that vein most notably "The thing" and probably hundreds of global warming cautionary tales since.

I just got this image of supernaturals being rabid climate change activists. "NO GODDAMNIT! IF THE POLE KEEPS MELTING YOU'LL UNLEASH CTHULHU! DO YOU WANT AN ELDER GOD WIPING HIS ASS WITH YOUR HOUSE?"

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sun Jun 01, 2014 10:54 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Those were some good editing catches, but consider ignoring things which are choices and not errors. Merriam-Webster is Okay with 'OK'.

Well, I did say "usually ... but you can ignore that".

Tumbling Down wrote:
Lokathor wrote:In the Scholomance section, "the dread blood knights" should probably be "the deaded blood knights".
Dread is a perfectly legitimate adjective.[/nitpick]

Yeah I know, I said probably. It's a legit adjective, but specifically using it like that is pretty old school. These days you'd usually conjugate it.

Anyway, I whipped up a PDF sample of what this chapter might look like when formatted with headings and such, because I was a little bored today. You guys can have a look https://github.com/Lokathor/After-Sundown-2e

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Mon Jun 02, 2014 1:04 am

Prak_Anima wrote:
Midnight_v wrote: Right I remember that "try not to get imprisoned there" line. Smart. So in cannon there could basically "the ice prison in the south". Alternatively, just a few badass supernaturals trapped down there waiting since the last ice age cold snap or longer.
I think that was around 1400 to 1600, there are a lot of popular movies and stories of that vein most notably "The thing" and probably hundreds of global warming cautionary tales since.
I just got this image of supernaturals being rabid climate change activists. "NO GODDAMNIT! IF THE POLE KEEPS MELTING YOU'LL UNLEASH CTHULHU! DO YOU WANT AN ELDER GOD WIPING HIS ASS WITH YOUR HOUSE?"

Cue A Colder War.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Jun 02, 2014 1:27 am

I now kind of want to troll anti-climate change fundies by claiming that ancient demons are imprisoned in the ice and we must do everything we can to stop the melting of the caps, lest Abramileth The Destroyer be let loose and bring the End Times.

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Mon Jun 02, 2014 2:32 am

CatharzGodfoot wrote:
Prak_Anima wrote:
Midnight_v wrote: Right I remember that "try not to get imprisoned there" line. Smart. So in cannon there could basically "the ice prison in the south". Alternatively, just a few badass supernaturals trapped down there waiting since the last ice age cold snap or longer.
I think that was around 1400 to 1600, there are a lot of popular movies and stories of that vein most notably "The thing" and probably hundreds of global warming cautionary tales since.
I just got this image of supernaturals being rabid climate change activists. "NO GODDAMNIT! IF THE POLE KEEPS MELTING YOU'LL UNLEASH CTHULHU! DO YOU WANT AN ELDER GOD WIPING HIS ASS WITH YOUR HOUSE?"
Cue A Colder War.

One of my favorite Nu-Cthulhu tales

I now kind of want to troll anti-climate change fundies by claiming that ancient demons are imprisoned in the ice and we must do everything we can to stop the melting of the caps, lest Abramileth The Destroyer be let loose and bring the End Times.

Both of these things are pretty much exactly right.
Frank hit on it with the thing in the volcano, but there are elders and some of those elders are... antisocial as fuck.
I think you can get there without going into total mythos land.