Urban Fantasy: How Many in the Conspiracy

[deaddmwalking]

Surely you'd inevitably run into problems with, say, people wanting to play as Nosferatu and Brujah and wanting to play in a certain city because it's a real place, and you've gone and said it's where there are only Toreador and Gangrels?

Unless you were to, say, make up a template for what type of monsters live in a city, and make another for how many, and let individual gaming groups tack that onto whatever cities they wanted to.

I'd agree - while certain factions may be dominate in a particular region, most factions should be REPRESENTED, which is another argument for increasing the number of supernaturals within your defined areas. We've talked about how the clans/factions needs to be relatively small. If you're using New Orleans as your exemplar, and you allot 40 vampire luminaries TOTAL, with 13 clans you'd have 1-5 (average 3) per clan.

I don't think having representation by every clan is compatible with a small number of supernaturals.

I definitely think that barring representation (ie, there are no Ravnos in Chicago, suck it) isn't the way to go. Saying that a particular domain is DOMINATED by one clan (or a struggle between a defined two or three clans) is less problematic.

[erik]

I thought we didn’t need 13 vamp clans if it’s multi supernatural types.

[deaddmwalking]

I thought we didn’t need 13 vamp clans if it’s multi supernatural types.

Sure, agreed. I know Frank suggested a smaller number of clans. I don't think anyone has proposed a fixed number and/or the flavor that makes them unique.

I don't think you could have less than 5 clans, and that might be a little limiting. I can see a lot of pressure to add additional clans down the road.

If you choose 5 clans and you opt for equal representation, and New Orleans (with surrounding territories) has all the clans represented and you have 40 luminaries total, you're up to 8 per clan. Of you could make 1 clan dominant (20) and the other four roughly equal (5 each). But I still feel that those types of numbers are very limiting.

It appears that there has been a clarification that there are at least as many trash supernaturals as luminaries, so if there are 1:10k luminaries, we're down to 1:5k TOTAL supernaturals.



Edit -

I wanted to amend my answer. I do think that there is room for geographically isolated clans that don't feature everywhere. If you set your game in San Francisco and the 'major clans' are represented, a vampire visiting from Haiti that represents a different tradition is fine and appropriate. If that 'clan' resonates, it will grow organically and over time more and more of them will show up until they're a 'major clan'. It would be wholly appropriate to have 'major clans' that feature in Southeast Asian mega-cities that are generally different from the 'major clans' that show up in American Cities. As part of your world-building, you probably want to acknowledge that and allot some representation of major American clans in Asian cities and Asian clan representation in US Pacific cities. So it's okay if the 'Shanghai Primogenitor Vampire Clan' has a few members in San Francisco and Vancouver, but none in Chicago. In any case, enough vampires should be 'in flux' that the number of Ventrue (or whatever) could wax and wane in a particular location over time, as long as having some show up wouldn't 'break' the game.

[virgil]

Why do you have to have everything represented in every particular region?

[deaddmwalking]

Why do you have to have everything represented in every particular region?

With my expanded answer, the answer is you don't. It's okay to have some things be very location specific. There only needs to be one Jade Throne, or one Portal to Asgard - those types of features may define a place. And clearly guardians that are unique to those locations are appropriate.

But because this is a table-top roleplaying game, GENERALLY, you want to support player choices. Assume a game with five players, each from one of the five clans you've decided on. Assume that in designing the world, you remove one clan completely from each of the five cities you create on your first pass. No matter which location you choose, one character is automatically an outsider and their character choice is not supported.

All else being equal, it would be better if some of the cities had a MINOR presence of each of the major clans, but that none of them had been defined canonically as having no presence.

With a minor presence, you have options to introduce contacts or resources without violating established setting canon. There are times that is going to be helpful.

It's all about providing the players and MC options for a variety of game experiences. At some point you may have to decide that you can't reasonably support all of the play space, but I don't think you should start by trying to make a game that couldn't appeal to anyone other than you. As a cooperative game, building inclusiveness into the game is a good thing - while you can't always support every option, there's no reason not to try to support the options you can.

[pragma]

I have one concern with the 1:10,000 ratio, which I agree gives you the ability to easily fully specify domains: it leaves very little room for a body count. Most TTRPGs I have played escalate over a session (or if it's a particularly slow burn Shadowrun, over two or three) to a shootout of some vareity. If there are only 145 vampires, you can't kill more than 14 without having a serious impact on the setting. I like DDMWs numbers because they allow for running vampire gang wars over a long campaign without having to rewrite setting material.

However, I'll admit that I'm a relative stranger to the source material, having only played two sessions of Werewolf for reference. Is it expected that you're killing things other than kin? Is it expected that you're killing nothing? The latter seems unlikely given players I've interacted with.

Edit: As suggested below, I meant 1:10k, not 1:100k as originally written

[virgil]

But because this is a table-top roleplaying game, GENERALLY, you want to support player choices. Assume a game with five players, each from one of the five clans you've decided on. Assume that in designing the world, you remove one clan completely from each of the five cities you create on your first pass. No matter which location you choose, one character is automatically an outsider and their character choice is not supported.

Why do vampire clans (aka, race) need to be the primary social grouping for PCs, rather than geographic/social-specific faction?

[erik]

I have one concern with the 1:100,000 ratio, which I agree gives you the ability to easily fully specify domains: it leaves very little room for a body count. Most TTRPGs I have played escalate over a session (or if it's a particularly slow burn Shadowrun, over two or three) to a shootout of some vareity. If there are only 145 vampires, you can't kill more than 14 without having a serious impact on the setting. I like DDMWs numbers because they allow for running vampire gang wars over a long campaign without having to rewrite setting material.

However, I'll admit that I'm a relative stranger to the source material, having only played two sessions of Werewolf for reference. Is it expected that you're killing things other than kin? Is it expected that you're killing nothing? The latter seems unlikely given players I've interacted with.

First, pretty sure the ratio proposed was 1:10,000.

Second. If you have a fight where 14 Luminaries die in one go, that should be a big fuckin deal. That level of shakeup will probably bring some level of investigation by neighboring Princedoms to assess threats and opportunities at the very least.

Now more likely you will have fights where a dozen spawn tier monsters die. That’s a news event on VNN (vampire news network), but not setting changing. A prince can turn a dozen thugs pronto and keep status quo. Remember. There are about 4-5x as many spawn tier servitor types. Losing a dozen or two out of 600 isn’t major. Especially since they are not in positions of power mostly.

I think you only like DeadDM’s numbers because you started off by a factor of 10 (or by 50 if counting non luminaries too).

There is no reason to make every podunk town a major supernatural hangout. And lots of reasons not to.

[Username17]

Yeah, literally no one thinks 1:100,000 is a good idea. The proposal by sane people is 1:10,000.

A basic urban fantasy campaign takes place in a sandbox with roughly one hundred major NPCs. At 1:100,000, only a handful of megacities are available as areas of interest. White Wolf tried that number, and it was so obviously unplayable that they never once wrote a single adventure or region writeup that even attempted to be consistent with it. At 1:1,000, the threshold for being a "playable" sandbox is so low that Wikipedia doesn't even bother listing them all. You couldn't possibly make meaningful statements about what's going on in the setting because Wikipedia loses interest after listing 311 cities and neighborhoods that would meet the threshold needed to get over a hundred magic creatures. It's simply absurd.

The happy medium under discussion is 1 per ten thousand. It's a sweet spot in which New Orleans is a playable location (with 145 Luminaries) and we aren't worried about splitting Boston into dozens of domains or anything retarded like that.

Why do vampire clans (aka, race) need to be the primary social grouping for PCs, rather than geographic/social-specific faction?

They do not. And indeed, if you want there to be 13 Vampire Clans, they can't be. You need political factions and you need them to be ones that the player characters can interact with. But here are some important points about that:

• The political factions in New Orleans don't need to be the same political factions in Tampa or the same political factions in Detroit. Different domains can just have political factions to interact with and that's fine.
• … except that if the player characters are locked into a single political faction, that faction needs to be something they can interact with everywhere they go.
• More than 7 political factions in a domain is really pushing it, and generally it's hard to make more than 3 to 5 work. There are only 80 to 200 Luminaries in town, so when there are eight or more factions then your small "factions" can carpool in a single vehicle.
• Traitor factions and secret inner circles and shit do count as factions against your 7 faction limit, and because they need to be minorities of the factions they are hiding in they expose the beating heart of demographics limits really fucking fast. You basically just can't even have a secret faction inside a secret faction inside a faction because that would be just one dude.
• Whatever political factions you choose, it has to be either a playable choice to have different players be members of different ones (this is very hard), or more likely to have all the players be from the same faction even though they will still want to play different roles.

What that gets us to is that you can have quite a few Vampire Clans and however many flavors of Lycanthrope you want to have. But those can't be the political factions. To put things in Magic terminology, all the "Guilds" have to be multi-racial. The Sabbat has to accept both Weresharks and Nosferatu.

So we can have however many kinds of monsters as we want, but there won't be a politically relevant number of most of them in any particular domain. Further, we can have as many black hat factions as we want, but only a couple of them will have significant numbers in any specific domain. Finally, however many white hat factions we have, there has to be at least one (probably exactly one) operating in any particular domain.

Those are the constraints we operate under, and it means that we can't have factions that are particularly similar to White Wolf's old Vampire Clan as Political Faction model.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

On the prior page of this conversation, Frank proposes that trash tier supernatural would be fewer in number to the luminaries, with human survivors outnumbering them at between 3x and 10x the number of luminaries.

Originally in this conversation, a distinction was not made between luminaries and other supernatural creatures. In my posts, I have generally not maintained a distinction - I'm more interested in the total number of supernatural than what specific percentage are important. The determination that luminaries exist at a ratio of 1:10,000 and trash tier monsters are roughly equal in number was a stealth admission that a ratio of 1:5,000 supernaturals to humans is more reasonable.

Personally, I like 4x to 5x as many trash tier to luminaries. Even outside of vampire stories, in 'rogue cop' movies like Lethal Weapon you want a few serious bodyguards supporting the BBEG. A leader with 3-4 supernatural henchmen and 20-30 goons feels right to me for a lot of groups, but I can also see a gang with everyone roughly equal in power and no Renfields. I'm not sure whether supernatural henchmen should necessarily qualify as 'trash' - having something in the middle seems appropriate.

True 'trash' should die en masse (ie, someone exposes them all to sunlight) - they make the odds look insurmountable, but a small victory quickly evens the odds. I think there is room for supernatural trash.

Again, using Knoxville, I could see 10-15 'important' vampires, but the total number should be roughly 10x that - all the enforcers and believers that make the important vampires actually matter - representing what they're in charge of.

[Trill]

Originally in this conversation, a distinction was not made between luminaries and other supernatural creatures. In my posts, I have generally not maintained a distinction

OOHH
I think I begin to understand why you and Frank seem to consequently disagree on the number.
Frank, when giving the 1:10000, did you mean (1 luminary):(10000 Humans) ?
Because if so then I think I understand.

For Frank the 1:1000 might seem ridiculous, since he thinks it means luminaries. The total ratio of supernaturals to humans would then lie at about 1:100 or more, which is absolutely untenable.
How do you want to have a masquerade when a significant part of your population is involved?

For DDMW the 1:10000 might seem ridiculous, since in his view it means (1 supernatural):(10000 Humans), meaning that if one tenth of those are luminaries you only have 1:100000.

Frank, DDMW, is this correct?

[deaddmwalking]

Originally, the term 'supernatural creature' was used with the 1:10,000 ratio. On page 2, in response to suggestions about vampires quickly restoring losses Frank brought up luminaries as a way to control unparalleled growth. On page 3 Orion suggested that the 1:10000 ratio should apply to luminaries, which Frank has apparently accepted, and with roughly equal numbers of non-luminaries that would change the ratio of supernatural creatures to 1:5000.

In general, I think that it is significantly better. However, I'm fairly confident that Frank and I are not in agreement. Principally, a ratio of 1:10,000 is broadly acceptable to me as a worldwide figure provided populations cluster. I don't think I've seen Frank address why he thinks the ratio of supernatural creatures should be consistent in all places. I've indicated that a smaller number of vampires than 1:10k works for me in places that I don't want to make the focus of the game (like Siberia), but that I think the game should acknowledge that there are places that have a larger share. Effectively, I maintain that guidebooks should establish a normal range, rather than a fixed ratio.

[DrPraetor]

I switched back to 100K:1 instead of 10K:1 because I wasn't paying close attention to what I was typing.

Greater NYC should have more than 100 vampires, let alone witches and were-camels.

Some variation is obviously fine, but you don't want it to vary by an order of magnitude. If the ratio of luminaries to schlubs is 5K:1, and half the luminaries are obviously supernatural in most places, you get a dynamic range of 5K to 10K per monster depending on the luminary conversion rate. Which is fine to have - I like it as a setting conceit because some places should have zombie foci or otherwise be damned - but I'm not saying you need it.

If the answer is, "everywhere I want my campaign I want more monsters than that", than you just raise the ratio everywhere; but in any case, I think that's wrong. The grand monster ball of greater Dallas has 700 monsters. That is enough for minor factions of 35 monsters to have secret cells of 6 traitor monsters inside them, if that floats your boat. If you think you want more than that, or if you think you want more layers of sub-conspiracies than that, you're mistaken.

If your point is that Dallas will have a 5% chance of only 670 monsters (or 730) by stochastic fluctuation - that's true, but I don't think the monster census is precise enough for you to know. Dallas has about 700 monsters and if you meet somewhat more or fewer than you'd expect given the population, that is more likely to be a result of random chance than that the overall demographics are markedly different.

[Username17]

While I don't actually give a single flying fuck if some place has 1 Luminary per 8,000 and another has 1 Luminary per 10,000, not one person has actually brought up a single location where such a declaration would actually be necessary. But sure, I'll grant one: Malta.

Malta has a population of 465,000 and is an island nation in the fucking water. There isn't a surrounding hinterland, there's just water until you get to North Africa or Italy. If you wanted to have 50 supernatural creatures there, or 65, you'd have to play with the ratios slightly because simply adding more space isn't an option.

But for Grand Forks or East Texas or Knoxville, or any of the other locations in the US, you can just add rural territory until you hit whatever critical population threshold you happen to want. While you could vary the Luminary population, there is absolutely no need to do so, because the domain borders can be drawn arbitrarily to have the Prince be in charge of as much low population wilderness as required in order to bring the population numbers to whatever the fuck you wanted them to be at a fixed population ratio. It's not a problem. The Prince of Knoxville does have jurisdiction of some amount of rural hinterland around Knoxville that is not controlled by the more powerful Prince of Nashville, and if you wanted to have that hinterland extend into Whitley County, Kentucky before it ran up into the mostly rural domain of Lexington that would be fine. Most of the domains in Kentucky spill into Ohio or Indiana, so if there's some slopover to the south as well that would be reasonable.

Getting a bit off-topic, but where do those creatures come from? I mean, if you have 1 vampire, they can go round making new vampires and familiars and so on from the local population. That easy to explain.

But, do elves or goblins reproduce like humans do? Because then having 5 here and 10 there in isolated groups spread out across the country seems like it'd be a real demographic problem.

Mostly they get summoned from nightmare worlds. You don't have a Goblin immigrant community with grocery stores that cater to Goblins and special benevolent societies for Goblins that both protect and exploit the Goblins who would otherwise find it difficult to get jobs or own property in a society that discriminates against Goblins or whatever the fuck. Mister Gone is a fucking wizard, and he has summoned a pack of Goblins that serve him.

Zombies show up because of evil magic or evil science or some sort of magical or science disaster. Other trash tier supernatural creatures are similar. The hell hound that works for the Master Vampire in Lost Boys aren't there because there's a thriving Hell Hound breeding community in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Master Vampire happens to own one, it's there because the Master Vampire did some magical ritual that summoned a Hound from Hell. It's the only one in Santa Carla.

The existence of minion-tier supernatural creatures is interesting from a demographics standpoint. While they have to be encountered in groups or along side Luminaries to be much of a threat, they also don't have any political power or meaningful political interests. When you face Zombies, you face a pack of Zombies, but the Zombies collectively might as well be an unaligned hostile Steve. You don't need to face Zombies again the next adventure or the one after that.

Whatever minion-tier monsters your domain has just need to be enough to do a couple monster of the week adventures where the monster of the week happens to be a handful of minion-tier monsters rather than a single boss monster monster. Zombies need to outnumber the player characters when they show up, but they don't need to show up very often. And they don't need to show up at all in the various social gatherings.


No one brings their minion-tier supernaturals to Kindred get togethers.

A typical domain needs as many Zombie packs as it needs any other particular Steve. So maybe you have a Zombie pack, but maybe you have the awakened cabal of the cancerous organs that inhabit the dead body of Henry Rollins instead. New Orleans in particular is very "on theme" for Zombies, so you probably have a few packs, but Zombies are still significantly outnumbered by actual Kindred.

New Orleans has 145 Luminary supernatural Kindred. But it only needs 60 or less Minion Tier Supernaturals.

-Username17

[Dean]

I absolutely believe that for almost any WoD campaign I've seen you need a lot more minion tier supernaturals. It's been mentioned that you need enough supernaturals so that when you kill one monster per week you don't run out of every vampire and werewolf and steve your population allowed for in a 4 month campaign. That goes triple for trash tier minions particularly because they are often introduced in groups: A trio of vampire brides, a pack of hell hounds, a gang of ghouls etc. When you introduce a "pack" of zombies in a scene you've just eaten up 20 of those 60 minion tier supernaturals in one part of one session.

I think it's obviously true that you need as many or more minion tier supernaturals as luminaries. Partly because you don't want your game to have run out of your entire cities minion budget after 2 encounters with the Zombie Lord and one encounter with a group of ghouls. But also because the idea of luminaries is that they're the rare ones, that most people would turn into vampire spawn and few into vampires and so on. If ghouls or other minion tiers are actually much rarer than vampires or mages they don't feel very much like minions do they?

[Username17]

I absolutely believe that for almost any WoD campaign I've seen you need a lot more minion tier supernaturals. It's been mentioned that you need enough supernaturals so that when you kill one monster per week you don't run out of every vampire and werewolf and steve your population allowed for in a 4 month campaign. That goes triple for trash tier minions particularly because they are often introduced in groups: A trio of vampire brides, a pack of hell hounds, a gang of ghouls etc. When you introduce a "pack" of zombies in a scene you've just eaten up 20 of those 60 minion tier supernaturals in one part of one session.

Yes. One Zombie adventure could easily chew through a third of the domain's 60 minion tier supernaturals. So what? How many minion tier supernaturals are in Blade? Zero. How many minion tier supernaturals are in Underworld? Zero. How many minion tier supernaturals are in Interview With The Vampire? Zero. How many minion tier supernaturals are in Monster Squad? Three (although possibly more if you count the crypt scene in the prologue, since we have no idea what was going on with those skeletons). How many minion tier supernaturals are in Lost Boys? One.

Your typical scenario is that you go to the Prince's meeting room and there are waifish vampire courtiers there and a blind cackling witch adviser and shit and none of these people are minion tier supernaturals. And you get your mission and you do some investigating and talk to some sewer monster that talks to rats and knows stuff and he's not a minion-tier supernatural either and you figure out who the villains are and you throw down and they also aren't minion-tier supernaturals.

Basically, look at Monster Squad: as you run through the various monsters you encounter, you meet with a Vampire, a Mummy, a Werewolf, a Frankenstein, a Leviathan, and 3 Vampire Brides. That's one encounter with minion-tier supernaturals, and five encounters with Luminaries. And yes, the number of vampire brides is larger than the number of Wolfmans you encounter in their respective encounter, but we're multiplying a tiny fraction.

I think it's obviously true that you need as many or more minion tier supernaturals as luminaries. Partly because you don't want your game to have run out of your entire cities minion budget after 2 encounters with the Zombie Lord and one encounter with a group of ghouls. But also because the idea of luminaries is that they're the rare ones, that most people would turn into vampire spawn and few into vampires and so on. If ghouls or other minion tiers are actually much rarer than vampires or mages they don't feel very much like minions do they?

The issue here is that most minions aren't Hell Hounds and Vampire Brides and shit. Most minions are Renfields - human minions. Because it's set in the modern day, and humans are the most abundant resource. Minion monsters can only be encountered in very remote areas because they have such a hard time with the Vow of Silence. Humans with some Vampire House's sigil branded onto their neck can just pop their collar and pass for normies because they literally actually are normies who just happen to work for House Drcul.

When you have boardroom scenes and ballroom scenes and social interactions of most kind, there aren't any Goblins. If there are servants carrying around trays with blood goblets, those servants are humans. And that's fine.

So yes, the number of minions needs to exceed the number of real supernaturals by several times, but the number of supernatural minions does not. Supernatural minions are mostly a waste of conceptual space and suspension of disbelief. They use up shadows that you could hide a real monster in, but they do the work of "gang thug #4." It's a thing you want to be able to trot out sometimes, but mostly just because it's completely OK to go hog wild with ultraviolence against Zombies. But that's not every adventure or even most of the interaction with the supernatural that you do in the adventures they show up.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Spawn creatures are easily replaced however. So you don't need to keep a large stockpile of spawn creatures because you can just replace your stock of 20 zombies if you're the kind of horrible person who creates zombies.

Given that most spawn have the emotional maturity of a rabid attack dog, you don't want too many of them at a time because eventually they become more trouble than they're worth.

I'd say Cultists should be an exception to that in that I was under the impression that even trash tier evil wizards should be able to keep it together long enough to justify teaching maddening sorcery to either your most trusted or your most expendable Renfields, but I didn't actually watch Bible Black so I'm probably missing something. (Not helped by how Ghouls got one shitty discipline in V:tM)

[Thaluikhain]

Mostly they get summoned from nightmare worlds.

Ah, ok, I'd assumed demons worked like that, hadn't thought that would extend to goblins and elves and stuff. So there are no "native" populations of anything that don't start off as (or by) humans? That makes sense.

[Chamomile]

If supernatural spawn are going to be super rare, they should also be a significant upgrade over regular mooks, a halfway point between cannon fodder and proper luminaries. Giving them just one or two powers, sometimes not even particularly useful ones, makes them almost exactly as weak as gang thug #4, and so long as that's the case, people are going to use them as though they were gang thug #4. Particularly since Buffy the Vampire Slayer usually uses them as exactly that.

[Username17]

If supernatural spawn are going to be super rare, they should also be a significant upgrade over regular mooks, a halfway point between cannon fodder and proper luminaries. Giving them just one or two powers, sometimes not even particularly useful ones, makes them almost exactly as weak as gang thug #4, and so long as that's the case, people are going to use them as though they were gang thug #4. Particularly since Buffy the Vampire Slayer usually uses them as exactly that.

There are multiple ways you can look at Supernatural Spawn monsters.

The way they are used in Buffy and Monster Squad is to have them be "moral scrubs." That is, they are essentially interchangeable with Gang Thug #4 or Guard Dog #2, but people don't get upset when you kill them because they are supernaturally evil and deserving of face stabbing. In such stories, the "vampire spawn" and the "zombie" exist because you would like to show the main character chopping a dude's head off with an axe, but you don't want to do much work establishing that dude as a bad dude nor do you want to have the audience think about the ramifications of that dude's mother filing a missing person's report and shit.

In stories where the violence level is low enough that you don't need to have toss-off victim antagonists, or where the slashers are the bad guys and the victims are sympathetic, or where you are doing Hamletian tragedy and the characters who die are supposed to be named characters or at least of equal weight with those who are - then that's not required. Further, if you already have a non-supernatural contrivance for why it's OK for the characters to shoot a bunch of enemies in the face (such as the villains being Nazis or the action being set during wartime), supernatural minions of this sort aren't needed at all.

This is where we get the other kind of supernatural minion: the Palette Swap Upgrade. This is popular in videogames that need the ability to demonstrate increased threat levels in a simple visual language, and also in roleplaying games in the Dungeons & Dragons milieu, where there is again a perceived need to demonstrate increased threat level in a linguistically economical fashion. In Wolfenstein it's already morally acceptable to shoot the opposition in the face because they are Nazis, so the Zombie Nazis are an excuse to throw down enemies that have more hit points and communicate that to the audience in a simple and easy to grok fashion.

I would argue that urban fantasy games don't actually need either of those things. Enemies can be "full grown" Vampires, because mostly you're supposed to be having lots of talking parts with your opponents and that's hard to do when there are a lot of enemies. In the few times you actually have groups of enemies, they can easily enough be outfitted in military battle armor or be swat teams and shit if you want them to be "higher quality" in an easily identifiable fashion. So to the extent that either is any use at all, the "morally defensible punching bags" has more utility. Which is to say: any at all.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

You have purely urban domains in the United States. The Dominion of San Francisco is just urban area and probably its immediate neighbors are the Dominion of Oakland and the Dominion of San Jose, and those are urban areas too. New York is probably like 8 domains that are all physically small and jam packed with humanity. And then you have purely rural domains. Montana is pretty much just one thousand kilometers of wild lands.

So let's take a deeper dive and talk about Montana. The total population of Montana is approximately 1 million. At a ratio of Luminaries to normal humans, you end up with approximately 100 Luminaries in the 4th largest state (by area). The largest city, Billings allows for 10; the next 6 largest cities allow 7, 6, 4, 4, 3, and 2, respectively with generous rounding up. That accounts for 35 of your Luminaries. With an even distribution, all of the rest are effectively isolated individually. Effectively you have the evil wizard model - everyone has their own dark tower.

But let's assume that despite the thin population density, all of the supernatural creatures are in communication and recognize themselves as a politically distinct unit. Assuming you start in Billings, it's a 5 hour drive to Missoula, the second largest city. It's a 4 hour drive to Great Falls; 2 hours to Butte; 3 to Billings and 3.5 to Helena. Basically it's a big enough place that you're unlikely to make a day trip (or night trip) out of any of these other cities - let alone the hinterlands. But in order to have a society that means anything, you're probably going to want close to 100 creatures with agendas

[Side Note - I'm not real clear on what the term luminary means in this context. I understand that vampire brides don't count, but they are supernatural creatures. I do know that luminaries have a special meaning in After Sundown. I'd think that a luminary in this context ought to mean a creature with effectively freewill and an agenda - a dominated slave wouldn't count, but a loyal body servant would].

So there are a lot of questions about how to handle Montana in an Urban Nights setting. The first question should be, do you even want to? Does Billings make sense as a place to set a game with 10 'important' supernatural creatures? Does having roughly 2/3 of the supernatural creatures living in isolation increase the number of stories you can tell versus having small pockets of densely grouped supernatural creatures? I'd argue no - rolling up and killing your 50th solitary supernatural is going to feel repetitive.

But what if you concentrate them? Let's say we take all 100 supernatural luminaries and put them in one place - Billings. That'd give us 100 supernatural creatures to ~100,000 people, or 1:1000 - 10x the 'suggested' ratio. And if there are an equal number of 'trash' monsters, we might have a ratio of 1:500 supernaturals...

I think ultimately you have to establish a range of 'normal' and there are aren't 65 luminaries living independently. If the normal range is 1:2500 to 1:20,000, even with a MEDIAN of 1:10,000 you can have 100 luminaries in Montana, but you're free to sprinkle them more judiciously.

Alternatively, you could assume that there is a minimum population threshold before you start counting. That would leave rural areas generally deserted, but I'm not sure that's a problem.

As far as Domains, there's no reason to make them all the same size in terms of population. Lichenstein and Monaco both have fewer than 40,000 people, but they both exist as independent nations. Despite the small resident population, James Bond movies show that you can make Monaco an adventure destination. It's clearly a place that can have more than 3-4 Luminaries. Nice is only 30 minutes away, but I don't see what you gain by trying to make the Luminaries in MonteCarlo care about Nice or vice versa seems to miss the point of setting a game in an exotic place to begin with. And it's not like MonteCarlo doesn't count as urban - it is the most densely populated country in the world. It's a weird and crazy aspect of the world, and if your game ignores those strange places to enforce conformity, it's missed direction at some point.

In talking about Monaco, I can think of a lot of reasons why it would be exceptional - having quite a few more supernaturals than it would 'deserve' by population figures alone. I can think of other places that are allotted more supernaturals than they need - concentrating them where it helps make interesting stories is exactly what you'd want from a roleplaying game.

[kzt]

Their is no reason to make them all the same size, but they have to make sense. If a small city is close to a large city it's going to be natural that, over time, the large city ends up in charge. There doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to assume that state or international boundaries matter to supernatural entities. They might be convenient lines for some reason, but they are not intrinsically important.

For example, the reason the mayor and city council of Arlington Texas can tell the mayors of Dallas and Ft Worth to go to hell is because the state of Texas and the USG will back them up. Is it likely that supernatural Arlington can do that? I really doubt it.

Equally I would tend to suspect that the prince of El Cenro CA spends a lot of time on the phone saying "Yes sir, I understand" to the prince of Mexicali, Baja.

For Monaco and Lichtenstein you'd need to come up with a compelling reason why they are not the property of someone a lot bigger, like the prince of Nice or Munich. There certainly would be someone local who runs it, but they have a boss who has to be kept happy.

[Username17]

But let's assume that despite the thin population density, all of the supernatural creatures are in communication and recognize themselves as a politically distinct unit. Assuming you start in Billings, it's a 5 hour drive to Missoula, the second largest city. It's a 4 hour drive to Great Falls; 2 hours to Butte; 3 to Billings and 3.5 to Helena. Basically it's a big enough place that you're unlikely to make a day trip (or night trip) out of any of these other cities - let alone the hinterlands. But in order to have a society that means anything, you're probably going to want close to 100 creatures with agendas

Yes. Political organizing in Montana takes a long time. There's a lot of driving involved. That's the whole point. If you want to set things in Montana, long distances between things and people staring off into the horizon making non-committal statements are going to be front and center. People are going to have Brokeback Mountain style adventures where they achieve social isolation from people they live with by simply moving far enough away that direct communication becomes difficult. That's how Montana is. People have a lot of space around each other, both physically and socially and visiting other people is a big enough endeavor that you don't "pop in," you call ahead and stay for a long time. People fucking send letters to each other, or e-mails, rather than face-to-face chatting because you don't really "run into people" very much.

If you wanted to set a game in Montana, this would be a core reason why. The very Fargoish remoteness of everything and everyone is a core, probably the core reason you'd set a story there at all. This is a feature, not a bug. If there was so much supernatural shit going on in Billings that you could have your whole campaign there and never drive long hours on a dusty road at night while Coyotes chortled in the middle distance, why the ever loving fuck would you bother setting things in Montana at all? There are places in the world where things actually are urban and stuff and people and events and shit are all within walking distance and you can knock on a friend's door because you happen to be within a block and a half anyway and all that. And that's not Montana. That's New York and San Francisco and Seattle and Boston and lots of places that aren't Montana.

It's Montana. People can get hauled off by werewolves and have it be several days before people start looking for them because no one even fucking drives by their house every day. That's extremely central to the Montana experience and I don't know why you think this is a problem.

Nice is only 30 minutes away, but I don't see what you gain by trying to make the Luminaries in MonteCarlo care about Nice or vice versa seems to miss the point of setting a game in an exotic place to begin with.

People who actually live and work in Monaco do care about Nice. Virtually everyone who works in Monaco commutes in from France or Italy. There's a regular bus that costs 1 Euro and a 20 minute fast commuter train that costs 3.60 Euro.

This is just an incomprehensible statement. Monte Carlo is in the metropolitan area of Nice. That's just what it is. It's a wealthy suburb of Nice that happens to have weird historical reasons for a weird tax structure. It's a city where you can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in three different countries because the metropolitan area extends across national borders.

Which is just a broader point: different domains are different. In size, shape, population, and demographics. But they are also different in terms of how people and monsters interact with them and each other within them. And these differences are precisely why you'd choose to set your stories in one instead of another. You wouldn't want to tell a story about urban density and avoiding the panopticon in Montana, although you very well might want to tell such a story in London. You wouldn't want to tell a story about gay cowboys eating pudding and encountering aliens far from civilization or law enforcement in London, but you very well might want to tell such a story in Montana.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Here's the thing: you can set a game in a combined statistical area, but no one has offered a compelling reason that you would want to. Yes, if your game is set in Pasadena, you know that the vampires in Glendale can stroll across the Arroyo Seco so they're close enough to be important - that's actually GOOD. But presumably the reason that vampires live in Glendale is do things in Glendale.

Further, so many cities are surrounded by smaller towns and suburbs it's a well noted thing. But people are used to heading into the city for 'excitement'. One reason it is 'urban nights' is that you get things happening in cities that you don't typically find in rural areas. New York is known as the City that Doesn't Sleep - I can promise you, Knoxville does and Murfeesboro REALLY does.

Not only do you want to set your games where you have things HAPPENING, you want to set them in a place where it makes sense for them to be HAPPENING. The larger the city, the more room you have to add supernaturals before the masquerade would necessarily break down. Codifying that into your demographics makes sense.

Whether that's by establishing certain 'hot spots' and other relative cold spots or by establishing a 'normal range' that allows for natural variations, adjusting the concentration is going to help make interesting places STAY interesting.

[Username17]

Here's the thing: you can set a game in a combined statistical area, but no one has offered a compelling reason that you would want to.

What. The. Fuck?

Look, as literally every single person who has been involved in this discussion in any way has told you repeatedly, combined statistical areas represent the actual experience on the ground. When you catch a bus from Santa Cruz to Capitola the bus doesn't change colors along the way and you don't meaningfully leave town at any point during your journey. When you cross from Pasadena to Altadena you do so by crossing the street, and the street is pretty much the same on both sides.

If you're setting a game in San Francisco, it might be reasonable to go to the San Francisco Airport (which is in Burlingame), go watch the San Francisco 49ers (who play in Santa Clara), or the Golden State Warriors (who play in Oakland), or the Sharks (who play in San Jose), or the Giants (whose stadium is factually in the city limits of San Francisco). Because seriously only one of the major local sports teams has a stadium that is physically in the San Francisco city limits.

The "local color" of an area includes things that are in the entire area. The combined statistical area. Because that's what the term means. Trying to put up invisible walls to keep you from going to suburbs and exurbs and inhabited unincorporated areas that are part of a city's metropolitan area is completely insane. No one and nothing works like that, and you'd need one hell of a good explanation for why you'd want things to work that way.

The burden of proof is on you. People have told you why they want to treat combined statistical areas as culturally significant units. They want to do that because that is what combined statistical areas actually are and what they represent. You are the person who is trying to make the map override the territory. And that's crazy. And also pointless.

-Username17