#roanton

So, last time we spoke about what worked and didn't work in Roanton and I listed an example NPC that is being re-worked from the ground-up. All of this federates greater cohesion and narrative control on the part of yours truly, the storyteller. Many more options await to bait players into side stories or little one-off encounters to let them know the city thrums with life, albeit an unseemly kind. This is a city infested, like much of the World of Darkness' cities, towns, random trees on the side of the road, all of it. But it isn't exactly a city dominated as the signature cities are.  It's more Chicago in miniature. Chicago being the morass of infighting (WoD factions) that it is in-setting, but between largely human factions (mages, ghouls, and various splat-aligned cults included) who are, to various degrees, "In the Know" about the strange world they live in. Internecine conflict (in this context among mortal men) creates fertile grounds for further calamity -- perfect for the WoD, new and old.  It's a city settled in a barely plausible rim between the Big Apple and Beantown, two nexuses of rather potent means in the WoD--the city of Geists and the city of Mages. Roanton itself is an arbiter between these two great places of American culture. The little city-town funneling tourists from one maw to another. A place of flux, where the chaff escapes the terrors dwelling within capitals, the supernatural runoff.  Roanton, the pit where all sins gather into a well that whispers horror in the dreams of your fears.  Which makes it all too appropriate that starting out in Hunter, men are those in charge of the night in Roanton (more or less). Humanity is the center of the World of Darkness, new and old. They're where our splats are derived from; they're the gilded candles the spirit world flocks around; a strange fascination for the critters of splats, both species and singular.  Men are the biggest boogeymen of all. And sometimes, their horrors simply can't be matched by the critters in the dark. 

Example: The Conductor, for instance, originally a powerful spirit who ruled over a train platform in the city, who could tell anyone a vital secret or presage events to come, is now an entity that exists in the collective minds of the city's homeless, uses them as vessels. It's methods and goals are unknown to every supernatural being and occultist in the city, save that in some odd way it values these disenfranchised peoples.  This feels so much better than the original Conductor, much more apt for player involvement and far, far more interesting to run across in the middle of a tense situation. An enigmatic, free hand in the crazed morass of plots that is Roanton's underworld. It makes things more colorful, I feel.  That's all for tonight. Sleep is needed and more drawing board discussions on setting are taking place in my brain meats.