Worldbuilding nonsense

Of making up 4 seasons of Imaginary TV to be the background lore of an RPG is getting to write deranged sidebars speculating on the thing you've written.

So on both here and on patreon, I've written a lot of short fiction about a very haunted New England town called Martin's Passage. This, what will hopefully be just the first full length Martin's Passage book, may seem familiar, as parts of it have featured here before.

I've bit the bullet and set up a gofundme to try and keep my phone on while I look for work. The lack of unemployment is really starting to hit.

It also has links to most of the other ways you can help out.

Season 1: The Daylight City

“Please, Mr. Elwood. I just want to know that my daughter is safe. If she doesn’t want to come home, that’s fine, but I need to know she’s alive.”

-Veronica Caravaggio, Season 1, Episode 1: “A Midnight Train to Nowhere’

In the first season, things are strange, but not supernaturally so. It all starts with Jake Elwood getting a visit at his run down office by one Veronica Caravaggio, wife of Salvatore Caravaggio. Sal’s the alleged head of the alleged Caravaggio crime family, and his daughter’s gone missing. Neither Sal nor Veronica want to involve the police for obvious reasons, and Jake, as Veronica points out, is the only private investigator in the city who isn’t an ex-cop. Veronica is skeptical of using Sal’s men as it might rile up the other factions, and so it’s down to Jake. At first, he wants to turn her down- there’s no good reason to get involved with the Caravaggio family, but something about her pleading gets through to him, and he’s on the case. He follows the trail, which initially goes cold thanks to a dead body- not the missing daughter Natalia, but that of the man she was last seen with, who’s been murdered with a spear.

We soon meet another recurring character- Mark Cornish, a homicide detective who knows Jake and has been assigned to the case of the murdered man, who turns out to be a Romanian mobster named Andre Dragos. Jake is forced to work with Mark to stop Andre’s brother was raising hell, and learns that Natalia is now wanted as a person of interest in the case since she’s the last one who was seen with Andre while he was alive.

Natalia seems to be moving from gang to gang looking for sanctuary from a mysterious figure pursuing her and as Jake follows her trail as well, he encounters the outlaw bikers of  Moon Devil MC, uncovers a conspiracy of knightly bank robbers in the Organization of Archaic Amusements while trying to track down a lead on the spear used to kill Andre, and finally gets a his first look, and a picture of the man who followed Natalia and Andre on that fateful night, a man known only as Mr. Long.  Reporting his progress to Veronica leads to disaster.

Sal Caravaggio finds out about Long and leads some men to bring him in for a chat about his daughter’s whereabouts.  None of the men survive, and Sal is hospitalized after getting a spear through the gut. The local news start calling Long ‘The Impaler.”

Through all this Jake’s relationship with Veronica seems to be getting closer than “Detective and Client”, with only guilt about Sal’s condition preventing it from progressing beyond the occasional flirtation and lingering look. Jake continues to investigate the people Natalia’s contacted, but the girl remains one step ahead.

Jake continues to run into new organized crime outfits: another encounter with some Dragos muscle leads to him befriending the Park siblings, Nathan and Wendy, who both operate as a single white hat hacker known as Parsifal. As Parsifal they help him get access to some records that may give allow him to finally get ahead of Natalia’s flight. 

No gang story would be complete without corrupt cops, and unfortunately for Mark Cornish’s appearances on the show, he ends up crossing them, then dies in Jake’s office with a fatal gunshot wound. The cops initially try to frame Jake, but as it happens, they’re on the Caravaggio’s payroll and a word from Veronica has them searching someone else to frame. Not being of fan of someone else getting railroaded, Jake finds the truth: another detective, one Tristan Knight, was the real killer, having developed a jealous obsession with Mark’s wife.  He wasn’t even part of the group that threatened Jake, so they’re happy to turn on him. Mark happening to have crossed the dirty cops was a coincidence, and they apparently,  get off scot free, which is just how it goes sometimes.

Mark’s widow, Isobel, provides Jake with his personal casebook, which contains the final info he needs to track down Natalia and Mr. Long. He catches up to her just as Long does, and the confrontation  goes badly. Jake apparently meets his death at the hands of Long, and Natalia runs again- but this time, it seems, Long isn’t chasing her. Instead, he leaves a different way, and walks entirely out of the story and the show (Since he doesn’t reappear in any later season.) We roll credits and then cut to Mark sitting up, gasping for breath, with only a scar where the spear mark would be.

Midnight City was a syndicated crime drama that ran for roughly 100 episodes and 5 seasons, from 1997-2002.

The first season was pretty straightforward- a private eye, one Jake Elwood, was hired to find Natalia Caravaggio, who just so happened to be the daughter of local mob boss Salvadore Caravaggio. Naturally, the search for her was the throughline of that entire season as Jake interacted with the various gangs and crime families in the city, which was never named. (But bore a certain suspicious resemblance to Vancouver, where it was filmed.) Some episodes were heavily focused on the search for Natalia, while others followed what was called by many a "Mobster of the Week" format.

In the finale of Season 1, he finally finds Natalia, only to end up getting run through with a spear, used by the mysterious "Mr. Long", the man who Jake believed had kidnapped the young woman. Jake apparently dies, but Natalia managed to get away in the confusion.

And then the after credits teaser showed Jake sitting up, shirtless, with only a faint scar from what should have been a fatal wound to the chest.

Online speculation was rampant, with rumors about a retooling in the face of lagging ratings to this being intended all along to the show having been cancelled outright.

The truth was probably closer to the first one, as when season 2 started airing, several cast members did not return, including most of the supporting cast from the Caravaggio family and Mr. Long. The first episode opened in media res, with Jake, very confused as to why he's alive, being given a guided tour of what his guide called "The Midnight City, the first time the title was ever dropped in the show.

Many previous characters were reintroduced as explicitly supernatural beings- including one of the rival families to the Caravaggios, the Romanian crime family called the Dragos, who, Jake was told, were all vampires and their thralls.

Jake's guide, an unhoused man named Archer Baldwin, introduced himself as a seer, who'd been guided by visions to find Jake in the wake of what he called "The Dolorous Stroke"- the spear wound that nearly killed Jake in the first season finale. Archer claimed that Jake was walking a mythical path, and that he wouldn't be able to avoid the supernatural by closing his eyes to it, as he'd done before.

So I had an idea smack me in the face recently about 'You know, you coined the term heartstaker, you should totally do one, actually." And I started thinking about what sort of game I'd make in the vague genre of "My Own WoD" and my thought was:

Human factions and characters should both be involved with the secret supernatural world shit and more importantly should be just as weird or weirder than any of the actual supernatural beings to the point that the vampires and werewolves and whatever find them kind of off-putting. Not even necessarily like, humans who cast spells, even. I'm basically thinking of Narita characters. Average human involved in the supernatural is at least on the level of Isaac and Miria in terms of 'What?" Or the Durarara guy in the bartender suit who uses vending machines as a ranged weapon.

Essentially, you're in a big city with a vibrant nightlife. All kinds of factions are scrambling to control it or make the most profit from it, and the ones who just want to blend in enough so they can drink some blood in peace are probably the most normal ones of the lot. There might be a wizard or a demon king from another world hanging out tending bar, and meanwhile a completely normal human who smiles all the time and buys and sells information? That's the one everyone warns newcomers not to mess with and to run from if he seems happy to meet you.

And then I realized that there's another nineties/oughts rpg that involves playable vampires, and has a system that uses d10s that'd probably be even more suited for this, that's now fallen into obscurity because the licenses all expired.