Campaign of the Month: October 2017
Blood & Bourbon
Character Portal
“Now won’t you come along with me
To the Mis-sis-sip-pi?
We’ll take a trip to the land of dreams
Blow down the river to New Orleans
The band’s there to meet us
Old friends to greet us
Where the line and the dark folks meet.”
Louis Armstrong, Basin Street Blues
“New Orleans has always been a city where if you don’t fit in anywhere else, you seem to end up here.” “New Orleans characters just aren’t comfortable in Phoenix or Houston. They don’t really fit in anywhere else.” “This city has a way of growing new [characters]—they’ll be back. It’s an organic thing. The environment here, it’s just the way people are. Whoever you are, you can be it here.”
New Orleans is a city of characters.
It’s voodoo queens and jazz musicians. It’s Southern belles and street performers. It’s corrupt politicians and crazies howling at the moon. It’s gangsters and crooked cops. It’s psychics and charlatans. It’s drunken tourists and tour guides. It’s a woman flashing her breasts on Fat Tuesday. It’s Southern gentlemen and mafiosos. It’s Ignatius J. Reilly and Anne Rice. It’s drag queens and con artists. It’s African and French and Spanish and Irish and Italian and Vietnamese and Cajun and Creole and an eye-wateringly hot gumbo of laughing, dancing, drinking, eating, fucking, living, dying, teeming humanity.
It is a place like nowhere else in America. It is salt of the earth working men and women, Southern Gothic craziness, seedy back alleys and freewheeling debauchery, eccentric non-conformity, gaudy tourist traps and laid-back, well-heeled genteel glamour and more. It‘s a place that gets under visitors’ skin and into their pores and straight into their blood. Once they visit, it never leaves them.
Below is a roster of the personalities to be found within New Orleans. Some are human. Some used to be. Some never were. Some are entities of terrible power. Some are feeble wretches hidden behind paper tigers. Still others are ultimately average, having attained their positions in life (or death) through coincidence or consequence. All of them, by chance or providence, call the Crescent City home.
Won’t you meet them?
The Living
“Our laws are harsh, and harsh by necessity. If the kine knew of our existence, they would rise up and destroy us.”
Philip Maldonato to Caroline Malveaux-Devillers
There are approximately 378,000 mundane humans who live, breathe, and die in New Orleans. This number balloons to over 1,150,000 when one includes residents of the city’s greater metropolitan area. However grossly overpopulated the Big Easy might be by Kindred standards, vampires compose less than one ten-thousandth of the city’s total population. Most mortals go their entire lives without knowingly crossing paths with the supernatural. Far more than the Children of Caine, it is the Children of Seth who truly rule New Orleans.
It is the foolish Kindred who underestimates them.
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The Damned
“We like to think that we Malveauxes rule Louisiana, but we’re only the most public face of things, a couple tiers removed from the man on the street. And these people are the sharks to our minnows.”
Caroline Malveaux-Devillers
“Matthew and Orson have bodyguards. They have private armies. We play with millions of dollars. They play with hundreds of millions. We have ties to judges, police, and local lawmakers, but they give those people the 3 AM phone calls they jump out of bed to obey. I would not be surprised if one of them has ties to Dad, another to Matthew, and another to Orson.”
“Their connections go beyond the official. Gangs, MCs, organized crime. They’re the people pulling the strings.”
“The thing is, as far as I can tell, they don’t even really play at power on the level we do, because they’ve got it. Instead it’s about their Traditions, which govern their interactions with each other. And that’s where the game is. Showing each other up. Humiliating each other. Climbing their own power structure.”
Caroline Malveaux-Devillers
New Orleans is a good city to be Kindred. The Masquerade is relatively easy to maintain. The French Quarter in particular, and many other neighborhoods as well, boast an astonishingly high crime rate. The constant influx of tourists, especially during Mardi Gras, represents nothing so much as a walking buffet for the Damned. Given the city’s occult reputation (as well as its association with vampires, thanks to a certain well-known novelist), it is very easy for witnesses to dismiss unusual phenomena as a hoax, a drunken hallucination or “some weird voodoo thing.”
All of these factors, as well as the presence of three separate Kindred factions all seeking support and alliances against the others, combine to create a city with a Kindred population in excess of 100—vastly larger than the worldwide average would suggest (at least for a city as small as New Orleans), and grossly overpopulated by the standards of other Camarilla cities. This strain has necessitated the formation of the Krewe of Janus, a full coterie of Kindred that exists solely to protect the Masquerade. Few doubt that Prince Vidal would prefer to rule over fewer subjects, but to date, all of his efforts to curb the Big Easy’s population have met with little success. Something about New Orleans simply seems to draw the undead.
The Clans
“The rebels then built a new city.
Out of the fallen empire,
they collected the thirteen clans
that had been scattered by the great war,
and brought them all together.
The Book of Nod
New Orleans is a Camarilla city, and as such, most of its Kindred residents hail from the seven founding clans. All are well-represented, although some are more politically influential than others. Several clans lack representatives on the primogen, while one clan, the Toreador (also the most numerous clan in New Orleans), has two. Caitiff and thin-bloods are also present in some numbers, but heavily discriminated against.
The independent clans consist primarily of the Giovannini and the Setites, with a few Ravnos. The Assamites have no permanent presence in the city.
Among the Sabbat clans, the Lasombra antitribu have a small but growing body of members. The Tzimisce remain ghastly enigmas outside of the the periodic Sabbat incursions.
The Factions
“We always, always have something to do."
Anonymous
“But the problem is that the one thing we can always do is hunt. And the vampire who only hunts, who times their existence based upon how long it is until they can next feed, becomes a hollowed-out, snarling monster at a truly terrifying rate.”
“So we find purpose in each other. We cling together… first, yes, for simple survival, food and shelter, the pretense of love. But then for faith, for power, for liberation, for defiance, even for reform.”
“What did you do to make it through tonight? What will you do to make it through tomorrow night? And what covenant will you make with your Kindred to make it all worthwhile?”
Anonymous
The Lancea et Sanctum rule the nights of New Orleans, and would do so unopposed were they not divided between the Hardline Sanctified who follow the dogmatic and tyrannical Prince Vidal, and the Bourbon Sanctified who follow his more easygoing and laissez-faire archrival, Antoine Savoy. Thanks to this rivalry, the Circle of the Crone has carved out a niche among Kindred who practice Vodoun and alternative religious faiths, and can challenge either Sanctified faction individually.
The Anarch Movement underwent a brief civil war in 2016 and is now divided in its support of the prince’s two rivals. The Invictus has remained a constant presence in the city and bastion of the Old South. House Tremere prosecutes a bitter feud against the Circle of the Crone in its bid to master the Big Easy’s occult secrets. The Ordo Dracul is little more than a coterie in the city and stays under the prince’s radar.
Outside of the Camarilla, the Giovannini and Setite clans are insular enough to be considered factions in their own right. Both reside in the French Quarter and have tied their fortunes to the Bourbon Sanctified’s. Finally, the dread Sabbat has no permanent presence in New Orleans, but makes incursions every year during Mardi Gras.
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The Coteries
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
“I have kept the company of many Kindred in this domain. In younger nights, I whiled away the hours discussing transient philosophies with the Order of the Dragon and I sparred with the platonisms of the Invictus. My own faith rang hollowly in the ears of my Sanctified companions, while the Circle of the Crone matched wits but not theologies with me. Even those who swore by no covenant or creed called us allies.”
“Yet still, despite our differences, we kept each other’s confidences and counsel. We did this because, those differences aside, we were beholden to each other. We watched each other’s backs, because who else would?”
Handsome Jack, Confessions to a Prince
Kindred are Embraced into clans and pledge allegiance to covenants, but coteries are the vampires with whom they associate on a night-to-night basis. The importance of these groups should not be underestimated. Many, such as the inner circles of the prince and his rivals, the Cabildo (primogen council), the Guard de Ville, and the Krewe of Janus have played pivotal roles in New Orleans’ political landscape. The majority of neonates, too, band into krewes for mutual protection and companionship. A well-disciplined neonate krewe can bring down older vampires that might crush any one of the coterie’s members alone.
A vampire’s coterie-mates are the lead chanters in their Requiem.
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The Strangers
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Vampires aren’t the only supernatural creatures to stalk the shadows of the World of Darkness. The darkness belongs to many other mysterious and horrific entities, some of whom also prey on mortals, while others exist among them or even protect them… sometimes. If any generality can be made about these others, though, it’s that the Kindred don’t know much about them. The converse is equally true, and any interaction between the race of Caine and the other monsters who prowl the night is going to be tentative and suspicious, if not downright hostile and violent.
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by:
False_Epiphany