(UA) This Is The City (take 2)

[Tim Dedopulos]

The points about the major groups and schools not really being that 
competing is fair enough as it goes, but it misses one rather crucial 
point... they're there as examples, not as the only members of the 
underground.

Look at it - there are maybe 30 Goddess pornomancers in Chicago. There 
are 20 misled Teenies in New York. There are 70 or so of the TNI in 
Seattle. There's the Freak and Dirk Allen, and the True Order. But that 
doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the people out there.

I've always thought of it in terms of a business sector - as 
opportunities arise to fit into a slot in the market, they will be taken. 
You'll rapidly get to saturation point in any geographic location.  
Everywhere you go, there will be a few major players, probably 
vacillating between uneasy truce and covert hostilities. There will be 
plenty of lesser players, hanging on coat-tails and trying to get in on 
the act. Then there will be a horde of little people picking at crumbs, 
and a handful of eccentric, colourful characters who just seem to muddle 
along.

If you're based in Boston, you're not going to see any of the groups 
mentioned in the sourcebook from one long year to the next unless 
something huge is going down, in which case they'll all stampede in like 
Godzilla vs Megalon, trash the place, and vanish again, or unless one 
happens to be passing through. You may not even notice if Dirk or Daphnee 
is at the next table - it's not like there's an Occult Underground 
"Hello!" magazine, after all. Does that mean that the place is empty? 
Absolutely not.

There could be an insanely aggressive major player in the form of a bunch 
of rich old Ivy League professors desperately searching for the secret of 
eternal life in the form of the philosopher's stone, using a School of 
magic based on alchemical transformations, and hiring hit-men out of 
Chicago when they want some wet-work done. There could be a large cult of 
witch-families who escaped from Salem, ruled by The Thirteen, the 
matriarchs & patriarchs of the clan, trying to keep up devotions, amass 
money and power, and keep hidden. There could be sect of Lovecraft 
crackpot mages running off the power that his fiction gives the New 
England area, frantically searching for the exact physical location 
Lovecraft imagined when he wrote about The Temple of Dagon in Innsmouth, 
so that they can get the charge they need to call back (create?) the Old 
Ones. There could be a bunch of Yardies running drugs to the Eastern 
seaboard who've realised there's more to this Voodoo shit than they 
thought, and who've imported a top-notch Mambo adept from Haiti to help 
give them an edge. There could be a soldier who deserted from the 
Revolution army, and has been looking for a way to make amends ever 
since. There could be an order of Hunters who've been trying to bring The 
Thirteen and their families to justice ever since they escaped. There 
could be any number of petty little groups and rogue freelancers looking 
for easy pickings. Starting to sound busy enough yet?

Surely it's more fun to come up with your own rich local subculture 
packed with touchy lunatics than to just be stuck with Field Offices for 
the groups in the book...

As for going elsewhere - well, where you going to go? Everywhere is going 
to have it's local supremos... and you won't know who they are, or what 
they can do, or what they're after. The boonies are no better; god alone 
knows who's lurking in the Catskills. At least at home, you have a chance 
of getting to know who you're up against, and your friends and contacts 
are handy too. You're packed in with your enemies all right -- because at 
least in your own pitch dark be-tigered room, you've worked out where the 
furniture is.

Tim

       Imagine there are two of you. Which one would win?

Tim Dedopulos, Project Editor **** tdedopulos at carltonbooks.co.uk