Help! Need someone who knows more about North American geography than I do!

[sparkindarkness]

As mentioned here: http://sparkindarkness.livejournal.com/204537.html I am running a werewolf game. Because I prefer to stick mostly to game canon and because the game requires the interaction of many many tribes it is to be set in the Americas (European werewolf tribes tend to have their own established territory and multi-tribal septs are rare or limited to maybe 3 tribes. It‘s also easier to shoot them there).

The things is I don't know exactly where to situate it. I want to keep it as close to the real world as possible (makes for less invention and more interesting research - in my last campaign they went Yuma, Arizona to Miami to Townsville, Queensland and I had lots of fun researching them all) but I am willing to tweak things (turn a moderate city into a NYC sized metropolis, for example). But I need somewhere to start.

So, what do I need?

A city moderately close to forested wilderness “close” can be “within 2-3 days solid travel” but more than a week would be pushing it. The wilderness has to be predominantly woodland.

Temperate/cold climate Snows in winter. Has pine trees. That kind of thing. No deserts, palm trees, calypso dancers.

Not somewhere already heavily established in White Wolf’s canon I like the canon, I use it a lot and don’t want to clash with it too badly since I may want to use it. So NOT: NYC, New York State, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago

A Camarilla City So nowhere that is established as Sabbat - so NOT Toronto (rest of Canada’s fine, I never bought the idea of all of Canada being a Sabbat holding - it made NO sense) Detroit, Miami, Mexico

Bonus points
Not essentials but they’d be nice bonuses if possible:

Native wolf population
Wilderness is actually a National Park or similarly legally protected
The city has a history (not necessarily current presence) of organised crime ties


All suggestions gratefully appreciated!


(ETA: I'm going to do brief research on each suggestion and probably post another post on detailed pros and cons of each :))

Comments

[gnarlycranium.livejournal.com]

It doesn't exactly snow there, but... Seattle? I mean, you don't GET any more National Park/wilderness(biggest wilderness area in the US)local wolves/pine trees than that.

And as for organized crime? Boy howdy. Granted a ton of it is Chinese, but Seattle was an underworld paradise. Still has the highest per-capita rate of unexplained disappearances in the country.


.....Actually, I was up there myself researching a potential WW book a number of years ago, before the primary author got ganked to military duty in Afghanistan.

[gnarlycranium.livejournal.com]

Or, I think it snows in Vancouver BC, which is a bit farther north.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

They really needed to cover Seattle and Portland in the canon. I mean, California was Kue-jin/Anarch war zone - what happens with the rest of the west coast with that craziness going on?

A lot of Chinese organised crime would probably lead to some interesting Kue-jin/Hengeyokai chronicles.

Aie I keep coming back to how good a location this is until I hit the "west coast" problem. Can I swap Washington State and, saaaay, Virginia round?

[gnarlycranium.livejournal.com]

The thing about WW canon when it comes to the West Coast is that a lot of it is... sortof... well, stupid, and full of big fat holes. San Francisco (where I live), the cradle of hippie goodness and ground 0 for the Resurgence, a Technocracy stronghold wut? After going to NASA's yearly shindig down at Moffet Field and seeing the astronauts hanging out with the tech industry peeps hanging out with the Burning Man crowd AND NOT BEING ABLE TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE CAUSE THEY'RE THE SAME DAMN BATCH OF PEOPLE... it seems... silly.

I did a lot of research in Seattle. 60% of the people are of Chinese descent-- the largest population outside China I believe. The governor at the time I was there was Chinese (and shares his last name with somebody I saw in a photo at a local Asian history museum that had the caption "A Meeting of Tong Leaders" from like 1910.. when I inquired about this the dude running the place gave me a very very odd look). When the asian immigrants started coming (brought in by the boatload and essentially sold into slavery by rich people from THEIR OWN countries), racism was so intense that they had 0 help from the locals-- no police, medical care, etc. They essentially set up their own micro-governments. That's the entire reason such things as a "Chinatown" even exist, anywhere. Organized crime has a long, long, long history in Asia-- and in many cases, it's been a lot more popular with the people than the actual government or police. They operate IN THE OPEN, with nice plaques and signs labeling such-and-such "Benevolent Society" and so on. If you look too interested in these signs and take a couple too many pictures, PEOPLE START FOLLOWING YOU THE FUCK AROUND. Seattle is the center for shipping between the US and Asia, lines of commerce that are absolutely massive. Kuei-Jin would fucking OWN Seattle. Anybody-- Anarchs, Camarilla, Sabbat, whatever-- who thinks they can entirely keep out a race of vampires thousands of years older than them, with powers and organization that dwarfs theirs, with their claws firmly clamped on the US economy's lifeblood, they're dreaming. One really bizarre thing I noted in Seattle's I-District, that I still don't understand, is that the different Asian populations are mixed in together side by side in apparent peace. On the same block as one of the Chinese Benevolent Society buildings, I bought a soda from an older (50sish) Japanese man with tattoos peeking out of his sleeves and one pinky missing. Same damn street. How they do it, I don't know, but they've obviously got a better system worked out to unify them than the local Cainites would (even the Hengeyokai tribes and Kuei-Jin actually negotiate and work together). It's not necessarily a chaotic warzone-- the different sides are firmly entrenched, with very clear territorial lines, maybe with some kind of truce worked out.

Across Puget Sound is Olympic National Park-- 60 square miles of pristine wilderness, the largest reserve in the US. Massive mountain range with snow and mountain goats, temperate rainforest, etc. Washington is also one of the few places that's reviving a wild wolf population, and there's a wolf research/etc place a bit to the north of Seattle.

The city itself has a fascinating history. It was built below sea level, on sawdust fill. For the first couple decades women were not allowed, period, except for those performing 'essential' roles that could not be filled by men, resulting in a booming industry of prostitute "seamstresses". The plumbing situation and sewage-soaked sawdust made Seattle the most disease-ridden city in the country for 50 solid years. Around 1900 they finally did the fill properly (an operation that moved more earth than any other human endeavor besides the Panama Canal)-- but the only place they could put the dirt was on public land; between the buildings. Drunk people died crossing the street and falling off the 20' ladders to the sidewalk. In 1912 those gaps were covered over by new sidewalk, creating the underground. In the sidewalk there's grates of antique glass that are skylights below. During Prohibition the underground was REAL fun.

And... eryeah. Stoopid 9-11. That book would've rocked. :p

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Well I suppose they went for the tech angle - but really, the technocracy wouldn't do well with all that indepedence of thought

You get tehse insular communities for their own protection very often. I find that's often the case with many organised crime - the Krays in London were depressingly popular in the neighbourhoods they operated in

The Keu jin would have a major presence - but they have that pesky inability to create new Kue Jin which would be what gives the kindred and edge - especially since the Quincunx have only just begun the great leap outward. Actually I'd expect there to be a large UNAFFILIATED and UNEDUCATED Kue-jin population - Kue-jin that have arisen from the local population without the benefit of thq gaki or the Quincunx to educate them.

That's an insane beginning for a city - sawdust sewage and no women *boggle* That book would been ideal - can you imagine that setting? The underground alone would have made for some great nossie lairs

[gnarlycranium.livejournal.com]

;_; I KNOW, I've BEEN imagining it, waugh! I was so looking forward to it. I mean, fuck, I could go on-- Seattle is where the term Skid Row was coined. That's the street where they rolled the logs down the hill to the water to ship them away... right through the middle of the asian community, where it didn't matter if a log went off course and ran over somebody or smashed a house. And before that, the asian community was FLOATING ON AN ARTIFICAL ISLAND MADE OF GARBAGE. Which at one point caught on fire, and sank, with massive casualties. On top of the other major fires that nearly wiped out the whole city (as was the trend at the time). The shadowlands in this place would be insane.

At one point we found a building that had obviously at some point been a Masonic temple-- there were Mason symbols in the stone above the door, in the walls and floor. The place was huge, but had no signs, no markings, just a small unobtrusive locked door with steps leading upwards inside. On the top floor, 5 stories up or so? A massive open balcony, with huge pillars, totally decked out in opulent red and gold. I'd like to know what goes on in there.

I went on the Underground Tour twice-- you can go down below street level and see the buildings' original entrances, and all sorts of crazy things. The sawdust settles and rots, so the floors down there wobble up and down sometimes like 3'. (At one point a little kid drowned in a pothole in the sawdust-filled streets-- he was trying to paddle a little boat across it, the thing was something like 9' wide, 18' long, and 8' deep.) When they got toilets, they had to be built above sea level because the plumbing went to the ocean-- which in some cases meant climbing up 15 stairs or so to get to the toilet, which is fun in the dark while you're toting a shotgun to fend off plague-infested rats. (the underground was eventually condemned due to AIDs bubonic plague) If the toilet was not high enough and you happened to flush while the tide is coming in you'd end up with a massive geyser.

Yeah pretty much only the Sabbat would be able to shake up the Kuei-Jin much, and that by sheer fucking Zerg rush. Which could be quite effective, depending. To even get the Kuei-Jin to bother to pay attention much less reveal themselves, they'd have to start by going after the mortals in the asian communities, fucking up the businesses and infrastructure, which would threaten the support systems and food sources for the Kuei-Jin-- which are vulnerable in that they are unusually VISIBLE, Chinatown being such a distinctive thing, organization has its down side. The international districts do have very clear borders, though, and there would be solid defenses of some kind to prevent that type of invasion. It'd be messy, good popcorn stuff.

Kuei-Jin have groups specifically dedicated to hunting down the newbies and whipping some civilization into them-- the thing is, without that, new Kuei-Jin tend not to ever surface from a crazed bestial state and get themselves dead rather quickly, after making a big cannibalistic mess. There might be a few orphans that manage to survive, but not necessarily a large group.

One of the characters I'd made was a dude who was born in Seattle around the turn of the century, fatherless, mother a prostitute-- he'd never been anywhere near his homeland and couldn't even speak the language fluently till after he rose and got dragged back there for re-education. He was a bootlegger, a gangster-- not yakuza or tong style, but a garden variety suspender-wearing, drug-dealing, woman-beating, tommy gun-toting thug. He's quite mellow and philosophical now, appreciates tea, but still talks with an entirely American accent, which confuses people beautifully.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Hey. doesn't snow there? I've heard the Valley It Home_of_usher speak of the freezing cold and drifts of snow!

[gnarlycranium.livejournal.com]

That's in Eugene, which is about an 8 hour drive south of Seattle, but which should have an even milder (but similar) climate. I dunno wtf has been up with the weather lately, but generally they don't see a speck of snow in the valley any more often than like once every five years. It mainly just rains. A LOT.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

So it's not just the Valley It's sensitive californian-ness? :P

[gnarlycranium.livejournal.com]

Oh it snowed in the valley half a dozen times last year, which is just BIZARRE. Of course, when a Californian says 'drifts' of snow, they generally mean 'an inch or two'. (whereas back home in central oregon, it meant things like 'three feet of snow fell and the stuff sliding off the roof is piled up so high we can't get out the back door, oh and the ceiling in the living room is caving in')

[home-of-usher.livejournal.com]

wrong Valley. NYA. I'm living in Oregon now and Gnarly is Living in SF. How's that for a Switch? :P