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

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's just WAY better than anything the werewolves have in their arsenal.

Werewolf PCs have a couple of *really* killer tricks up their sleeves, unfortunately. It doesn't matter if the ghouls murder all the Kinfolk - they can't stop a werewolf with Sense Wyrm and Sense Of The Prey from following the master home, walking *right through* all his defenses without even noticing them by virtue of stepping sideways, and popping out instantly to smash the vampire with all kinds of incredible unsoakable aggravated damage before the vampire gets to throw Majesty or Entrancement or Dread Gaze.

Basically, if it comes to outright war, vampires can make werewolf kinfolk extinct, and they can kill all the wolves, but they have great trouble (mechanically) killing the werewolves themselves if the werewolves think like PCs, and, because of being written second and written badly, there are a LOT of Werewolf things that vampires simply cannot deal with in time - the werewolves might lose the war, but they win the battles by *killing the vampires dead* in a way that, mechanically, the vampires simply can't deal with. Every vampire the werewolves know about is either a Tremere who has later-written anti-werewolf thaum, or is ash, very fast.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

But that';s the point - werewolves are killing machines of doom against anything but the most ancient and powerful of vampires - but on any battlefield that isn't actually a physical confrontation (like mortal influence) they fail pretty badly

Which is why i alwasy told my vampire players "don't fuck with the werewolves. They CAN kill you" of course after loooong sessions of playing the Gangrel with a fuckton of experience declared "like hell they can" which was kind of hard to argue but it was generally the case