Short List!

[sparkindarkness]

These cities all meet enough of the requirements to be strong contenders, so I’m beginning to poke them. There have been a few recent suggestions that I haven’t had chance to look at yet as well :)

My main con coming up here is nom-nom factor which I am measuring under these rough terms (the lost kids test, which is macabre and fun :P):

Your kids are lost in the woods:
REALLY HIGH nom-nom factor
The kids are already dead. Any search party will take heavy casualties and will return with an eternal fear of shadows in the darkness and an infinite respect for Mother Nature’s wrath
HIGH nom-nom factor
The kids will die of exposure before being found. Months will pass before anyone stumbles on the bodies
Moderate nom-nom factor
The kids are lost but with a LARGE concerted search effort we may just find them before they get in trouble.
Low nom-nom factor
Bothersome, gather some neighbours together, sure of finding them
Very low nom-nom factor
You worry about them meeting a stranger in the woods and being kidnapped (i.e. the chances of them running into other people are high)
Non-existant nom-nom factor
Called the kids on their mobile phones and told them to get home. They stopped in the forest gift shop on the way

A less macabre test

You’re heading to the woods with your lover for some public sex0ring.
Really high nom-nom factor
There are easier ways to have a suicide pact
HIGH nom-nom factor
You’re being followed by a film crew recording “natural born survivors” or are planning a really cheap “divorce”
Moderate Nom-nom factor
You find a place for your sex0ring but keep near the edge of the wood
Low nom-nom factor
You can go just about anywhere in the wood for your romp and not worry about being distracted or getting lost.
Very low nom-nom factor
You can’t actually use the wood for sex0ring without being arrested because there are so many damned people around
Non-existant nom-nom factor
You check into a log cabin hotel, buy condoms from the vending machine and order room service to bring up some whipped cream.




Indianapolis
Pros
State capital - with all the infrastructure and government opportunity that implies (and corruption)
Lots of park land
State forest near by
Lots of the usual nice amenities - universities, airport, transport links, diverse and strong businesses
Rust belt city so I can have lots of abandoned warehouses (these are an essential. Every vampire has an abandoned warehouse for nefarious meetings. It is known. In one chronicle it was a joke that an enterprising Ventrue had bought land and constructed 20 abandoned warehouses to lease out to vampires for all their plotting. He had a rota).
Population high (approx 800,000 and 2,000,000 in surrounding area)
Moderately diverse
Baltic Population
Cons
Further west than I’d prefer
Forest lacks nom-nom factor

Madison
Pros
Greenery everywhere you can shake a stick at,
A strong history of liberal causes and counterculture
A strong PRESENT of counter culture goodness
State capital - with all the infrastructure and government opportunity that implies (and corruption) (Albeit on a smaller scale than Indianapolis)
Lots of the usual nice amenities - universities, airport, transport links, diverse and strong businesses
Cons
Population on the lower end of acceptable
Too far west for preference
Forest has lack of nom-nom factor.
Terribly low crime rate. Really really low.


Minneapolis/St. Paul
Pros
Good sized [population (3,000,000 in surrounding area)
Forests close to the city. Lots of parks - lavishly funded ones too
Native American history of the appropriate tribes
Lefty liberal history inc. equality, workers rights, native rights
Diverse population
Diverse immigration inc. Scandanvian (Get of Fenris), Russian Jews (Silver Fangs) and Poland/Balkans (Shadow Lords)
Lots of the usual nice amenities - universities, airport, transport links, diverse and strong businesses. Really nice High tech in business
Arts is nicely high (even with a theatre called Penumbra) if I don’t use it for this chronicle I’m going to set a Toreador one here
Large foreign born population
Cons
Getting far too far west for preference
The forests/greenery looks extremely patchy and sporadic - there’s lots of it but it’s spread out and tamed and has very little nom-nom factor.

Ottowa
Pros
It’s in the east
An actual capital - with all the infrastructure and government opportunity that implies (and corruption) times 10 and an assurance that the local vampire population are going to be beefy and scary (and it’s not currently embroiled in conflict like DC)
Forest with high nom-nom factor. I may be reading the mpa wrong but once you get out of city limits and especially looking northwards there are just TREES everywhere
Biiig population
Hi-tech industry (silicon valley of the north - well, you‘ll save on cold rooms I guess)
Very large foreign born population, inc Balkans population
Lots of business and infrastructure to play with
Cons
We’re encroaching from Croatan to Wendigo areas. Not inescapably but a little far.

Comments

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

You're pretty dead on for Minneapolis. It's got all that good things, but the nom-nom factor is way low for most of the immediate area. However, if you drive up north about 4 hours, you have fairly high nom-nom potential. The Boundary Waters -- although beautiful and lovely and filled with scenic hikers -- also have no roads. None.

Minnesota is also fucking cold for 6 months out of the year. It starts snowing in October and often doesn't stop until May.

[chesh.livejournal.com]

Actually, you only have to drive out for about an hour or so (depending on the direction) to reach exurbs where the the nom-nom factor starts to get moderate. Drive out towards WI, south, or northeast (I think?), and in under two hours you're in some pretty high nom-nom territory.
Earlier this summer, a mentally retarded man with a kidney transplant disappeared from the summer camp he was at. With a good number of volunteers doing searches, they finally found him a week later, not too far from where he'd left (it was literally the second-to-last or third-to-last search party that found him). On the "yay human interest" note, he was covered in bug bites, but, amazingly, alive despite a week without food or anti-rejection meds.
http://ethel.livejournal.com/907307.html

It doesn't happen too often, but people just disappear every year in the woods and farmland - some of them probably want to disappear.

[cuglas.livejournal.com]

LOL. When I lived in Southern Minnesota, the earliest snow we had was 18 inches on October 31 and the latest snow we had was 3 inches over Memorial Day weekend. (Last weekend in May).

The Boundary Waters is high on the "wilderness" scale. Easy to get lost in and never come back.

Indianapolis is around 3 1/2 hours from Shawnee National Forest and it has a moderate "wilderness" scale. It would be easy to die there, if you got hurt while hiking. I would count on my ability to hike out of there, if I got lost, but if I got hurt while hiking, I'd be worried that no one would find me. It's sparsely populated and a lot of the small towns out there feel sort of surrounded by the wilderness area.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you were in Southern Minnesota at the same time that I was. First year there was 16 or so inches of snow on Halloween. I was shocked.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, making a wilderness area more scary (removing some small towns, etc) is probably less disruptive than picking a small city and making it bigger to satisfy the other requirements. I suspect you're going to have to do a bit of that.

After all, some of that wilderness around the Twin Cities lacks nom-nom because it's been tamed. If it had been hosting Red Talons since the mid-1700s, people would have left it alone more, and it would have stayed scary :)

[only-playing.livejournal.com]

I would recommend Louisville KY.

Pros
Has all the infrastructure and corruption of a state capital, being that it is the largest city in the state
Lots of park land VERY close by
State forest near by
Lots of the usual nice amenities - universities, airport, transport links, diverse and strong businesses
Rust belt city so you can have lots of abandoned warehouses.
Population high
Moderately diverse- We've been getting a lot of immigrants lately from Africa and Asia


There are several state forests in Southern Indiana (just across the river) that are spooky enough for at least a moderate nom-nom factor.

Waverly- http://www.westvirginiaghosthunters.com/waverly.html Damned spooky place, perfect hideout for either mages or vampires.

[tyki-tock.livejournal.com]

Ottawa is my vote (it's with 2 A's and 1 O btw XD). Speaking as a Canuck myself, it really is out in the middle of freakin' nowhere, and I'm sure you could consider the area to have a high nom nom factor. It's very isolated, far from any other major Canadian cities, with only a few small satellite towns to feed it, yet as the nation's capital it has enough infrastructure to support a large coterie, IMO.

[chichiri-no-da.livejournal.com]

Oops, that was me.

[jerril]

Forest with high nom-nom factor. I may be reading the mpa wrong but once you get out of city limits and especially looking northwards there are just TREES everywhere

"Our country reeeeaks of trees / Our yaks are reeeeeealy large / and they smell like rotting beef carcasses..." - Ren and Stimpy

You want evergreens, we got evergreens. You want deciduous, we got deciduous. Pine, cedar, birch, maple would be the really predominant species, depending on which direction you go in and the local soil depth.

There really ARE just trees everywhere. Except where the Shield gets too close to the surface, and then you get these little barren clearings with two inches of moss on them, and then rock. Or just plain old exposed rock!

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Indianapolis - corruption
Ick, you'd have to smooze wif de cops.
Anecdotal, Capones boys got off the train in Indy seeking to expand the empire. They were gunned down by IPD. Best make sure they're nice and happy.

Large warehouse? You can get a couple of Masonic lodges. I'm pretty sure one is for sale but not sure of the other one. And there are plenty of old brick warehouses some were even renovated as apartments then left empty for some damn reason then the forsale signs went up.

[dontkickmycane.livejournal.com]

If it's trees you're looking for, Ottawa is the place to go, for sure. Have you considered Toronto? It has quite a seriously shaggy green belt running right through it. If you want to get out of the city, though, you have to traverse quite a bit of outskirts; suburbs, industry and farmland, before you get to any real bush. The downtown core is more like American cities than Ottawa, too. I always thought of Ottawa as a cleaner, prettier city than Toronto.

[home-of-usher.livejournal.com]

Cons
Getting far too far west for preference

Whaaat? West? Wisconsin isn't even in the Middle third of the US. So's most of the others except for St. Paul. What's wrong with going west again? I might have missed that from a previous post.