We're back, and picking up right where we left off: in a dreamy, fiery flashback to Dawn's burning apartment, with Mike Evans holding a gun on his brother. Things only heat up from there...
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Managed to catch up again!
ReplyDeleteAbout the railroad:- It’s all personal anecdotal experience, and not in KS specifically, but I have some familiarity with rail in the Midwest a few years later than this, but still in ‘90s.
I’d say that you got it right when you retconned the Amtrak stop out of existence (certainly in Centralia, which I think is where Aaron was trying to catch the train - Belleville might still have a stop, although it’s not guaranteed by any means).
However, there might well be a station that’s not used any more, or (thinking positively) has been converted to something else. You find these all over the place — although often they’ve been demolished, of course. In general, there are far more disused stations than there are stops, so if you can get the train at all, there’s usually a station.
You’ll have noted the population decline in Belleville since 1990. That’s a comparatively mild case. (See Cairo, IL for something more extreme, although admittedly you’re getting into an area that’s culturally as much part of the South as the Midwest.) But it’s typical enough of the experience of towns in the region. This is another reason why I’m not fond of Vampire: the Masquerade’s 1 vampire/100,000 mortals rule, because there’s an awful lot of thematically appropriately territory that’s in relatively small towns. It’s another thing about VtM that’s part of the time when it came out, when the pop-cultural image of large central cities focused much more on crime and “inevitable” decay than it does now. It was dated by the mid-90’s, and post-Great Recession it’s *really* dated.
Actually, I don’t think VtM has a place for largish towns at all in its WoD. You have major metro areas, which are vampire territory. Everthing else seems to be very rural, dominated by werewolves, but that doesn’t seem to include towns of e.g. 10,000-25,000 people with, at this time, some manufacturing as the basis of the economy, and now (with the small factories gone) very little to keep people there at all.
In the WoD in 2019, these towns should presumably be idyllic, thriving places free from supernatural influence. Meanwhile, all the hip central cities with their IT professionals and overcrowded Whole Foodses should be the nightmarish dystopias that Reagan’s America imagined them to be.
One thing that strikes me as particularly Vampire about these large towns is that often, when the jobs started to go, they turned to trying to get a prison located there as a new source of employment. That seems very much like the sort of thing one can imagine a Ventrue that controls the local political establishment doing.
There are so many ways in which Vampire, while its overt politics are left-wing, ends up being a pretty right-wing game.
On that note, I do like that you’ve avoided having anyone make the “plausible” case for the Camarilla to Aaron: “Look, they almost wiped us out once. We really do need to stay hidden. Someone has to enforce that, and this is what we’ve got. Plus, you may not have noticed, but once you get outside the areas that we control, there are a lot of these furry death machines that want to kill you.”
It’s built into the world’s backstory, despite the game’s ostensible politics, that order and hierarchy are responses to a genuine threat, not to imagined fears that have been invented by people in power to keep themselves in power. Which would be a position much more in keeping with what the game says are its politics.
Update: Looked up Belleville and realized that I’d misheard the population as c. 20,000. C.2000 would also be far too small for an Amtrak stop. You wouldn’t get a Greyhound station in a place that small, either, or a car rental agency — it would be your own car or nothing to leave by a legal transport option.
ReplyDeleteMost of what I said above about large towns wouldn’t apply to Belleville, either (although true of communities that are about 10,000+).