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DAMNATION CITY:
District Map Segments
THIS EXIT
TM
This free companion kit contains larger
versions of the nine map segments that
appear in
Damnation City
, pp. 184–195,
plus two bonus maps.
In this packet, we present the maps
without the labels given with them in
Damnation City
. While each map was
designed with a particular kind of neig-
horbood in mind, whatever label you
want to put on one of these maps is just
as evocative as any we could put on them.
Cities come in all shapes, neighborhoods
defy expectations, the cold lines of a map
can’t always describe the sweaty details found at street level. Pairing
labels and maps is part of the brainstorming process, part of what
makes your own city unique.
What if those buildings in the Industrial map aren’t warehouses
anymore, but condos? What if there’s a hospital in there, or a bunch of
underground nightclubs, or even a zoo? Are those circles on one of the
bonus maps marking the location of English-style roundabouts, or are
they fountains, war memorials, or the legs of an overpass?
For quick guidelines on combining these map segments into larger
urban landscapes, see “Putting It Together” on p. 195 of Damnation
City. Change the sense of scale on these maps by printing them out at
different sizes, or expanding them 10-25% or more on a photocopier.
Cut out parts of the map you like and tape them on another map. Get
a black marker and draw in a new river. Make them yours.
DAMNATION CITY
The Prince is the master of the city, but
he has named you lord of your territory.
Are you a tyrant or a saint? Will you pull
the Prince’s strings or become the Prince
yourself?
This book includes:
Guides to selecting or designing
a modern city that’s right for your
chronicle, and giving that city the
World of Darkness’s gritty supernatural
atmosphere.
Tools and tricks for running dramatic
and suspenseful stories in a crowded and shadowy city, including such
new systems as “City of Millions” and “Attitude and Ambience.”
New styles of gameplay for
Vampire: The Requiem
, called Barony
and Primacy, that take advantage of more than 50 urban Districts
and unique Sites.
A guide to the ctional city of Newcastle — a new World of
Darkness environment ready for you to customize and bring to life
in play, using any or all of the book’s dozens of optional rules.
400 pages ISBN: 978-1-58846-267-1 WWXXXXX
Click below to order your copy:
© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf, Vampire and World of Darkness are registered trademarks of CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Vampire the
Requiem, Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Storytelling System and Damnation City are trademarks of CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP, Inc. The mention of or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to the trademark or
copyright concerned. This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are
ction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This product contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.
Designed by:
Will Hindmarch & Craig S Grant
Map Segments
• Angled
• Big Block/Downtown
• Boulevards
• Industrial
• Park
• Grid
• Slums/Warrens
• Waterfront
• Winding Streets
District
Tall buildings cast long
shadows. Tall buildings
can also provide the secu-
rity of windows and wit-
nesses. When you’re on the
street between the looming
concrete of gargoyled sky-
scrapers, are you safely in
the public eye or are you
trapped in the cold corridors of a uncaring city?
When you look at the shapes on any of
Damnation City
’s District
maps, what do you see? Take the park map as an example. Do you see a
residential park where locals go to play catch with the dog or keep watch
on the kids during soccer practice? That’s one way to look at it.
No matter how you’re looking at it, though, take the time to consciously
change up your expectations. Your first instinct is valuable — it can get
you an atmospheric and vivid setting for your stories — but if you want
greater longevity out of these maps, you need to go beyond your gut.
Reverse your assumption. If your first instinct was to make the park into
something happily suburban — something that could be horrifically cor-
rupted by the presence of
Vampire
characters — turn your first impulse
around and make the park boldly urban. Now you’ve got a new kind of
atmosphere and, if you will,
character
for the District in that map. Now
you’ve got New York’s Central Park or Chicago’s Grant Park.
Think about how you can change the character of the map just by visu-
alizing taller or shorter buildings rising out of those shapes on the map.
You don’t have to get deep into the details at this stage. Just play around
with your mind’s eye. Imagine yourself walking up and down the streets,
headed toward the park. Are the buildings stone towers capped with jagged
Gothic spires, or are they severe tinted-glass slabs reflecting the lights of the
outside world? What’s on the ground floor of these places — dirty shops
huddling behind steel accordian-grates between the feet of giant buildings,
or bright-white fishbowl-lobbies staffed with pale, corpse-like sentries?
Imagine you’re being chased down this street. Would you want to flee
into the safety of the park’s trees and Christmas lights, or would you rather
face your pursuers than venture into that gnarled, haunted urban forest?
Look at the example of the park map on this page. By putting tall buildings
all around the park, you get a big-city, Central Park kind of neighborhood.
Tall buildings mean money — money to build them, money to live or work in
them, and a neighborhood desirable enough to bring in all that money.
This park must be nice enough that people want to look at it. Expensive
high-rises line its edges like spectators. Lavish penthouses and breathtaking
boardrooms look down onto the red-and-gold treetops in the fall. Wealthy
mortals (and lordly vampires) look down through the skeletal winter trees
at the park’s orange lanterns and tiny, distant visitors. Just by changing
the height of the buildings, we create a sense of the District’s character.
Push it further. This is the World of Darkness, so maybe this neighbor-
hood was coveted once, long ago, but after a series of violent crimes, a
couple of bad fires, and a week-long riot, the rich people and their money
fled for some other neighborhood. Now the buildings on one side of the
park are husks, with squatters living inside them like maggots in corpses —
or like refugees from the social warfare that ruined the neighborhood. On
the other side of the park are the posh flats of the lingering glitterati.
Now the park has a degree
of the fearful symbolism of
the World of Darkness: It is
the wilderness separating the
hedonists from the desperate,
the repressed from the lawless.
As the sun goes down, the
fields transform from frisbee
grounds to drug markets. The
garden becomes the grave.
A Handsome Park
A Barren Park
District
Now turn it all around. What
happens if you lower all those
buildings? If you drive some of
them into the ground or tear
them down? Some of those
shapes on the map are just
empty lots, mud littered with
needles or sharp grass growing
around rusted cars.
What kind of buildings are
long and low? Wide kind of
buildings are wide and flat?
We’re probably looking at ware-
houses, factories, single-story
strip-malls, row houses, junk-
yards, mechanic’s shops, and the oddball apartment or office building
left over from the nights when this neighborhood was something closer
to thriving. Tonight it’s a mix of ruins and rehabs, with chain-link and
vines all around. More windows are broken than not. Kids come here
to do a little UE (urban exploring) so they can put pictures on their
websites, but those kids disappear. Their shoes and clothes end up as
curiosities in some brick-studded empty lot.
The low buildings here means that sound travels differently. Line of
sight is different. Crazed dogs bark...
somewhere
in the distance. Head-
lights go by on the other side of a rotten fence, in the middle of the
night. A gunshot cuts through the night.
It’s lonely here. Out here by yourself, you’re stealthy or you’re vulnerable.
What kind of a park lies at the center
of this bombed-out District? Once it was a
nice, green place, where the families of fac-
tory workers barbecued and played baseball.
The rows of multi-family housing that faced
the park were envied back then. But tonight
the park is a stretch of dead leaves, brown
ponds that smell like gas and piss, all punc-
tuated with half-dead trees and vandalized
playground equipment. In a way, the park
itself is undead — poisoned by chemical
runoff from the nearby factories.
Or maybe it’s all the park’s fault.
Maybe the park was ruined first by the
kids who turned it into a garden of sin, slipping away behind the trees to
fuck, drink, and abuse themselves with drugs. Their vice attracted those
who would feed on it — dealers to feed their habits, and vampires to take
advantage of their addled bodies. Once the shadow of fear fell across the
park, it was surrendered to those who dwell inside fear. Once a Kindred
landlord got his fangs in the neighborhood’s flesh, it was doomed. He
pushed the neighborhood lower and lower, making feeding easier and
easier, until missing persons and sexual assaults were so common that
most of the kine drifted away. The Kindred pushed too hard. Now the
neighborhood is bleeding out.
The 3D buildings in this booklet were created using the free version of
Google SketchUp™ (www.sketchup.com). With it, you can create rough
versions of your own Districts’ buildings, adding a new dose of visual power
to your chronicle. (White Wolf Publishing is not affiliated with Google.)
About
Atmosphere
Atmosphere is a tricky thing. It’s every-
thing in between the tangible details. It’s the
ephemera, the delicate
something
that makes
the setting’s inherent character get inside
your audience — the players — like smoke
seeping in through the pores. It’s difficult to
establish and easy to accidentally dispel.
The only way to improve your ability to
create atmosphere is to practice. The more
you do it, even badly, the better you’ll even-
tually get. You’ll have scenes or whole ses-
sions where the atmosphere of your city gets
compromised. That’s inevitable. Keep the
story moving and you’ll get another chance
at atmosphere soon. In the meantime, you
can practice evoking atmosphere by imagin-
ing your city in different times of day and
different times of year. Imagine what’s hap-
pening inside the buildings, underground,
all around you.
Think critically about the process you go
through to visualize your setting to yourself.
Do you know what the buildings are made
of? When they were built? What it smells
like on the street? If you got off the subway,
what’s the first thing you’d hear?
Collect details between game sessions. Jot
down things you see, hear, smell, and feel in
the real world, then import a few of those
details into your fictional settings. High
Street smells like burnt sugar. The sound
of the expressway drifts in through the bar’s
open windows. Tail-lights flow through
downtown like blood cells through the body.
Edgeville feels like a Soviet city.
For vampires, the city is always night.
As the city grows, the vampire’s daytime
memories become obsolete. What does
this restaurant look like during the day?
What’s color are the church’s stones
without the sodium-orange glow of
the streetlamps on them? The vampire
doesn’t know.
Think about color. It’s a vital tool
for you. Without the even shine of
the sun, everything is black unless it’s
lit up. All light has color, and every
color has the power to evoke atmo-
sphere — the blue sheen of halogen
headlamps, the yellow flutter of a
dying fluorescent bulb, the untrust-
ing glare of floodlights, the ghostly
green haze of cheap electric lanterns.
The undead see the city by the lights
they are given or the lights they carry
themselves. That’s ripe with subtext, isn’t it?
Look at the simple projections of the city again, with lights and tangible
air turned on them. See how the canyons between the high-rise buildings
go dark below those giant towers? See the bands of light created across
the park? See how the city fades away into the fog? See how just the tops
of the low factory and retail buildings peek up above the shadows? These
are details you can use to inspire yourself and your players — and these
buildings don’t even have faces, texture, lights, or sounds. But imagine
how the moonlight hitting the highest warehouse windows might make
them glitter blue above the shadows. (Vampires of a certain ilk always want
to know where shadows are, and what others can and cannot see.)
One last lesson in these simple graphics: Go easy. Look at all the atmo-
sphere and information you can get out of even naked shapes pretending
to be buildings. Don’t overload the players with details. Evoke atmosphere,
don’t list specifications. Two or three defining details spark the imagina-
tion; too many details smother it. Use the touchstones you share with your
players. If they’ll understand what you mean when you say “like Savannah
on St. Patrick’s day,” use that. Speak to your audience.
© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.
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