Curseborne Occult Lawfare

In the legal defense system, there are two important roles. The first is the ability to defend clients in a trial, and consulting others in legal matters outside of a trial so that it never comes to that. However, when the occult is involved, and reality warps in ways that mundane law can comprehend, only one company steps up to help its clients regardless or race, creed, or dimensional origin. These are the case files of Smith, Michaels, and Morrison, the Curse Attorneys.

Players

(With thanks to Kittlefish)

Kittlefish - Lydia Maples, esq.: Flashy Vampire lawyer, wants to be the public face of the branch and is the fiery courtroom orator.

Daxian - something sorcerer-y?

Jeremy Kopczynski - lawyer, expert witness-wrangler and speaker for the dead

Donan - Lisa Jenkins Delver into records, seeker of secrets. Also a Sphinx Primal and good at sneaking.

mysstic101 - vodnik, either also sneaky investigator or legal negotiator

History of Smith, Michaels, and Morrison Consulting Limited

We at SM&M pride ourselves on our four virtues: our willingness to hire and defend anyone regardless of origin or creed, our honesty and dedication to our clients, our sincere dedication to legal ethics, and our ability to strategically apply the correct persuasion to get judges to accept that supernatural evidence is valid. (Please refer to the employee contract 4-C-200 for the reminder that supernatural evidence itself must be valid for it to be considered valid for massaging). Founded in 1938 in Los Angeles in the wake of the Varney case wherein it became clear that the local dock labor union needed legal representation of a more particular kind in order to evade the fact that the notoriously abusive work conditions were partly caused by a mindbending vampiress and her crew and evidence needed to be found and properly presented, and later that a prominent leader needed to be protected from a psionically empowered frame job for murder, our Senior Partners realized that a true legal aide required a certain amount of...specialized talent. Also recognizing that many in law enforcement were Accursed with special needs, they saw a perfect solution to both.

As a professional associated with our firm, you will not just be defending our clients in court, but investigating the occult cases that nobody else can solve, and giving them the best possible legal aide in both trial and civic areas. Justice may be blind, but with SM&M, it doesn't need eyes to see!

Welcome To Sunny(?) Norwich

The World of Curses is much like our own, but...weirder. Such as here, where you were hired by a months-old branch office in a city that, were it not for magic and divination, probably would not exist.

"The Misty City", "Boston's Oddball Sister", and sometimes "Miami of the Snow", due having a similar climate to its southern neighbor, and having the uh, eccentricity of Florida at times, Norwich is sometimes also called "Salem, but urban and with gargoyles." It has a pretty good art scene, but it's well-known it was founded because of ecstatic visions more than anything about the north of Boston having useful material, and then, infamously, was the Greely Trial, which would have been the Norwich Witch Trials, except the second trial was of Patience Warren, wife of the extremely popular Elder Malcolm Warren, who flatly refused to believe the allegations against his spouse. What happened next turned the inherently tragedy of a witch hunt into an absolute farce as witnesses recanted their accounts, several tests were openly deemed heretical by religious authorities, a missing child was found alive and well (because he was a notorious runaway), and eventually, it came out that the primary source of the accusations, Luke Greely, was an adulterer, thief and scammer, who had accused the first woman largely to cover up an affair, as revealed by his own wife. While the fallout was not nearly as clean as the sanitized version of history where the Puritans realized how silly there were being and ran him out of town (in fact, a good quarter tried to counter-riot upon the declaration that he needed to leave), it did set the mood of the town, and later entire city going forward - Salem and Norwich seem to embrace witches as mascots, with Norwich being the place where "the place the Devil won his day in court."

This has led to it also being a place that also got permanently magnetized for curses - it's an open secret among Accursed it only exists due to magic influencing people, but the occult symbolism of the Greely Trial of "the holy managing to get its lawsuit tossed out for malicious prosecution" permanently made it a magnet for the Outside...which is good for the tourism board. Lots of news of the weird to put on the brochures.

Also, ever since the Snake Room "opened", it's been a magnet for Outsider refugees. And the social tensions that come with any refugees. So, uh, no pressure.