Editing Setting-Intro

Ever since anyone in New York can remember, the unchallenged ruler of the city has been Julian La Pelle, an Invictus Ventrue of great age. He once called himself Prince but now prefers the more modern title of Executive. As New York grew from a colonial port to encompass the five boroughs, La Pelle placed his own progeny on the thrones of Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island to rule each in his name. Eventually he even expanded his reach across the Hudson River to Jersey City and Newark. 

It couldn’t last, of course. Few Princes have ever held such huge domains as Julian La Pelle did. As old as he was, La Pelle sometimes slept for weeks or months at a time, leaving the city to his Counts (more recently called Directors). In 1966, he disappeared for a long torpor of over a decade. That’s when The Uprising occurred.

An alliance of Carthian and Circle of Crone Kindred, for centuries pushed to the margins of the city by La Pelle’s Invictus and his Lancea allies, began an eleven-year long campaign to tear down the established power structure of New York’s All Night Society and replace it with something more to their liking. They almost succeeded, too. It started small, but within a few years, gathered tremendous force from the downtrodden and oppressed Kindred shut out of the ossified power structure built by La Pelle. The climax occurred during the Blackout of 1977, when the entire city lost power one July night. 

On that night, the Ventrue Directors of The Bronx and Queens were killed. Hortense, the Director of Brooklyn, turned her cloak and went over to the Carthians; many say she was secretly with them for years before that. With her help, the Uprising nearly carried all of New York City. 

La Pelle’s sleeping place was never discovered, however, and the Directors of Manhattan and Staten Island managed to hold their ground, though their power and influence were shaken down to the foundations. And in the chaos, a darker force rose up on the west side of the Hudson River. A Parliament of Strix suddenly appeared in Newark and Jersey City and massacred all of the Kindred there. To these nights, to set foot in New Jersey is a death sentence for any Kindred.

With over half of the city in their grasp, the Carthian-Acolyte alliance set up a series of democratic Councils to rule Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx. With their goals all but achieved, the leaders of the Uprising assumed that it would only be a matter of time before Manhattan and Staten Island fell, but it was not to be. La Pelle woke from torpor the next year and he was far from pleased at how he found his city.

The next twenty years turned the city into a war zone as La Pelle sought to retake the lost boroughs and destroy the Uprising. Despite his immense personal power, the web of influence he had spent centuries building had been shredded and he has not been successful in restoring it. Many of the rulers of the Uprising met their Final Deaths at the fangs of the Executive’s Enforcers, but many more survived, including La Pelle’s traitor progeny Hortense. Eventually the war petered out as the truly fanatic supporters of either side were eliminated, and the survivors grew tired of always looking over their shoulders for the other side’s assassins.

Since the turn of the millennium, New York City has been in a cold war. The Invictus and Lancea still hold onto the beating, bloody heart of the city, Manhattan, while maintaining small pockets of domain in the outer boroughs. The Uprising has splintered and balkanized the rest of the city, and while not totally disunited, they are not the force they were in the 70s and 80s. This is the All Night Society of New York in 2016. Fragmented, chaotic, but the war is basically over. For now. No one thinks the Executive has really given up on destroying the Uprising, and the leaders of the Uprising haven’t abandoned their ideals of a new All Night Society without La Pelle on the throne.

Your characters, like many neonates, are forced to navigate the treacherous remnants of old battlegrounds from night to night. For most of you, free movement between the Executive's and the Uprising's territories is possible, but occasionally dangerous. Trying to be Lights in the Darkness earns you the respect and contempt of Kindred on both sides, and you can use that. Between the clashes of these two forces, there are many people, kine and Kindred both, ground up and spat out who need your help...