damnation city district map segments

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DAMNATION CITY: District Map Segments THIS EXIT 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. TM © 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. Check out White Wolf online at http://www.white-wolf.com Designed by: Will Hindmarch & Craig S Grant 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 fictional 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: DAMNATION CITY HARDCOVER DAMNATION CITY eBOOK Map Segments • Angled • Big Block/Downtown • Boulevards • Industrial • Park • Grid • Slums/Warrens • Waterfront • Winding Streets DAMNATION CITY DAMNATION CITY

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Page 1: Damnation City District Map Segments

DAMNATION CITY:District Map Segments

THIS EXIT

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.

TM

© 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 fi ction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This product contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.

Check out White Wolf online at http://www.white-wolf.com

Designed by: Will Hindmarch & Craig S Grant

DAMNATION CITYThe 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 fi 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:

DAMNATION CITY HARDCOVER

DAMNATION CITY eBOOK

Map Segments

• Angled

• Big Block/Downtown

• Boulevards

• Industrial

• Park

• Grid

• Slums/Warrens

• Waterfront

• Winding Streets

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Page 2: Damnation City District Map Segments

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 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?

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Page 3: Damnation City District Map Segments

BARREN 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.)

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Page 4: Damnation City District Map Segments

AboutAtmosphere

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.

ABOUT ATM

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Page 5: Damnation City District Map Segments

© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.

ANGLED

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.BIG

BLOCK/D

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.BOULEVARDS

MAP SEGM

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.

INDUSTRIA

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.

PARK

MAP SEGM

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.GRID

MAP SEGM

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.

GRID

MAP SEGM

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.GRID

MAP SEGM

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.SLUM

S/W

ARRENS

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Page 14: Damnation City District Map Segments

© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only.

WATERFRONT

MAP SEGM

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© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Permission granted to duplicate for personal use only. WIN

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