Urban Fantasy: How Many in the Conspiracy

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Fri Nov 16, 2018 10:22 pm

No setting bible is going to dictate, beyond a few handfuls, which cities are relative hot spots or dead zones. What the setting bible will do is tell you the benchmarks, and then writers of expansion material and MCs will build on that as they see fit. When some hack writes Seoul By Night and describes the city as having a disproportionate concentration of Kin, that hack does so with reference to the setting bible guidelines but is in no way constrained by them.

On the flip side, when your MC decides that at his table Seoul is the home of an elder evil that eats all lesser Kin that enters its territory, the setting bible lets your MC know this is anomalous and invites him to consider what effect the vacuum in Seoul might have on the population of neighboring Incheon.

In no case do these guidelines actually place constraints on what's going on in any individual game, because no matter how globe-trotting anyone's game is, there will still be 99% of the major population centers on Earth off-camera and available to absorb any of the demographic anomalies that exist in the setting as implemented at any particular table.

That said, it's probably a shitty choice for a line developer to canonically define any major population center in the English-speaking world as devoid of Kin. This is because your customers will mostly speak English and will hail from any of those population centers; they will be butthurt when your setting advice for their city is "go fuck yourself." You would much more easily get away with putting your magical dead zone somewhere your players are less likely to live.

So, even though the Seoul metropolitan area (20M people) is an order of magnitude larger than Cleveland's (2M), it's much more acceptable from a business standpoint to describe Seoul as a "mysterious ghost town with a deadly secret" in a sidebar of Korea By Night than to do the same to Cleveland in Shadows of Flyover Country.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sat Nov 17, 2018 2:06 am

I actually agree with that. I posit it's best to put an explicit maximum as well as defined ranges. I'd suggest something like 1:300 at that maximum but the setting bible is going to make it plain that something like that doesn't happen in Megaopolis but might in Bumfuck Nowhere. You could have a family group of 5 vampires living in a rural town of 1500 and that's both unusual and if more show up they're going to have to fight it out.

In 'normal' configurations you can have dense (1:5000), standard (1:10,000) and sparse (1:20,000). You don't have to define which one every city in the world is in advance - as long as there are guidelines for how the kindred trend to live in each situation. If there isn't a guide to Terre Haute but the GM wants to set the game there, saying 'canonically there are 2 vampires there' isn't helpful. What do 2 vampires even do? If there are some generally accepted number in total you re going to be fine for your game. And you don't canonically define where there aren't supernatural (unless you want to raise a middle finger to Hoboken or something) but as you develop locations you address those needs. It's okay if your players in Phoenix don't know what the Vampire scene is like in New York until they go there. And until/unless you publish a source book it's equally fine to say that there is a super-concentration of Vampires in Brooklyn and virtually none in Manhattan or that they're relatively abundant in all the burroughs and New York is 'dense' throughout.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Nov 17, 2018 11:29 am

The core issue with demographics is that you want to have sand boxes with between 100 and 1000 supernatural creatures in them. Those sandboxes can be "the borough of Queens" or "Montana and Wyoming" there's no need or impetus for the domains to be geographically the same size. But they do want to be mostly demographically the same size. Giant cities like New York, Ciudad de Mexico, and Los Angeles can have characters concerning themselves about districts rather than the entire metropolises, while rural areas can have physically large jurisdictions that cover a lot of sleepy little towns.

While it would indeed be pretty weird if the demographic distribution was literally completely uniform, there's not much cause to get caught up in the details because the size of the domains isn't constant. You can have some tiny town in East Texas terrorized by Leatherface and family, because that domain includes basically the entirety of East Texas. Including Henderson and the entire Big Thicket.

But now that Masquerade is Abandonware again (that was quick!), I think it's a good time to rethink the entire set of character generation demographic questions that a character might be asked. So let's consider a 13th Generation Assamite of the Vizier Caste.

Being a member of one of 13 clans of Vampires is not too much of a burden on the setting. It's not even too much of a burden on the setting if Vampires aren't the only type of supernaturals. 13 Clans is too many if there are supposed to be social groups of each in every domain, but so long as you can allow your vampire society to exist with no Assamites or no Nosferatu in one domain or another, this can be fine. If roughly a third of the Kin are Vampires and your monsters are roughly 100 per Domain, then you really only have room for 5 or 6 Clans in any particular Domain that have enough members to have an argument in a coffee shop. And that's OK as long as you don't insist that every domain has their own council of 7 Primogen. There's a group of killer clowns in New Orleans, but there isn't one in East Texas, and so on and so forth.

The existence of the 13th generation is too much of a burden on the setting. It's fucking ridiculous. Any number raised to the 13th power is a fucking stupidly titanic number. Like, four to the 13th is a bit north of sixty even million, and White Wolf was ranting about going up by sevens and shit. Vampire fiction does not need or benefit from long lists of "begats." The Underworld movies did just fine with like 4 or 5 generations of vampires. You want elders and you want neonates, and you want vampires in-between, but there's no benefit to having a lot of shades of gray in between those three.

The Vizier Caste is simply not workable. The idea is that the Viziers are a minority of a minority of the Assamites. But for that to work, you need to have more Sorcerers than Viziers and more Warriors than Sorcerers. But even in domains where this clan has a social presence, there's still only going to be like 5 or 6 of them, right?

-Username17

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Nov 17, 2018 12:17 pm

A few advantages in a base rate of things existing in setting and adventure design as well as the shared world experience of playing the game.

1 per 1k for supernaturals is 328k in the US, 120k in Mexico, 37k in Canada, the population is growing in Mexico almost as quick as the US, most are a modest age at most, there's only 700 in DC, and not any in congress. That gives you stories about population movements, how few old survivors might be around at most.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demograph ... ted_States

The more your numbers vary from that, the less the new supernatural stories fall out of the real history of the places. About 650 die in the US civil war out of a population of 23k, but the population grows by 8k by 1860. 90% are US born, the rest mostly recent Irish migrants.

There should be 90k extra supernaturals in the US by the year 2050, above the loss rate. That's about plus 8 per day across the country, witches, wolves, vamps, poltergeists, divide it up it's still a big deal locally to make a new one, but it's constantly happening.

--

I think that's a very useful tool for a nearly-real world, just wiki up a plot with associated history, turn on the news even. So you want every concentration of spooky stuff to have a sparseness right next door that cancels it out. One block of a city has a lot of vamps then the surrounding blocks have less than normal, one town is the hellmouth then surrounding towns are quieter, so that overall it just works. New York city is rich? Then upstate is not.

It occurs to me this makes hellmouth settings self-fulfilling. Demons count, so concentrating them and continuously killing them keeps the hellmouth open and demons pouring out, because hehehehe. Of course, if you let them out and they kill off all the good witches, well, room for more demons again. Really no way to win, other than make lots more other supernaturals, like Buffy did. Woo. Plot.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Nov 17, 2018 2:22 pm

1:1000 is too high precisely because it would end up with 328 thousand supernatural creatures in America. That's too many if you want your Kin to be meaningfully "elite." At over 300k, you're comparing them to ethnic groups like the Armenians (700K), the Hmong (260k), or the Egyptians (256k). At the point where "The Kin" are being compared favorably in numbers to ethnic groups that have actual political pull you aren't really doing "secret masters" stuff so much as "model immigrant community" material. I don't really want to read about Werewolf Tiger Moms or some shit.

Individual supernatural creatures should be like super villains or gang leaders. Not like rando gang members. 1:10,000 gets you there.

The other issue is that you want domains with roughly 100 Kin in them so that you can have social interactions and still potentially learn names. At 1:10,000 that area is "The greater Birmingham, AL area" which is a reasonable setting for Urban Fantasy. At 1:100,000 that's "only mega cities" which is far too restrictive. And at 1:1000, that's "Grand Forks, North Dakota" which sounds like a parody deconstruction of Urban Fantasy as a concept.

-Username17

pragma · Post by **pragma** » Sat Nov 17, 2018 10:21 pm

"Vampire: The Parody Deconstructioning" sounds like a pretty fun game. (Or at least a satisfying one shot.)

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 12:15 am

If you happen to live in Grand Forks and you have 25 people in your LARP, you want it to be reasonable that Grand Forks can support those kinds of numbers without being the functional equivalent of a mega-city.

The idea that you're passing within inches of the Masquerade frequently and you could almost just join it is part of the appeal - just like with Harry Potter fandom.

30k in the US isn't the number you want. 300k is probably closer. I'd estimate about 200 to 350k with the caveat that they tend to concentrate. There can be 10k vampires in New York without it being 1/3 of the total.

You put a number like 30k as canon, and you will actually have the locations of every vampire defined before you know it.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 12:54 am

But DDM, that was already addressed.

If you live in Grand Forks and you want to have a 30-member vampire LARP, then you take advantage of the fact that the exact distribution of the 30k isn't defined anywhere. There's more than enough space in the US to absorb whatever demographic oddities you create by declaring that Grand Forks is the place where 6 different homesteader packs collide for whatever reason as part of the metaplot for your LARP.

Grand Forks can easily have that many vampires, just as long as that's not demographically representative.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 2:14 am

Our hypothetical 25 player LARP in Grand Forks, North Dakota is precisely why a 1:10,000 ratio works so much better than 1:1,000. Either way, 25 Kin amounts to roughly one quarter of the domain's Kin. The difference is what your explanation is for where the other 75 are.

At 1:1,000, the domain is literally just the urban area of Grand Forks. At 1:10,000, the domain includes the entirety of North Dakota. So the 'missing Kin' can just be in Bismark or Fargo or somewhere in the Badlands.

-Username17

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 12:41 pm

But 328k in the US is not a big number, the US is fucking huge and heavily populated, they have 23 states with more people than my country. In NZ it's 5k supernaturals, including just 600 for Māori and 14 for Niueans. Niue has their own mythology, man, they probably need more than that.

Fiji gets 885, including 224 Indian, so there's room for Rhakshasa and also other things from India, while also having all the Fijian mythology. But Rapa Nui people on Easter Island is like 4, plus 2 for the local Mestizo. That's not a lot of Moai.

The other 75 in Grand Forks, North Dakota? 50 live in the burbs, 25 in the city, but 3 are Native American, 2 Hispanic, 1 African American, 1 Asian. Even in a place where almost everyone is white, you still get enough to represent minorities without fudging.

If you suddenly want an exemption for 100x your base numbers because they're small but interesting places, or small minorities someone might want to play, there are many thousands of very small and interesting groups in the US. Everyone gets a few, that's good. The Amish in Missouri get 13 so some can be young pacifist fishmalks, the FBI get 22 as field agents and a few of them can be wolves who cover up all the shapechanger reports by being spread around a bit without that being every kin in the FBI.

With a few everywhere, it means when there's a weird crime in a small group, you can just say it's supernatural and have that not get stupid after the twentieth time you do it in North Dakota. But it's still not predictable because they can be 100 different types for monster of the week campaigns that literally run for years, without radically changing the underlying assumptions along the way.

Minority groups in general, US Armenians get 700 supernaturals, the Hmong get 260, and the Egyptians get 256. So you can have players interact with a menacing Egyptian mummy lord and wipe out their couple dozen young buddies of various kinds and yet not make Egyptian themed supernaturals extinct across the US, because there's space for ten groups that size and the module that turns up later with more of them still works for everyone. Come on, that's several movies, surely leave the potential open.

Gives you more space beyond wanking on about and pretending to be a Vampire talking to a handful of other Vampires in your local megacity, and works for places that aren't cities, or are minority groups within a city.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 2:47 pm

Tussock wrote:The other 75 in Grand Forks, North Dakota? 50 live in the burbs, 25 in the city

No. You idiot. First of all, 50 in the burbs and 25 in the city doesn't cover the 75 more Kin for Grand Forks, that's 75 total. The total is 100 at 1:1000, which is why this is such an obviously ridiculous plan. Secondly, Grand Forks doesn't have "city" or "burbs." It's fucking Grand Forks. It's just a 100 square kilometer area that has about a thousand people per square kilometer in it. It's barely even urbanized, it's just like if you took a random sample of one third of the Maldives and called it a city. There's no "burbs". It's fucking all burbs. It's just a 10 kilometer square of mildly built up area next to Highway 29. And the area around it looks like this:

There's no "outside" population. It's a flat empty wasteland for kilometers in every direction. You get on Highway 29 and travel south for 120 kilometers and you get to Fargo and along the way you pass a couple of gas stations and a few villages. That's the whole point of this example. If 100,000 people is enough to stake a domain, then the four hundred and fortieth largest metropolitan area in the US is a Domain. That's fucked. It's fucked because that's so many "urban" domains that you couldn't possibly meaningfully affect the setting as a whole, and it's fucked because it means that there isn't really any room for "rural" domains.

If your cutoff for a domain is "about a million people" (which is what you get at 1:10,000), then you have around sixty "urban" domains where you have places like Fresno and Tulsa rounding out the bottom, and the top ten American cities are hacked up into sub-domains with gangs claiming turf lines at arbitrary places in New York and Los Angeles. And then you have areas like Montana that are geographically large rural domains where Witches and Werewolves drive many miles to have meetings under the full moon in the middle of the wilderness.

If your cutoff for a domain is "about ten million people" (which is what the old White Wolf numbers get you) then you have to fudge the fuck out of things to have any supernatural society at all outside a handful of megacities. For fuck's sake, depending on how you count built-up urban areas, there are only 25-40 of those things on the entire fucking planet.

And if you put the cutoff for a domain at "about 100,000 people (which is what 1:1,000 gets you), then things are totally unmanageable. Not only are there many hundreds of urban areas that get their own domains, but even urban areas like the Bay Area have nearly twenty constituent suburbs that individually qualify as domains. It's not just that the Prince of San Francisco is rivals with the Prince of San Jose, the fucking Prince of Concord is talking smack about the Prince of San Mateo. It's completely unworkable and totally fucked.

-Username17

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 4:24 pm

You previously said that domains vary in geographical size - that's good. A rural domain might be expansive, but there are also limitations on how far your supernatural can or should travel. Consequently, there have to be small domains' both in size and population. Conversely, there could be populous domains. The Bay Area doesn't need 20 domains - it could have 5 'large' domains. In your game, moving to the Bay Area means being a small fish in a big pond. Your actions are going to matter to your buddies but they're less likely to permanently change the meta-plot. That's good. You have inelastic play spaces.

If you want to change the domain system, you take over Fresno or Jackson Hole - places where your posse is a significant power block just because they appreciably change the balance of power.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 4:30 pm

There used to be a nearly 20 person V:tM larp in Bath, Somerset, a city that does not even have 100,000 people because England is tiny. I think we just tried not to think about how many other vampires there were or how to explain vampiric turnover when PCs died.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 4:51 pm

DDMW wrote:A rural domain might be expansive, but there are also limitations on how far your supernatural can or should travel.

Not really, no. Montana is enormous, but you can drive from end to end in 10 hours. Travelling from one end of the domain to the other takes a single day even if you have no magical travel abilities or own a private plane or something. Even the largest domains are things that enforces can go to the far corners of at will. There is absolutely no advantage in chopping rural domains up into one hundred thousand person units. Zero. None. Zilch. Nada.

Neither you nor Tussock have managed to name a single thing that would be made better by going to the 0.1% demographic. It's absurdly large, totally unworkable in game, and does not add anything positive. That's the bottom line: there's no advantage to doing that. Such a high Kin to humans ratio has a huge burden of conceptual space and doesn't let you tell any stories that you wouldn't be able to tell with one tenth that many.

Omegonthesane wrote:There used to be a nearly 20 person V:tM larp in Bath, Somerset, a city that does not even have 100,000 people because England is tiny. I think we just tried not to think about how many other vampires there were or how to explain vampiric turnover when PCs died.

The Santa Cruz County one explicitly stated that we were on a Hellmouth and had a massively larger Vampire population than you'd think and it officially took place in the vampire infested Santa Cruz analog from Lost Boys. But the big issue there is that in Masquerade, literally every city ever discussed as a campaign setting or adventure locale had "more than its share of vampires." I mean, even fucking Night City in Cyberfang had double its demographic share.

If you find yourself writing "this location has more vampires than the demographics would suggest" for every single location, you need to ask yourself whether your proposed demographics are holding you back. And Masquerade's demographics obviously were. You couldn't do fucking anything described in any part of Masquerade with the 1:100,000 ratio.

You don't need to go all the way to 1:1000. You can do all the stories you need to do at 1:10,000 But 1:100,000 simply failed all design specs.

-Username17

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 6:08 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: You don't need to go all the way to 1:1000. You can do all the stories you need to do at 1:10,000 But 1:100,000 simply failed all design specs.

-Username17

Across the planet, you probably don't need to go with 1:1000. That'd give you roughly 8 million vampires; compared to 800k for a ratio of 1:10,000. But if you only have 800k in the world, and you decide that approximately 400 vampires is the ideal 'space', you're going to have about 2k total population centers. Your players are going to be geographically separated, so you're going to want to have just about every world-capital represented. There are more than 300 cities in the world with more than 1 million people - a huge chunk of that total. And since the US only has about 10 cities of 1 million+, most of those are somewhere else. Since you want to reserve enough vampires for the United States to have a significant vampire population in Santa Cruz and Columbus, you just need more, total.

Unless you decide that you're going to have Supernatural deserts and some of China's 160 cities with 1 million + people won't have any supernaturals at all.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 7:41 pm

Sana Cruz is probably going to end up belonging to the Bay Area, or SF or San Jose domain, depending on how you want to slice it up. As long as you send your tribute to the boss and don't get caught plotting against him or try to pop the masquerade the vampires of Santa Cruz can manage it however they want.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 7:42 pm

DDMW wrote:And since the US only has about 10 cities of 1 million+, most of those are somewhere else.

The United States has fifty three metropolitan areas of over a million people even by the weirdly small numbers that Wikipedia's list of metropolitan areas uses. Extend that to metropolitan areas of over 900k on that list (most of which are listed at over a million on other lists), and you have an even sixty. Plus you presumably have room to carve up the largest sprawls into a handful of domains, so you have like seventy urban domains plus a similar number of rural domains for the United States. Depending on how you carve up New York, Los Angeles, and Chicagoland you could make it an even 150 if you wanted. How is that remotely constraining?

That implies a dark universe where the Kin divide the world up into roughly 3500 domains of various sizes, and most of those are in Asia. How is this a problem?

Again and again you point at incredibly reasonable numbers and stamp your foot and say it's a big problem. What exactly is the problem? What is the issue caused by Fresno being a domain with its own prince that is solved by having Fresno be five domains with their own princes fighting it out over control of Old Fig Garden?

DDMW wrote:Since you want to reserve enough vampires for the United States to have a significant vampire population in Santa Cruz and Columbus, you just need more, total.

Columbus Ohio has 2 million people in it. At 1:10,000, that's 200 vampires, which is more than plenty.

Santa Cruz County has 274 thousand people in it, which is short of where it would need to be to qualify as a domain. However, if you include the people living on the other two sides of the bay through Monterey County, that's a population over seven hundred thousand, which is reasonable. If you instead lump it in with San Jose to the north, you're north of 2 million people and the domain is entitled to hundreds of vampires. In any case, Santa Cruz itself is entitled to 27 vampires under this scheme, so domain or not there's enough vampires to do Lost Boys 4 times over.

1:10,000 is simply not a problem for Columbus or Santa Cruz to get their vampires on. And I don't know why you keep insisting that it is.

-Username17

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 7:51 pm

The problem with 27 vampires in Santa Cruz is that if the PCs show up, they are 1/5 of the total. If they end up killing half of them, and then need new characters, there isn't really a pool to draw from.

Having ~100 vampires in Santa Cruz is going to work out better.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 8:33 pm

What might help here is a tradition of replacements. If a well respected supernatural creature is killed, it's considered kosher and normal for the local council to induct promising mortals/reinfields into the masquerade until they're back up to carrying capacity for the domain.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 8:51 pm

deaddmwalking wrote:The problem with 27 vampires in Santa Cruz is that if the PCs show up, they are 1/5 of the total. If they end up killing half of them, and then need new characters, there isn't really a pool to draw from.

Having ~100 vampires in Santa Cruz is going to work out better.

No. ~100 vampires in the sandbox is required. The sandbox is going to include Monterey or San Jose or both. Because you can literally see Monterey from Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz to Santa Clara commute is a major commuter route that a large number of Santa Cruz residents perform. Santa Cruz is often described as a suburb of San Jose, after all.

Having Santa Cruz included in a sandbox with over a 100 supernaturals is trivial. It's part of the fucking Bay Area.

-Username17

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Nov 18, 2018 10:50 pm

Grek wrote:What might help here is a tradition of replacements. If a well respected supernatural creature is killed, it's considered kosher and normal for the local council to induct promising mortals/reinfields into the masquerade until they're back up to carrying capacity for the domain.

If we're going for a vampire-focused paradigm where most supernaturals who make up the 0.01% of people are blood suckers, and also if we retain the thing where childer are supernaturally bound to obey their sires, then every vampire wants as many childer as possible, and would really prefer that every single vampire in the domain be their mind slave rather than someone who can meaningfully oppose them if treated poorly. So, you don't need a specific tradition of replacing slain vampires, you need a tradition that strictly enforces the 1:10,000 ratio and determines who get to replace the fallen.

violence in the media · Mon Nov 19, 2018 2:38 am

deaddmwalking wrote:The problem with 27 vampires in Santa Cruz is that if the PCs show up, they are 1/5 of the total. If they end up killing half of them, and then need new characters, there isn't really a pool to draw from.

Having ~100 vampires in Santa Cruz is going to work out better.

What is wrong with the PCs deciding to go somewhere that their posse makes up a large chunk of the local supernatural presence and start to clean house? It sounds like you're arguing for so many supernatural creatures everywhere that the PCs can never kick over the apple cart.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Nov 19, 2018 6:17 am

Chamomile wrote: If we're going for a vampire-focused paradigm where most supernaturals who make up the 0.01% of people are blood suckers, and also if we retain the thing where childer are supernaturally bound to obey their sires, then every vampire wants as many childer as possible, and would really prefer that every single vampire in the domain be their mind slave rather than someone who can meaningfully oppose them if treated poorly. So, you don't need a specific tradition of replacing slain vampires, you need a tradition that strictly enforces the 1:10,000 ratio and determines who get to replace the fallen.

Supernatural creatures that can infect humans and turn them into supernatural creatures need heavy-handed restrictions on reproduction lest they go all Shadow Over The Sun and make the setting unrecognizable as it turns into Daybreakers 20 minutes into the future.

Werewolves need a reason that they don't just bite all their friends and turn them into more Werewolves. Vampires need a reason that they don't just bite every one of their thralls and make an army of Vampires.

The tradition of progeny from Masquerade was an explanation, but not a particularly good one. Like, if you tried to make the setting into Daybreakers in someone else's domain they had the right to go all Highlander on you, but if you just moved to Phoenix first, you were fine. After Sundown's Luminaries restriction is particularly heavy handed, but it does work.

-Username17

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Nov 19, 2018 3:21 pm

violence in the media wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:The problem with 27 vampires in Santa Cruz is that if the PCs show up, they are 1/5 of the total. If they end up killing half of them, and then need new characters, there isn't really a pool to draw from.

Having ~100 vampires in Santa Cruz is going to work out better.
What is wrong with the PCs deciding to go somewhere that their posse makes up a large chunk of the local supernatural presence and start to clean house? It sounds like you're arguing for so many supernatural creatures everywhere that the PCs can never kick over the apple cart.

Nothing is wrong with having the option to kick over the apple cart. Having a wide variety of populations is something I'm arguing in favor of.

Using 1:10,000, Salem OR has ~17; Salt Lake City has ~20; Pasadena CA has ~14.

These are the types of places your players are going to live, and they'll want a significant supernatural presence. Do me a favor - look up your hometown's population and divide by 10,000. For me, that's Anaheim CA and the current population is around 350,000. That gives me 35 vampires for the whole city to play with. Since I'm going to have a cabal centered in Disneyland that has 22 members, I have 13 left for everything else in town. That doesn't give me the numbers I want for a biker gang near Anaheim High School, or the socialites that have a mansion in Anaheim Hills.

If you start developing your demographics and you find that every place you work on needs an exceptional number of vampires, you need to change the demographic assumptions.

Now, some of this has to do with what a vampire IS. If there are no 'mook vampires', then you don't need 100+; but if a certain percentage are going to be disposable, you need numbers to reflect that.

For Anaheim CA, I think I want at least 200. Some of those are 'solitary' - some of them are part of groups that I know I want and some of them are 'available' - when I need to pull in a new group I don't have to have them invade from Corona - there remain a few groups that I haven't clearly defined until/unless the party starts interacting with them.

1:10,000 doesn't give me a demographic relationship that I think works. Expanding the area to 'all of Orange County' isn't a particularly helpful option. The advantage of using 'the real world' is the ability to be familiar with it. There are parts of Orange County I'm really familiar with, but parts that I'm not. If the purpose is to ground the fantasy with realistic elements, using things I'm familiar with is helpful.

And if you're including all supernaturals, it's even harder. I didn't even go into the werewolves that are based out of Irvine Regional Park/Santiago Oaks Regional Park (which overlaps/abuts Anaheim Hills).

If I end up with 1:2000 (175 total) and that works out to a really reasonable number, I'm going to scoff at 1:10,000 as a suggested ratio. Now, if Anaheim has 5x the suggested supernatural creatures, I could assume that there are other places that have 1/5 the suggested vampire population, so it 'balances', but that's not as easy as getting the demographic mix right from the beginning.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Nov 19, 2018 5:03 pm

Ddmw, you live in Anaheim so I know for a fact that you know what complete nonsense you are talking. Pasadena is not a lone trading outpost in the wilderness. It's a neighborhood of a mega city. If you take one step north of Pasadena you are in Altadena. If you take one step south you are in South Pasadena. But importantly, if you keep walking through South Pasadena you go into Alhambra without every leaving the city. And if you keep walking you seemlessly pass into Monterey Park and if you keep walking the sign will tell you that you are in East LA without ever once being out of the city for a single step. Los Angeles is a seventeen million person megacity that is two hundred kilometers across. Picking out individual neighborhoods and acting like it's remotely a problem that the population of supernaturals isn't high enough to support the stories you want to tell is fucking insane.

If you don't feel like there are enough supernaturals to interact with in Anaheim, interact with some of the ones in Fullerton or Garden Grove. Because they are LITERALLY ACROSS THE STREET.