A Modern Kindred History of New York

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TheDagda
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Joined: Sun Mar 21, 2021 7:53 pm

A Modern Kindred History of New York

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“Hello out there, Afterlife Kiddies. This is the Underworld calling…

We have some new faces in the All-Night Society of late, and our esteemed leader has generously sponsored a bit of educational programming for you vicious young things. Get comfy and open those pretty ears, because I am not going to go over this spiel twice.

The City that Never Sleeps has been a battlefield near from the start. War has been our constant. The first European Kindred who dared the perilous journey to ‘New Amsterdam’ ruled as a moonlit sovereign, lording over the mortal settlers. That reign ended with the arrival of the British under Richard Nicholls in August of 1644 - and the British Invictus who hid among his troops. The agents of the First Estate moved swiftly to overthrow the unofficial ‘Prince’ and their small brood, and by 1650 the first true Praxis was established over the city now known as ‘New York.’

It did not last, of course. Nothing ever does, here in the City That Never Sleeps. Still, credit due, dearly-departed Prince Nigel held his Praxis for more than a century. It all ended in flames, of course, with the onset of the American Revolution. For a time it seemed a glorious opportunity for the Prince and his Court, but the end was near for them both. In the fall of 1781, the first adherents of the writings of Emmanuel Baptiste Carth arrived in the beleaguered city, and soon the Invictus were besieged by the burgeoning numbers of what would one day become the Carthian Movement. With fury and fire, the surviving members of Prince Nigel’s Court were driven out, and the ‘Midnight Congress’ was formed to rule over the city’s war-weary Kindred survivors. Deeming itself ‘The Peoples’ Camarilla’, members of the ruling body would eventually ally with the Anointed faithful of the Lancea et Sanctum to form what came to be called The Old Alliance. Though they would face war and trouble, and would contend with the fiery arrival of the Circle of the Crone in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Old Alliance had a good run, and some even dared to call our fair city the ‘American Camarilla.’

If you know your history, that touch of pretension makes what happened to the Old Alliance an absolute gas. When the Golden Age of Sleaze came to an end, the Sanctified decided that it was time that they stopped being junior partners, that God wanted the Archbishop to sit the throne, and that the City That Never Sleeps was overdue a bit of Old Testament judgment. In the late months of 1994, the majority of the City’s Anointed and laity broke with their former allies and began the first moves of the Church Coup.

To the spear-polishers’ credit, they did pretty nice for themselves, at first, but in the end they found their reach was greater than their grasp. Though the Invictus and the majority of the Circle stood neutral in the conflict, the Movement gave as good as they got, and the shadow war between the former allies showed no sign of stopping any time soon.

Of course, the entire world pretty well knows what happened next. September 11th, 2001 - and the absolute mess that followed it. The All-Nighters came to call it ‘The Cataclysm’ - not due to the tragedy itself, mind you, but due to what followed. The city was overrun with government agents and highly-alert police, making the upkeep of the Masquerade an absolute nightmare. With such high stakes at play, even the Invictus could no longer sit idly, and nor could certain politically-minded opportunists among the Circle’s burgeoning Cult of Midas. With enemies on all sides, the Sanctified were forced into a bitter cold war with the rest of the city, desperately grasping for any advantage they could find in order to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

They believed they had found it in 2004, when the Ordo Dracul decided to come out of hiding. Using all manner of blasphemous ritual and occult secrets, the Ordo’s then-leader, a charming piece of work by the name of Christoph von Thaler, tore open a doorway best left sealed in his quest for power. Having had a good number of the Order’s members already hidden among the Sanctified ranks and finding common enemies in von Thaler’s hatred of the Crones, the Sanctified leadership sold their souls, so to speak, and allied with the faction the city now remembers as the Shadow Heresy.

The next year was one of the worst the city ever knew - and if you’ve been paying attention, that statement should tell you how awful it was. Diablerists and diabolists ran rampant, and ghosts, demons, and worse haunted the shadows of Manhattan. Few places remained safe, and those refuges frequently bore a murderous cost. It was not until a pair of rogue Dragons on the outs with von Thaler fled the city looking for help that the tide would begin to turn. On Christmas Eve of 2005, the Triumvirate arrived from far-off Philadelphia, a trio of elite Dragon veterans with orders to terminate the Shadow Heretics and undo their blasphemous workings. With allies from the Invictus, the Carthians, and the Cult of Midas, the Triumvirate stormed the Heretics’ Black Chantry on Christmas night, and though they suffered grim losses, as the sun was rising the next morning the Triumvirate and the allied forces of New York stood victorious.

What followed next was a reckoning of terrible proportion. The Triumvirate’s leader declared Praxis over the city, and no one left standing had the will to argue nor the strength to contest her. In the nights that followed the ascension of Voivode Nikola Kavinsky, the surviving members of the Shadow Heresy were brutally executed alongside nearly all the Dragons of the city, the Sanctified were stripped of positions and their leadership put to the torch, and the survivors of the purges were left to pick up the pieces. Voivode Kavinsky made a few obscure changes to the city’s laws and added two of her own before slipping into the shadows, leaving the Carthian survivors to restore their former administration under the Order’s oversight.

It’s been fifteen years since Kavinsky took the Praxis, and tonight the City That never Sleeps is thriving again. The Five Families work to keep the peace, and the firm hands of the Axe-Sworn ensure that the Prince’s rare edicts are enforced.

And that brings us to tonight, Afterlife Kiddies…”
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