Venue Introduction

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

Welcome to the City That Never Sleeps. One of the oldest cities in the New World, New York is also one of the bloodiest cities known to the Kindred. For nearly four centuries, the city has slowly expanded outward, consuming its neighbors and casting its spell over the minds of the living and the dead alike, and like the Kindred themselves, it consumes lives and remakes them in its own image, even though that image changes from night to night and century to century. It has witnessed the earliest nights of two covenants, and the fall of three Praxes, nights awash in fire and blood. But for fifteen years, the City That Never Sleeps has known a tense peace under the firm, measured hand of Prince Kavinsky and the Order, a welcome reprieve from the violent nights of the Church Coup, the Cataclysm, and the Shadow Heresy. Still, only the rankest neonate would let their guard down in a town like this. It’s a cold, vicious city, New York, but you know what they say:

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere….

Venue Themes

A Requiem for the Streets

Though Prince Kavinsky’s firm hand has put an end to the organized violence between the Covenants, only a fool would take the tenuous peace as a promise of safety. While the disputes of the mighty are now settled on the debate floor and in the dueling circle, brutality and violence are still the language of the lowly and hungry dead of NYC. With the grand games of the Danse Macabre so heavily-curtailed, the city’s Kindred are often left with only their desires, their vices, and their Beasts to distract them from the crushing press of endless nights,.The All Night Society of New York is young, vital, and hungry, led predominantly by ancillae and ‘living’ in dread of the shadows cast by the tiny, terrifying handful of elders who have endured the crucible that is the City That Never Sleeps, not one of high-born undead oligarchs and calcified theocrats. Perhaps some night you will rise to the august ranks of power, but for now, for tonight, yours is the midnight world of blood on the streets, illicit lusts in the shadows, and a hunger like fire in your undead guts…

Old versus New

In the city that saw the birth of both the Carthian Movement and the Circle of the Crone in America,it should come as no surprise that the streets have always burned with the fires of revolution and the passions of change. Yet the city is also one of the oldest European settlements in the country, and its memory is long indeed. Old World elitism rubs shoulders uncomfortably with New World populism, and stubborn tradition wars nightly with reckless innovation.

Piety versus Blasphemy

In this city, not even one’s soul is sacred. Just as the material wars among itself on matters of tradition and revolution, so too does the spiritual side of the city. More than simply a matter of vice and virtue, the guises and orthodoxies of the Covenants split and take on strange, even sometimes-heretical new shapes in New York; with the usual political bickering of the Kindred sharply curtailed by the Prince’s edicts, there is precious little to allow the city’s vampires to hide from their own souls…

Moods & Inspirations

Movies/TV Shows

From Dusk Till Dawn [Film and Television Series]
The Lost Boys [Film]
Near Dark [Film]
True Blood [Television Series]
The Warriors [Film]

Music

What to Expect As a Player

Understand that Vampire: the Requiem is a horror game, and more than that, it is a game whose horror is far more visceral and internal than some other games in the Chronicles of Darkness; quote Shakespeare, ‘you shall hear of carnal, dark, and bloody things.’ Vampires are cruel, violent, socially-stagnant, and above all else, predatory beings; for the Kindred, Hell truly is other people, and the Devils are not simply all here – they are all brazenly on display, an unliving gallery of all the sins of the past remembered.