The Lowlands
The part of Scotland directly north of England and south of the Highlands, normally considered to encompass the Central Plain of Scotland and the Southern Uplands. For all that the romanticism of the Highlands pervades Scottish national identity, it is in the Lowlands that most of Scotland can be said to dwell. This is the most agriculturally fertile part of Scotland, and the most populous, with most of Scotland's admittedly small population (just over five million) dwelling in the rolling hills and sparse forests of the Lowlands. Both of Scotland's major cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, are likewise found in the Lowlands. Traditionally, the economy has been one of heavy industry, underpinned by the steel mills and shipyards of Glasgow.
The Lowlands are also the most haunted part of a haunted island, as ghosts teem in the Lowlands in great numbers. No other part of Britain has seen quite as much war, treachery and blood as the Lowlands, as Scottish chieftains, Roman governors, and English kings fought to gory standoffs for millennia -- and unlike in ever-changing London, the ruined castles and fallow battlefields of the Lowlands can maintain ghosts on this plane for centuries. The most notorious and deadly ghost in the Lowlands is likely the specter of the cannibal-chief Sawney Bean, who wanders with his dead family about the hills, consuming those unwise enough to be caught alone in the mountains. Even more powerful is the the long-dead Wizard of Balwearie, Michael Scot, who has haunted the ruins of Glenluce Abbey for past nine hundred years and is as potent an archmagus as the British Isles have ever seen. Both the Argent Collegium and the Freehold of Elphame make some claims to control over the Lowlands, but neither has the ability to exercise more than nominal authority over the region.
Edinburgh
The second largest city in Scotland and the historic and current capital of the region, Edinburgh is located towards the east of the Scottish Lowlands. The original city was founded upon a rocky outcropping (a volcanic plug, to be precise) upon which Edinburgh castle now sits, with the Old Town stretching out down the length of the plug (the Royal Mile) and reaching its end at the Palace of Holyrood, seat of the Kings of Scotland. To the south stretches the New Town, the spilled-over suburbs and exurbs of Edinburgh, the modern counterpart to the Old Town's rich history. Edinburgh has traditionally been a seat of learning and education in Scotland, home to the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, and with the University of Edinburgh among the best in the world.
Edinburgh is also home to the Argent Collegium, one of the most successful Awakened organizations in the British Isles. The Collegium was founded during the Scottish Enlightenment, and represents a kind of Silver Ladder / Mysterium hybrid organization, emphasizing the importance of controlling knowledge as a way of guiding they destiny of the world. They are the teachers of the great and powerful, educating both mortals (via the numerous mages on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh) and the supernatural (in hidden chambers that honeycomb the rocky bluff on which the Old Town stands). The Collegium has maintained cordial relations with both past and present Awakened leaders in London, usually trading their knowledge and teaching ability in exchange for the Englishmen's greater ability to burn, mutilate, and destroy.
Glasgow
The largest city in Scotland, third-largest in the British Isles, Glasgow is known for urban decay, sectarian violence, and radical leftist politics. A city of about three million on the western coast of Scotland, the 1707 Act of Union gave Glaswegians access to all the ports of the British Empire, and in 1900 Glasgow built more ships than America, Germany, and Russia combined. Much of this economic and urban growth was fueled by Irish Catholic immigration, leading to religious violence between Catholics and Protestants, and also the rise of socialism and anarchism courtesy of the wretched working conditions. Glasgow is currently the murder capitol of the United Kingdom.
None of this is helped by the Other City. Every few months or so something happens in Glasgow. By night, the people in parts of the city — rarely more than maybe a couple of streets at a time — find themselves and their surroundings changed. This new city that invades Glasgow’s space usually has a name, but it’s not the same name every time; Glasgow has had a number of different names — it’s been Grassic Lewis, Unthank, Golgonooza and Bethmoora a couple of times each so far, and may have other names in the future. It is a place where madness infects laws both human and physical, where a man is arrested and hanged without ever being charged, where stigmata appear in the shapes of mouth and eyes in cuts, where a hundred miles of trolley fit between two blocks of flats, where the dead walk with no memory of life, and where a university catalogs the daily lives and dreams of every citizen of Glasgow in shelves a thousand feet high. And, always, somewhere in the background far away, colossal unseen engines throb and clatter. And, sometimes, something long and wingless and many-tailed flies shrieking across the night sky, too quickly for its shape to be properly made out.
The result of the Other City's influence is that madness doesn't simply run in Glasgow's supernatural community, it practically gallops. The supernatural are far more susceptible to being taken into the Other City than mortals, and wise supernaturals give Glasgow a wide berth. What remains is a stew of outcasts, marginals, and lunatics, driven ever crazier by the Other City. The most powerful supernatural in the city is vampire Alan MacLeish, the Laird of Glasgow, a Catholic Sanctified who is highly unstable. Among his recent and often arbitrary edicts have been a ban on feeding on Catholics and the calling of a blood hunt against one of his Hounds, whose crime was failing to turn up to confession one week. And MacLeish is far from the craziest supernatural in Glasgow.
County Angus
Nestled between Dundee and Aberdeen, half in the Highlands, half in the Lowlands, Angus is a farming and fishing area, with a mountainous uplands and a more populous coastal region. Angus has some claim to being the birthplace of Scotland, with a rich history of Pictish settlement, and with the Declaration of Arbroath, establishing the medieval kingdom of Scotland, signed at Arbroath Abbey in 1320.
Angus is also home to one of Scotland's more unpleasant supernatural legends. The story goes that a group of hapless and
poorly-informed Ghost Wolves from Dundee found fell foul of a village of people who seemed unaffected by Lunacy, and who, silent, blank-faced, behaved like insects in a hive. The central power in this place, the queen of the hive, was a waxy-faced woman with faceted eyes who styled herself “The Madonna of the Wasps.” The woman effortlessly took control of the werewolves’ minds; only one of them was strong-willed enough to escape, and he had to kill one of his own packmates to do it. The lone survivor’s name isn’t generally known. He’s never any closer than a “friend of a friend.” This isn’t the only story about the Madonna of the Wasps — she’s become something of a legend among werewolves, vampires and mages alike.