The Midlands

Known proudly as the workshop of the world, Birmingham is the UK's second-largest city after London. A commercial and proto-industrial center since the 12th century, by the 1700s Birmingham was one of England's most important cities, characterized by a high degree of economic and social freedom. When the Industrial Revolution happened, Birmingham boomed, becoming, arguably, the first truly modern industrial city, and a world financial capital to boot. During the 19th century, it remained a vibrant, powerful city. It is also the regional center of democratic, socialist, and even communist political agitation, playing host to any number of feuding proletariat groups at any given time. In 1904, the area was even visited by a prominent young foreign radical named Vladimir Lenin, who rallied the oppressed workers against the oppression of their careless overlords.

For almost eight hundred years, the Worshipful Company of Kindred had dominated Birmingham. A coterie of a dozen Invictus-aligned Kindred, they passed along the Princely throne among themselves as they cycled in and out of Torpor, controlling the city with a combination of force and largesse. Then the Birmingham radicals began moving in in the early 1880s, the Worshipful Company suddenly ran found itself desperately out of touch, and they were faced with a very large and very restive Kindred population. The Carthian Revolution of 1901 coincided with the Boer War Riots, and saw most of the Worshipful Company staked and thrown into a furnace. Then things got really messy.

In fairly short order, the Carthian factions splintered along political lines, and by the mid-1900s there was open violence on the streets. At one end, the Brotherhood of Enlightened Self-Interest combined the usual Kindred self-aggrandizement with René Descartes and Voltaire to come up with a brew of extreme individualism. At the other end, The Hive drew upon Marxist doctrines and decided to create the New Soviet Man with copious use of mental Disciplines to weed out all individuality. In the middle, the Bodhisatcracy believes in rule by enlightened, Zen-like beings, who just so happen to usually be the Bodhisatcrats themselves. Each side began to Embrace en masse, there were numerous street fights, Kindred were staked and buried, or else thrown into furnaces... the grand irony is that during the fighting, the loyalists and childer of the Worshipful Company of Kindred, now calling themselves the Birmingham Corporation moved back into their former positions of power. Their CEO, Ritchie Chalmers (he does not call himself Prince), is exquisitely aware that his position is secure only so long as the Carthians are more concerned with murdering each other, and he encourages it as best he can, while trying to shore up his own rickety position.

Despite these troubles, Birmingham is still home to an awful lot of Kindred, as all sides have been Embracing at high rates since the 1880s to make up for the constant attrition. While this has kept numbers up, the average Birmingham vampire is less than thirty years dead, and Ritchie Chalmers is a mere century and a half, while his predecessor was over six centuries old.

Selly Oak

In a grocer’s shop in Selly Oak, Birmingham, the old grocer sits, hunched at the window, his glasses reflecting the light, his white hair grubby, yellowing, his shop empty. His clientèle consists wholly of the ghosts of Birmingham. Inside the window of the shop is a sign, written in grocer’s marker pen, saying, “Smoking killed my wife.” He hopes that one day she’ll be one of his customers, but she never is. The spectral customers, who never buy anything, can be spoken to, when they’re in the shop. They know many things.

Pronounced 'Les-tah', Leicester is home to two universities and the largest collection of textile factories in England. Before the Industrial Revolution, it was a moderately prominent market town, becoming an industrial center afterwards. Its fortunes mirror those of its western rival Birmingham, with similar economic heights and plummets. The tenth largest city in the UK, Leicester is best known for its demography -- a full 30% of its population is South Asian, and it's been called the largest Indian settlement west of Mumbai.

Leicester is also notable as being one of the few success stories of the Ghost Wolves. As the local Forsaken and Pure were few and far between even before the vampires went into an orgy of destruction, in recent years First Change after First Change slipped through the cracks. The result is that in 1903, a group of Ghost Wolves formed a sizable pack of their own, battling and evicting the vampires from Leicester. These “Pariah Dogs” mostly come from the Indian and Pakistani communities, although at least a couple come from the Afro Caribbean community, too. Most of them are fairly liberal Muslims, who interpret a lot of what they experience in the light of the Muslim mythology of India. Their leader, Raish Khan, sees himself as a latter-day master of the djinns, a hero from a new Islamic mythology. More than anything, he’s a relentless self-publicist. The Forsaken see him as a damned nuisance who’s never met a Highborn or a Bale Hound, and is in store for some nasty surprises whenever the Kindred get their act together.