From SuspireWiki
The city was built on a swamp and it smells like it. Everything in D.C. oozes with putrid ichor. The stench of desperation and depravity hangs heavy in the air and clings to everyone who passes through. There are no good neighborhoods in Washington D.C., only the obtrusively gated off security cordons around monuments and government buildings. Everywhere is slum and slum is everywhere. There is no escaping it. The trains don’t run far enough to get away from it. The roads bring you back in. Everything in the city pushes travelers back in towards the center, towards the monuments and the startling poverty encroaching from all sides.
It’s been a very long time since the city’s government even made any pretense at dealing with the municipality’s myriad problems. The streets are too narrow and choked with traffic and frequent motorcades and VIP security zones. Government security and police have grown inadequate to insulate the wealthy and the bureaucrats from the city’s riff-raff, and private paramilitary forces provide additional protection, with little accountability and a reputation for aggressive behavior. The city’s budget is so choked from graft and corruption that there isn’t much money left for any meaningful projects. Healthcare is a joke. There aren’t enough hospitals, and the ones there are are so overcrowded they’ve taken to dumping the uninsured on the steps behind the still-under-construction Reagan memorial. Sanitation services are inadequate, giving the city its characteristic sludge and grime and stench.
Machine politics are too heavily entrenched in the city for anything to ever change. Every November the government springs into action. Busses that haven’t been seen since last election are deployed from unseen depots to ferry voters from polling place to polling place. Most of the city’s poorer residents are pressed into voting four or five times at least. It’s not unheard of for important elections to see a 105% voter turnout rate. Those who don’t vote, and can’t pay, have an unfortunate tendency to lose out on vital services. The police somehow respond even slower to homes that aren’t registered as having voted properly with their local ward captains and aldermen. If you’ve been in town for long, someone is in your business, and keeping track. You owe favors just by existing, and you’ll never get ahead. The District of Columbia ravenously craves the blood of its own.
Kindred Politics
Most kindred visitors to Washington D.C. are quick to peg it as a Nosferatu domain. It’s a reasonable assumption to make but it’s not correct. A Ventrue Prince has held the District’s Praxis for as long as anyone cares to remember. His name is Randall Brown, and he’s as mad as his blood is thick. Brown rules the city with an iron fist, and when he’s coherent enough to espouse a covenant he claims to be a libertarian Carthian. More often he’s stuck between bouts of paranoia and hysteria, and doesn’t seem to acknowledge any covenants at all. He rules for his own sake and no one else’s. Those brave enough to be his allies tread lightly, lest he fly unprovoked into a rage and purge them…again. The reward for those who manage is great. Brown has such a flimsy grasp of reality, his primogen and their cronies are allowed to rape it utterly.
Almost all feeding in D.C. is technically poaching. Almost every inch of the city that’s considered safe for kindred habitation has been sold off to some landlord or another, and hunting rights cost more than your average kindred can pay. The city’s poorer residents secretly whisper rumors to each other about which of the domain holders are entirely fictitious, aliases under which this lord or that holds additional territories. It doesn’t much matter though. Even if some of the down and out of D.C. had concrete proof that the prince was being lied to, and were willing to risk telling him, they’re all in far too much boon-debt to ever be able to do anything. If one doesn’t sign off a slew of large boons to get feeding rights legally he soon ends up caught poaching, and indebted all the same. The city’s harpies keep meticulous track of boons. More martially inclined kindred find work as mercenaries, enforcing them. There’s remarkably little government interference—Brown retains neither a full time Hound nor Sheriff.
The established Carthians are fat and happy. They hold the lion’s share of the domains and boons, and a near monopoly on the primogen council. Carthians and Carthians alone are allowed to manipulate local politics—the Federal Government is strictly off limits to all kindred—and they take full advantage. It’s not uncommon to find an addition to a Carthian’s haven paid for by city contract. Contrarily, Invictus kindred have a difficult time in Washington. The city was planned and built while the Invictus was busying itself in more established cities, and they’ve never caught up. It’s been a vile slum so long that most of the covenant finds it a distasteful place to live anyway. A single House consisting of three kindred, House Tacita, is the center of the small Invictus power structure, and the covenant’s only bulwark against ever encroaching Carthians.
The heavily Monachal Lancea Sanctum thrive in the desperation and fear that permeate D.C. They walk a fine line of neutrality between the Carthians and Invictus, trying to be indifferent when they can. The Bishop, Ian Kelley, is relatively young, not more than an ancillae by any means, but has proven adept at guiding his covenant through the hazardous city. The Ordo Dracul, which, like the Lancea Sanctum has had much of its leadership purged by the paranoid prince in recent decades, has fared far poorer. The Academy is tiny and led by a young Scribe who can scarcely afford to feed and protect himself. A dragon’s life in D.C. is fraught with fear, as they’re the Prince’s favorite whipping boys when it comes time to show that he is still powerful. The Circle of the Crone, for its part, stays out of the fray. The covenant is predominately Nosferatu, rarely seen above ground, and almost permanently absent from Court. Whenever the Hierophant Naomi Welsch appears at court, rumors fly, more often than not about her holding some mystic bond over the Prince. One would be unwise to be caught with such gossip though. A lot of kindred disappear in Washington.
Hierarchy of the Damned
- Prince Randall Brown, Ventrue, Carthian
- Primogen Carla Crawford, Daeva, Carthian
- Primogen Gerald Osgood, Daeva, Carthian (Prefect)
- Primogen Whilemina Tyche, Mekhet, Carthian (Myrmidon)
- Primogen Arthur Ternblatt, Ventrue, Carthian
- Regent of the Underworld, Naomi Welsch, Nosferatu, Circle of the Crone (Hierophant)
- Harpy Edward Seville, Daeva, Carthian
- Harpy Gwendolyn Tacita, Ventrue, Invictus (Councilor)