Neo's Chicago by Night - A V5 Setting Book

1. #1Chicago

   Keys: chicago, second city, windy city

   Enabled · After character · Order 5 · 100%

   Entry settings

   Chicago is the self-proclaimed unassailable throne of the American Camarilla, a Ventrue and Toreador stronghold ruled by Prince Kevin Jackson. It is stable in the way a clenched fist is stable. Jackson's regime presents itself as progressive, orderly, and modern - a domain that survived the Second Inquisition intact and made peace with the Lupines - and it maintains that presentation through the systematic persecution of Anarchs, Caitiff, and Duskborn, with re-education that runs from threats to Blood Bonds.

   Timeline: 1871 - The Great Chicago Fire reshapes the city and the Kindred holdings within it. 1993 - The War of Chicago. Lupines attack the Succubus Club, Lodin calls a Blood Hunt, and roughly a third of the city's Kindred die amid overlapping Sabbat and Lupine assaults. Lodin is among the dead. Post-1993 - The Primogen Council rules by committee, brokering the treaty with the Garou and dividing territory. Late 2010 - Kevin Jackson takes praxis, toppling Joseph Peterson. Modern nights - Jackson consolidates. Anarchs are purged, the Clanless and Duskborn are hunted, dissent is answered by Hounds with accelerant, and Clan Lasombra petitions for entry.

2. #2The Court of Chicago

   Keys: the court, jackson regime, the regime, court of chicago, friends of the court

   Enabled · After character · Order 5 · 100%

   Entry settings

   Prince Jackson's court is deliberately unceremonious. Old World protocol is trotted out only when traditionalists visit, so that they understand they are dealing with an organized regime rather than a frontier. The rest of the time the court runs like an executive office: collaborative in tone, decisive to the point of brutality in practice.

   Kindred without formal title who nonetheless matter are styled Friends of the Court. The designation is a leash as much as an honor - it marks a vampire as useful and therefore watched. Alan Sovereign serves as Seneschal, Damien as Sheriff, and the Hounds handle what neither of them will put in writing.

3. #3Primogen Council

   Keys: council of primogen, primogen council, the primogen

   Enabled · After character · Order 5 · 100%

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   Chicago's Primogen Council advises the Prince and, in the years between Lodin's death and Jackson's ascension, effectively ruled the city. Eight seats are currently filled:

   Annabelle Triabell - Toreador Cedrick Calhoun - Nosferatu Critias - Brujah Horatio Ballard - Ventrue Jason Newberry - Malkavian Khadija Al-Kindi - Banu Haqim Marcel - Ministry Rosa Hernandez - Gangrel

   There is no Lasombra seat, pending the outcome of the defection negotiations. There is no Tremere seat at all. The fall of the Vienna Chantry and the shattering of the Pyramid left the Warlocks reeling worldwide, and when Chicago's own Primogen Nicolai Antonescu vanished, Jackson used the vacancy to strip the clan of representation entirely rather than allow a successor.

4. #4The Hounds

   Keys: hounds, prince's hounds, the hounds

   Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

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   The Hounds are Prince Jackson's enforcers, and the instrument by which his orderly domain stays orderly. They deliver warnings, burn havens, and remove Kindred whose removal the court would rather not discuss. Sheriff Damien has reshaped their recruitment since taking office, favoring fighters over diplomats and steadily increasing their number.

   Officially they answer to the Sheriff. In practice a Hound acting on the Prince's word does not need to explain itself to anyone, and their arrival at a haven is generally the last conversation its occupant has.

5. #5The Loop

   Keys: loop district, the loop, downtown chicago

   Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

   Entry settings

   The Loop is downtown Chicago and the seat of Kindred power in the domain. Corporate towers, financial institutions, and the machinery of legitimate influence are concentrated here, which makes it Ventrue country by default and Prince Jackson's ground in particular. Ballard Industries, the banks Alan Sovereign controls, and the Sherry Hotel all sit within or against it.

   Feeding in the Loop is a matter of etiquette rather than opportunity. The herd is transient and well-documented, cameras are everywhere, and a Masquerade breach downtown reaches the Second Inquisition faster than anywhere else in the city. Beneath it runs the Labyrinth.

6. #6North Side

   Keys: north chicago, lincoln park, north side

   Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

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   The North Side is affluent, cultured, and comparatively safe, which makes it Toreador ground. Galleries, theaters, restaurants, and the nightlife economy run through it, and the clan's grip on Chicago's cultural institutions is administered from here. Annabelle Triabell holds substantial influence over the district's social calendar.

   It is also the most heavily Elysium-adjacent part of the city. Neutral ground clusters here because this is where Kindred with reputations to protect prefer to be seen.

7. #7South Side

   Keys: south chicago, hyde park, south side, bronzeville

   Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

   Entry settings

   The South Side is the most contested territory in the domain. Bronzeville and Hyde Park in particular are patchworks of Anarch strongholds, independent fiefdoms, and mortal gang territory that no Camarilla authority has fully digested. Jackson's purge has driven Anarchs here in numbers, which has made the district both their refuge and the place the Hounds visit most often.

   The South Chicago Pack ranges along its outer edges. Kindred who hunt carelessly this far south sometimes discover the treaty's boundaries the hard way.

8. #8West Side

   Keys: west side, west chicago

   Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

   Entry settings

   The West Side is industrial, working-class, and largely beneath the court's attention, which is precisely what makes it useful. Warehouses, rail infrastructure, and stretches of genuine abandonment provide havens for Kindred who would rather not be inventoried, and the Anarchs have used it for staging and meeting since long before Jackson.

   It is also where a body can be moved without anyone official noticing, a fact several parties rely on and none discuss.

9. #9The East Side

   Keys: lakefront, east side, the east side, lake michigan

   Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

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   Chicago's east is Lake Michigan, so the East Side is really the lakefront and the strip of neighborhoods pressed against it. The waterfront, the harbors, the museum campus, and the shipping infrastructure all sit here.

   Kindred value it for two reasons. Water complicates pursuit, and the harbors have moved cargo that no manifest records since Prohibition. Capone's operation still touches the docks.

10. #10The Collar

    Keys: suburban chicago, suburbs, the collar, collar counties

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    The Collar is the ring of suburbs and satellite communities surrounding the city proper. It is nominally Camarilla territory and practically a frontier - too diffuse to police, too quiet to hide in, and too close to the Garou territories established by the treaty to be comfortable.

    Kindred who end up in the Collar are usually there because the city expelled them or because they want distance from the court. Both conditions attract the Sheriff's interest.

11. #11Gary

    Keys: gary indiana, gary, northwest indiana

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Gary, Indiana sits at Chicago's southeastern shoulder, and its relationship to the domain is that of a supporting character to a lead. Post-industrial, hollowed out, and never fully claimed, it has served for decades as the place Chicago's problems go: exiles, Sabbat remnants, Kindred with no standing, and the occasional elder who wants to be adjacent to power without being subject to it.

    Modius held court here for years as a rival Prince in all but recognition, and the memory of that arrangement still shapes how Chicago's Kindred regard the place. Jackson considers Gary a containment zone rather than a territory, which suits several of its residents.

12. #12Succubus Club

    Keys: the succubus, succubus club

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    The Succubus Club is Chicago's iconic Kindred nightclub and a standing Elysium, opened in 1982 under mortal frontman Brennon Thornhill. It was built directly over the torpid resting place of its true owner, a fact known to almost no one for most of its existence.

    Lupines attacked it during the War of Chicago in 1993, and both Thornhill and Prince Lodin died in the aftermath. It reopened afterward under the ownership of Portia, expanded briefly into a mobile franchise across several American cities in the late 1990s, and remains the central social hub of Kindred Chicago - which means it is the single best place in the domain to be seen, overheard, and catalogued.

    Its ownership is currently the object of quiet legal maneuvering. Brennon Thornhill's surviving family and Edward Neally both have designs on the paperwork.

13. #13Blue Velvet

    Keys: blue velvet, the blue velvet

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    The Blue Velvet began as a jazz lounge and has since relocated a few blocks and moved underground, both literally and in reputation. It is owned by the Malkavian elder Bronwyn, and it is the visible face of the Circulatory System - the blood trade she operates across the domain.

    Kindred come to the Blue Velvet when they need to feed without hunting: emergency supply, catering for gatherings, discreet arrangements at short notice. The prices are steep and the terms are exact. What most patrons fail to consider is that every transaction tells the proprietor something about them.

14. #14Red No. 5

    Keys: red no 5, red no. 5, red five, red number five

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Red No. 5 is the newest fashionable nightspot in Kindred Chicago and the Succubus Club's chief rival for the domain's social center of gravity. It draws a younger crowd, a less formal one, and a notably higher proportion of Kindred who have reason to avoid the older venue's ownership.

    Its rise has been fast enough that several parties assume someone is subsidizing it. No one has proven who.

15. #15The Labyrinth

    Keys: the labyrinth, labyrinth, undercity, the warrens, nosferatu tunnels

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    The Labyrinth is the Nosferatu domain beneath Chicago - a sprawl of freight tunnels, sewers, abandoned subway works, utility runs, and excavations that predate anyone's memory of who dug them. It is the clan's territory by unchallenged right, and it is the reason no Prince of Chicago has ever ruled without accommodating the Nosferatu.

    Movement through the Labyrinth is faster and safer than movement above it, and information travels faster still. Kindred who wish to cross the city unobserved negotiate for passage. Kindred who try it without permission are not always found.

    Somewhere in the tunnels, painted on a wall, are the words CAPONE LIVES. Most who see it assume it is old graffiti.

16. #16Belmont Avenue Chantry

    Keys: the chantry, chicago chantry, belmont avenue chantry, belmont chantry

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

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    The Belmont Avenue Chantry is the Tremere seat in Chicago, and it is a fortress holding a clan that no longer has anything to fortify. Since Vienna fell and the Pyramid shattered, the chantry has functioned as an independent house answering to no external hierarchy - which its Regent, Abraham DuSable, has treated as an opportunity more than a catastrophe.

    It remains warded, staffed, and productive. What it does not have is a seat on the Primogen Council, and everyone inside the building is aware of what that absence means.

17. #17The Sovereign

    Keys: sherry hotel, the sovereign, the sherry

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    The Sovereign, housed in the old Sherry Hotel, is the Ventrue power center of Chicago - a residence, a meeting house, and a demonstration of what the clan considers appropriate. Business is conducted here that the court proper never hears about, and invitations are extended along lines of blood and utility rather than title.

    Alan Sovereign's name and the building's are a coincidence he has never bothered to correct, and which he has quietly allowed to work in his favor.

18. #18The El

    Keys: chicago transit, the el, the l, cta, elevated train

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Chicago's elevated rail network is the city's circulatory system and, for certain Kindred, its safest road. Malkavians favor it - the Cobweb has been passed along its platforms for longer than the current court has existed - and Anarchs use it for mobility that leaves no vehicle registration and no toll record.

    The stations and the disused stretches beside them host havens for Kindred with nothing: alcoves, service rooms, closed platforms, maintenance passages that connect in ways the transit authority's own maps no longer reflect. It is not comfortable. It is very hard to search.

19. #19Art Institute of Chicago

    Keys: the art institute, chicago art institute, art institute

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    The Art Institute is a standing Elysium and the most prestigious neutral ground in the domain after the Succubus Club. Toreador influence over the institution is total and has been for generations, which means Elysium here is held on Annabelle Triabell's terms even when she is not present.

    The Traditions are enforced strictly within its walls. Violence at the Art Institute is not merely a breach of Elysium but an insult to the clan that maintains it, and Chicago's Toreador have long memories and excellent lawyers.

20. #20O'Hare International Airport

    Keys: chicago airport, ohare, midway airport, o hare, o'hare

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    O'Hare is one of the busiest airports in the world, and the Camarilla monitors it accordingly. Every Kindred arrival and departure that goes through official channels is logged by the court, which is how Chicago knows who is visiting before the visitor announces themselves.

    The volume that makes this surveillance valuable is also what defeats it. Cargo moves through O'Hare at a scale no one can meaningfully inspect, private aviation operates on the margins of the system, and a Kindred with the right ghouls and the right documentation can enter or leave the domain entirely unremarked. The court is aware of this. It has not solved it.

21. #21The American Indigenous Center

    Keys: the center, sealed building, american indigenous center, boarded building, indigenous center

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    A shuttered community building on the city's near west side, boarded, condemned, and watched more carefully than any derelict property warrants. For years it housed a cultural and social organization; for years, something else lived in it alongside them.

    The presences in the building are not documented by any Kindred authority and answer to no known taxonomy - not Garou, not wraith, not anything the Tremere have a name for. What is known, by exactly one vampire, is that they are quiet when they are fed and that they are not quiet otherwise. Accidents, dread, and dark compulsions bled through the building's occupants during the years it was in use, worsening whenever the feeding lapsed.

    The organization has since relocated. The building is sealed. Something inside it is still hungry, and the Gangrel who has been managing it for decades is now reduced to smuggling victims past a barricade into a condemned structure he has no legal or supernatural claim to.

22. #22Goblin Roads

    Keys: shadow roads, goblin road, the roads, goblin roads

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    The Goblin Roads are passages that are not quite in the world - shortcuts through spaces that connect where they should not, walked by things that were not invited and occasionally by Kindred desperate or foolish enough to try them. A journey that should take hours takes minutes. Sometimes it takes considerably longer than it should, and the traveler cannot account for the difference.

    Few Kindred in Chicago know the Roads exist. Fewer have used one deliberately. Those who study them tend to acquire habits and vocabularies that make other vampires uncomfortable, and the scholarship attracts the kind of attention that scholarship of this sort attracts.

23. #23Kevin Jackson

    Keys: jackson, prince of chicago, prince jackson, kevin jackson

    Enabled · After character · Order 5 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Kevin Jackson is the Ventrue Prince of Chicago, and the most successful American Prince of the modern nights by the Camarilla's own measures. He took praxis in late 2010 by toppling Joseph Peterson, enforced a Masquerade tight enough to survive the Second Inquisition, held the treaty with the Lupines, and rebuilt Chicago into what the Ivory Tower points at when it wants to claim the sect still works.

    His public posture is progressive modernity: collaboration, professionalism, results. His actual method is collaboration until collaboration stops working, then decisive violence delivered by people whose names never appear in court records. Anarchs are purged, Caitiff and Duskborn are hunted, and dissenters find their havens burning.

    The part few Kindred understand is that Jackson does not want the Anarchs eradicated. He came up from the streets, he has ties there he has never fully severed, and he understands better than any elder in the domain that a manageable Anarch threat is the only thing keeping Chicago's ancients docile and dependent on him. He persecutes them in public and preserves them in private, and the arrangement has made him indispensable to both.

24. #24Damien

    Keys: sheriff of chicago, damien, sheriff damien

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Damien is the Sheriff of Chicago, a Brujah, and the illegitimate childe of Critias - a lineage that puts his own sire on the Primogen Council he answers past. He is also, by chronology, barely a century dead, and by blood a sixth-generation descendant standing two removes from Menele. He has begun to hear the Beckoning, gently, which by any conventional reading of his age he should not.

    Before the badge he was a singer for the Baby Chorus and an Anarch in good standing. The Lupine raids during the War of Chicago ended that: the band was ambushed, his audience was slaughtered, his mentor died, and so did his Caitiff lover. Everything he has done since proceeds from that night.

    He took Jackson's commission because Jackson wanted a Sheriff with no debt to Lodin's old guard, and because the office let him expand the Hounds, recruit fighters instead of diplomats, and gain access to occult research he could not reach as an Anarch. He is not a loyalist. He believes in the Camarilla as a weapon and swore his oath meaning it, and he pursues errant Anarchs with the specific thoroughness of a man policing the people he used to be. He keeps equally hard tabs on the incoming Lasombra.

    The Baby Chorus has reformed without him. He runs their merchandise operation and puts out the occasional single to keep the name alive.

25. #25Critias

    Keys: critias

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Critias is the Brujah Primogen of Chicago and one of the few figures in the domain trusted, however grudgingly, by both the court and the Anarchs. He is old, he is genuinely principled, and he has spent the modern nights trying to hold a position that offers no good options: representing a clan half of which has left the sect, on a council serving a Prince whose policy is to hunt them.

    He is Menele's descendant and Damien's sire, though the latter relationship is not one either of them advertises. Watching his own childe take the Sheriff's badge and turn it on their shared former allies has cost him something he does not discuss in session.

26. #26Al Capone

    Keys: alphonse capone, al capone, capone

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Alphonse Capone was Embraced after his arrest and retirement, which the Kindred who repeat the story tend to get wrong. He has run Chicago's organized crime from underneath ever since - never quite reaching the top of Kindred society, permanently second to Ballard under Lodin and now third behind Jackson as well.

    Jackson tried to have him killed and claims in court to have succeeded. Capone faked the death, and continues to operate. He has lost most of his formal power and retains the parts that matter: the docks, the unions, the money that does not go through banks, and a network of mortals who have never heard of the Camarilla.

    He is, by the standards of his peers, unexpectedly generous to Kindred who treat him decently. His Touchstone reminds him of his mother.

27. #27Marcel

    Keys: marcel

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Marcel is a Follower of Set holding the Ministry's seat on the Primogen Council, and a self-styled Friend of the Court who has made a career of being useful to everyone and beholden to no one. He plays the Camarilla's game convincingly enough to sit at its table and maintains channels to the Anarchs, the Lasombra, and interests outside the domain entirely.

    His clan's doctrine is liberation through transgression, and Marcel practices it as patient statecraft rather than street-level corruption. He does not push people toward their vices. He waits, and makes sure the door is unlocked when they arrive at it themselves.

28. #28Horatio Ballard

    Keys: ballard industries, horatio ballard, horatio, ballard

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Horatio Ballard is a Ventrue elder, childe of Lodin, and the head of Ballard Industries - one of the largest financial empires in the domain. He was his sire's designated heir and has never quite recovered from the fact that the succession went elsewhere twice: first to the Primogen Council's interregnum, then to Kevin Jackson.

    He supports the current regime and does so competently. He also outlived his own claim, and both he and the Prince know it. Ballard Industries remains the economic backbone of Camarilla Chicago, which makes him permanently necessary and permanently watched.

29. #29Alan Sovereign

    Keys: alan sovereign, alan, seneschal, sovereign

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Alan Sovereign is the Ventrue Seneschal of Chicago, childe of Horatio Ballard, and the administrator of the Prince's regime in all the ways the Prince prefers not to be seen administering. He controls a substantial share of the city's banking and is very good at the work.

    He is also badly frightened of the Second Inquisition, to a degree his peers consider excessive and his subordinates consider contagious. That fear has produced a persistent rumor: that Sovereign has already been approached, already cooperated, and is feeding FIRSTLIGHT information in exchange for his own survival. Nothing has been proven. The rumor will not die, and Sovereign's response to it - meticulous, defensive, procedurally immaculate - has convinced no one either way.

30. #30Edward Neally

    Keys: edward neally, theodore logan, neally

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Edward Neally is a Ventrue operating under the mortal identity Theodore Logan, and his current project is the Succubus Club. Not the influence within it - the deed to it.

    His instrument is Oscar Thornhill, nephew of the club's original mortal frontman, whom Neally has been feeding vitae and steering with Dominate for some time. Neally is confident he can move the entirety of the club's ownership into Thornhill's name through entirely legitimate legal channels, at which point the property belongs to a man who belongs to him.

    Whether the club's current proprietor is aware of this is an open question that Neally has not risked asking.

31. #31Oscar Thornhill

    Keys: oscar, oscar thornhill

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Oscar Thornhill is twenty-six years old, mortal, and does not understand why his uncle's old friend Edward has taken such an interest in him. He has been fed vitae several times and has had his thoughts arranged for him more often than that.

    He is the intended legal vessel for the Succubus Club's ownership. He has no idea, and if the plan proceeds correctly he never will.

32. #32Brennon Thornhill

    Keys: brennon thornhill, brennon

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Brennon Thornhill was the mortal face of the Succubus Club's ownership from its 1982 opening, installed as the respectable name on the paperwork by his sire, Prince Lodin. He died during the War of Chicago when the Lupines came through the club.

    His interest in the property did not end there. The Thornhill claim persists through family, through documentation, and through the ambitions of those who understand that the club's ownership has never been as settled as its current proprietor allows people to believe.

33. #33Lorraine Matthew

    Keys: lorraine, lorraine matthew

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Lorraine Matthew is a Ventrue of Lodin's own line and one of the former Prince's genuine favorites, which in the current regime is a liability she manages by being useful elsewhere. She is allied with Capone and moves comfortably in the parts of Chicago's economy that do not file quarterly reports.

    She remembers the old court, she has never pretended otherwise, and Jackson tolerates her because a visible remnant of the previous regime that behaves is more useful than a martyred one.

34. #34Joseph Peterson

    Keys: joseph peterson, peterson

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Joseph Peterson was Prince of Chicago before Kevin Jackson took praxis from him in late 2010. His tenure is chiefly remembered for the failed Olympics bid - an enormous, expensive, publicly humiliating venture that consumed the court's attention and political capital and delivered nothing.

    He is a cautionary tale in Chicago's Elysia: the Prince who mistook a prestige project for governance and lost a domain over it.

35. #35Bobby Weatherbottom

    Keys: weatherbottom, the hurricane, bobby weatherbottom

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Bobby "The Hurricane" Weatherbottom is a Ventrue who does not fit his clan, and has stopped trying to. Loud, physical, and allergic to the patient institutional maneuvering that defines Chicago's Blue Bloods, he is treated by his peers as an embarrassment who happens to be extremely effective at the specific things they need done loudly.

    He is not stupid. He has simply concluded that the Ventrue game in this domain is played by elders who will never let him win it, and has opted for a different one.

36. #36Jacob Schumpeter

    Keys: schumpeter, jacob schumpeter

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Jacob Schumpeter was a Ventrue of the Chicago court. SWAT took him, and no Kindred has seen him since.

    Whether he met Final Death in a FIRSTLIGHT facility, whether he is still being held at Blacksite 24, and whether anything of him has been recovered are all unknown. The court does not discuss it, which several Kindred read as an answer in itself.

    Shortly before the raid, Schumpeter had berated both the Prince and a certain thin-blood in open company, calling the latter a walking Masquerade breach. The timing has not gone unnoticed. Nothing has been proven, and the suspicion has settled into the sort of uneasy consensus that never quite becomes an accusation.

37. #37Portia

    Keys: portia

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Portia is a Toreador ancilla and the proprietor of the Succubus Club, which she reopened in the years after the War of Chicago and has run as Chicago's premier Elysium ever since. She is elegant, socially formidable, and very well connected - the sort of Kindred whose good opinion is worth cultivating and whose club is where the domain's business actually happens.

    She presents as considerably younger than her competence suggests, which most attribute to a good sire and unusual talent. She sponsors promising newcomers, mentors selectively, and has taken a particular interest in at least one Duskborn, which she frames as charity and the court finds mildly eccentric.

38. #38Helena

    Keys: minos, toreador methuselah, helene, helena

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Helena is a Toreador methuselah, among the oldest and most dangerous vampires on the continent, and she has spent the modern nights walking Chicago's Elysia under the alias Portia - passing as an ancilla, running the Succubus Club she built over her own resting place, and letting a domain full of elders assume she is a talented young socialite.

    She diablerized her sire Minos in antiquity. Her feud with the Brujah methuselah Menele dates to the Punic Wars and structured the undercity of Chicago for most of a century, until the Beckoning took him and left her without her opposite number.

    She went into torpor after the War of Chicago, in which she lost Prias - her mortal lover, later her ghoul, the architect of her haven and the only thing she had left that resembled an anchor. She rose in the years that followed, destroyed her own childe Maria, reopened the club, and set about reclaiming the influence her absence had cost her.

    She is also starving in a way mortal blood cannot address. To hold off the Beckoning she has her servants Embrace mortals so that she can feed on the results, consuming her own extended progeny on a schedule. Bret Stryker serves as a honeypot for the arrangement. Annabelle Triabell, her descendant, is Blood Bound to her and does not know it - which is why Annabelle can resist a call that should have taken her years ago.

39. #39Annabelle Triabell

    Keys: triabell, annabelle triabell, annabelle

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Annabelle Triabell is the Toreador Primogen of Chicago, childe of Maria, and thereby Helena's descendant. She holds the clan's seat, controls the domain's cultural institutions through the Art Institute and the North Side's social machinery, and is one of the most effective political operators in the city. She is also the Kindred most often asked to explain the Helena and Menele feud, which she does well and incompletely.

    She sired Bret Stryker, among others.

    She hears the Beckoning, faintly, and can set it aside - a resilience her peers attribute to strength of will and which she has no reason to question. The actual cause is that she is Blood Bound to Helena and has been receiving regular reinforcement she has never consciously registered. She does not know. The bond holds her steady and holds her in place, and the elder maintaining it has no intention of explaining the mechanism.

40. #40Bret Stryker

    Keys: stryker, bret stryker

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Bret Stryker is a Toreador of the Chicago domain, Annabelle's childe, and exactly as unpleasant as his reputation suggests - vain, grasping, casually cruel, and convinced that proximity to power constitutes possession of it. He is a fixture at the Succubus Club and cultivates newcomers with an enthusiasm that flatters them until they understand what he is for.

    He works for Portia. What he actually does is identify and deliver: Kindred with no standing, Duskborn, newly Embraced strays, anyone whose disappearance will not generate questions. He believes he is running a talent pipeline for a well-connected patron. He is provisioning a methuselah, and the day he becomes more useful as a meal than a procurer is a day he has never allowed himself to consider.

41. #41Bronwyn

    Keys: bronwyn, elinor hewitt, circulatory system

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Bronwyn is an eighth-generation Malkavian elder, born Elinor Hewitt in the fifteenth century, and the owner of the Blue Velvet. She is old enough to claim a council seat and has never wanted one - influence exercised from behind a bar has always suited her better than influence exercised in session.

    She runs the Circulatory System: Chicago's blood trade, covering emergency supply, catered feeding for gatherings, and discreet arrangements at short notice. Other Kindred find the business distasteful and use it anyway. Bronwyn regards it as commerce and leaves sentiment at the door.

    The trade's real yield is not money. Every transaction tells her who fed badly, who fed desperately, whose preferences would ruin them if disclosed, and who cannot hunt for themselves anymore. She has accumulated decades of this - from petty scandal to the kind of buried thing that would break a clan - and releases it sparingly, only when an agenda requires it.

    Her mask is Elinor Hewitt, manager of several well-reviewed bed-and-breakfast properties. Her derangement is not theatrical: she has severe difficulty with new people, and the standoffishness her acquaintances read as arrogance is closer to a wall she cannot lower. She was sired by Bryan and destroyed her own childe Corbin when Corbin became a threat to the operation.

42. #42Jason Newberry

    Keys: jason newberry, newberry, son

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Jason Newberry, called Son, is the Malkavian Primogen of Chicago - Embraced in 1893, sired by Maureen O'Leary, and the clan's voice on a council that has never entirely known what to do with him. He is more coherent in session than his peers expect and less coherent afterward than he lets them see.

    He is plugged into the Cobweb, which means the Malkavian seat is the only one on the council with access to information the Prince cannot intercept.

43. #43Alexa Santos

    Keys: alexa, alexa santos

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Alexa Santos is a young Malkavian of the Chicago domain, nonbinary, and troubled by visions of Lilith - the first woman, Caine's consort in Noddist doctrine, and a figure whose worship the Camarilla considers a Bahari problem rather than a theological one.

    They did not seek the visions and do not want them. The Bahari want them very much, and have made their interest known. Alexa's ongoing refusal to be recruited into a cult that considers their affliction a calling is one of the more sympathetic ongoing struggles in the domain, and one of the least noticed.

44. #44Patricia Montgomery

    Keys: porcelain, patricia montgomery

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Patricia Montgomery, called Porcelain, is a Malkavian of Chicago whose derangement expresses as a fixation on surfaces, composure, and the maintenance of an unbroken exterior. She is immaculate at all times, in all circumstances, and the effort this requires is not visible until it fails.

    She is useful to the court as a social barometer. Porcelain notices cracks in other people because she spends every waking hour managing her own.

45. #45Talley

    Keys: the hound, talley

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Talley, called the Hound, is a Lasombra assassin and troubleshooter whose reputation rests on centuries of quiet, exact work on behalf of his clan. In the modern nights he has been repurposed as a diplomat and intermediary in the Lasombra's approach to the Camarilla, a role he performs with the same precision he brought to the previous one.

    He is courteous, patient, and genuinely pleasant company. He is also a predator whose civility is a working method rather than a temperament, and his loyalty runs to the clan rather than to any sect, court, or individual within it. He sired Sierra Van Burrace.

46. #46Sierra Van Burrace

    Keys: sierra van burrace, sierra, van burrace

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Sierra Van Burrace is a Lasombra ancilla, Talley's childe, and the principal architect of her clan's integration into Camarilla Chicago. Where her sire is the instrument, she is the argument - elegant, politically fluent, and impeccably poised, moving through the domain's Elysia as both diplomat and mentor to younger Magisters.

    Her project is perception. She needs the court to see the Lasombra as indispensable assets rather than Sabbat refugees seeking asylum, and she has been remarkably successful at it. Beneath the presentation she remains a master of shadow and manipulation, and the refinement that rivals any Ventrue is a tool she selected deliberately.

47. #47Eustace Lancaster

    Keys: lancaster, eustace lancaster, eustace

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Eustace Lancaster is a Lasombra elder who relocated to Chicago as his clan's negotiations with the Camarilla began, and who is less interested in politics than in surviving whatever the politics produce. Cold, exacting, and disinclined to spectacle, he has spent the transition securing his own relevance rather than advocating for any particular outcome.

    He Embraced a carefully chosen childe in 2018, selected as an asset and a potential legacy inside the Ivory Tower. His ambitions are real and almost never spoken aloud.

48. #48Araceli Rivera

    Keys: araceli rivera, araceli, celia

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Araceli Rivera, who goes by Celia, is a Lasombra of the Chicago contingent and one of the more visible faces of the clan's younger generation in the domain. She has adapted to Camarilla social conventions faster than most of her elders and is frequently deployed where a Magister needs to be present without the room tensing.

    She is aware she is being used as reassurance, and has decided that being the reassuring one is a position with a future.

49. #49Michalis Basaras

    Keys: michalis, michalis basaras, basaras

    Enabled · After character · Order 20 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Michalis Basaras is a Lasombra of Chicago whose commitment to the Camarilla arrangement is considerably more conditional than his clan's negotiators would prefer the court to know. He came for sanctuary, not for conversion, and he regards the Ivory Tower's traditions as a costume the clan is wearing until circumstances change.

    He is careful. He is not disloyal to the Lasombra. He simply has not agreed to anything he intends to keep.

50. #50Les Amis Noirs

    Keys: les amis noirs, amis noirs, friends of the night

    Enabled · After character · Order 10 · 100%

    Entry settings

    Les Amis Noirs, the Friends of the Night, are the shadow power behind Clan Lasombra - an inner circle that predates the Sabbat, survived the sect's collapse in the West, and is currently steering the clan's migration into the Camarilla.

    Very few Lasombra know the group by name. Fewer know who sits in it. The Chicago negotiations are proceeding along terms Les Amis Noirs set, and the Kindred conducting them are not always aware they are executing someone else's plan.

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