The Roaring Age
"Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour."
War ends, but the scars remain on the world. In a world of darkness, old wounds linger and are joined by new ones, but in the United States, glamour and glitz hide growing corruption and increasing problems. As farmers starve and lose more and more, as the conditions were set in poverty and problems for the Dust Bowls of the 1930s, the country marched onward towards an uncertain future.
Women have gained the right to vote, but where to go from there? And what of the vast inequalities that exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between the flappers and the poor scullery maids, between the 'New Women' the rising middle class that consumed and worked and attempted to live a life at once decadent and free.
Activists struggled and the world shifted beneath everyone's feet. Prohibition and gangsters, travelling circuses and freak shows, it is a world that is at once like our own, less than a century old, and yet so unlike that of our own.
It is, in other words, the perfect time period to set a period version of the World of Darkness in, with enough that is strange and bizarre and horrible and even sublime to fill anyone's quota.
So, the idea behind this (besides that I'm not starting it quite yet) is that rather than have a long and involved character creation, I'll give archetypes and then there will be a little bit of definition gained via the Prologue.
Also, I'm still not decided what sort of Quest it will be. Thus, after each option I'll state which of the three (Mage, Vampire, Hunter) seem to fit with the general story being told. I might also have sections where I tell two different hooks for how the Prologue begins. Notably, whatever this is, it isn't a world where all three exist.
A world of vampires is not a world of Mages, and if Hunters go after dangerous Witches, they don't need to worry about the Obrimos.
So, since this is just for fun and I'm not going to actually start a Quest, at least not for a long while...here we go!
[] The Flapper: She is a new woman, a liberated young girl who doesn't want to live the sort of life her mother did. She's independent in the city, or at least as independent as she can get, and has her own job and her own ambitions. She's more political than some flappers, even if she wasn't around and important in gaining Women's Suffrage, and her keen intelligence and social grace has gotten her through life so far unscathed, but in the dark alleys and speakeasies, there are secrets and there are lies, and there are the men who tell them. It's the big city, honey. Settings: Vampire, Mage.
[] The Farmhand: He's the young man constantly on the edge of one doom or another. He helps out where he can at one farm and another, but all of them are doing poorly, and more than that, there have been a pattern of deaths, lifestock torn to pieces or disappeared, crops trampled down, that some have spoken of as being part of some large prank. Others, though, have told darker stories, but surely that is all those are: stories. He is a bull of a man, strong and quick of wits, even if he is hardly well educated, and he is a man who knows how to work with his hands and stick to his virtues. Setting: Hunter.
[] The Slave: They lied, they tricked, they stole her away from the village she had been born and raised in. Though of course, her parents and their poverty, and the war and chaos of the Warlord period certainly didn't help. Either way, she has been brought to America as a slave, with nothing more than a bunglingly signed 'contract' to 'legitimize' it. America is a strange land, and one she never wished to see, and as she arrives to be auctioned off, she knows that she must do something...but what? She is, or was, a dutiful daughter, reasonably hard-working and yet she is also out of place, with no English and in a land where her very existence as an 'immigrant' from China is illegal. Settings: Vampire, Mage.
[] The Preacher's Daughter: Her father is an important man, a preacher with ties to the NAACP, and a leading figure in a community that needs all of the help and encouragement it can get to deal with its poverty and problems. And she has been raised as well as can be, a little bit of a tomboy, a little bit of a lady intellectual, pious and curious, with loving parents. But recently, something has changed. Her father is having meetings with strange people at midnight, and is sneaking out of the house. What is he doing? That curiosity digs and digs at her, until one evening she wants to find out. Settings: Hunter, Mage.
[] The Jazz Player: He's a hard drinking, hard playing trumpeter, a man of fashion, taste, and verve. A man with no roots, who lives a life without connection and contact, in a country that is hostile to his very skin. But recently strange things have happened. He has seen things that cannot be explained except perhaps by alcohol. But even without the alcohol, something is going wrong, something dangerous and unexpected. Settings: Mage, Hunter.
[] The Veteran: They say that by 1945, he'll actually get some money for what he did for the fucking country. Where does that leave him in the meantime? With a useless 'bonus check' and a game leg and far too much alcohol and far too many bitter regrets. He wasn't in the war as long as some of the British bastards he'd seen, torn to bits, tattered little shreds of men. He isn't that bad, not yet. He isn't, and he's never going to be. But he's seen things. He's seen things in the dead of night stalking from trench to trench with hungry eyes, he's seen a woman made of light walk out and pick up a dying man, he's seen far too much and he's far too young to be going mad...and yet, here he is, rioting and raving in a shitty bar about his circumstances. Setting: Hunter, Mage.
[] The Banker's Wife: Her husband was a very important man, a man who was intelligent, and even kind to her, even despite her legacy as something of a firebrand when she was younger. She is past all of that nonsense, now, and even has children, and yet she does sometimes wonder how she might have lived her life differently. Yet, ultimately, she is happy. Or at least she is content? Isn't she? Then, the bank fails, then her husband falls apart. Then she loses everything as she has to hold a crumbling, dying family together with all of her might, no matter what the cost. Settings: Vampire (if you want to be really fucked up), Mage. Actually, maybe Hunter if you wanted to play with the 'was a firebrand' element.
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A/N: So yeah, incredibly provisional, and I'd definitely want to buy a book or ten on each of these subjects if I was going to read it, but I hope I provided a decent dusting of common archetypes that might make interesting scenarios. Of course, the last one is cheating, since it's 1929 and thus just past the Roaring Twenties, but I think it could work.
Either way, yeah, feedback is always neat, even if I'm not going to do it anytime soon.
