Search the Community

First draft: Baile Dealain ("Electric City", formerly Suthertoun and more formerly the towns Brora and Golspie) The shell of a once-thriving industrial centre, surrounded by sinkholes and abandoned mines, Baile Dealain is a city of both enduring and desperate people working with what little the past has left them, menaced by a creeping underworld it unknowingly awakened. Baile Dealain sprawls across the wide eastern shore of Sutherland, on the more gentle southern side of the Scottish Highlands, with its northern border at the broad River Brora that supplies most of its water and bears most of the surviving business, including a busy seaport and an international airport. Its southern reaches aren't as well-defined, but encompass the old town of Golspie by the majestic seat of Clan Sutherland, Dunrobin Castle, petering out into the dense Benvraggie Forest cloaking the hills looming over the city. Littering the land between the shoreline, where most of the people live, and the hills are the remnants of the coal mining and white sandstone quarrying that helped build Baile Dealain, including decaying collieries, sinkholes, collapsing warehouses, mountains of coal waste and gaping quarries. The city centre is additionally divided by the railways once used to carry goods, with districts, neighbourhoods and even single buildings standing as islands among crisscrossing tracks. A huge statue of George Leveson-Gower, former Duke of Sutherland and notorious figure in Highland farmer evictions in the 1800s, stands on Ben Bhraggie Hill above the city's south; the statue is so frequently vandalized that vandals often have to repair the plinth to keep it from toppling. History: Golspie and Brora, a small fishing village and Renaissance-era coal-mining village respectively, were the subjects of a sudden burst of activity in the early 1800s as part of a planned economic revitalization of the Highlands by Elizabeth Sutherland and her husband George Leveson-Gower. Golspie was intended to become a new deep-water harbour for fishing boats to challenge Dutch supremacy in the North Sea, while the centuries-old coal mine in Brora had revealed vast additional seams and plentiful deposits of sandstone. Inland farmers evicted from their homes were to supply the needed manpower, and the Sutherland's vast new wealth from George's inheritance of Francis Egerton's estate as Duke of Bridgewater would supply the capital to fund the daunting task of industrializing the region. But then news came that the Brora coalfield's seams were far bigger than initially reported. In fact, they stretched throughout the nearby hills clear down to Golspie, and were accompanied by high-quality sources of white sandstone. With the easy access to the coast and plans already in place to build a a harbour, the plan rapidly changed from simply expanding the economic profile of two villages into a far more ambitious project: the great City of Sutherland, Suthertoun! Soon the new mines and ports opened, and people flooded into the area from both Scotland and abroad seeking the opportunities Suthertoun offered. The economic boom brought electricity to the far north for the first time, locals bestowing the name "Electric City" to the pale-bricked, smoking metropolis that had sprung up to bring new fortunes to Scotland. Even the appearance of venomous snakes from the mines, a subterranean breed called "greenbacks" unknown anywhere else on Earth, seemed like a good omen as birds of prey also began flocking the region to hunt them. The area wasn't free of trouble. Aggressive mining brought collapses, people mysteriously vanished, sinkholes opened up as the groundwater was used for washing coal and rifts began to grow between the centre city that did most of the mining, the north city that did the transporting, and the south city that did the selling and entertaining. To make matters worse while the coal and sandstone were bountiful, they were finite, and the industries expected to replace them or at least offset decline failed to pay off. Even the early 1900's herring boom that benefitted Scotland so much elsewhere never made it into Suthertoun nets, and when the coal finally ran out in 1974 that was just one of many closing doors on the city's once sandstone-bright future. Busy factories closed, and became nests for the greenbacks, the snakes gradually spreading even into the hills. Now renamed Electric City in an ironic echo of old optimism, Baile Dealain faces an uphill battle against urban decay, rampant unemployment and organized crime. The latter is of great concern to both city leadership and the townspeople, thanks to a sharp increase in the city's use as part of human trafficking networks. Efforts to clean up the town and make it a tourist destination have had mixed success, as its various caves, mines and sinkholes have proven popular for both amateur and experienced spelunkers while bringing considerable risk due to mysterious disappearances and attacks on locals and visitors alike by the growing greenback population. The sudden establishment of a Ministry of Powers branch in Old Golspie has only added to concerns that the worst is yet to come. Secret History: Over 100,000 years ago, the Serpent People of Lemuria sought weapons of war that could answer the problem of Atlantis. For that, they turned to Shash-Vathu, the great City of Secrets. Creations of alche-mysticism, cosmic grafting, and even terrible automata lurched from its gargantuan gates to bring terror to the lives of humans across the planet, and it was one of the great victories of Naran the Wise, Master Mage, that saw the Metropolis of Monsters banished to the depths of the Earth. For a time. Like many other realms of the Serpents, Shash-Vathu came to rest in Sub-Terra, the great underworld dimension. Like many others, the city was torn apart by strife between various factions, the survivors unable to comprehend, let alone use, the machinery and magic at their clawtips. Unlike many others, however, the humans in 19th Century Suthertoun dug right down to them. The miners were killed, the mine collapsed, and the damage done. Since then, the Serpents of Shash-Vathu have watched the changing fortunes of the surface city, snatching, experimenting and replacing all they can as they slowly relearned about Earth, their great heritage and their greater destiny. The greenback snakes are their eyes and ears, slithering throughout the city and environs to keep careful watch on the unsuspecting humans. The surge in organized crime has been a great boon to them, allowing disguised Serpents to travel the world and bring back subjects with nobody the wiser. However, the Serpents are far from all-powerful even underground. The industrious Morlocks long worked in tandem with humans, a quasi-partnership developing between the two peoples as the Morlocks guided or protected the miners and the miners traded tools and alcohol to the Morlocks. The increasing boldness of the Serpents hasn't gone unnoticed, and the two species frequently wrestle for control of the countless doors between Earth-Prime and Sub-Terra below the city. In addition, while the defeat of Shash-Vathu was great, many ancient weapons or monsters linger below the surface, and the Ministry has rushed to the area in part thanks to the discovery of what can only be described as a fiery giant lying dormant 100 meters below Dunrobin Castle. What To Do: The primary struggle of Baile Dealain is against the forces of poverty and corruption. The cops are on the take, there's often not enough to go around, and services are stretched thin. The shapeshifting snake people from prehistory, swarms of deadly reptiles, or howitzers that fire souls of the damned are a secondary concern, augmenting "real" problems faced by ordinary people, or a lighter backdrop for visitors to deal with that gets complicated by more mundane issues they didn't expect. In addition there could be cryptids living in the hills a monster-hunter might need to deal with, a crimefighting detective can chase down kidnappers, and an aquatic-themed hero can tangle with menaces from a colder and wilder time.

GM Bill Sweeney's Home Cowal Place, Dunoon, Scotland, UK Saturday, November, 7th, 2015 10:20 PM The sound of violence cut through what should have been an otherwise sleepy night in the seaside town of Dunoon. Sprawled directly in front of an exquisite Baronial style home. Were half a dozen men, attempting to fend off an attack by at least two dozen assailants. Te men sieging were armed with firearms, unlike the estate's knife wielding defenders. However, any illusion that they had paid a visit to the local Dunoon gun shop could quickly shattered by a cursory inspection of their weapons. The material shone brightly even in the dead of night and was adorned upon each man's arm as if some sort of hand cannon. Furthermore, rather than bullets it was instead crimson colored lasers bursting forth towards the homestead. The skirmish attracted the attention of the local populace. Doing everything to get out of the way of the crossfire. Everyone knew who lived in that house. And what the consequence of such an open declaration of war meant for anyone unfortunate to get caught in the aftermath.