A thread for creating the city and discussing its details.

Lets start describing our neighbourhoods! Try not to describe any specific locations or NPCs, as those will come later.

This is also where we get to work outthe vibe of Halcyon City. Is it dark, crime-riddled, and Gotham-esque, or is it bright, clean, and overwhelmed with Superheroes like Earth 616's New York? Are the neighbourhoods shaped by superheroes like The Justice League's Superman Memorial, or are they not seen as a major part of public life, like in (most of) the MCU?

Hello everyone! Always excited for Masks. I'll lead us off with my snippet of city from my RTJ message. I look forward to people's additions!

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Old Town used to be the beating heart of Halcyon City. This was back in the Golden Age, when thirty stories of masonry and stone towered over the world. Some of the oldest businesses in the city still reside in Old Town. It was the setting of many of the great Golden Age stories. Mr. Metro taking on the Crime League during the robbery of the First Federal Bank. The wedding of Miss Liberty to the Aviator- interrupted by an attack from Kolonel Kaiser's death blimp. And ape attacks.

So many ape attacks.

Most of the old businesses moved out, though. Through much of the Bronze Age, Old Town was a run-down slum. Abandoned buildings and dark alleyways. Today marks a period of revitalization. Old Town is gentrifying, with fancy condos and high-end boutiques. This started with the Mercury Building. It used to be the center of Old Town, the home of the Mercury Press- Halcyon City's flagship newspaper. Owned by Trapper Johnson (better known as the masked hero the Manhunter) the Mercury Building was 25 stories of granite and steel, with art deco facades and a grand statue of Mercury on the rooftop. Mercury Press moved out when Trapper Johnson was arrested in order to distance itself from the scandal to swank new Uptown offices. The Mercury Building was recently renovated into luxury condos, and two of the nation's most talked-about new restaurants occupy its ground floor.

Hi all! :D  I haven’t ever played Masks, so I hope you’ll bear with me while I figure out how to play.  I’m excited, though!  Here’s my neighborhood blurb:

Port Halcyon is a large seaport that serves as a hub for international shipping as well as a home for most of the city's water-based ventures.  The port itself has berths for cargo ships with many towering cranes for loading colorful shipping containers stacked in maze-like configurations.  On the other side of the bay is the Marina, an upscale harbor for sailboats and yachts as well as berths for luxury cruise liners.  The Arnault bridge is a huge, blue-painted suspension bridge that spans hundreds of feet above the port bay to provide an important north-south connection between the city districts on either side.  Inland from the port is Wharftown, a rundown neighborhood primarily populated by longshoremen and other port workers, that is riddled with canals that bring most of the city's drainage out to sea.

In terms of theme, my port area has kind of a dichotomy between gritty and shiny upscale in relatively close proximity, which seems to be the case in a lot of big cities IRL.  YahtzeeNinja seems to have a similar contrast between old and rundown areas in the midst of a revival.  I didn’t think that deeply into it while writing it though, because I was mostly thinking of cool settings for foiling crime and defending innocents from dastardly villains :)
This message was last edited by the player at 18:47, Sun 01 Aug 2021.

Since it seems to be the thing, here's the pitched neighborhood from the RtJ:



(I'm equal parts fascinated and horrified by the "urban renewal" that went on in the 60s and 70s, and wanted to speculate what it might have looked like with super-level resources thrown at it as a social experiment.)

Mood-wise, it feels like I'm pretty in-tune with the posts so far. If we were thinking about comic-book style color palettes, I'd lean high saturation and high contrast. The brights are almost but not quite neon (no need to revisit the 90s), the darks are intensely dark. Turned up to 10.5 but never 11, so to speak. I feel like the simultaneous highs and lows might be a byproduct of superheroes. Maybe people have relied on these god-like individuals to do great things to an extent that legitimate institutions are weaker than they are in more realistic settings. Even Superman couldn't be everywhere at once, and the super-rich Iron Man and Batman equivalents are going to be idiosyncratic at best in their philanthropy. shrugs

Hello all!  Seems like we've actually got the same general idea on our neighborhoods thus far; they all hold that theme of blending old and new interfacing together, so I think we should really lean into that as part of the overall story.

The Railway District
One of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, hailing back to some of its earliest permanent developments as railway workers put down roots and built homes alongside portions of the first major railroad to connect to Halcyon City in the late 1800s.  It is thus very much a "two sides of the railroad" sort of neighborhood.  The sort that began as a run-down area developed out of necessity with a lot of personal culture and history behind it, but that's slowly being expanded upon by more modern, yuppy/hipster-ish developments.

The Railway District is primarily homes, community-focused resources, historical preservation sites, and small personal businesses with a very clear dividing line between the old and the new; neither being bad on their own, just very different from each other.  Where the one side of the tracks has old architecture, the other side has trendy condos.  One side has a quaint Mom-and-Pop's One-Stop-Shop, while the other side has a neighborhood-run community store full of organic greens and Etsy-style novelties.  There's an overt difference in architecture, mood, attitude, and tone between the two sides, but neither are at all unpleasant toward the other and consider themselves to still be the same neighborhood.  An equal mix of rivalry and camaraderie between the locals who live on each side to help make it more interesting, rather than being a flat "we don't like them" feud, though there's certainly room for extremist portions to form gangs, corporate by-outs of land, or the like.

The older portions of the Railway District would be seen as the roots of the locals, where their history lays and where many grew up in, while the newer portions would be opportunity and future progress.  Given the similar theme it has to Old Town, it feels like they're probably the same general area of the city; Old Town is likely the commercial portion whereas the Railway District is the residential portion.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:39, Sun 01 Aug 2021.

New to Masks and PbtA, but since I've been RPing for over 30 years, hopefully I'll swim and not sink.  My RTJ which appears to have some places and people identified, but this of course can be changed to suit.
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Neighborhood: The Starlings.

Sulawesi Lane was one of those places that just seemed destined to grow.  When Halcyon was still young, a mere village, a prominent gentleman Charles  Starling and his adoring wife Heather established a manor house on the outskirts of Halcyon and claimed acres upon acres of land.  The village grew up and reached the edges of their estate.  Just as Halcyon grew so with the Starling family, twin boys first, then every three years after that a daughter until they had five children in all.  Heather died giving birth to a sixth child, a son.  Charles, bereft, held onto his sanity up until he married away his first daughter.  The years following that were not kind to the family, Ulysses Starling, one of the twins took ownership of the estate and sold it to the city to help pay for medical.  Larkin Starling, Ulysses twin, was on the city planning council.

The massive estate was broken down into pieces and Sulawesi lane branched into Apo Rd, Malabar Rd, Meves's Rd, among others.  Land sold to the affluent, and so it was for years.  The Starling family stayed in politics and business and decisions about the Starling estates were handled with care through the years.  After the Second World War, the Starling family saw a decline, and the estates were divided again.  More roads, more types of starlings attached to avenues and road and lane and street because "why kill a theme", even if people were beginning to forget the history.

Fast forward to today, generations later for the Starling family, their affluence diluted, the Starlings refers to a section of the city that clings to white picket fences, green lawns, and Home Owner Associations.  People live in the Starlings, families, not businesses, not government buildings not even schools.  But on the edges of the Starlings where home owners keep their shades drawn, businesses lurk and wait for the first rezoning law that will allow them penetration.  On the edges of the Starlings, the buildings get taller, coffee shops promise a little pick me up on your way into work, and the pizza place a dinner when you get back home.

And what of the original estate?  In the center of the Starlings where Sulawesi "Avenue" terminates, Heather Starling Park.  The manor house was torn down long ago.

I also was trying to condense the descriptions down in my mind to something that could fit on a line or two.  I apologize if I didn't do your neighborhood justice in my summary; I know that they are each more nuanced than this.

OLD TOWN - Tall buildings, dark alleys.  The rich conduct business here and some reside here.
PORT HALCYON - Arnault bridge connecting Wharftown to "The Marina", the working class on the other side of the port from the upper class.
MARBLEWOOD HEIGHTS - Art scene by day, gangs by night.  Public Housing making the most of its roots.
THE RAILWAY DISTRICT - Dichotomy of old vs new.  Residential with some business zoning
THE STARLINGS - Single family homes, where the inner most homes are worth more and the outer most homes are cheap.  An area surrounded on all sides by either business or industrial.

That's a really good summary Atexercise!

Next, pick someone else's neighbourhood and describe a specific location. It could be a gang hideout, a nightclub, a park... Almost anything! It might also be worth considering where our team is based. Do we have a secret loft in Marblewood Heights, a picturesque carriage-house in The Starlings, or a branded tower in The Railway District?