a massive sink hole only a a few hundred meters from a giant lake? At minimum it needs to be further inland a bit. Every town in that area is at the mouth of a river basically, except Holland that is relatively inland because of the lake. I could see an alt-history where lake Machatawa is actually a flooded part of 'The Chasm'. Hot swap Holland for Arcadia and have it be an overgrown suburb that has gobbled up Grand Rapids in the current time line.

Go Blue!

Any way as for a bad neighborhood. I don't think we need to write up the Pit explicitly because we already have the Chasm as a land mark.

I like the concept of the upper class crime neighborhood.

Name: Elysia

History: Prior to the opening of the Chasm Elisya was the place to be for wealthy upper class families in town. It featured beautiful mansions, well appointed apartments, walkable spaces and thebest of the best in public transit. After the Chasm opened the centers for commerce and business shifted from the area, most of the money moved away and property values plummeted. Apartments were left to rot and filled up with squatters, Mansions that weren't bought up by Wise Guys to live in were bought up and converted to multi-plexes by slum lords. The parks have gone to see and filled with tent cities and the train only serves to ferry rim-gangs in to pick fight with local Elysians.

What Is The Primary Source Of Crime In The Neighbourhood: Drugs, Violence, and Prostitution all thrive in this area. It serves almost as a little sin-city being so far from the city center and the businesses there.

How Do The City's Authorities Treat The Neighbourhood:
Elysia is an almost forgotten area of the city and the slum-lords and wise-guys the run the place pay handsomely to keep it that way. City police already had reduced jurisdiction from the days when the area was wealthy and affluent. The private security that has handles most of the calls in the area are a bunch of thugs that are more likely to just take you out back and break some bones as they are to properly book you, gotta keep those crime stats low after all.

Other Information:

As an aquatic hero, I'm not sure how I would have ended up in the Midwest... but I suppose it's no odder than Aquaman being the Justice League chair when they were based out of Detroit.
This message was last edited by the player at 17:25, Tue 16 May 2023.

20% of all the freshwater in the world or something like that is right there? Seems like a good enough reason.

Name: Spring Meadows Memorial Park

History: Every city has a graveyard. Most big cities have quite a few. Arcadia mostly only has one, which was built by some filthy rich robber baron, whose philanthropic streak stemmed from an attempt to salve his own guilt about the poor and hopeless people, many immigrants, who broke their backs to build his empire. Spring Meadows happened when aforementioned robber baron bought up an enormous tract of over seven hundred acres of land, close enough to the railroad for bodies to be brought to the funeral by rail. It's a garden cemetery with an extensive arboretum and gardens dedicated to various themes or flower varieties spread throughout, as well as a few enclosed mausoleums funded by particularly wealthy families.

What Is The Primary Source Of Crime In The Neighbourhood: There are two very distinct reasons that Spring Meadows has...troubles. The first is that seven hundred acres of open ground with scattered groves of trees where no one goes at night is an incredibly good place for clandestine dealings, and people routinely conduct things like drug deals, meetings to arrange a hit on someone, and discussions which require total privacy on neutral ground. The other is that occasionally the odd cultist or aspiring necromancer tries to do something stupid and gets just enough right to make everything go very wrong.

How Do The City's Authorities Treat The Neighbourhood: Overall, they're nervous about it. They obviously don't believe in the reports of things like ghosts and zombies, being sensible and grounded people, but there's just something...uncanny about Spring Meadows once the sun goes down. It's a big enough cemetery to count as a forest, and after sunset it gets very, very dark out there. Nobody wants to be dispatched for a midnight emergency services call from the Meadows.

Other Information: Whether there actually are ghosts and zombies in the park is an open question. There might be some equivalent to Gloomweaver's cult from the card game that's active in there, or it might all be the product of overactive imaginations and a huge, creepy graveyard.

No problem at all, no requirement for anyone to chime in if they can't think of anything. Though if you suddenly do have an idea I won't hold you to any silence!


I think I like 'The Pitt' being the Bad Neighbourhood simply because if we have a gaping chasm  in the middle of the city then it would be a shame not to use it as a major setting.

That said no reason that the criminal side of things can't lead into a classier place; can't imagine the leaders of criminal syndicates want to slum it with their footsoldiers - they want to live in (and control) the bright lights! I can imagine we'll spill into there before the game is done.

As for where exactly the city is located I hadn't given it much thought beyond the classic 'sort of East Coast USA' comic setting. I'm happy with Michigan being the location. I'm British so to be honest I'm googling fine details for any areas anyway!

I actually live pretty close to that area now, western Pennsylvania so it's only a relatively short drive to get to the location we're putting Arcadia in currently. The cemetery is heavily referenced from one in Cincinnati.

The Pitt actually sounds a lot like my post-apocalyptic Pittsburg in a game I am technically still GMing. The mayor's name is Gyarados Skullfucker. If you would permit me a bit of self-promotion: link to a message in another game

The Great Lakes are the closest thing we have to an inland sea.  But if this does mess things up for you, Leviathan, we can go East Coasty.  We could go Coastal Virginia, or replace Mobile, Alabama.

But the best place besides this might be in Northern California or Southern Oregon.  There was plenty of mining done in those areas, but the seismic activity in those areas would justify the Chasm.

Regarding the description of the Pit as being like postapocalyptic Pittsburgh: I want to offer up some defense, but last year a sinkhole caused a bridge collapse, leading to pictures of a bus being lifted out of a massive sinkhole with a collapsing bridge by crane. (I still don't know how to do rpol image links very well, but if it will work, https://cdn.discordapp.com/att...5692/Frick_bus_2.jpg is a great picture for this).

So, it's not all that far from preapocalyptic Pittsburgh, really.

Hey, I really like how far Pittsburgh has come.  It's a pretty nice city.

Oh, I fully agree. There's a reason I moved here, and I think I've only left the county once since I did. It's been over a year since I even left Pittsburgh city limits I'm fairly sure. But I remembered the "Port Authority buses surviving apocalypse" memes and I couldn't resist.

Savage! xD

So, my imagining of The Chasm is much larger than a normal sink hole can explain. Like it is big enough that it needs to have been caused by super powers.

I imagine you're seeing it something like this?

Closer for sure!

That picture is from the San Andreas movie.  I'm toying with using Midjourney to put together some pictures of the Chasm shanty town.

@GM Do you want a map or will we be making things up and then creating a map later on from what we collectively invent?  Like in Gotham, for example, where a lot of places were named before there was ever really a firm map or location.  Good Old New Jersey.

I don't tend to bother with maps for narrative first games like this and especially supers ones. Everything is conveniently where it needs to be and the distances between things are fairly trivial when it comes to the mechanics.

If anyone does want to knock one up for kicks then I have no objection.

I do love that San Andreas photo though - exactly the sort of thing I was imagining though it's a bit more built up after a decade; at least one bridge over it etc.

The bridge sounds like a fantastic set piece, honestly. I could also see there being a glass-floored skywalk with a memorial built out over the chasm, maybe at some location that was particularly important before the collapse.

Scary thing is that I've had something like that running around in my head for a while.  With memorial plaque.  And there's a separate worker's memorial on one side of the bridge to commemorate the incredible work and sacrifice it took to rescue people and restore services on both sides.



How do people feel about the possibility that the villain wasn't found?  That there were different people accused, and perhaps even someone arrested, but in the end the results of the investigation were inconclusive?

Gives us a mystery to eventually uncover...

So, If we are costal and it is THAT big then I think it makes sense for them to have allowed a part of it to flood or maybe be terraced and developed and to use the epicenter that went deepest for mining. It's easier to run a ferry than to build several bridges after all and a dam is a useful piece of infrastructure.

Gotta love a mystery. Definitely should be more to it than "Dr. Quake completed his plan and then was sent to jail soon after." lots of options even if it isn't "and we don't know who it was."

Just because Super Villains are rarer in this setting doesn't mean that there aren't constant dangers.  It may be that our coastal city with ocean access has attracted a number of unpleasant sea monsters into the Chasm, and/or there are things that were buried in the earth within that are now slowly trying to infiltrate the shantytown.

For all we know, this is a 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' type of situation, and we are regularly having to deal with troglodytes and dinosaur incursions now.


As for coastal mining, I should mention that there is a strategic Uranium reserve along the Texas Gulf Coast.

And Northern California and Southern Oregon has some lovely coastal mineral reserves, as well as fault lines that could be triggered from delving into the wrong mineral seams.  The name Arcadia does goes well with places like Eureka, Arcata, and Fortuna.  Put it in the Klamath Hills, say where Crescent City is, or just above in Oregon, and you can also have Serpentinite processing.

Just as a note, when looking up Serpentinite, I ran across information about the Lost City Hydrothermal Field.  If there was a similar feature in a tidal rift off the coast of our location, it might make an interesting connection for Leviathan.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:02, Thu 18 May 2023.

In reply to Advocate (E) (msg # 43):

Not to mention a city this physically unstable will have lot of natural disasters for us to deal with and save people.

Just to show how seismically active the Cascadia region is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAJcLtBhNEM&t=181s

Love this!



Also love this.

I'm thinking that the villain was never seen. Heroes fought through a horde of minions (I'm thinking clockwork robots, not sure why) and then a few broke through to confront the villain. Next thing was the mighty explosion and neither heroes, villain or the artefact have been seen again!

That's definitely interesting. I wonder how many conspiracy theories are circulating? This is the kind of disaster where even without anything particularly mysterious, people will make up all kinds of conspiracies and malevolent actors behind it. If the villain was never confirmed to be present and it all ended with just a huge question mark, there will be so many theories circulating about secret plots and such. I'm sure Caress, for example, suspects that the whole thing was arranged by her former boss so he could sweep in after the heroes and villain fought, and take out whoever won while they were exhausted from the fight. Then he could grab the relic and run, having let other people do all the work of accessing it, and no one would ever know he was there at all.

It's what she would do, after all.

Question: Is there a reason we'd be putting Arcadia somewhere seismically active? It almost seems like it makes more sense if the area is particularly stable. A hole the size of the Chasm on top of a fault line seems like it would have some, uh, consequences that would make rebuilding in the city not really be the best idea. Also, if I were the one stashing a relic of unspecified but terrible power somewhere underground, I'd be looking for the least tectonic activity I could find. The last thing I think that they'd have wanted was for an earthquake to cause damage to the object, and result in, well, this.