City23: 4th Week of February

#City23: 3rd Week of February

I’ve written about my #City23 projects here and on Tumblr. Check out my last post.

I’m working on two #City23 projects: a fantastical version of medieval Nottingham and a contemporary fictional city in Maine called Cape Crescent. The first is best suited to my game Sherwood, while the second might be a good alternate setting for Moonlight on Roseville Beach or another paranormal sleuths game (waves excitedly at Goblin Archives’ Liminal Horror).

Nottingham

While I set out to keep poking around to see what was in the outer bailey of Nottingham Castle, that expanded into looking at how people in the outer bailey influence other areas and factions.

I quickly discovered that the barracks, where we find the noble-born guard Lieutenant Guis De Bethencort, obnoxious, pious, and privileged, but loyal to the guards under his command, were connected through an engagement (Bethencort and the sheriff’s sister Célène) as well as an affair between Bethencort and a subprior named Albert.

Célène is a sorcerer with a captive demon who fuels and informs her magic. Albert is also a member of the sheriff’s family. Like Nottingham Castle, Holy Trinity Priory (aka Lenton Priory) was a real French monastery and a branch of Cluny Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Lenton’s monks were famous for interfering in local politics, often through brutish, violent means. I’m already planning to include an analog to Lenton priory in another Sherwood product, so Albert’s doing double duty here: helping me flesh out this fantastical version of Lenton Priory (which is technically outside the town but controls the churches and much of the land inside the town) and also see how the sheriff and his allies try to infiltrate and influence other local factions.

Célène joins the Madame Morvan, the brewer we met last week, in manipulating the outer bailey’s brewhouse to experiment with herbs and mushrooms to magical and manipulative ends. Where Madame Morvan’s Old Bailey Red helped create compliant and obedient guards under the sheriff’s command, Célène’s Nottingham Gold induces both prophetic visions and delusions of having had prophetic visions.

Over this next week (hey, March, you’re already here!), I’ll be moving farther into the castle past the outer bailey’s walls and seeing what that helps me discover about the castle itself and the wider town beyond.

Cape Crescent

While a lot of this week’s work focused on Nottingham, I did take some time this week to look a little bit more closely at what Jones-Clark laboratories is doing. Instead of looking at NPCs this week, I looked at the laboratories products: an experimental sleep aid that gives you access to other people’s dreams, another that causes you to broadcast your own private information through telepathic bursts, and another psychedelic that leaves anyone who takes it susceptible to short-term possession from entities from beyond.

Over the next week, I’ll keep poking at the subgroups that make up the Ghost Bay Foundation and figure out what’s going on with their Project Helena, which I name-dropped in January.

End of the Month

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my progress on this over February, with 28 entries over 28 days. While I didn’t consistently work on #City23 every day, I did manage to work at least 3–4 times each week. While none of my entries are long, I was glad to start digging into the darker aspects of Nottingham and Cape Crescent and start getting some specificity on the opponent factions.