North America
Contents
Quote
"I'm a no-good coward, an American too. A North American, that is. I'm guilty of murder of innocent men, innocent women, innocent children - thousands of them. My planes, my guns, my money, my soldiers - it's my blood on my hands. It's all my fault. I must not think bad thoughts."
-- X, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts"
Introduction
No other continent is as much a battleground between Sabbat and Camarilla as North America. Then again, no other prize is as rich. New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are all worth fighting over; the markets, the media and the missiles are all desirable. There are rich veins of silicon to be mined in the computer firms of California, Washington state and Massachusetts; there are also vast untapped natural resources in the Canadian north and in the wilds of Alaska. The Great Plains are still the breadbasket of the world, and starving an enemy's herds is as good as starving him directly. There are prizes well worth going to war for here, and the master strategists of both sides - as well as those who stand behind them - know it.
In Europe the battles have grown a bit stale and a bit predictable. Here they are still fresh and savage, as even the denizens of longest standing have been here for a mere handful of centuries. Things have not ossified the way they have in the Old Country, nor are there still-potent indigenous creatures strong enough to challenge the Kindred for rule of the night. On a stage mostly cleared of those pesky werewolves, and with the Antediluvian puppeteers not betraying their hands to their puppets, a bloody play is acted out every night by the vampires of North America. Even the bit players find the action intense and deadly.
Geography
Europe's Kindred population often exists along clearly delineated clan and sect lines. Spain? Lasombra and Brujah. Austria? Tremere... and so on. This is not so in North America. Repeated waves of immigration to and migration across the continent, not to mention a decided lack of wars to decide internal boundaries, have thoroughly mixed vampires of all clans and affiliations across the United States and Canada.
Canada
Covering nearly four million square miles, Canada has a human population of just 27 million mortals, and most of them live within 190 miles of the southern border with the United States. Most Canadian territory is putatively under Camarilla control, but in actuality anything above the magic 190-mile mark (and much that is below it) is left to the Lupines. There is a strong Sabbat presence in and bordering eastern Canada; parts of Quebec (including Montreal) and Ontario (including Toronto), as well as major portions of the United States bordering these regions, are under Sabbat control. The so-called Maritime and Prairie Provinces (including such cities as Alberta and Edmonton) and British Columbia are all essentially free from Sabbat taint, but are as sparsely populated by vampires as by humans. The two largest cities in Canada are Sabbat. After all, what do the antitribu care about the fishermen of the Grand Banks?
For Camarilla vampires, the question is whether or not the Masquerade can be maintained. Canada's violent crime rate is much lower than the States', mandating much more caution on the part of Canada's Kindred. In general, they are fewer, farther between and much more reluctant to take human life unnecessarily than their American counterparts. This is not so much an expression of morality as one of selfpreservation; excessive violent crime shocks and mobilizes Canadian society in a way that no longer touches Americans. Fueled by public outrage, the search for a violent criminal will prove relentless until the perpetrator is found.
Canada has vast natural resources and a solid high-tech industrial base. The Prairie Provinces, in addition to Alberta's oil fields, have extensive agricultural industries. Edmonton houses, among other things, the world's largest shopping mall, home to its own criminal (and perhaps Kindred) subculture. On the east coast, the struggles over Quebecois independence and the depletion of the Grand Banks fishing shoals have severely damaged the economy of the Maritime Provinces. Quebec and Ontario, though, remain prosperous rivals in the heart of the country even as the one repeatedly threatens to secede and the other works diligently to get Quebec to remain.
The Quebecois separatist movement, countered internally by the Federalists and externally by the rest of the country, centers around the French-speaking minority's attempts to secede from the rest of Canada to form a Francophone republic. A referendum on secession in late 1995 showed the province's population to be narrowly in favor of remaining part of the Canadian union, for now.
As stated earlier, most of the vampiric population is concentrated in the cities and towns along the U.S. border. There is no Sabbat presence west of Lake Huron, meaning that the Camarilla rules the Prairie Provinces uncontested. The population is the usual mix of the seven main clans with a smattering of others, but all are on their best behavior. The miles between the cities are too long and too Lupine-infested for ready travel from city to city on the ground. Blunders can lead to exile, and exile usually means death here. Plus, with such intense potential pressure from the kine, Canadian Kindred will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their princes in punishing offenders. After all, there's nowhere for them to run either.
Infiltrated by Japanese vampires, British Columbia stands outside the wars of the Sabbat and Camarilla. Ruled by the independent Prince Sigfried, the city of Vancouver is a model of efficiency for other princes. Effectively free of sect entanglements, the city is ruled by its prince alone.
United States of America
New England
A region of contrasts, New England houses dead factory towns and the Green Mountains, has a reverence for tradition and boasts a Malkavian prince in its biggest city. Heavily infiltrated by the Sabbat, Massachusetts contains a large portion of the region's high-tech industry and population. Further north, Maine is entirely Sabbat, but this means little; most of the state's human and Kindred population is clustered "Down East," far from ravaging Lupines. Connecticut is the most prosperous non-Sabbat state in New England, but it does border on the Sabbat-controlled New York. The home of many insurance agencies and financial houses, as well as a great many wealthy ghouls who commute to New York daily, Connecticut is a staging point and supply dump for New York City's beleaguered Ventrue.
