The Greensboro Chronicle, subtitled Greensboro by Night, was a live-action Vampire: The Masquerade chronicle that ran from December 2004 through May 2005. It was played as a LARP (live-action roleplaying game) on the campus of Greensboro College and through occasional live chat and forum avenues. It was a fully open game, allowing any and all players to participate as long as they followed reasonable roleplaying etiquette.
Theme
The themes of Greensboro by Night revolve around largely social and supernatural conflicts in Greensboro, North Carolina, where the vampire population is very small and the supernatural night very, very big.
Themes explored in this game include:
The Great Experiment There is no heroism except for the endurance to remain just one day more. |
Characters live in a world in which the disenfranchised are in power, but must endure what obstacles are placed in their paths by others and wonder how long it will last. |
Last Stand This is not about saviors. There is no savior, no martyr, no rescue but what you bring yourself. |
Characters must confront the fact that they live in an isolated and tiny community, so when things go wrong, no outside forces or greater powers will come to help them. |
More Things in Heaven and Earth Life is a hideous thing; from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth. |
Characters discover that they are only one small part of a world full of supernatural creatures... and that the other parts are much larger and more frightening. |
Plot
The Domain of Greensboro, North Carolina, under the control of the Caitiff Prince Orson, is the central location and power bloc around which events of the game revolve.
Politics
Greensboro is a tiny Domain in a backwater area to most vampires, making its politics not of very much note at all except for the fact that is isolation and lack of value have allowed for groups to rise to power that would normally have been crushed by the Camarilla establishment. A Caitiff Prince runs the city with a Lasombra Seneschal and an extensive list of Independent influences, while the local shapeshifters are rare non-Garou breeds banding together for protection and influence.
The city lies in the path of the Sabbat East Coast Offensive, compounding its longstanding struggles to avoid being subsumed into the larger Domains of Charlotte or Raleigh, and much of the city has devolved into guerrilla warfare between marauding Sabbat packs and local supernatural powers, each fighting, living, and dying on their own rather than joining together. While the meager Camarilla court sees the city as an opportunity for a young up-and-comer to take over and finally control a Domain currently being run by riff-raff, their internal machinations against the Prince only serve to further weaken the resistance against the invaders. Over the course of the game, the combined forces of the Camarilla vampires outing and running the Seneschal out of the city for suspected Sabbat sympathies along with the Sabbat themselves killing half the neonate population resulted in the city's fall and destruction, leaving it a graveyard that has not to date been rebuilt.
Social & Supernatural Plots
Greensboro has become a haven for non-Garou shapeshifters who wish to escape the oppressive dominance of the werewolves in their society and return to more ancient and local practices, making it far more highly populated by strange creatures with unknown powers than most larger and more important Domains.
Similarly, social plots among the vampire characters revolve around the strange and unmapped territories and powers they encounter as the city draws the dispossessed, the rare, the bizarre, and the mythic to fill its power vacuum. Rare bloodlines, strange morality paths, and ancient Disciplines make even the "regular" residents strange and uncertain of which of many almost unknown powers will emerge victorious.
Players
Abe Schraeder Andrew Carley Miguel |
AJ Schraeder Benton Cobblepot |
Al-Don Schraeder Pal-Mal Theolonius Kapak |
Anne Myers Lesya Pervuchina Maeve Glaistig |
Chris Carpenter Jag |
Chrissy Jones Jodie Chase Katherine DeLaney |
Clare Coe Gabrielle Kalija Mia Johnson |
Dave Coe Kevin Rosnic |
Derrick Dickens Cadrian Ikth |
Jarrett Sullivan Brian O'Keefe |
John McIntosh Dominic Vaughn |
Karl Goetz Cyrus Warren Leo Marsden |
Karla Artis Jade Sirkov |
Kehlee Walsh Lily McLeod |
Kris Smith Marcus Ivey |
Matt Guinn Jimmy |
Matt Phelps Jack Hammer |
Thomas Beerbower Pedro Caliventez III |
Tom McCoy Jerard Johnny Dirnt |
Trent Cormier Ray Terry |