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Confidential · GM Eyes Only

The City, Behind the Map

GM Reference · Chapter 05
Everything on this page is spoilers

This chapter is the answer key underneath the city map - what's actually going on in each part of town, not just where the three pinned sites sit. The PCs have lived here their whole lives; treat all of this as things a local already half-knows. The Foundation runs on top of the mundane, it doesn't hide the mundane.

The Quarter, Decatur Street

The French Quarter's own tourist economy is the best cover in the city: ghost tours, street psychics, buskers, and drunk conventioneers mean nobody blinks at something strange happening on a Quarter sidewalk, they assume it's a show. The Screen sits in that noise on purpose - an unmarked door between two real bars, easy to walk past a hundred times before anyone who isn't looking for it notices it's there. Praline Lady (see the Adversary Index) works these same blocks, one more cart smell in a neighborhood that's full of them.

The Docks, Bywater

Downriver from the Quarter, still a working stretch of port: container traffic, rail spurs, warehouses next to shotgun houses and artist studios that moved in cheap and stayed. Site-19 hides inside an active section of Poland Avenue Wharf for the same reason a smuggler would pick it - nobody logs one more container on a pier that's already logging thousands. The neighborhood around it doesn't know what it's next to; it just knows the port never really stops.

Central City, the Power Plant

Market Street Power Plant sits in underused industrial land near the river bend, decommissioned for decades, too large and too structurally committed to demolish outright, too isolated to attract anyone curious. Repository 23 uses exactly what the building already was - cavernous, windowless in the places that matter, already sealed off from the city around it before the Foundation ever needed it to be.

The Rest of the City

Not everything anomalous is pinned to the map yet. The phantom carriage horse still runs its old route through the Quarter and into the Garden District, unbothered by which decade it is. Bayou St. John holds the Cypress Coiler, patient in water that looks calmer than it is. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, blocks from the Quarter, is where the Backstreet Choir keeps singing after dark, whether anyone's there to hear it or not. The city's full of this - three pinned sites doesn't mean three anomalies.

Using This at the Table

When players go somewhere the map doesn't cover, reach for what the neighborhood actually is before inventing what's wrong with it: tourist density hides things in the Quarter, industrial scale hides things in Bywater, isolation hides things in Central City. The camouflage is the setting, not a coat of paint over it.