Location Seed: Tallahassee.

I should probably note that there is a difference of opinion over what an actual Elder Sign looks like.

Tallahassee – Google Docs

Tallahassee

It surprises some occultists to find out that Tallahassee, Florida has the potential to be the single most dangerous city in North America, supernaturally speaking.  That it is not is mostly due to the unsung (deliberately so) efforts of generations of magicians, priests, shamans, psychics, spiritualists, and people with steady hands.  And it’s sometimes been a close-run thing, at that.

To make a very long, but not very well-documented, story short: when the Apalachee Native American tribe settled the area, they discovered very quickly that the hills in what is now Tallahassee were occasionally host to a variety of unpleasant supernatural entities (the kind that blur men’s memories, and thus make them virtually indescribable).  Normally, the sensible response to that sort of thing is to move away; but the mystics among the Apalachee found it curiously difficult to actually depart. The entities could be warded off and even fought without too much danger, so the tribe drifted into simply accepting the situation.

And that’s been the pattern.  The Spanish authorities likewise ended up shrugging off the problem, and when the United States took Florida (burning the village at what is now Tallahassee in the process), the government eventually established the territorial and state capital there.  And this was done with the relevant authorities actually knowing that there were inimical magical entities there! It was known, but somehow deemed not really relevant.

That’s been the situation ever since.  Today, it’s an open secret in the government that there’s a bunch of evil supernatural creatures underneath the ground, and that they need to be kept at bay.  For Heaven’s sake, the city’s webpage features a modified Elder Sign! But nobody talks about it, except to people already aware of the supernatural. And certainly nobody ever does anything, past the old rituals, which are admittedly not very onerous.  Chants, prayers, the occasional animal sacrifice; every so often a thing comes out of the sewers, and has to be shot by the cops. It all functions, so why fuss?

That, at least, is the opinion of the people who aren’t professional occultists.  The ones who are tend to get very concerned that Tallahassee might be some sort of trap. Or perhaps some sort of farm.  Circumstances are such that supernaturally gifted individuals can make a decent living in Tallahassee by keeping the entities under control, and anybody gifted who moves to that city soon becomes extremely reluctant to ever leave it.  Those occultists who subscribe to the ‘power is equivalent to belief’ school of theurgy are typically convinced that the entities under Tallahassee are feeding off of the mages and whatnot living above it, and most other occultists concede that, in this particular case at least, they may have a point.  Certainly nobody assigns anybody to Tallahassee overwatch duty unless they’re ready to have a permanent presence there.

The funny part about this? Tallahassee isn’t otherwise a particularly inherently magical city.  Although it is easier to cast spells there, mostly because there are a lot of mages convenient to the place at this point.  Which should not be surprising: after, all access to an established support network is just as beneficial to spellcasting as it would be to any other human activity.