Shrouded Charlotte
City: Charlotte, North Carolina
Population: 4,000/24,000
Controls: Charlotte and outskirts
Government: Machine
Problem: Monsters
Heroic Opportunity: Mercenary Work
City Aspect: Secretive
When people think of the Serpentfall, they have this image of a two hundred wave of water crashing its way across the east coast of North America, obliterating everything. Which is what in fact happened, in a lot of places. Alas, a lot of other places died more painfully. Like, for example, Charlotte, North Carolina: it was sufficiently above the crest of the tsunami to avoid immediate drowning, but the combination of refugees, lack of food, horrible sanitation, and the first outbreaks of monsters proved fertile ground for typhus, and a horrible local version of influenza. The entire region is still considered to be a dangerous plague zone, which keeps a lot of people away.
This well suits the people who live there, as Charlotte is now more or less the HQ of the Free Colored Army, and the town would much rather that this did not get out. The FCA operates out of the former Negro Agricultural and Technical College; which did survive the plagues, thanks to strict quarantine and a little luck. Their numbers were bolstered by survivors and military dependents from the 555th Parachute Infantry Division out of nearby Camp Mackall, which is probably why Charlotte is still a going concern in 1948.
While Charlotte hosts the FCA, it does not run, nor is it run by, the Free Colored Army. Technically, the city is administered by NAT college President Ferdinand Bluford; in practice, he is merely an arbiter of disputes between a semi-formal collection of various interests that only avoid outright factionalism because everybody agrees that eventually the Konfederacy will be coming, and that both Charlotte and the FCA need to be ready when it does. Oh, and that Charlotte and the FCA still need more time to prepare.
Which means that Charlotte is prepared to pay well for mercenary work, should they run across any lost and reasonably personable mercenaries who don’t mind doing very discreet jobs for black people. As for jobs? Well, there’s monster killing, and then there’s — well, quietly assassinating Konfederate sympathizers and pinning the blame on somebody who deserves it counts as ‘monster killing,’ too. It’s reasonably remunerative work; Charlotte doesn’t pay fantastically well on its own, but it has some decent looted military gear. The FCA can offer more intangible benefits, like intelligence on mutual enemies, a convenient safe house for operations, or even contacts behind enemy lines. But people have to kill a lot of Swamp Devils or Night-Riders to get access to those. Doesn’t hurt if there happens to be an African-American in the adventuring party, either.
…Look, it’s nothing personal. This is just a bad time all around, OK?