There’s a little project that I’d like to do for The Day After Ragnarok, assuming they ever bring back the game line. Alas, there’s one big problem: I’d have to write up Chicago. For a game setting written by Ken Hite.
Well, you solve big problems by turning them into smaller ones. Like setting the parameters, at least.
City: Chicago
Population: 200,000/2,000,000
Controls: the southern and western shores of Lake Michigan
Government: Despotism, shifting to Machine. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
Problem: Factions
Heroic Opportunity: Mercenary WorkCity Aspect: Tense and Free-Wheeling. The Kelly-Nash Machine running Chicago needed a figurehead when sitting Mayor Edward Kelly sickened and died in 1945. What they got instead was former state senate minority leader Richard Daley. He’s an ambitious politician constantly struggling with the more shadowy leaders of the Second City over just who is in charge of what, and who. Well, as long as that struggle doesn’t get in the way of extending the Mayorality’s sway over as much as the city can grab. ‘Chicago First, and Forever’ is the city’s new unofficial motto, and it’s one of the few places in the Poisoned Lands that actively plans on how to resist if the USA ever tries to come back.
A decent start.
Remember that Chicagoans don’t want to take over outlying areas for the sake of growth/sprawl alone.. they also want to “run (Racine / Milwaukee / Winnetka / Gary / South Bend) properly”, and to be fair, they have a point.
The Chicago machine also understands, in a transactional or mutual back-scratching sort of way, that they need the consent of the governed.. at least a plurality and ideally a solid majority.
No king of Chicago was ever gauche enough to try to run (Hillside / Berwyn / Ford Heights) simply because it was there.. although several barons absolutely did… and sometimes “running it properly” requires cleaning someone else’s mess. (Cicero, after Capone)
Best of luck –
Mew
…and that, in turn, offers a bit of rhetoric on their plans to resist the incoming USA… because if they’re putting meaningful effort into good governance with something resembling the consent of the governed, then first of all, the US has no right to come take that from them by force, and second, how are they supposed to believe that a distant overlord is going to be better than what they already have?
The combination of the specter of the US coming in and the desire to keep the buy-in of the voters probably also keeps the local knives a bit blunter than they otherwise would be. Like, there are absolutely local power struggles going on, and they do get kind of vicious… but there are limits on how vicious they get that pretty much everyone respects, and the folks who try to push it “too far” (whatever that might mean) rapidly find themselves getting handed over by their own people. Machine governments understand how to make the mutual backscratching thing work, even when it’s with the opposition.
Further thought – that if it’s an environment where decent spies and operatives who get caught wind up embarrassed and ransomed (in exchange for whatever political tokens they get exchanged for) rather than dead, then it’s an environment that’s developing a decent number of people who have practice doing things like that without dying… which means that if the US ever does come calling, they may find that the local version of the underworld is playing at a higher level than they otherwise would have expected, and quite possibly find *themselves* being embarrassed and ransomed back.
There’s also a good shot that the Chicago’s homegrown operative scene manages to tease out at least a few examples of corruption and inappropriate behavior on behalf of the US… leading to that moment when the Chicago government gets the massive hypocrisy coup of being able to call the US out over whatever the US corruption embarrassment of the day is while presiding over a government that’s composed *primarily* of corruption.