The Rudas Thermal Baths - Location, NPC, Plot Hooks

Rudas Baths (pronounced something like "Roux Dosh" ([ˈrudɒʃ])) is one of the Turkish-style bath houses in Budapest.

In the M:TBU setting, it is a location much like the Spy's Demise BBS detailed in Digital Web: perhaps the only place in town where the Awakened and Enlightened of any stripe can come together and talk without fear of aggression. By mutual agreement, Technocrats and Traditionalist, hell, even upstart Disparates, can rub shoulders here and chat.
How is that possible?

Goals, Obstacles, and Dark Secret options

Thinking further about what the Premise Statement implies, still following the Setting Design book, I'd like to detail the potential goals of the characters that fit the premise, and the obstacles that make their lives interesting.

Goals

The initial goals, the "thesis" of the campaign, if you will, will be quite mundane - make ends meet, be able to practice your magick in peace/unharassed,  not go to jail, help friends not go to jail, try to get rich off some magickal artifact looted (at great personal danger) from a villa in the Andrássy Rifts, pay through the nose for such an artifact, be hired by one of the Chinese Tongs for an odd job, etc. Routine stuff to familiarize the players and the GM with the setting.
(I'm assuming the PCs start out already Awakened, and members of the same cabal.)
Once the dark secret is revealed to the PCs, the meat-and-potatoes goals ("anti-thesis") come into play.

Some spoilers for potential dark secrets in the setting:

Characters implied by the Premise Statement

The Premise Statement (and the setting's central metaphor) limits PC options for players to be mages. Traditionalists, Orphans, Disparates.

While the setting itself supports Technocracy campaigns, and I will try to make good on that statement in later posts, the premise as it stands is that PCs are at the receiving end of state-sanctioned oppression, and that sort of assumes non-Technocrats.
To elaborate further, PCs should ideally be conspicuously, possibly unapologetically "different", marginalized in some way even before they have Awakened.
Some examples:

Fleshing out the Premise Statement

Central Setting Metaphor

Paradox that reality-bending will-workers accumulate when their magick goes against consensual reality is a metaphor for discrimination and exclusion - the 'tyranny of the majority' that scorns and derides any occurrence of 'the Other'.
Mages, by extension, stand in for all types of 'out-of-the-ordinary', non-mainstream, non-middle-class, non-heterosexual, that a Technocracy-affected society rejects.

Premise Statement

An assorted cabal of mages in a contemporary dystopia; an alternate-history Post-Communist Budapest, is trying to get by, combatting intrigue, political repression, and social exclusion, when they discover a dark secret that would change the status quo if revealed, and must decide what to do about it.

I'll follow the advice in the Dancing Light Press Setting Design book, and flesh out the Characters, Goals, Obstacles, and Primary and Secondary Setting Elements that the central setting metaphor above entails.

In a later post:)

The Circle Collective - Traditionalist factions in Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl

This is part two in a 4-part series of high-level overviews of the main Traditionalist factions in my Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl campaign.

The Circle Collective

Hotel Budapest a.k.a the Circle

The Schiffer cabal - Traditionalist factions in Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl, part 1

This is part one in a series of high-level overviews of the 4 main Traditionalist factions in my Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl campaign.

Spoiler alert

For those not playing with a collaborative world-building kind of troupe style, there might be some traditionally GM-only background material in this post.

Schiffer cabal

The Schiffer villa, the cabal's headquarters

Life imitating fiction

The Chinese People's Republic has released an app to teach people about Xi Jinping, the current general secretary, and about Chinese Communism in general.
You can rack up points in-app to exchange for real-life rewards;
government officials are required to download and use it;
future employers and state organizations (one and the same, right?) have access to your scores.
The reason I'm including this news item here is that this reminds me so much of the older generation of New World Order Technocrats in the Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl (M:TBU) setting. (You know, the guys tucked away in the Szabadság Square underground car park labyrinth, convinced that they are still running the show.)
Gamifying propaganda,
making people willingly feed the fires of bureaucracy, and
blatant brain-washing are what floats these old-guard NWO hardliners' boats.

Mood music suggestion for your Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl campaign

It's a work in progress - at the moment it's mostly lots of krautrock and lots of moody ambient.

Your mileage may vary - just as with any background music, it might distract instead of enhancing the game, or the individual tracks may not gel together well, especially on shuffle play.

Try it and see if it works for you and your troupe.

To my mind, it communicates the atmosphere I was going for in this setting-in-progress quite nicely.

The Andrássy Rifts

The villas along the section of Andrássy Avenue between Kodály Körönd and Heroes' Square almost all have uncontrolled portals into various parts of the Umbra

There, I said it.
This is arguably the backbone of the setting - it was the first of the defining ideas.