Hardytown, also known as Budapest District 5.

In real life, Budapest has 23 districts, each with its distinct character.

This is the first in a series of district write-ups for Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl that take advantage of the concept of the Fate fractal to give prospective Storytellers a potted bio or nutshell review of sorts.

Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash

Location Aspects

• "Barcelona of the East"
  This used to be THE City, and now it's an overpriced attraction overrun by boozing tourists.
• "Poster Child of the Regime"
  Home of the city state government; every single experimental legislature, quietly ignored in less core areas, is in full force here - anyone in uniform is in their element over here.
• "The Mayor is King"
  The long arms of Molnár [ˈmolnaːr] the mayor, reach everywhere. It's an open secret that he's getting his beak wet in all sorts of local businesses, through a widespread network of fronts, stooges, and dummies, to be able to maintain his incorruptible public image.

Location Skills

• Alertness: there are surveillance cameras everywhere, drones (some of them are flown by civilian-looking people, but you can never know, taxi drivers in the district are said to be on police payroll (if not outright clones, as some more paranoid willworkers will tell you). In short, the system of public trust ("közbizalom" [ˈkøzˌbizɒlom]) set out by the powers that be - part Social Credit System, part Big Society - is in full swing.
  

  Watch this eye-opening discussion about what the Social Credit System looks like from the inside.

• Resources: people living here, and people staying here, are rich. Everything is fancier, and there are more pickpockets, and more con artists.
• Security: It is virtually impossible to make a clean getaway once the authorities have been alerted to some subversive shenanigans of a PC or his posse.

Point of Interest

The historic (outer) city walls (from the 15. century). Most of it demolished, some of it maintained or reconstructed as a listed building. All of still magickal.

Let's go whole hog with the Bronze Rule, and give this POI a set of Fate aspects and skills as well.

City Wall Aspects

• "I've got the highest-value real-estate in the city state."
•  Secrets for sale.
  (Can be 'interrogated' as a witness, if the 'interrogator' does not think asking a wall questions silly.)
• Extends underground in parts.
• A mind of its own.

 City Wall Skills

City Wall gates (there's 4 of them, numbered in the diagram below - basically wide streets leading within the historically enclosed space) have

• the Bureaucracy skill that they use to demand payment (mystical or otherwise) from those wishing to enter,
• and Alertness/Scan, that they use to take note of anyone entering and exiting - a bit like having some mystical security cameras that a mage with the necessary skill may take advantage of.

City Wall Stunts

Willworkers whose paradigm is consistent with an historic, physically not quite existing wall having mystic power-ons, the City Wall offers the following:

• Teleportation along perimeter.
• The mystic shadow of the wall can hide mages from scrying attempts.

NPC

Molnár, the mayor since forever. He is the main employer for people living in the district, directly or indirectly, through shell companies. Very many people's livelihood depends on not getting on his wrong side. To be fair, there are countless projects he's introduced, organizing street fairs, promoting businesses (the 'right' ones), offering aid to old age pensioners and youth, building and maintaining playgrounds, all the sorts of things people expect from a mayor. He's popular, then; people grumble, but vote for him time and again.
GMs might equally make him out to be either a sinister figure (that is, a Szövetkezet technocrat or someone influenced by a Syndicate advisor), or a well-meaning man-of-the-people corrupted and turned into little more than a mobster by power.

Plot hook

• Nasty-looking, extremely ripe mangoes turn up at fire-sale prices in recently opened outlet of supermarket chain that was hyped in all the local media. Turns out the things are some sort of Umbrood eggs(?).
• Improbable traffic recorded/reported at one or more City Wall gates - the same person entering several gates at once, entering walls but never exiting, and/or exiting without having first entered.