Notable locations, encounter table, couleur locale, and plot hooks for one of the most magickal neighbourhoods of the Mage: The Budapest Urbancrawl setting.
Landmarks
Tisztviselőtelep [ˈtistviʃɛløːˌtɛlɛp]
The neighbourhood has traditionally been home to a loose activist community promoting liberal values, self-governance, civil liberties. The regime that got into power during the 2008 crisis equates this community (as virtually all other non-state-sanctioned groups, especially if they're political) with domestic terrorism, and has found a subtle way of breaking it up.
The pre-war council estates in this area have been lovingly renovated to their former glory, and have been given over to drug rehabilitation clinics and institutions easing former addicts back into society. (Hence the name Cleartown - the rehabs operate based on Szekeres-Bara life system principles, a central one of which is being clear of stimulants, chemical and ideological alike.)
Most of the original inhabitants have been bought out or moved away on their own accord. Some actually work in the rehabs - the ones that have accepted that they cannot overthrow the system, but still wish to make the world a better place in any limited way they are allowed.
The Blaha Lujza square numbers game
On the site where the National Theatre used to be before it was dynamited in the seventies to make way for the underground station stands a stubby building with a chasing light marquee running around the top. The LEDs display a five-digit figure, Budapest's GDP as of the previous midnight, expressed in fillér, the now-defunct small-change coin.The purpose of the setup is for people, children in particular, to come and guess by how much the city's economic might has swelled compared to last night. Whoever guesses correctly gets to be a news headline for the day, and wins a top-of-the-line electric car, a flat in one of the downtown skyscrapers, a lifetime supply of some fancy foodstuff, etc. Winners also sign an agreement that they might be called upon at any time to participate in propaganda as celebrity endorsement. Someone hits the jackpot about once a month.
Rigging the outcome and so winning every single day is child's play for any disciple of Entropy, but the media attention that it generates is anathema to most M:tBU willworkers.
The boastful advertisement of a prosperity that is founded on the Quintessence flowing through the Danube, while effectively outlawing magick in state ideology adds insult to injury in the eyes of many of the city's mages.
Palotanegyed [ˈpɒlotɒˌnɛɟɛd]
Four or five city blocks of mostly nothing but lavish Renaissance Revival, Neoclassical, and Eclectic palaces, built in the second half of the 19th century.They have all been renovated recently with new money from porn shoots gushing into the neighbourhood, which functions more as a studio backlot than a residential area.
Memories of the flood
The great Danube flood of 1838, when about two metres of icy river water washed away houses and drowned hundreds, hit this section of the city the hardest.
Those who are attuned to such things may use the "memory" of the flood as a sort of surveillance network in the district when looking for someone or something in an area that had been overrun by the icy water.
The Biodome
The former botanical gardens (a major location in the Hungarian Ur-YA novel The Paul Street Boys, and so beloved by nostalgic generations) have been upgraded to a vertical biodome, with lifts taking visitors to the top.A bit like if the Eiffel Tower was a controlled ecological environment.
Lots of magickal plants and herbs.
Corvin Mall
A big and luxurious shopping mall. There is a sort of day care center with a room filled to the ceiling with
Cleartown Sports Complex
Possibly the largest and best-equipped public sports facility on the continent. Regularly hosting international games.Really the only trouble is that its site coincides exactly with that of the oldest and largest Budapest cemetery where lots of artists, politicians, and VIPs were buried.
There are plaques and a little permanent exhibition to commemorate the past, but that is little consolation to those who have been cut off from the spirits that used to teem here.
Little China
Overlaps with Cleartown. Details coming up in a dedicated post.Encounter table
| 1 | Construction workers fresh from their shifts drilling the shaft of the new underground line; grimy, tipsy, and looking for a fight. |
| 2 | Large group of teenagers, each riding their flavour-of-the-month personal transporter (segway, unicycle, hoverboard, scooter, whatnot). Their numbers and irresponsibility with the high-speed gadgets is bound to cause an accident. |
| 3 | Porn crew shooting a cutaway scene. Explicit or not, as the case may be. |
| 4 | Foreign tourists looking for the sports complex. |
| 5 | TV crew shooting a vox pop (man in the street) interviews with the question: "How are you celebrating Clear Day?" (Probably some special day in the Szekeres-Bara calendar.) |
| 6 | Glossy flyers being handed out advertising newly-opened Chinese restaurant/Chinese massage parlour/cyber cafe/state-sponsored internet celebrity performing at upcoming event/Szekeres-Bara life system tenets/the new underground line being built - turns out it's actually going to be an elevated train! |
| 7 | Wedding ceremony in a courtyard behind a half-closed gate - when the guests become aware of the PCs' attention, they promptly disperse, as though nothing had been going on, clearly afraid. What is that about? |
| 8 | Couple of cold turkey, very polite, very compliant addicts, sweating profusely, eager to do anything for any upstanding member of society to pay their debt to society. |
| 9 | A division of Freedom Fighters - essentially a street gang reenacting the 1956 revolution, hunting terrorists, that is, some dissenter group that the council media is targeting this week/month. They are tolerated by the city council. |
Plot hooks
- PCs find out a fence is paying exorbitant finder's fees for some strange-looking beetles, and especially their pupae. It is said they secrete some magickal hallucinogenic/drug with hypnotic qualities/extraordinarily effective conductor/lubricant/industrial wonder. Further investigation reveals the grubs have first been found in the National Museum Gardens. Children finding them have developed strange symptoms, alerting authorities. Some more nosing around implicates the Biodome and its tree-worshipping cultists.
- Rumours tell of a violent altercation outside the Monkey King Cabal's embassy. The Pesti Srácok Freedom Fighter gang seem to be behind the ruckus. What is their agenda?
- Construction of the new underground line has halted until it is determined what the sensational find in the newly-drilled section of tunnel exactly is. (Magickal) treasure? Proof of alien life? A bomb put there by a time-travelling (
terroristfreedom fighter) mage, waiting for the construction crews to find it, and take it to some high-ranking authority figure/museum to blow it up?
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