The City of Phoenix Bay

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Ysariel
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Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2016 2:14 pm

The City of Phoenix Bay

Post by Ysariel »

"In fire the city died; in fire it was reborn." These words lie engraved upon the Victory Monument before city hall in Unity Square. They tell the storied history of a city and people that have fallen many times over, only to rise again with a fire fiercer and brighter than ever before. Straddling the Golden Gate upon the Californian coast, Phoenix Bay is the birthplace of the United Nations, a world center of finance, technology, and culture, and the site of some of the greatest superhuman conflicts the world has known. Phoenix Bay and its metropolitan area replace San Francisco, Oakland, and parts of other neighboring cities of the San Francisco bay area of our world.

In its earliest days, I set the city of Phoenix Bay in the Freedomverse default campaign setting, and many elements from that setting remain. However, as my experience as a writer has grown, I have started to prefer building an original world instead of playing in someone else's. If you are joining this campaign as a player, note that elements of the Freedomverse may be either absent or different from their canon versions.
Last edited by Ysariel on Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
Ysariel
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Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2016 2:14 pm

Re: The City of Phoenix Bay

Post by Ysariel »

History

Twilight of the Gods
10 billion - 2 billion years B.C.E.


Long before life arose on Earth, Star Gods mighty beyond comprehension ruled the universe. The Celestari held absolute power over matter and energy, yet were unsatisfied with their lot. Companions they sought; not corpses, not docile sheep nor believing flock. Fellow gods they sought to raise up as equals, new faces to ease the monotony of their infinite existence. The Celestari devised Project Apotheosis, a plan to both encourage the development of nascent civilizations, and seed new worlds with life. They created a race of deiform servitors - the Preservers - to carry out and watch over their experiment.

Yet the Star Gods were disappointed, for innumerable peoples proved physically, mentally and morally unfit of Apotheosis. Eventually, the mightiest Celestar of all grew disillusioned with the grand experiment and demanded its termination. Its true name is unpronounceable by any mortal tongue, but the nascent civilizations of the universe soon gave it a new and terrifying moniker, for the light of judgment it turned on their worlds. They called it the Lightbringer.

The Lightbringer put the budding worlds to the torch, and the Celestari hurried to defend their child civilizations. But the Lightbringer was both the greatest of the Star Gods and the only one that had long brooded on dark thoughts of annihilation. It seduced many others to its terrible cause, and in matters of war and combat its mastery could not be matched. Galaxies burned with quantum fire as trillions were slain and Celestar after Celestar perished in the void.

In deepest desperation, one of the few remaining Celestari unleashed a cosmic device of unimaginable power. It rewrote the laws of reality and tied the psychic fabric of the universe to the material one. Activated in such an era of destruction, it gave life to the powers of War, Death, Hate, Famine and many other evils, setting them loose upon the universe to wreak further havoc. But even as the other Star Gods cursed it for this act, the Celestar in question triumphantly revealed the light that now shone forth from the device: Hope. For its act, this Star God became known as Pandora - the All-Gifting.

The of power of Hope energized mortal civilizations, and a few exceptional individuals learned to wield it against the Lightbringer and its minions, becoming the first Guardians of Hope. The Guardian Corps joined forces with the Star Gods and their Preserver servitors, turning the tide against the Lightbringer. After incalculable sacrifice, the Lightbringer's power was broken. But countless civilizations had been snuffed out, and many of the remaining Celestari, disillusioned with this reality, left for higher planes of existence or other dimensions. The age of gods had ended, and the age of mortals had begun.

Pandora faded into the mists of time, and its ultimate fate is not recorded, leaving the Guardians of Hope as the keepers of a new dawn of sapient life. The forces unleashed by Pandora's Box led to the rise of Incarnates -- mortal embodiments of abstract concepts wielding godlike powers. The inert remains of the defeated Lightbringer, lost in the apocalyptic final battle, drifted through the stars and eventually landed on Earth.
Ysariel
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Re: The City of Phoenix Bay

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The Serpent and the Fruit of Knowledge
20,000 - 10,000 B.C.E.


The Serpent People of Lemuria reigned supreme over Earth - until the Preservers arrived in orbit and uplifted the great apes, producing Homo Sapiens. At first, Lemurians looked upon humankind with pity for this short-lived, physically feeble and mentally underdeveloped species. Adopting the role of a mentor civilization, the Serpent People gave unto humanity the fruit of knowledge, teaching hominids agriculture, mathematics, literature, science, sorcery and more. Under their guidance, humans advanced with incredible speed, and raised up the city of Atlantis to call their own.

But human greed and envy know no bounds, and Atlantis grew to covet the power and wisdom of Lemuria. For their part, the Serpent People's belief in their innate superiority, and their alarm at humanity's rapid and reckless pace of advancement, led them to balk at human demands for equal status. These differences proved ultimately irreconciliable. When Atlantis took by force what Lemuria would not give, both sides went to war, and the war destroyed them both.

Thousands of years after the Great Cataclysm, a small group of Lemurian survivors emerged from their doomsday vault high in the Himalayas. They discovered that it was the hominids - fast-breeding, recklessly-advancing, infinitely-adaptible and ambitious hominids - that had become the dominant lifeform of Earth, while the Serpent People had either fallen into degeneracy or sold themselves to eldritch powers for survival. Acknowledging that the planet's future lay in human hands, they resolved to build a sanctuary from which they could continue the ancient pledge of the Lemurians to guide and mentor human civilization, and prevent a second Cataclysm from coming to pass. They founded what humans would come to call Shambhala, the Golden City, and it would stand as a refuge for spirituality and knowledge for nearly 12,000 years more.
Ysariel
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Re: The City of Phoenix Bay

Post by Ysariel »

The Phoenix's Bay
1776 - 1846 C.E.


Spanish explorers established a small fort and mission at the mouth of the Golden Gate in 1776. In the years that followed, a small town grew up around the site and attracted settlers. The area passed into Mexico's hands following its war of independence from Spain and was recognized for its excellent harbor and strategic location. But surrounded by inhospitable terrain, separated from New England by thousands of dangerous miles, it seemed destined to remain an insignificant fishing village forever.

In 1846, following the end of the Mexican-American war, Captain John B. Montgomery sailed into the bay to claim the settlement and California for the United States. His ships anchored in the bay late in the afternoon, and the Captain and his men went ashore to take stock of the situation. At the advice of locals, they climbed to the top of a hill overlooking the presidio. That day the bay was clear of fog; the sun hung low in the sky, and its dazzling rays, reflected upon the waves, set the sea aflame with dancing golden light. Northbay and Southbay appeared to the Captain as the fiery wings of a great Phoenix, with its head at the mouth of the Santa Barbara river and its tail fanning out towards the Golden Gate. Awed by the sight, he named the area "the Bay of the Phoenix", and very soon, Phoenix Bay would become a name heard all around the world.
Ysariel
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Re: The City of Phoenix Bay

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From Gold Rush to Gilded Age
1848 - 1869 C.E.


"Gold! Gold!" rang the exultant cry, and across the globe, countless souls answered. The California gold rush had begun. Thousands made the dangerous trek westward in search of precious metal. Sailors deserted their ships to hunt for gold; the ships themselves were sank to claim title to the land beneath when it was filled. Even today, construction works occasionally unearth the remains of buried ships and even a little sunken treasure, fueling the endless legends of buried wealth and stolen gold.

In those freewheeling days, Phoenix Bay was a chaotic place where gambling, prostitution, robbery, murder, extortion, Shanghaiing and all kinds of crime ran rampant. Government officials were incompetent or corrupt. The rule of law rarely penetrated into the narrow, maze-like streets of the hastily-built city, while out in the goldfields there were few property laws governing claims. Often, it was not lawmen but common citizens who stood up for their fellow human beings. The Superpower Index of the world then was low and few of these early men and women had extraordinary abilities. Still they donned masks for protection against reprisals and took to the streets to punish injustice. Phoenix Bay was not the first place in the world to see costumed crimefighters. But it was here, in this fertile soil, that the seeds for a culture of vigilante justice took root.

Few of the Gold Rush prospectors found the wealth they were seeking. Instead, they found a land whose abundant rain, fertile soil and sunny skies nurtured acres of orchards and vineyards, the mining industry drove technological innovation, and peoples from all around the world gathered in dance halls, saloons, jazz clubs and bars. Phoenix Bay emerged from the Civil War virtually untouched by the conflict. By 1869, when the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed, making the journey from New York to Phoenix Bay a mere 6 days by train, the city was a vast, cosmopolitan metropolis that continued to grow with shocking speed.

Yet it was a city beset with problems. The local government remained hopelessly corrupt and its streets were crowded with vast numbers of immigrants and the working poor. An enterprising few had made tremendous fortunes as mining, banking and rail tycoons, but not all used their wealth responsibly. Most shockingly, those mystics who arrived discovered the true source of the gold the miners had been digging up. For Phoenix Bay sat upon the subterranean ruins of a great Lemurian city, located at a mighty leyline junction and sunken by the earthquakes unleashed in the war against Atlantis. The stage was now set for the city's first great era of superhuman conflict.
Ysariel
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Re: The City of Phoenix Bay

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Kings of the Hill
1870 - 1915 C.E.


By 1870 Phoenix Bay was running out of room on its birthplace at the peninsula south of the Golden Gate. Marshes were drained, the sea was filled, and factories and harbors sprouted on the east side of the bay instead, giving rise to a new generation of wealthy businesspeople. The most influential of these was rail tycoon Richard "Boss" Nolan, whose cartel of corrupt industrialists rigged elections, monopolized prices, and rewrote city ordinances to their liking. To solidify their dominance, they masterminded extortion, blackmail and all manner of armed thuggery. "Robber barons" did not begin to describe them; it was said that one could not get any city permit or contract, nor even a job as a clerk in City Hall, without Nolan's blessing. In a fiery editorial, the Bay Chronicler condemned what it called "The New Monarchy, Or The Reign Of The Robber Kings". Boss Nolan and his posse were henceforth called "The Kings" and the city's industrial heart on the east side of the bay would forever be known as "The Kings' Junction".

Arrayed against the Kings were a motley crew of vigilantes. Many came from the city's poor underclass, ordinary people who had personally felt the heavy hand of the Kings' rule, including Samson the Strongman, the Living Locomotive, Ginny the Gaslight Girl and the Eastern Wind. Others came from more privileged backgrounds, who saw the threat the Kings posed to the rule of law, American democracy and free trade, such as adventurer-archeologist Doctor Danger and philanthropist-scholar Monsieur Noir.

To enforce their criminal empire, the Kings funded a small army of criminals both mundane and super-powered. During this time the city saw villainous plots such as Professor Plague's Miasma Machine and Lady Scarlet's Carnival of Horrors that drew on the growing powers of science and sorcery to terrorize the citizenry. Nolan's political machine installed corrupt officers who ensured that these rogues were freed as quickly as the vigilantes could put them behind bars.

But the heroes were not intimidated. By relentlessly foiling the Kings' plots and racking up costs in the form of bribes and lost contraband the heroes hit the Kings where it hurt -- their pocketbooks. By the close of the century there was a sense that the tide had turned. Nolan's men were booed in public and while the polls remained heavily rigged, the vast crowds that showed up to cheer pro-hero candidates were unnerving for the Kings. And it was then that the crime war took a supernatural turn.

The latter half 19th century had seen an explosion of interest in the occult in the West, and various Hermetic orders and spiritualists gathered in Phoenix Bay, attracted by the powerful ley line nexus under the city. At the same time, vast numbers of Chinese laborers had come to the city to work on the railroads, building the largest Chinatown in the world and bringing anti-Qing rebels and mystics in their wake. These learned ones of East and West discovered that Phoenix Bay sat atop sprawling ruins far more ancient than any human civilization and protected by mighty sorcerous wards that claimed the lives of the earliest explorers. Doctor Danger theorized that the ruins were in fact the lost city of Cibola, which Vasquez de Coronado tried and failed to find in 1540. Speculation ran rampant as to what treasures might lay buried within, with some even claiming that the Fountain of Youth was located there.

The year was 1906 when Nolan, desperate for some advantage that might get rid of these pesky vigilantes once and for all, received word that his minions had found a way past the wards of Cibola. He was last spotted getting into a carriage with other members of his posse and never seen again. Two days later, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale leveled the city and caused massive fires that left half its population homeless. The quake collapsed all tunnels and portals leading to Cibola. None of the Kings' bodies were never found, and it is assumed they ventured into, and perished, in the depths of the lost city.

Defiant in the face of disaster, Phoenix Bay's people set out to rebuild, and aid poured in from all over the nation. But with money came the puppet-strings of influence and power. The Illuminati, an ancient secret society from the era of Atlantis, had long held sway in New England; now, it extended tentacles into Phoenix Bay's halls of power. Masonic lodges sprouted up all over California, and the children of the Eye and the Pyramid installed puppets in key positions.

With Illuminati money, Phoenix Bay was rebuilt in merely 9 years as a gleaming, modern city, reborn as the Pearl of the Golden Gate and the Paris of the West. The reconstruction effort redrew city and county lines, with the southern terminus of Marlin county, portions of Alameda county, and the nearby cities of Berkley and Oakland, among others, being formally incorporated as boroughs of Phoenix Bay in 1915. Compared to the Kings whose power the heroes dismantled, the Illuminati proved far subtler masters. They allowed both criminals and heroes alike free reign of the city, preferring to remain hidden and unknown and only exerting their influence on rare occasions. Only the most veteran and well-connected figures of the underworld even suspected the mighty conspiracy that had taken root in their city.
Ysariel
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Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2016 2:14 pm

Re: The City of Phoenix Bay

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Flight of the Falcone
Prohibition & Great Depression Era


In 1922, Antonio Falcone fled to Phoenix Bay with a few trusted followers, licking his wounds after being ousted from Chicago by rival Italian-American gangs. Here he found a land of opportunity: a city awash with the wealth of the Roaring Twenties, headed by a chronically corrupt and incompetent government. The reign of the Falcone family was about to begin.

Posing as a successful businessman, fast-talking Falcone slipped into the social circle of Phoenix Bay's elite, plying the influential men of the city with drink, gifts and beautiful young women while collecting blackmail material and building connections. Mayor Willard Whatley was among those who fell under Falcone's spell. Whatley had been elected on a platform of cleaning up organized crime in the city, especially the infamous red light district called the "Barbary Coast" near the old harbor. Instead, rival criminals were driven out while Falcone's men ruled over the place as a stronghold of vice and villainy. To this day, the area is still jokingly called "Whatley's Folly".

The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl brought countless starving, jobless citizens to Phoenix Bay in search of a livelihood. Some turned to crime in desperation; others were seduced by Falcone's promises of wealth and power. Toegther they swelled his ranks by the hundreds. The 1930's saw Falcone at the height of his power, ruling over a multi-ethnic criminal empire and planning a triumphant return east to take over what had been Al Capone's turf. These were some of Phoenix Bay's darkest years, a time where tommy gun-wielding gangsters prowled with impunity in the foggy nights, where every cop was on the take and every street under Falcone's thumb.

Few were the brave souls who fought crime in those dangerous years. The city's heroes recognized that coordinated action was necessary, and recalling the Vigilance Committees who had fought crime in Phoenix Bay's earliest years, they formed the city's first premier superteam -- the Vigilance. But, though the Vigilance was able to physically defeat many of Falcone's thugs, few witnesses were willing to testify in court and many criminals escaped without so much as a slap on the wrist.

The Vigilance recognized that a change in strategy was needed. Most of Falcone's men were not able to fly, lift a car or bend steel bars; their power lay in their ability to intimidate, coerce, bribe and corrupt. Despite being unlicensed vigilantes themselves, members of the Vigilance sought help from the same Federal prosecutors and agents that had brought down Al Capone in order to bypass the city's corrupt law enforcement. Simultaneously, they launched an all-out assault on the criminals, targeting members of Falcone's inner circle in dramatic and high-profile actions that seized the public imagination. Falcone's enforcers were left tied up unconscious in front of police stations or dangling from streetlights before the very businesses they had tried to extort. Soon the eyes of the world were on Phoenix Bay, and citizens across the nation followed every twist and turn of the unfolding saga.

With hero support, Federal agents succeeded in nabbing Falcone on charges of smuggling, human trafficking and murder. The highly-publicized trials led to a massive groundswell of support for the heroes who made it possible. Pro-hero candidates won the presidential and mayoral elections of 1936 by a landslide, including the "Good Mayor" Blake Berkeley, who succeeded in cleaning up the worst excesses of the Barbary Coast, driving the gambling parlors and prostitution houses underground. Roosevelt signed into law the Hero Act of 1936, legalizing costumed crime-fighting across the nation. This close cooperation between vigilantes and law enforcement set a precedent for the superheroes of later generations.

But unlike the Kings before them, the Falcone family was never thoroughly rooted out. Despite relatively small numbers and intense competition from the Syndicate Lords, they remain a dominant force in the underworld of the city and America. It is widely believed that Antonio Falcone took the fall for his family, going to jail that his sons and daughters might continue the criminal organization he built. And if any doubt the cold-blooded ruthlessness of these gangsters, then recall that Mayor Berkeley was gunned down before City Hall in 1938, merely two years after taking office.
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