Life on the Walls

Live Free or Die
-State Motto of New Hampshire

For the kindred of Castle Rock, the situation is dire.  Castle Rock is situated a mere sixty miles from the neighboring cities of Concord and Boston but it may as well lie across the ocean.  New Hampshire is a maze of deep forests, rural communities and scattered lakes and rivers.  Haunting those woods are packs of Lupines, the dread Sabbat alliance known as the Crimson Tide and stranger things still.

For the Kine, Castle Rock is a city past its prime and slowly succumbing to urban blight.  For the Kindred, it is even worse than that: Castle Rock is a cage and one entirely too full for it's size.  A city of the size of Castle Rock could normally be expected to hold fifteen or so Kindred.  Now, it is forced to provide sanctuary for approximately forty Kindred souls.  Driven from the countryside and the outlying townships of Maine and New Hampshire by the depredations of these numerous and terrible foes, the Kindred of the city pen themselves into cramped feeding grounds.  Travel by land through the dense forests and the "Iron Dark" of New England is hazardous at the best of times.  The Packs of the Crimson Tide watch highways running west towards Vermont and along the Eastern Sea Board.  Under the best of conditions, it is hazardous and those who seek shelter in Castle Rock, more often than not, find themselves unable to leave.  Gallows humor has set in among the natives and they refer to their city simply as "The Rock" in reference to the legendary Alcatraz Prison and the ambush laden roads as "Damnation Alley."

Image Credit: Francisco De Goya

A sane princedom within the Camarilla would seek to use this as pretense for drawing upon the aid of larger sect resources.  So isolated a principality would surely be forgiven for calling upon a small army of Archons for the purposes of pushing the predatory Sabbat vampires from the hills and forests of the surrounding state.

Castle Rock is not a normal principality due to the fact that it's Prince is far from normal.  The Brujah Horace Milton rules Castle Rock with an iron fist and with the blessing of his Sire, Roman Pendragon; the true power behind his throne.  Pendragon is one third of a conspiracy of British elder vampires known as the Triad in imitation of the trio of Romans who transformed a republic into an empire.  Lord Pendragon forbids travel via Pease International Airport and was responsible for the destruction of nine out of ten of all Kindred native to the state when he began his move to consolidate power in Northern New England.  Pendragon's reign over the region is undisputed and his word is law in the state at large and Castle Rock specifically.  Rather than rumors of assistance, whispers of a coming purge echo through the salons and Elysia of the city and there is a sense that the other shoe may soon drop.  Certainly, Milton the Usurper Prince has few qualms of pronouncing a sentence of final death upon those within his domain.  Thus, the Kindred of "The Rock" find themselves trapped between continental tyrants and brutal, remorseless killers; the devils they know and the devils they don't.