Within the Heart of The American Nightmare: Castle Rock at a Glance

Ne Desit Virtus (Let Valor Not Fail)
-Castle Rock City Motto

Castle Rock is a fictional city located within Rockingham County, New Hampshire.  It occupies a peninsular sliver of the Atlantic Sea Board that keeps the state from being a landlocked cousin to Vermont.  Over the course of it's history it grew up to swallow and eventually incorporate the real-world town of Portsmouth.  The world has changed a lot in the years between this writing and the publication of Dark Colony.  Much attention has been drawn to the plight of the rust belt states in the days since the last US presidential election.  What was once the paradise for the blue-collar worker has been ravaged by the twin forces of financialization and deindustrialization.  Exacerbated by the loss of stable employment and destitution of it's outer regions, Castle Rock hangs on by her fingernails and a few of her still viable industries.  A historic and prosperous core hides vast barrens beset by all of the social ills of our age.

Image Credit: CCP

Castle Rock came to prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  What started as a port town that served as a munitions manufacturing hub during the American Civil War quickly spread west to encircle a number of nearby communities.  Becoming a major trade hub with Europe and later a supplier of arms and ammunition during both world wars.  Associated industries soon cropped up around Castle Rock and Portsmouth; foundries and gun powder production facilities that supported both the burgeoning military arms industry and the Portsmouth Naval Yard located on an island within the estuary of the Piscataqua River while earning her the sobriquet of "Bomb City" as it swelled to a peak of two-million inhabitants during the golden age of capitalism that lasted from between the end of World War II and the 1970s.  Since that time, she has lost nearly a quarter of her population as the young and the lucky flee for greener pastures.

The downfall of Castle Rock began slowly but inexorably in the 1970s.  Deindustrialization stripped many of the attendant industries as they were off-shored to Asia, Central and South America.  In the gaps, gang crime, destitution and chemical dependency crept in.  Large swathes of the city are now home to decaying buildings that were once thriving warehouses and textile mills during the industrial revolution.  Illicit businesses, opioid pills and redrum heroin crept in to fill the gaps and now there are two Castle Rocks: The prosperous, historic Castle Rock that swallowed historic Portsmouth and still appears to the tourist as a quaint New England Factory-and-Fishing town situated next to a humming financial center and the crumbling, empty expanse of industrial properties and tenements that surrounds it.  One of the jewels of New England slowly loses it's luster.

This is Castle Rock as we find it in the World of Darkness of 2017.