Overview

The Templar got a text and checked his phone. No one thought anything of it. We were meeting the Archbishop, and he was standing against the back wall like a beautiful statue. No one paid him much mind. He was a goddamned glorified bodyguard, right?

So anyway, guy gets a text. The next thing we know, the Archbishop’s head is rolling across the marble floor, and his body turned to ash.

"What did we do? Bitch, we ran! That pretty motherfucker was a Templar for a reason!"

– Brian O’Malley; Brujah Antitribu and Former Priest of the West Baltimore Pack

It was 2012 when everything changed.

Situated between the Washington DC, Philadelphia, and New York, Baltimore was a veritable playground for Sabbat packs cutting their teeth on the Final Nights, and learning what it could be to be True Sabbat. 

Crime rates increase and government corruption was at an all-time high. It was incredibly easy for them to keep their foothold, and other than the neighborhoods of Little Italy (A stronghold for the Giovanni since the early 1900s) and The Block (A Place Only a Setite Could Love), the city itself was chaos. Even the nice little touristy places–Federal Hill, Fells Point, Hampden–were places people just did not walk alone late at night.

After two-or-three in the morning, even the cops didn’t pay the goings on much mind. It was far too dangerous to do so.

Then it started happening. 

One day, an abandoned warehouse went up in flames in Pigtown. Mortal firefighters attempted to keep the fire contained to save the rest of the Historic District from going up in flames. They succeeded, but the damage to the 19th Century Warehouse was almost complete. When the building was demolished for safety purposes a few weeks later, they learned that someone had been living there.

The residents of the neighborhood told the investigators that there were squatters there occasionally, and they caused a good deal of trouble late into the night. That the building was gone was a godsend. Most residents were performatively grief-stricken that there may have been people who perished.

A few weeks after the fire, the roof of the old Westport BG&E Building collapsed. A massive building that had been abandoned for years and not kept up properly, the roof caving in was only in shock in that it took so long to happen. 

Still, people nearby swore that when it happened, they heard screams and then suddenly nothing. 

When investigated, no human remains were found.

Things like that happened for weeks in Baltimore City. Nothing out of the ordinary in a city so corrupt that even the infrastructure was crumbling. While it looked like just another sign of urban decay, the Sabbat knew better.

They were being slowly exterminated.

Amongst the Kindred of Baltimore, June 6, 2012 is known as ‘The Night Of Blood’. In reality, the kine barely noticed a difference. It was the night that the Camarilla showed up in force and swept up enough of the Sabbat remnants that they were able to take the City. 

The Independent Clans in Little Italy and on The Block?  They did little to stop the Camarilla from coming into the city. On paper, they stayed neutral, though both groups agree that the Camarilla are better for the tourist business as well as the vice-trades.

In reality, both groups helped with the incursion as a means of protecting family and cult, as the Sabbat had begun encroaching on their agreed upon territories. When one of the Giovanni Cousins was dumped on the doorstep of the Giovanni Donna by a Sabbat Ductus, close enough to death that his only saving grace was the Embrace, it became a matter of survival.

When one of the cult’s sacred brothels was desecrated by a frenzying Gangrel, the Setites threw their lot where they’d lose the least.

The two groups couldn’t take the Sabbat on their own, but the Camarilla could.

For ten years, the Independent Clans and the Camarilla have been waging a sort of ‘Cold War’ in their tenuous peace. The one thing that keeps them together is the Treaty of Baltimore and the fact that they are smack in between two Sabbat Territories, with small splinter groups still hiding in and around the city.

Between the threats from without and the threats from within, Baltimore is a powder-keg.

Whether it will explode is not a matter of ‘if’...

But of ‘When’.