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This was a campaign background I used for several years, with (first edition) Fantasy Hero.
Aegis is the city built on the source of all magic. Eight hundred years ago, the vampires gathered together a coalition of the other Hellspawn and fought for citizenship. They won, and now Aegis is the only city in the world (possibly the universe) where you pay to be Undead. The vampires are part of the ruling clique, and the other Eldritch, Faerie, and Hellspawn are also equal citizens (making up about 40% of the city's population).
(A new PDF of the player information is here)
The PCs live there. And they've just been hired by the new Lord Aminon, who's hoping to rebuild the family name.
It won't be easy -- the old lord sat up at his funeral and mouthed an Omaki curse. That points to some powerful foes for the new lord. And in the background, as always, the vampires are plotting...
Where did this come from?
Thousands of years in the future, there was a medieval theme park -- kind of DisneyPlanet. Unicorns, dragons, elves, and so on had all been biologically engineered and placed there. And when magic returned to the universe, that's where it happened.
The galactic commonwealth immediately quarantined it, leaving the poor sods to survive as best they could. Well, it turned out that magic was inhibited by the presence of iron -- so they slammed a nickel-iron asteroid into the gateway where magic was erupting. (That'll teach'em!)
But the magic continued to leak out, just in a more controllable fashion. And now, thousands of years after that, most of the world doesn't even remember their spacefaring past. They've got bigger problems to consider...like what happens when something lets loose the things on the other side of the Gate.
The Aegis campaign grew from a discussion with James Nicoll about blood-based economies. It kind of got out of hand. I have about thirty pages of background for the players (and it still doesn't cover the secret stuff that only the elves know).
Anyway, it's big. And I haven't fully converted it to HTML yet. But if you're interested, you can download the huge PDF file (about 435K).
Heh. I just had this adventure idea. See, vampires from other lands, freshly minted (as it were) would have heard of Aegis, and would probably want to go there. A wise vampire would send an emissary and dicker, making the relevant payments. A not-so-wise or desperate vampire would just go, hoping to establish himself/herself as a citizen.
But the vampires get one or two of these a year. And they hunt them down and kill them. PCs might get to be the human half involved in this (vampires wouldn't want them to actually see the killing, since that would teach them about vampires). I think it might be interesting to play.
In fact, I've just started exactly this campaign, and you can read about the first session, Job Interview with a Vampire. (Hey, I had to use the title.)
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