Chicago. The no man's land city. It's great skyscrapers now hollow's of their former selves, and only the inner city still showed signs of life. The dilapidated edges wreathed in shadow and every dark corner held the promise of danger. It had not always been so, it had once been the hub of development and commerce, how times had changed . . .
In the early 21st century the world had been turned upside down, magic was creeping back into existence and the creatures and beings from myths and fairy tales were becoming flesh and blood. It started with a few defective births, children with odd physical mutations, some grew to be beautiful, fair and light, others were hideous, great tusks and bulbous heads constantly set in a frown at the mistreatment of the people in the world around them.
The changes were slow at first, then an explosion of these births happened. Many blamed radiation, others thought of them as government experiments. It wasn't long before humans developed magic, real magic. Manipulation of the elements and delving into people minds; military operations across the world latched on to these individuals, their defence against the orcs and trolls which were appearing. But of course as in all things there were those who sought them out to be the aggressors. And twenty years ago it is for this reason that the Brotherhood were able to cross into our world.
A high concentration of magic users broke rank from their party and cast a spell, a big spell, one to rip open the very fabric of reality. The reasons behind why they did this are still not clear, nor are they for public record, but for anyone with a hacker like mine you can get a basic idea of events, security software of twenty years ago is nothing compared to now.
One thing is certain, for whatever reason this tear was made, no-one expected there to be something waiting on the other side.
The brotherhood is a race of insectoid monsters from a different dimension entirely to our own. The tear opened the gateway for them to break through, and for a world new to its magical capability the result was complete devastation. Chicago was overrun with monsters in a matter of hours, thousands died in less than a day. The world as one reacted to the new threat. Mages from across the world were brought in to erect a shield, a strong one. Two thousand mages stood in arms, four hundred thousand trolls, orcs, elves, human pushed back the horde to assist the mages in closing the rift.
The gap closed but the remains of a cracked Chicago was declared a neutral territory, highly secured at its perimeter should the Brotherhood return. There were some that stayed within the boundary line, a few who formed gangs to patrol the streets, and those who could not afford to move away, some that stayed became susceptible to the energy and bacterial clouds that leaked from the cracks and mutated. Those that stayed became trapped by quarantine, nothing in Chicago goes in or out without strict paperwork.
A/N: Hi guys, thanks for reading, this is the second part in the Chicago campaign played out by the RPG team, if you haven't read The Blood Seal: Chicago Part 1 then this might not make a lot of sense. I'm also not completely finished writing this story yet so there'll be a few delays between chapter uploads. A special thanks goes to Anna Lakisova (fabulous artist) who gave me permission to use the cover picture for this story. I don't own this story, the background is from Catayst Games and the main storylines are all created by our Games Master, we're just playing along.
This campaign ended up being huge, it took weeks and weeks to get through and as a result a lot of the nitty gritty details of what we did are sort of lost in time, so I've tried to fill these gaps where I can and at least provide a story that free to check out my other wors and thanks for those who have so far read my stories and provided valuable feedback!
Cheers! xxx
