Realm of Sand and Fog

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1 Venues
2 Boundaries
3 History
- 3.1 Fae History (1st draft)
4 Places
5 Characters
- 5.1 Residents
- 5.2 Frequent Visitors

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Venues

Tales from the Six Demon Bag

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Boundaries

This freehold encompasses the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara. The primary locus of the freehold is San Francisco and the Peninsula.

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History

For a history of the City of San Francisco and its environs, please see the San Francisco History Index, a very useful link site that covers local history for this area.

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Fae History (1st draft)

For the bulk of local history, the Gentry have managed to keep things very quiet. The Hedge was thick and well-patrolled, so very few Changelings managed to escape. Those that did stayed hidden, losing Wyrd over time, and staying unnoticed. The Gentry were loathe to come into the World, and they were rarely motivated to send out their servants to look for escapees that were weak and few in number. The indigenous fae and their Changelings were

At 5:12 AM on the morning of April 18, 1906, a major earthquake struck San Francisco and Northern California. As buildings collapsed from the shaking, ruptured gas lines ignited fires that would spread across the city and burn out of control for several days. With water mains out of service, the Presidio Artillery Corps attempted to contain the inferno by dynamiting blocks of buildings to create firebreaks. More than three-quarters of the city lay in ruins, including almost all of the downtown core. This destruction was not limited to the World, though, and the earthquake was felt even in the depth of Arcadia. Some Changelings took advantage of the chaos and confusion to find their way out and rather than hiding, they started to band together to form a mutually-protective society. The freehold as we know it now was founded in 1906 by Thomas Lin, about whom we will learn more later.

Rebuilding was rapid and performed on a grand scale. Rejecting calls to completely remake the street grid, San Franciscans opted for speed. Amadeo Giannini's Bank of Italy, later to become Bank of America, provided loans for many of those whose livelihoods had been devastated. The destroyed mansions of Nob Hill became grand hotels. City Hall rose once again in splendorous Beaux Arts style, and the city celebrated its rebirth at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. In ensuing years, the city solidified its standing as a financial capital; in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, not a single San Francisco-based bank failed. Indeed, it was at the height of the Great Depression that San Francisco undertook two great civil engineering projects, simultaneously constructing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, completing them in 1936 and 1937 respectively. It was in this period that the island of Alcatraz, a former military stockade, began its service as a federal maximum security prison, housing notorious inmates such as Al Capone. San Francisco later celebrated its regained grandeur with a World's Fair, the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939-1940, creating Treasure Island in the middle of the bay to house it.

During World War II, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard became a hub of activity and Fort Mason became the primary port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific theater of operations. The explosion of jobs drew many people, especially African Americans from the South, to the area. After the end of the war, many military personnel returning from service abroad and civilians who had originally come to work decided to stay. The UN Charter creating the United Nations was drafted and signed in San Francisco in 1945 and, in 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco officially ended the war with Japan.

Urban planning projects in the 1950s and 1960s saw widespread destruction and redevelopment of westside neighborhoods and the construction of new freeways, of which only a series of short segments were built before being halted by citizen-led opposition. The Transamerica Pyramid was completed in 1972, and in the 1980s the Manhattanization of San Francisco saw extensive high rise development downtown. Port activity moved to Oakland, the city began to lose industrial jobs, and San Francisco began to turn to tourism as the most important segment of its economy. The suburbs experienced rapid growth and San Francisco underwent significant demographic change, as large segments of the white population left the city, supplanted by an increasing wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America.

The strongest time for the newly formed freehold came in the mid to late 1960s, when the creative passions were at their height in the city. San Francisco was becoming a magnet for America's counterculture. Beat Generation writers fueled the San Francisco Renaissance and centered on the North Beach neighborhood in the 1950s. Hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, reaching a peak with the 1967 Summer of Love. In the 1970s, the city became a center of the gay rights movement, with the emergence of The Castro as an urban gay village. Glamour was easy to come by, and the Freehold’s members grew strong and proud, fending off the servants of the Gentry.

Some Changelings, however, were homesick for the security of their Fae existence. They made deals with the Gentry to spy on the Freehold in exchange for... power, affection, promises of repatriation, whatever they felt they needed most. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, startup companies invigorated the economy. Large numbers of entrepreneurs and computer application developers moved into the city, followed by marketing and sales professionals that changed the social landscape as once poorer neighborhoods became gentrified. The Loyalists built their strength over this time, trying at this time to weaken the resolve of the Freehold members, taking advantage of changes in the World's economy. They would manipulate mortals into actions that upset access to Hollows, that lessened the creative force in the city as a whole, and forged ties with Fetches to disrupt the lives of individual Changelings. When the bubble burst in 2001, many of these companies folded and their employees left, although high technology and entrepreneurship continued to be mainstays of the San Francisco economy,

Timing their coup with what is now called the "Dot Com Burst", Loyalist forces seized control of the Freehold, destroyed most of the Court, and announced that Sand and Fog was now a protectorate of Arcadia. The remaining members of the Court organized resistance forces, and there were lengthy and protracted skirmishes for the next five years. In 2006, a company of Changeling mercenaries calling themselves the "300" made one last blitzkrieg attack on the nearest Loyalists and Gentry outposts and Hollows. Heavy casualties were sustained on both sides, culminating in a tense treaty wherein all forces retreated to their home sides of the Hedge, lacking the strength to continue an all-out war. Since then, the Gentry are not known to have traversed the Hedge again, although it is likely that they maintain ties to their former enslaved Changelings.

Now, 2007, the city exists in a state of tension, as things are just a little bit too quiet. Are the Gentry gearing up for another attack? Why are they so interested in us, anyway? Where are the Loyalists? Are Changelings actually disappearing? Is it safe to start over?

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