After the Punic Wars in the third century BC, Rome had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula and the Lusitanian army had been driven to the brink of defeat. After promising peace, Roman Consul Servius Sulpicius Galba betrayed the Lusitanians and killed many of them in a bloody massacre. Among the few who escaped was their leader, Viriathus. Viriathus organized a resistance force and drove the Romans back to regain control of the peninsula. Lusitan was overjoyed. From humble origins and often called barbarians, they had held their own against the Roman legions.

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What more perfect environment could there be for the nocturnal Kindred than the glorious city of New Orleans? It is a place—perhaps the only place—that fully embodies not only the feel but the very essence of what it is to be damned to darkness. Even the paradox of un-life itself is mirrored in every contradictory facet of this roiling city that is at once gaudy and genteel, pious and perfidious, daring and discreet. Here, in the bloated belly of the Deep South, the wine flows, the dice roll and the pleasures come slow and steady as molasses. Nothing is difficult here, unless it has to be, and yet nothing is free, either.

Nothing is ever free.

Some readers might think they are familiar with such a place. Some might even have been there, a fair number on more than one occasion. But the New Orleans you think you know, though it seems to be the city of which is spoken here, is not the New Orleans of a modern-gothic world. No, the New Orleans of the World of Darkness is a significantly darker place, filled with more people, more crime, more vice, more wine, more desire, more despair — more everything than its real-world counterpart. This is where it all hangs out, for both Kindred and kine, where dreams intercourse with reality, begetting nightmares most unreal — where even the dead must toss in endless, fitful sleep.