Vampire the Masquerade: Endless Night
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Vampire the Masquerade: Endless Night

A Vampire the Masquerade RPG set in modern day in the fictional metropolis of December City, Virginia.
 
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 A Brief History of December City

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Margifish
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Join date : 2015-06-26
Age : 44
Location : North Carolina

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PostSubject: A Brief History of December City   A Brief History of December City EmptyMon Jun 18, 2018 4:39 pm

December City began as a small trading post in 1762; it's prime location on the Virginia coast and reasonable proximity to other settlements making it inevitable that a town and then eventually a city would form around that original, humble establishment. The founder of the city proper was a wealthy German businessman named Josef Dassinger whose original intention was to name it after himself. However, the clerk drawing up the charter in 1804 misheard the name as 'December', and having a sense of humor he allowed the mistake to become the newborn city's official moniker.

Commerce and industry remained the beating heart of December; the city growing wealthy long before the waterfronts, much like Virginia Beach eighty miles to the south, were developed with an eye for resorts and idle playgrounds for society's elite. This trend towards creating places of spectacle and leisure culminated in 1901 when a Hungarian entrepreneur named István Mészáros purchased the island sitting in the bay just offshore the city; renaming it Sarkany ('Dragon' in Hungarian) and setting about creating a permanent amusement park in the vein of Coney Island and other such parks of the time...called The Menagerie.

Starting around 1910 the city's favorable climate and fresh sea air made it a desirable location to treat the sufferers of long-term illnesses and several sanatoria were built as a result; both the sanitarium health resorts for the wealthy as well as the far less comfortable sanatoriums designed for the common folk. The city saw an expansion of industrial plants when the country entered World War 2 in 1941 but these remained restricted to the outskirts of the city and it remained more known for it's lovely beaches, hotels and famous island park than it did for its contributions to the war effort...including the sanatoria. These lasted until the late forties; the discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin (the first cure for tuberculosis) in 1943 eventually making the facilities obsolete. The last sanitorium in December City closed in 1948 as a medical facility but was re-purposed and reopened two years later as an art museum. The more luxurious sanitariums remained operational even as they were converted into ordinary resort destinations that still catered to the upper classes who could afford to stay there.

From the 1950s on fishing and the railroads became December's main sources of income, despite an economic slump during the Vietnam War that it finally fully emerged from by 1976. It's status as a port helped it survive, but the explosion of modern tourism caused an economic boom for the city beginning in the early eighties and only growing through to modern day...a virtual horde of hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs springing up to pepper the landscape.

Today December rivals Virginia Beach as a travel destination in the state, drawing everyone from businessmen to beachcombers to art lovers to history buffs...the glitter and polish of the city shining from it's center to the coast and concealing the dirtier, poorer sections on the inner fringes.

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