Cambridge

To the north and west of Boston, separated from the city proper by the intervening Charles River, lies the highly educated liberal bastion of Cambridge. In addition to Harvard and MIT, Cambridge is home to a number of Buddhist monasteries, New Age bookstores, alternative religious centers and similar places of importance to the area’s Awakened community. The prevailing atmosphere is one of unbridled intellectual exploration, and many who find themselves in Cambridge for school find that they like it enough to stay.

Treaty Zone: Manray

If any place could be considered to be a “watering hole” for Boston’s (or, more accurately, Cambridge’s) supernatural community, it would be the black-painted dance club and bar called Manray. This isn’t where mages go to do business (that would be the Emerald Scroll, in Roxbury); this is where they go to cut loose with other like-minded Awakened folks. The club’s halls, bars and dance floors have been the setting for many meetings between those Twilight people who exist neither as part of humanity nor removed from it. The club’s Sleeper habitués are so colorful, so diverse and so jaded that no mere oddity of appearance is likely to garner attention of any sort. Suit drinks with Mohawk, straightedge chats with burnout and witch chats with tech-geek, all with equal ease. A mage needing to contact another mage — or possibly even a member of one of Boston’s other supernatural communities — could do so at Manray in relative safety. The place is well known for its reputation as neutral territory, and individuals come here from as far away as Connecticut and Maine to conduct diplomatic missions in the environs of the club.

Manray’s unspoken rules are simple and quickly passed around by word of mouth: No killing for any reason. No fighting for any reason. No magic for any reason. The rules, enforced if necessary by the cabals that frequent the place, serve to keep everyone on an equal footing, and are even acknowledged (most of the time) by Harvard’s Seers of the Throne. Mages have been known to interpret the no magic rule as meaning no vulgar magic, but even in those cases they’ll use spells typically only for communicating with associates across the crowded bar or similar non-hostile purposes. Anything else endangers the club’s value as a diplomatic resource between the city’s supernatural factions, and that would be a loss all the way around.

The truce zone is only official inside Manray itself, but extends, unofficially, for a radius of “a few blocks,” however that gets defined. The neighborhood outside the bar is located between MIT and Harvard and largely consists of housing for students of those two universities.

The area outside the truce zone, especially the grungier section west of Massachusetts Avenue, has seen some ugly encounters, but police patrolling the area between Harvard and MIT are somewhat more accustomed to seeing odd sights than their counterparts in, say, Peoria or Duluth.

Sanctum: The Fortress

The SMG cabal maintains a sanctum, a small brownstone, on the MIT campus.

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