Chinatown

Since 1870, Boston’s Chinatown has been the first home for many Chinese immigrants. Boston’s population of Chinese immigrants is relatively small and not particularly well connected; consequently, Boston’s Chinatown, unlike that of many American cities, is far from being a tourist attraction. On the contrary, this neighborhood has been one of the city’s problem areas for decades, the center of much of the city’s sex trade and gang violence. Since the ’80s, however, efforts to reclaim “the Combat Zone” have been making headway, and Chinatown has benefited from that immeasurably. But with the impact of the Combat Zone waning, the business sector is now looking at Chinatown with a hungry eye. Chinese buildings and businesses are now being bought by developers and torn down to make way for upscale restaurants and hotels, and the Chinese who have lived in the neighborhood all their lives are being forced to leave the city for suburbs with smaller Chinese communities.

Unknown Demesne: The Combat Zone

In the 1970s, an urban blight seeped through Boston and grabbed a firm hold on several square blocks of the downtown area, most of which were in Boston’s Chinatown. Only the Glass Slipper, a strip club, and a handful of adult bookstores prospered at the time; most other businesses were forced out of the neighborhood (if not out of business altogether) by the high crime rate and the neighborhood’s expedited decay. Drug dealing, prostitution, gang violence and other sorts of violent crime were both widespread and blatant.

For many young mages, the Combat Zone was a thrill ride or, perhaps, a game of chance. Paradoxes, it was noted, were rare in the Combat Zone. It was clearly a Demesne, but no one could determine its exact type, the realm or realms from which it drew its power. Likewise, the soul stones that formed it could not be found, leading some to believe that the place was a naturally occurring Demesne. Many young mages took the ambiance of lawlessness as an open invitation to vigilantism or just an excuse to let off steam. Sometimes these mages’ efforts were directed at each other, but more often they were directed at criminals who mistook the mages for easy targets.

Eventually, this vigilantism attracted the attention of St. Michael’s Promise, a cabal of fundamentalist Catholic Banishers who started turning up to ambush and kill mages who had the temerity to use magic openly.

Although some younger mages continue the tradition of performing brazen magic here, the neighborhood has lost the post-apocalyptic feel that made “patrolling the Zone” a ritual of mage-hood throughout the ’70s and ’80s; but the presence of the Banishers makes the Combat Zone more dangerous now than it was in decades past.