Web Video / Dimension 20: City Council of Darkness

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City Council of Darkness is the twenty-eighth season of Dimension 20.

The season is a humorous take on Vampire: The Masquerade. It follows a coterie of vampires who, following a disastrous near-breaking of the masquerade in San Francisco, are exiled from Vampire society in the city, and forced to establish a new Camarilla outpost in the newly mid-sized small town of Purpee, Oregon (Pop. 18,006).

Purpee at first seems like a Dying Town where nothing ever happens—businesses sit empty, their infrastructure is crumbling, and their mayor is a dog— but as time goes on, the coterie soon find themselves in a Supernatural Hotspot Town with dark secrets around every corner.

The Red Iron Coterie consists of:

• Brennan Lee Mulligan as the Storyteller
• Emily Axford as Vesper Childers, aka Bat Child, Nosferatu
• Ally Beardsley as HJ Wingstreet, Ventrue
• Brian Murphy as Mitch Frederick, aka Darkness Man, Nosferatu
• Zac Oyama as Zaeth Bondana, Brujah
• Siobhan Thompson as La Contesse Madelaine d'Artois, Toreador
• Lou Wilson as LaVonte Worthy, Ventrue

Dimension 20: City Council of Darkness contains examples of:

• Asshole Victim:
  • The first death in the season is of a tech billionaire wearing an $80,000 sweater who sociopathically comments on how people will be replaced by AI in 20 years. Needless to say, there is no mourning done after his decapitation.
  • Darkness Man and Bat Child come across a man while hunting, whose only personality traits are that he doesn't respect his wife, Beth, and loves the police. Vesper ends up draining him because the duo think he's a bad person, and their only concern afterwards is that his death will be pinned on Beth.
  • When putting up posters for Swingles Night, in an attempt to hook Beth up with someone, Mitch accidentally attracts a guy named Butty who calls him a pervert and gropes him. Mitch doesn't hesitate to drain him of all his blood. ^note Brennan notes that this result came from Mitch using Streetwise to try and get Beth to try Swingles Night, rather than Persuasion.
• All Part of the Show: A Running Gag is how the Coterie's (more specifically, LaVonte's) go-to strategy to maintain the masquerade during violence incidents of blatant vampirism is to convince any witnesses that the carnage is merely "a Banksy." Apparently this is not that uncommon, as they later find out Aaron Bow became a Vampire Hunter after losing his parents in a vampire attack that was covered up in a similar way.
• Artistic License – Martial Arts: Bigfoot, and later Vesper are constantly referred to as masters of the martial arts of “Kumite”, which is described as being very kick-heavy. Kumite is not a martial art, but is only a discipline of karate training, specifically one relating to grappling.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: A mutual example happens between the Red Iron Coterie and Cody. While the coterie has standing orders from the Camarilla to repel any werewolves in Purpee, when they discover Cody is likely a werewolf, they opt to take a softly-softly approach rather than any aggression. Cody quickly clocks they are vampires, and, though confused as to why he's not being attacked on sight, he gives the coterie valuable information on the town, making them more at ease with him. When he later meets them with Maya to share very important and personal information about themselves and the town, he also gives blood to creatly help Mitch and Vesper recover from their severe burns. This, in turn, causes the coterie to completely abandon any orders regarding werewolves and actively work against Camarilla plans to put a data center in an area critical for developing werewolves, given Cody has been literally nothing but helpful and respectful towards them.
• Been There, Shaped History: HJ and LaVonte were apparently involved in the downfall of Blockbuster. They describe their job in Purpee as a "Reverse Blockbuster" where, rather than gutting it, they need to breathe life into it.
• The Big Board: This season features a full-modeled miniature map of Purpee on the table as a frame of reference, as well as supplying the players and GM handheld pointers so that they can gesture to specific points of interest in the town.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Technically speaking the campaign is Evil Versus Evil, as the players are a group of vampires looking to take over the town of Purpee and bend it to vampiric dominion, and are wresting that control away from the antagonistic forces of the Whittaker and Douglas families. In practice, however, the Whittakers and Douglases have done so much damage to the infrastructure and livelihoods of everyone in town for short-term gains that the coterie's efforts are mostly beneficial for everyone else involved, simply because there's no point in ruling over a town that nobody wants to live in. It also helps that the coterie find themselves largely changing due to various factors their pre-Purpee lives kept stagnant, resulting in their ambitions for the town softening in turn.
• Boom Town: Discussed. In episode 3 HJ and LaVonte start discussing plans to turn Purpee into a massive, metropolitan city on the same level of significance as New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome. The rest of the Coterie (except for Madelaine) join in and start pitching their own ideas.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • This is the first season of Dimension 20 to use the Storyteller system of the World of Darkness instead of a variation Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition or Kids On Bikes, although Shriek Week used a similar homebrewed d10 system. This is also the first Intrepid Heroes season to use a system other than D&D.
  • Instead of the usual catchphrase of "Hi, Intrepid Heroes!", Murph introduces the much more extreme "Die, Intrepid Heroes!"
  • This is also the first season to use an RPG's default setting instead of Brennan creating his own, since the setting is baked heavily into the game structure itself and one of the major draws of Vampire: The Masquerade.
  • This marks the first full-length season where the Intrepid Heroes are playing unambiguous Villain Protagonists as vampires of the Masquerade who callously feed on humans and have been ordered to infiltrate and take over a human town. Though they do soften up over the course of the campaign and experience varying degrees of a Heel–Face Turn.^note The only prior seasons to feature the players as villains are the Sidequests Escape From the Bloodkeep which, as a parody of The Lord of the Rings, barely counts and also The Ravening War in which most player characters were happy to plot, scheme and murder innocents to further their goals.
  • This campaign is also far more open-ended than previous seasons. The previous campaigns all had main storylines to pull the Intrepid Heroes along a somewhat linear story towards a narrative conclusion, but this season is much more sandbox in its nature. The players have a goal and specific tasks to accomplish, but the order and how they go about doing so is entirely up to them. There is no Cosmic Deadline hovering over them to spur them into action, no MacGuffin to push the plot forward, no Big Bad whose plans they are trying to foil, and no immediate threat forcing them into action.
  • This is the first of the mainline Intrepid Heroes campaigns to not use any Battle Maps or Minis whatsoever. This is due to Vampire: The Masquerade being a much more roleplay-oriented game system than Dungeons & Dragons, and as such, it doesn't have specific tactical rules for combat like D&D (which evolved out of wargaming) does. Many previous sidequests used a modified version of Kids on Bikes where combat boils down to "roll higher than your opponent", but VtM obviously has a slightly more in-depth system.
• Bribe Backfire: When the coterie initially tries to get into Sweetie Pie's Gentlemen's Club, LaVonte offers Claude the bouncer a $100 bill to get past. Claude takes the bill and pockets it...and then still demands their IDs afterward.
  LaVonte: So that's not how this works. You're going to accept the bribe but then not fall to it?
  Claude: [shrugs] Feels OK.
• Deadly Euphemism: "Banksy" has become one as the series has progressed, particularly for messy deaths of mortals at the hands of vampires in ways that borderline breach the Masquerade.
• Democracy Is Flawed: When the Red Iron coterie vampires arrive in Purpee, they are confronted with a stagnant City Council failing to deliver on progress for the citizens it represents. The residents elected a golden retriever, Roofus, as their mayor. Roofus can't vote (even though he occupies one of five council seats), opening up a strong-arm alliance between the two Tyrannical Town Tycoon council members, Barnaby Whittaker and Eugene Douglas. Herbert Melvin, another councilman, has his head-in-the-sand and just votes with his wealthy peers, and the beleaguered city councilwoman Marisol Salmano wants to make change, but her capacity is limited, as she works two jobs as a nurse.
• Distracted by the Sexy: After Vesper made contact with a spirit at the end of episode 2, the Coterie go off to follow up on that lead at the start of episode 3... only to get sidetracked almost immediately when they come across a strip club.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Whittaker family and the Douglas family are two wealthy, politically powerful, and influential families in Purpee. The Whittakers are portrayed as white-collar, superficially left-wing, and cultured. The Douglases are portrayed as far-right, Christian nationalist farmers. The two families (or at least the older generations) despise each other. However, both families have seats on the city council and almost always vote together to advance their shared interests. It's very clearly a commentary on how the wealthy will always work together, regardless of personal enmity, to maintain their wealth and status.
• Dying Town: Very soon after arriving, it becomes immediately apparent to the coterie that Purpee is doing the municipal equivalent of bleeding out on the bathroom floor. It's a town with almost nothing going on save for the local state college (which attracts a lot of students, but they also always inevitably leave), and the town's businesses and utilities have been gradually shuttering. Not helping is that someone is deliberately making the town's infrastructure hostile to use, such as making something as simple as parking require using a particular app to pay, which is not only obtuse to use but requires intensely personal details to use for after-hours free parking (including but not limited to family history). It's later revealed that the town's state is due to the Douglas and Whittaker family doing all they can to pare it down for tax breaks and their own personal wealth, and that such actions have been happening since the town's founding.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: It is the World of Darkness after all, and allusions are made to Werewolves, Mages, Changelings, and Demons as potential threats. There have been ghosts, Bigfoot, and leprechauns found within Purpee so far.
• Feuding Families: Downplayed with the Whittakers and the Douglasses. Both are Old Money elite families who have been in Purpee for generations, and they hate each other; however, while they may argue and disagree in public, in private, they generally cooperate to advance their mutually-aligned goals. The coterie plans to exploit this enmity to make the Whittakers and Douglases play this trope straight.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Downplayed as the group are still murderous hematophagies with wildly skewed moralities on the best days, but as a group the coterie realize that unless they parley with their new neighbors, especially the supernaturally variety, their unlives in Purpee would be quickly cut short and the fact that happy, healthy, prosperous neighbors have more blood to give than the opposite.
• From New York to Nowhere The coterie is mostly comprised of daffy city slickers and socialites, with the exceptions of Mitch and Vesper, who originally hail from Omaha, NE. Rather than attempting to adapt to the Small Town Boredom of Purpee, the coterie endeavors to do their damnedest to turn the Dying Town into a Mega City.
• Fur Against Fang: The Red Iron coterie is confronted with the Camarilla vampires' hatred toward werewolves, which they discover to be completely unfounded through their positive, personal interactions with them. Cody, a Wonderful Werewolf who shepards werewolf youths through an Outcast Refuge via the Carolina Vine Trailhead, is nothing but kind and helpful to the coterie members. He explains to them that most vampires would try to kill him on sight, and this is part of why his role as a mentor to young werewolves is so critical, as the world is dangerous and unkind to them.
• Girl-on-Girl is Hot: In Episode 3, Madeline joins a stripper on stage and they perform an improvised routine clearly designed to evoke this.
• Hotter and Sexier: The Intrepid Heroes outright call this “The Horny Season” (because Vampires Are Sex Gods, as we all know) in the intro while undulating and writhing around. All except Murph who covers his eyes at the sight of his castmates attempting to be sexy. There's also a number of sex scenes in the story as part of the vampires' methods to seduce their way into power.
• Incredibly Lame Fun:
  • The college students in Purpee's idea of a good time is an activity they call "skipping the lip," which involves standing on one side of a train track, jumping to the other, then jumping back when doing a half turn. It evokes a near existential despair in Madelaine.
  • HJ and LaVonte love bookkeeping, and apparently do taxes for fun.
• Kooky Cascadia: The central premise of this season is "a troupe of six vampires are shipped off to a tiny, sleepy town in Oregon and ordered to take it over as punishment for a previous screw-up." This job also includes dealing with all the local supernatural goings-on (of which Purpee has many) and establishing Camarilla dominance over them.
• Mayor Pain: Purpee has a literal dog for a mayor (Roofus), and his position as a political figure-head makes it hard to make meaningful change in in the town.
• Mistaken for Gay: Heterosexual Life-Partners HJ And LaVonte immediately get assumed to be gay by Maya after they meet her in the town's food co-op. LaVonte is very upset by this assumption, even though he and HJ are from San Francisco, just bought a house together and have clearly just had some kind of fight.
  HJ: We have a lot of money—we're a dual-income...dual male income partnership!
  LaVonte: Now you are fucking doing it!
  HJ: I-I-That's what you would call it, right?
  LaVonte: We are business partners!
  HJ: Exactly! We're two businessmen!
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Once the Red Iron coterie realizes that their Camarilla superiors, mainly Ermine, only view them as expendable stooges to suck Purpee dry, the group effectively trashes their original Camarilla to-do list and starts a new list with projects that prioritizes the coterie's ensured survival over simple Camarilla dominance. When Ermine later returns and try to threaten the coterie in submission, they eliminate her and her enforcers, as they realize her clandestine scheme will leave them and the rest of Kindred-kind to starve.
• Named After Somebody Famous: A few of the supporting characters' names are clear references.
  • The Nosferatu Archon who accidentally gets set on fire is named Clive Tarker.
  • Brennan slips up at one point and accidentally refers to city councillor Herbert Melvin as "Herman Melville," his obvious namesake.
• Playful "Perv" Accusation: A running gag is that characters will frequently accuse Darkness Man - probably the single least-horny member of the coterie - of being a pervert. Sometimes it's playful, but other times it's a stern moral judgement.
• Polyamory: In episode 4, Madelaine inserts herself into Ana Lopez's and Cal Whittaker's engagement as a third. Mostly so she has easy access to Cal Whittaker's blood, which is close enough to noble blood that she can feed on it.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The game is run using Vampire: The Masquerade 5e, and follows most of the setting updates (The Second Inquisition makes itself known as early as episode 1), but some changes are made to better suit the table, the players, and the show format. The biggest ones are that narratively, Brujah are still allied with the Camarilla and have not defected to help form the Anarchs, and mechanically, Humanity is totally omitted.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: The entire coterie is shipped off to Purpee with a vague order to establish Camarilla dominion, in lieu of executing them all for a party at which the Masquerade was shattered, the Second Inquisition almost killed every important member of the San Francisco Camarilla, someone got Embraced, and an Archon was lit on fire.
• Sarcastic Confession: After making an Evil Lawyer Joke to Willy in episode 2, HJ and LaVonte both declare that they should be "put in the ground" if they ever become lawyers, to which Willy responds that there's "a coffin with [their] name on it." If only he knew...
• Spiked Blood: HJ and LaVonte both enjoy "blood cocaine," which appears to be cocaine mixed with blood to make it usable for Kindred.
• Supernatural Hotspot Town: In addition to the six vampires that have just moved in, Purpee also has a whole host of other mysterious creatures and goings-on, including ghosts, cryptids, and strange conspiracies. It's revealed in episode 9 that the Whittaker family is the cause of this. Whatever Wallace Whittaker did to get his family supernatural protection turned Purpee into, essentially, a sort of gravity well that draws in all kinds of supernatural weirdness.
• Take Over the City: This is, effectively, the Coterie's goal. They want to get themselves into positions of power within Purpee, and then, once they run the town, build it up into a massive, booming metropolitan city where they will have near-absolute control.
• Take That!: HJ and LaVonte decide to hold a screening of a movie at the college to attract the kind of quasi-sociopathic business major finance/tech bro audience they can work with. The movie they chose? American Psycho.
• Tech Bro: The first episode is set in San Francisco, so it comes with the territory. LaVonte and Wingstreet act more like your standard Venture Capital guys, and have a thinly veiled Sam Altman parody ("Davis Otherman") as one of the guests at their party, whose sociopathic ideas are off-putting even to the barely-human Reverend Tarker.
  Davis Otherman: I come from a place where I think that 90% of people will not be real, but will be solely digital in the next 30 years.
  Rev. Tarker That would be catastrophic... That would be catastrophic, you must be stopped!
• Vampires Own Nightclubs: In Episode 1, HJ and LaVonte are shown to be co-owners of the Red Iron Towers, which includes an industrial loft converted into a nightclub, the site of their disastrous Elysium party. It features all the familiar trappings you would expect from a hedonistic vampire party, from go-go dancers that have been given makeup deliberately designed to look like running mascara, truly copious amounts of drugs, and a giant mural on the floor worth six figures. Once the coterie relocates to Purpee, HJ and LaVonte make moves to acquire and invest in Mike's and Sweetie Pie's, the town's local biker bar and strip club.
• Vampire Variety Pack: As expected for Vampire: The Masquerade, each member of the coterie represents at least one of the Vampire clans within the Camarilla.
• Villainous Gentrification: Quickly after the coterie arrives, it's obvious that someone is turning Purpee into an unlivable hellhole through things such as dismantling the entire town's infrastructure and hiking up the prices on the local assisted living facility purely for some kind of financial gain.