A number of Backgrounds require that they be associated with a specific Area of Influence: a physical location around which these Backgrounds are centered. This is not meant to be the only area in which the Background is useful — just where it’s most powerful. The further away you go, the less effective it becomes. Someone with Contacts in Islington will still get most of the benefit if they need to search for information in Hackney, but won’t have nearly as much success in Havering or Kingston-Upon-Thames. This can also be somewhat mitigated by a good Power-Brokering roll.

The most common Areas of Influence are the 32 individual Boroughs of London; any single borough is a valid choice. If a particular borough has not been built on the grid yet (for instance, it may be a while before we get around to the far southeastern borough of Bromley), you can still select it, and will be able to exert the associated Background in the closest on-grid borough with little loss of effectiveness.

Optionally, you may choose to have multiple adjacent Areas of Influence for a single Background — applying Spies to both Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea, say. While this allows you to use the Background to full effect in more areas, it comes at the cost of an effective 1-dot reduction in power. Hence, if the above-mentioned two-borough Spies is bought to 4 dots, it will operate at an effective maximum of 3 instead. You may add more adjacent boroughs up to a maximum of 5, as long as you have effective dots to lose (a 1-dot Background can only have a single borough, a 2-dot can have 2, etc.).

As the game expands, it is likely that additional Areas of Influence will become available — Sussex (where Brighton is located), Kent (Dover), and Essex (the Channel resorts) being the most obvious. If and when these areas become available, this page will be updated and there will be a post to the in-game bulletin board: characters who wish to change the areas covered by their Backgrounds to make use of newly available areas will be able to do so.