London is a huge city, yes — both in population and in area. It contains everything from towering skyscrapers to tranquil forests within its boundaries, and just about anything you care to look for, you can find somewhere in its thirty-two boroughs. But London is also a huge city in a comparatively small country. England and Scotland together are about the size of the state of Louisiana. You can drive from London to Inverness in about ten hours, and from London to Paris in about six. Almost anywhere in mainland Europe, let alone the British Isles, is a reasonable and practical destination for a weekend getaway.

There’s a lot to see and do within range of the city and lots of opportunities for RP, and we don’t want to close off those avenues unnecessarily. We fully intend to have more of England than London itself in game — eventually, or so we hope, characters will be able to visit Brighton, the Cotswolds, Cornwall, Nottingham, Wales, and other areas of England on the main grid– so it would be a little weird to forbid players from going there IC until then. At the same time, the game is about London, not about Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, and so on, and it’s important that we keep the focus on the city itself — that’s already a lot to keep track of, after all.

For this reason, while you are free to have your characters travel outside the city of London proper without needing to check in with staff first, we have adopted the following guidelines for doing so, in addition to the standard Storytelling guidelines:

• Check the in-game IC news bulletin boards before you go; if there have been any significant developments that are a major change from the real world, they’ll be posted there.
• Avoid interacting with organized supernatural hierarchies when visiting. If you want to have your Vampire characters spend the weekend in Paris, fantastic! Just don’t get entangled with the Camarilla — beyond pro forma notification of them that you’re visiting — while you’re there.
• Ideally, the things you do outside London should point back toward London. If you travel to Scotland to do some research into a problem you’re facing, what you find out over the course of that story should generally result in you going back to London armed with new information, rather than staying in Scotland for an extended period.
• Don’t make major changes to the place you’re visiting. To paraphrase Storytelling, it’s fine to go to Paris and burn down someone’s house. It’s not fine to go to Paris and burn down the 9th arrondissement.
• When establishing in-game facts about your destination, keep them relatively small-scale. Finding a barrow somewhere in the Yorkshire that has some sort of horrible creature within isn’t an issue, but establishing that there are Black Spiral Dancers running wild across the whole area and savaging American tourists is too far.
• Once you get back, let staff know where you went and what you did when you were there! It’ll help us keep track of the goings-on in-game, it’ll allow us to make use of what you did in future plot developments, and it’ll help point us toward what areas should be high priority for the future. If we’re trying to decide between two areas and one of them has had a lot of interest already, that’ll be a strong influence on our decision-making process.

As always, if you want to go beyond any of these guidelines, talk to staff about what you have in mind, and we’ll see if we can find a way to make it work.