Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Franklin (Port Fontaine Campaign Setting)

Franklin is the largest neighborhood in Port Fontaine. With a population of nearly 6 million individuals, it is a sprawling neighborhood that runs from Ulton all the way to the city limits in the north. The western edge of the neighborhood stops abruptly at Corsair Street (aka 3rd Street), and the eastern edge runs right up into the coastline with the Atlantic. The denser urban core of Franklin (the edge of the burrough that presses up against New Hyperia, Dexton Reach, and Greenlight) has multi-story apartment complexes and condos that gradually shrink in height the further you get towards the edge of the burrough. There are even single family houses along the outer edges, making mini-suburbs in the periphery of the massive burrough.



Franklin is a heavily developed residential neighborhood that sprawls. There are light commercial areas and shopping malls and other attractions, but this neighborhood has always been the home for most of the folks who work in Greenlight, City Center, and Dexton Reach, (New Hyperia was a housing area for Greenlight, but that changed at the turn of the century, and Callow’s Field has always had a reputation for crime and other undesirable elements that kept people away). Most of the schools in Port Fontaine are in Franklin, and there are a few attractions that you won’t find anywhere else in the city.


There are nearly 800,000 students that use the Franklin neighborhood schools, and all of them start their day roughly the same way. A mass transit system designed by the Damascus company has transit hubs in every section of the neighborhood, and ferries children from their homes safely to school and back again every day. The system is free for students and district employees. Using a maglev system, the Franklin Educational Transit Network is quiet, accident free, and safe for getting kids from here to there. In the summer it’s used as a transportation hub to get students around the city to various attractions and museums in the burrough. It also connects to the hubs to the Reach, City Center, New Hyperia, and Greenlight.


Franklin (named after the founding father) has always been a pleasant place to live. Not as affluent as Corsair Point to the West, but home to a strong middle class, Franklin has grown as the city’s needs have shaped it over the past 150 years. What started out as large apartment complexes and multi-storey projects eventually gave way to smaller rows of compact homes with tiny yards. The streets are robust, designed to handle buses, trolleys and other forms of mass transit, but with enough space to accommodate the driving population as well.


Life in the Burrough


Franklin is an interesting dichotomy compared to the other neighborhoods. It has a massive population, but most of them work in other burroughs. They provide most of the workforce for the Damascus Company factories in the north end of Greenlight, and they work in all but the highest levels of most of the companies in the Dexton Reach. This means that for the most part, a majority of the burrough is empty of adults during the day shift for most jobs. The notable exceptions are of course the educational staff at the nearly thousand schools in the burrough, and the people who work in the commercial areas that support the huge population.


This does mean that for at least a few hours every day, there is a large chunk of school aged kids without meaningful supervision. Younger children are usually latch keyed, with the schools having active programs up until the early evening (including an evening meal). Middle and High school aged kids have a wealth of afterschool programs, clubs, and other activities to engage with, but this isn’t something that all of them participate in.


In many other regards, Franklin is the archetypical American dream. Two parent nuclear families raising their kids in a sheltered environment. The thing that really separates Franklin from other burroughs is that it is fairly homogenized. These are residents that have bought into the American ideas and ways of life and identify more as Americans than they do as people from someplace else that live in America.


High Median income, disposable wealth, and high property values make Franklin a socially upward trending locale. Things have been rising since the 1980s, and are continuing on that same trend line despite economic downturns in the rest of the country. The local economy seems to be robust enough to weather the storm, so far.


Because of the population, there are a few mutants, metahumans, and other super powered individuals living in Franklin. Most try to keep a low profile, because they don’t want the troubles and crises of a powered life intruding on the low key nature of most of their neighbors. There are a few exceptions, considered hot spots by the locals.


Points of Interest



The Damascus Zoo


The Damascus Wildlife Park and Zoo is the largest facility of its kind in New England. A sprawling zoological and conservation effort is centered near the heart of Franklin, and it has millions of visitors every year. The current big push has been the recuperation and rejuvenation of a troop of Gorillas that were rescued from a poaching operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Park’s primatologists and zoologists have been working on rehabilitating the troop since 2016 as a prelude to reintroducing them into the wild.



Jellico Field


The home of the Port Fontaine Warriors. Jellico Field is one of the largest sporting complexes in the US, with seating for nearly 105,000 people. It also has the attached Jellico Field House for The Port Fontaine Lights, (NBA Team). The Jellico Field Annex also houses the Port Fontaine Seawall, (MLB team). Together, the three teams share an impressive space in the eastern half of Franklin and almost always have packed houses during the various seasons.



Vine Street Social Club


Vine Street Social Club is one of the locally designated hot spots. It’s owned by a black sheep member of the Damascus clan who wants nothing to do with his family business. He’s sworn off the family trade and instead opened a social club that caters to Metahumans (and the few Mutants that live in Franklin). They attract gawkers of their own, and in turn that pulls more cash into the club.


Port Fontaine Cemetery


The largest cemetery in Port Fontaine, the Cemetery is a sprawling complex of headstones, mausoleums and crypts dating back to the city’s founding in the 1700s. In fact, Franklin was originally conceived as a funerary district, but the need for housing for the living outstripped other concerns. The Cemetery still hasn’t been filled after nearly three hundred years of continuous operation. Even the very wealthy citizens of Corsair Point inter their dead within old family crypts within.



The House of Storm and Sorrow


Port Fontaine’s original haunted house, the House of Storm and Sorrow (more properly the Wintercrest estate) has stood in mute testimony of some horrible event that happened during the war of 1812. Legend says that during the winter of 1814 a British raider landed along the coast and attacked Port Fontaine. The American troops defending the coast stopped the invasion, but something happened at the home of a prominent local family, the Wintercrests. No one is sure entirely what happened, but the entire family, and the crew of three British vessels were found dead around the ruins of the burnt out house. The last surviving Wintercrest (Wintering in Boston at the time) rebuilt the house, but it’s been a haunted ruin ever since, with ghost sightings and paranormal phenomena extremely common in the area.



Corsair Street



The real estate that sits across the street from the marbled wall that surrounds Corsair point is without exception a finely manicured lawn. The denizens of Corsair Point have used every legal (and possibly some illegal ones) strategy to keep the street from being developed in any capacity. They want nothing to intrude on their personal domains, and their continued oversight of no development of Corsair Street is another sign of their collective power.

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