Welcome to the City of Veils: Meridian Protocol!
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Baltimore wears its nights like a second skin—harbour fog, sirens in the distance, the soft thrum of trains under cracked brick. Something new rides that darkness. Whispers say a detective’s blood carries a god’s trace, a fleeting spark that makes monsters more than what they are. At the center is Det. Catriona “Cat” Fraser, youngest detective in BPD history and the unwilling fulcrum of a secret economy. She doesn’t know why courts, covens, and syndicates are suddenly tracing routes through rowhouse mazes and along the Jones Falls. She doesn’t know why the morgue lights hum a half-note lower when she walks in. She only knows the bodies are stacking up, the stories don’t agree, and too many people seem suddenly stronger, faster, hungrier than they should be.
The Meridian Commission—an agency that keeps the human and the hidden from tearing each other apart—has moved in quietly, badges tucked behind bureaucratic smiles. The city can feel it: a pressure change before a storm.
This is a story about power as addiction and the markets that grow around it. About the uneasy arithmetic of secrecy and safety when the press is at the door, when a witness asks for protection you can’t guarantee, when an ally disappears with a cooler you thought you’d locked. It’s about the people who choose to stay in the city anyway—Meridian specialists, cops and medics, fixers and reporters, envoys who pass for human in daylight—because if they leave, someone else will write the ending.
City of Veils: Meridian Protocol is a collaborative writing game: fast-paced, character-driven, and built for writers who like to push scenes forward together. No dice. If you want to make hard choices with quiet aftermaths, to chase leads through tunnels and harbour lights - to test loyalty against survival and watch the cost land—step in. Bring a voice with edges. Bring a character who can stand a little salt in the wound. The city’s awake. Who will you become when power is for sale by the vial?