As the victims literally trip themselves to death, the sturdier Nosferatu feed on them. The doped-up Nosferatu then volunteer for the most dangerous War Parties. The victims are used as fertilizer for the gardens.

THE UNDERGROUND

See you hide behind the door
Live in holes and disused shafts.
        – Joy Division, “Ice Age”

Just as the Ventrue have erected glass and steel spires to the heavens and the Toreador have encrusted the middle zone with frescoes, bas-reliefs and gargoyles, so the Nosferatu have carved their own dark kingdoms among the bowels of humanity’s works.

Most cities of the Gothic-Punk world have extensive underground areas beneath their streets. The Nosferatu have orchestrated the creation of these areas over centuries, and even the other vampire clans rarely realize the enormity of these subterranean realms. Some old cities have networks of catacombs and crypts dating back to the mystery cults of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the Nosferatu often founded (and even led, via Obfuscate) such cults, using the subversives

attracted to them as cheap labor to build networks of secret chambers and the like.

The Nosferatu continually expand these underground areas. Using their ghouls on the city council, they propose project after project, excavation after excavation. Under the guise of “urban renewal,” they oversee layer after layer of subterranean construction – a subway track here, a sewer line here, an underground plaza there. A few convenient accidents then convince the city to abandon the projects in mid-construction, leaving vast and desolate holes under the city. Into these areas the Nosferatu crawl.

Nosferatu usually have mortal pawns in the construction and maintenance industries; these servants keep the cities growing, evolving and changing. Just as a forest continually grows, dies and regrows over itself, so do cities inhabited by the Nosferatu continually reconstruct themselves.

Houses are built on top of abandoned cellars, are lived in and are torn down. Tenements are razed and buried under new tenements. Malls are built and maintenance tunnels dug, and then the malls suddenly go bankrupt and close. The surface of the city is the tip of a vast infrastructural iceberg – and only the Nosferatu know what’s down there.

Of course, certain secret places must be constructed by the Nosferatu themselves. In this area they excel. Visitors to a Nosferatu labyrinth are often awestruck as they splash