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Welcome to Alchemy - Washington, D.C.

The Mall

“ Folklore is the body of expressive culture , including tales , music , dance , legends , oral history , proverbs , jokes , popular beliefs , customs, material culture , and so forth, common to a particular population, comprising the traditions (including oral traditions ) of that culture, subculture , or group . It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared.” – Wikipedia

And folklore is not simply the study of some body of beliefs in some distant culture. It's the idea that the cops set a “real” speed limit and never tell us what it is. It's the idea that McDonalds burgers are 80% soy and 20% medical research lab leavings. The jokes we tell, the rumors we whisper, the things we know are out there, even if the party line insists they are not. We all know its true. We all know that more happens in this world than anyone will admit. And we all fear speaking of what we know, an undercurrent of our own folklore that is suppressed by our own official culture.

“ Urban legends are a kind of folklore consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them (see rumor ). The term is often used with a meaning similar to the expression "apocryphal story." Urban legends are not necessarily untrue, but they are often false, distorted, exaggerated, or sensationalized. Despite the name, urban legends do not necessarily take place in an urban setting. The name is designed to differentiate them from traditional folklore in preindustrial times.

Urban legends are sometimes repeated in news stories and, in recent years, distributed by e-mail . People frequently say such tales happened to a "friend of a friend"—so often, in fact, that " friend of a friend ", or "FOAF", has become a commonly used term for this sort of story. In the Netherlands , a story about monkey meat gave rise to the term "broodjeaapverhalen" (i.e. monkey sandwich stories ).

Some urban legends have survived a very long time, evolving only slightly over the years, as in the case of the story of a woman killed by spiders nesting in her elaborate hairdo. Others are new and reflect modern circumstances, like the story of people being anaesthetized and waking up minus a kidney surgically removed for transplant . Urban legends often are born of fears and insecurities, or specifically designed to prey on such concerns.” – Wikipedia

Modern Folklore

This is the central idea behind Alchemy. The beliefs we've carried with us as a culture for centuries do not simply fade because times change. They may shift, they may slide, but they still exist. They exist because, at their heart, so many of them contain the truth, or at least, -a- truth. Certainly, its usually a friend of a friend that saw something huge and furry running through the park. It was a cousin's coworker that dated the guy with the blood fetish. But sometimes… sometimes that friend of a friend is you. And sometimes that guy with the blood fetish is you as well.

Welcome to the weirdest city in the United States : Welcome to Washington DC and all the unspoken of and fringe strangeness that exists here. Welcome to Alchemy.

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Available Races

Characters on Alchemy may belong to one of four general racial types. These types are:

Mundane: Humans, plain and simple. Well, not so simple if you've paid attention to the wide variety that is humanity, but still…

Magi: Humans with one or more preternatural abilities. This includes psychics, wizards, necromancers, elementalists, and more.

Skinshifters: People that can take the form of beasts, sometimes with a few additional abilities. Even this is broken down into various types, both by breed and method.

Vampires: A catch all term for creatures which appear human, but are not, which feed on some aspect of humans. Most of them are dead or changed humans, but not all.

Remember, these are races available for player use. There are other things out there, perhaps more than dreamt of in your philosophy.