What's All This, Then?  For those of you with little or no experience with role-playing games, click here for a little bit of explanation to bring you on board. 

Allentown via Sunnydale  Why is our game set in Allentown? Because my players wanted to create their own characters rather than play the characters from the TV show. Beginning-level characters in Sunnydale would be overshadowed by Buffy and her friends, so I decided to change the setting to something far away from Sunnydale. Since I live in Allentown, Pennsylvania and all of my players are familiar with it, I decided to set the game in a fictionalized version of my home city. Eastern Pennsylvania has a history that is both long (for the USA) and rich, and I intend to draw upon that history in our games. We can make the adventures more real by drawing upon buildings, people, and events that are real. Not every adventure will be set exclusively in Allentown. They will, however, all take place in the Lehigh Valley.

Our Series honors all of the canon of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. In other words, everything that has happened in the show is actual history within our game universe. However, with Sunnydale being so far away, none of the events of the show have had a direct effect on any of the characters in our game.

Unlike Sunnydale, Allentown in the Buffyverse has not been a haven of supernatural evil. No one has ever seen a vampire here. In spite of this, Allentown in our game is darker than it is in real life.  Our Allentown is in the Rust Belt and has been in a state of economic decline since the late 1970's. Over the last few years, the decline has accelerated. About 25% of the buildings in the downtown "retail district" are vacant.  The indigent and transient populations have swelled as they were bled off from other nearby urban areas that could no longer support them, such as Philadelphia and New York.  People on the streets look down a lot, to avoid both eye contact and the copious litter on the sidewalks. In our Buffyverse Allentown, nice folks don't like to be on the downtown streets after dark, but it's not because of walking dead.

Our Buffyverse Allentown is the Allentown that Billy Joel sang about.

In order to be true to our setting, we're starting off with very little in the way of supernatural elements. Things are beginning to take a turn toward the Mulder, though. Also, just because the basis for our setting is a real city doesn't mean we can't use artistic license. For example, Allentown is situated on a river, but it doesn't have docks. However, if we're playing an Episode and the story dictates that there should be docks, well by gum, there'll be docks -- or something real close.

So far, all of the Cast Members are students at William Allen High School. As of this writing, Faith is the Slayer in Buffy canon, so we don't have a Slayer among our cast. We do, however, have a Slayer-in-Training, Desi Stark. For reasons that are not yet completely clear, Desi has not been summoned to Sunnydale along with the rest of the potential Slayers in Season 7. Nor, to the best of our knowledge, has she been stalked by the minions of the First Evil.

Desi is well-trained for combat, but her instruction on the occult was just beginning when she lost contact with her eccentrically reclusive Watcher, Mr. Philip Glass. As a result, she may be ill-equipped to deal with the kinds of things that she and her friends are beginning to see.