Introduction
Detroit. The Motor City. Motown. The D.
This city resting on the southeastern corner of Michigan isn’t like other American cities. Although it is
over 300 years old, the city you see tonight is the remnant of a twentieth century boom town. The boom
was the result of the local invention and introduction of the automobile shortly after 1900. This important
technological development changed everything in modern society, and nowhere was the transformation
earlier or more extreme than here.
Fueled in large part by Henry Ford’s unprecedented promise of a five-dollar work day, Detroit’s
population doubled between 1910 and 1920, and then gained another 60 percent by 1930. At the outset
of the Great Depression, Detroit was the fourth largest city in America and seemed poised to go higher.
The growth slowed during the 1930s, only to quicken again during World War II until finally running out
of steam by the 1960s. After reaching the unofficial “point of no return” with the infamous race riots in
July 1967, the decline that followed lasted through the rest of the century with no end in sight yet.
Perhaps the best description of Detroit ever written is from Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s 1932 novel Journey
to the End of the Night. After seeing the devastation of World War I battlefields, the slums of Paris, and
malaria-infested African jungles, the restless narrator of Celine’s novel comes to the Motor City to work
in a Ford factory. In the Detroit chapter, in an observation yet to be improved upon, he says, “It was even
worse than everywhere else.” And this was in the boom-time 1920s, when Detroit was perhaps at its peak.
It has been called everything from “the worst city in America” to “the buckle of the rust belt” to “the
murder capitol”. But even these titles are not adequate to describe the Detroit of Eyes That Burn. Like
parasites, or an incurable disease which festers on the spirit of the inhabitants, the undead prey upon the
bodies and souls of the people here too. Detroit has been on the battlefront between the Camarilla and
the Sabbat for decades. Waves of crime, racial unrest, and an annual tradition of senseless violence and
destruction have been fed by, and conceal the ravages of predators in numbers far out of line from what
the Camarilla elsewhere would consider prudent.
And even that is not the worst of it. Because no matter how you may deny it, or what lies you tell
yourself, you are one of the parasites. Your very presence is another tumor on the city. And though
you may have escaped a natural death, you are now an eternal outsider, an abomination and a predator.
You are also the target of others, a playing piece in a game of monsters. And you will never escape
either the game, or the battle inside yourself.
What Detroit by Night is not:
This collection of wikipedia pages is not a history of the real Detroit nor an accurate guidebook for
masochistic tourists. It is also not meant to be another canonical White Wolf “By Night” book. As any
present or past player should know, Eyes That Burn is its own world. We players of this game determine
what goes in here, and we alone. If you want to add something that you think would fit the spirit of
Eyes That Burn, go ahead and do it. If the rest of us really think something needs to be changed here, we
will let you know about it.
What Detroit by Night is:
This is an open-ended encyclopedia of the setting of Eyes That Burn made by, and for the players. As the
GM, my job is to lay out the format and contribute history. The list of entries that follow are incomplete
or just have a name. Since this all primarily for you, it is up to you to fill in the blanks. Having said that,
there will be some details that your character would have no way of knowing, even if they could be called
‘common knowledge’. There will also be things that only you would know, or have been lost to time but
are recorded here for posterity, or just because they’re cool.
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