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Madtown by Night is undergoing a major continuity and presentation overhaul. Revised canon, legacy material, and chronicle-specific material may currently appear beside one another. Check each page's status notice before treating it as current setting canon. See Canon and Continuity for details.
Learn what the setting is, what makes Madison dangerous, and where to begin without reading the entire archive.
Find event information, player guidance, pre-generated characters, and handouts for this year's games.
Explore player-safe history, factions, places, and character resources. Pages containing hidden information are marked.
Enter the deeper archive of hidden histories, character agendas, chronicle tools, and unresolved threats.
Storyteller Portal (spoilers)
Madtown by Night is an unofficial fan setting for the classic World of Darkness. It takes the familiar streets, institutions, conflicts, and history of Madison, Wisconsin, then reveals the pressure beneath them. Mages contest the shape of reality. Kindred cultivate territory and influence. Garou defend sacred relationships already damaged by settlement and development. Changelings preserve wonder in a city that forgets faster every year. Mortals build lives inside struggles they rarely recognize.
At the center stands the Capitol Node, a powerful but wounded concentration of older spiritual currents. Beyond the mortal city waits New Avalon, the beautiful and coercive Horizon Realm built through the long designs of Jay Dee. Madison is not the center of creation. It is something more intimate and perhaps more dangerous: a place where ambitious people learned how to make a city perform magick.
| Era | The City | Where to Begin |
|---|---|---|
| Founding Madison | Jay Dee adopts the life of James Duane Doty and begins reshaping the isthmus as a civic and Hermetic working. | Founding of Madison · Jay Dee |
| 1985 | Murders, broken treaties, and factional realignment reveal how fragile the supernatural peace has become. | Madtown by Night 1985 |
| 2015 | New Avalon is rediscovered while Madison's mages inherit a city built upon concealed bargains and unfinished crimes. | Madtown by Night 2015 |
| Later Chronicles | Campaign-specific futures, alternate continuities, and event material follow their own clearly marked canon. | Chronicles · Gen Con Games |
Jay Dee entered New Avalon's forbidden repository to confront the vampiric John Dee created by his divided Embrace. Neither returned. In 2015, the doors remain sealed, but something inside has begun requesting access to Madison.
Pages are being reviewed for historical accuracy, World of Darkness compatibility, internal continuity, and usefulness at the table. Legacy ideas are preserved as sources, not automatically accepted as canon.
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Madtown by Night is an unofficial fan-created setting. World of Darkness, Mage: The Ascension, Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Changeling: The Dreaming, and related properties belong to their respective owners.
Current reconstruction focus: Madtown by Night 2015 · Last major review: July 2026