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Resting
on the banks of the Mississippi in the Parish of Ascension,
Louisiana, New London is a five minute drive from
I-10 down the city's London Road. Halfway between
Baton Rouge to the northwest and New Orleans to the
southeast, the city was once a great industrial town
surviving on manufacturing and the oil industry. Today
however, both those industries have abandoned the
city to survive on its own, and most of New London's
economy is based off a mixture of gambling and tourism.
The absence of all but a handful of big businesses
however, has left the city to wallow in its history
as an early French-settled American town. Full of
breathtaking, crumbling architecture from the Colonial,
Romantic and Civil War periods interspersed with far
newer buildings, the city is home to a number of oddities
including the abandoned Colonial district of Mal Gardé
and a vast network of buried subterranean streets
and buildings that were simply built on top of after
the much of the city burned to the ground in the mid
1800's.
Today, the city is a patchwork of the old and the
new, the preserved and the abandoned, from the beautiful
Colonial churches and houses of the Fountain District,
to the bright lights of New London's Claireau Quarter,
where much of the tourism and entertainment is centred,
and the rusting iron and abandoned warehouses of Watchwater,
the city's once booming industrial district that has
now fallen mostly into disrepair. It presents a fascinating
contradiction to its visitors, with the rich opulence
of its bars and clubs on the one hand, and a high
crime rate and vast numbers of homeless on the other.
With the ancient Indian territory still well-preserved
in the Hollowmarsh Nature Reserve, and the beautiful
Fountaine House brooding just outside the city among
the Spanish Moss, mist and marshwater, New London
is an intricate patchwork of almost everything its
residents are, or have ever been.
It seems that despite all this time, New London is
still a frontier town, a place where people are made,
or broken, and a place where young Eldritch are once
again beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, now
is a time when they can really do something to change
the world around them, that maybe, if they believe
in their cause enough, and fight for it hard enough,
that people won't be able to help listening to them.
And, for a city that was founded on the beliefs of
a handful of mortals and Eldritch that believed the
same, perhaps that's a fitting sentiment for a city
that makes its money encouraging people to hope .
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