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Today’s post should be short and quick (it isn’t). I tend to set games where I live. Right now happens to be the San Francisco Bay Area. By canon, San Francisco is a city dominated by the angels. That is not how I run my games, but if you want to stay close to the books you should favor heavenly tethers over infernal Tethers.
There are currently somewhere on the order of 7 million people living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The exact number of tethers will depend on how frequent tethers are in your campaign.
- Very Rare – 1 Tether
- Rare – 7 Tethers
- Uncommon – 28 Tethers
- Common – 70 Tethers
I personally like the idea of Uncommon Tethers. With 28 different tethers, more than half of the Superiors will have a divine channel somewhere in the Bay Area – though some locations will be more popular than others even among Servitors of other superiors.
The Bay Area’s Only Tether [Very Rare]
According to Liber Castellorum, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is a powerful tether to Novalis, and has been since the late ’60s. If tethers are Very Rare in your game, you may want to consider using this as your only Bay Area tether.
However, the Bay Area has been changing. Silicon Valley is and has been a strong driver of that change. Even if you want tethers to be Very Rare in your game, you might want to consider placing a second tether somewhere in Mountain View or San Jose. Liber Castellorum has a usable tether to Lilith, but Vapula and Jean would also be valid choices.
In such an environment the game would be strongly driven by the conflict between the Celestials favoring the San Francisco vision for the area and those favoring the San Jose vision.
The Seven Tethers [Rare]
2 Liber Castellorum mistakenly identifies the location of “The Play” as the Stanford Football Stadium.
3 No such memorial exists in Golden Gate Park.
4 No such website exists.
With seven tethers you can have some real variety while still limiting the number of options the players have to communicate with heaven and hell. Where these tethers are located (and whom they are dedicated to) is up to the GM. If you go by the Liber Castellorum, five are infernal tethers, one a divine tether, and one an unidentified tethers:
- Golden Gate Park (Novalis)
- Winchester Mystery House (Beleth)
- SRI International (Lilith)1
- California Memorial Stadium (Kobal)2
- Golden Gate Park Memorial to the 1906 Dead (Belial)3
- Instant Informer Hub (Nybbas)4
However, if San Francisco is supposed to be the divine city that the In Nomine Literature suggests, I would probably switch that to 4 divine, 2 infernal, and 1 ethereal tether.
My Suggestions
- Golden Gate Park (Novalis)
Seneschal: Hallaren, Ofanite Master of Peace - Golden Gate (Blandine)
Seneschal: Chrysopylae, Cherub Friend of Sleepers - Alcatraz (Dominic)
Seneschal: Zelezni, Cherub Vassal Warder of Conscience - Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon (Eli)
Seneschal: “Lester” Servus, Elohite of Creation - Tanforan Racetrack (Baal)
Seneschal: T’Quomah, Balsaraph Captain of the Infernal Armies - SRI International (Lilith)
Seneschal: None. However, there will always be an accomplished celestial here working off one of their Geasa to Lilith. - Mount Diablo (Miwok & Ohlone Spirits)
Seneschal: None. However, any spirit with a mythological tie to the mountain may draw on its essence as if Attuned to the tether.
If you want the psychic landscape to highligh the 60s over the 30s, swap out the Tanforan Racetrack for the bathroom lab where Owsley (aka Bear) first cooked LSD. It would, of course, be a tether to Fleurity instead of Baal.
A Tether Each [Uncommon & Common]
Rather than pick and chose between Superiors, I have suggested a tether location for each of them. That gives a possible 46 tethers. If you want tethers to be uncommon, you’ll need need to halve this list for your campaign. On the other hand, you’ll need an extra 50% if you want tethers to be common.
Either way, some of these tethers will be far weaker than usual.
Divine
6 Until recently, the Palace of Fine Arts was the site of the Exploratorium.
- Blandine: The Golden Gate
- Christopher: Adventure Playground
- Death (Azrael): Point Reyes (Forked with Coyote)
- David: Latham Square5
- Dominic: Alcatraz
- Eli: Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon
- Gabriel: 807 57th Street, Oakland
- Janus: Altamont Pass
- Jean: Palace of Fine Arts (deteriorating)6
- Jordi: Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge
- Khalid: CAIR San Francisco (in Santa Clara)
- Lawrence: Stockton Gurdwara Sahib
- Lithroy: KPFA Headquarters
- Marc: Clay-Montgomery Building
- Michael: War Memorial Opera House
- Novalis: Golden Gate Park
- Orc: Equinix Server Exchange
- Yves: Bancroft Library Special Collections
- Zadkiel: Mission Dolores
Infernal
8 Where Owsley (aka Bear) first cooked LSD.
9 Site of Mabuhay Gardens, where the Dead Kennedys got their start.
10 Mark Hopkins Jr. is a better fit than James C. Flood (12/29/21)
11 I also considered one of the Richmond Oil Refineries, but Vapula would probably want to be closer to Silicon Valley.
- Alaemon: Room 641A
- Andrealphus: The Armory
- Asmodeus: 3223 Webster Street
- Baal: Tanforan Racetrack
- Beleth: Winchester Mystery House
- Belial: Buckingham Blvd7
- Fleurity: 1641 Virginia Street Bathroom8
- Furfur: Broadway Studios9
- Haagenti: Union Square
- Kobal: California Memorial Stadium
- Kronos: Hoover Institution
- Lilith: SRI International
- Magog: Basement of the Stanford Psychology Building
- Malphas: Mussel Rock
Mammon: James C. Flood Mansion, Nob Hill- Mammon: Mark Hopkins Hotel, Nob Hill10
- Nybbas: Salon Magazine HQ
- Saminga: Lake Herman Road, Benecia
- Valefor: Emeryville Shellmound
- Vapula: South San Jose Superfund Site11
Contested
Ethereal
- Coyote: Point Reyes (Forked with Death)
- Diwatas: Somewhere in Little Manila, Stockton
- Miwok & Ohlone Myth: Mount Diablo
- Mother Goose: Children’s Fairyland
- Mazu: Tin How Temple, SF Chinatown
- Guan Di: Kong Chow Temple, SF Chinatown
- Pulp Fiction: 891 Post Street
Other Options
I am, of course, not the first person to try and assign tethers to the San Francisco Bay Area. Here are what some other fans have come up with:
Book of the Neglected 
so i know that fall of the malakim is kind of stupid in terms of David’s motivation, but how good is the book on outlining the rest of los angle’s environment?
As with all the Revelations arc locations, I feel like it’s the perfect level of detail for a globetrotting game that’s only going to spend a few sessions there before moving on.
I think it’s woefully inadequate for any long term campaign. Even if you go with /rare/ tethers, there should be ~13 in the LA metro area.
are you planning on doing more entries in the tether series? i’m looking for tethers in maine and florida for my historical campaign.
Possibly, but they require a lot of research even when you know the area fairly well.
For me that means northern Ohio and western Massachusetts are far more likely to get a treatment than Maine or Florida.
That said, there’s no way Novalis is without a tether in the Everglades.
well, fair enough. i had planed to use western expansion as part of my campaign as well. i’m pretty good at adapting templates and my east coast tethers are starting out as minor tethers to begin with anyway.
So do you have any san francisco tether suggestions for the more water-focused superiors that didn’t get detailed in the books?
Not especially. I guess Oannes would have had something in the bay and Vephar something along the breakers (Pacific edge of the SF peninsula) – or maybe Vephar the bay and Oannes one of the main rivers that feeds into it.
I don’t really have a strong feel for what either would really be looking for.
What’s the population ratio for uncommon tethers? I’m working on homebrew tethers for a city and forgot the ratio chart in GM’s guide.
Still doing my best to not repost material direct from published modules.
On further review, the Mark Hopkins Hotel is probably a better Tether of Greed than the James Flood Mansion.
James Flood was a CA Silver Baron who got his wealth during the gold rush. His Mansion was one of the few Nob Hill buildings to survive the 1906 SF earthquake & fire.
Mark Hopkins Jr. was one of the four men responsible for creating the Central Pacific Railroad, the CA rail company that completed the western leg of the intercontinental railroad. All four became fabulously wealthy.
Hopkins was particularly renown for being tight fisted with money, but near the end of his life his wife convinced him to build them a Nob Hill manor. He died without a will before it was done, and his entire $20mil-$40mil estate was awarded to his wife (roughly $555mil-$1.1bil in modern currency). Shortly thereafter she married the interior decorator who helped her furnish the mansion, and wrote her adoptive son entirely out of her will. When he contested the will, it came to light that her 2nd husband had, in fact, married her for the money but the judge still determined that this did not give her son any right to the money.
In 1906 the manor was destroyed by the earthquake and fire, and was replaced by a luxury hotel, which is now a historic landmark, and is still one of the tallest buildings in SF. Hotel rooms currently start at $190/night.