I'm looking for forumites who have real-life Area Knowledge of New Orleans, either from personal experience, friends or family, research or just an abiding interest in fiction set in the city. I'm not setting an adventure in the city yet, but it will eventually happen and until then, details about New Orleans are relevant for the background of one PC, two crucial NPCs and at least eight other NPCs already established.
For background purposes, I should mention that this is for an ongoing urban fantasy / occult mystery / supernatural technothriller / Monster Hunter campaign,
Caribbean by Night.* In it, the PCs work as
highly capable** occult troubleshooters, or '
Night Riders' (Monster Hunter vigilantes), for the Galveston-born centenarian billionaire J.R. Kessler. Their area of responsibility encompasses the entire Caribbean and the surrounding region, including much of the Gulf of Mexico and the US
Gulf Coast.
Hubs of activity and concentrations of resources, personnel and allies for their influential Patron include: Galveston and the Greater Houston area; Beaumont (Jefferson County) and Anahuac (Chambers County) in East Texas; New Orleans, LA; Jackson, MS; Mobile, AL; various Florida locations; Nassau, the Bahamas; Dominica; St. Lucia; and Trinidad.
Two PCs are from Louisiana (Atchafalaya Basin and New Orleans, respectively), while the others are more or less foreign transplants to this very much southern milieu (Rhodesia by way of the French Foreign Legion, Denmark by way of Los Angeles and a graduate student from San Fransisco).
So, without further elaboration, let's start with a question that might end up mattering next session if New Orleans born Lucien Lacoste (PC) decides to use some weeks of campaign downtime to drop in on his Nana Lacoste, a formidable Creole / African-American /
gens de couleur libres lady with a reputation in certain circles as someone not to be crossed under any circumstances. In an earlier New Orleans, she'd be called a 'Voodoo queen'.
In any case, Nana Lacoste is a widow who married into an old French Creole (white, i.e, original meaning of 'Creole') New Orleans family shortly after Loving v. Virginia (after having carried out a long affair with the son and heir before they could legally marry). The Lacostes were very rich in the 18th century, decaying, but still aristocratic in the 19th century and struggled to hang onto at least refined middle-class respectability in the 20th century.
What they
did manage to retain was the family estate, a sprawling, outdated, impossible to maintain, Southern Gothic decaying mansion / townhouse. I'm thinking large enough so that there are rooms that no one visits and decaying enough so that it would take months, if not years, as well as hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, to restore every room to full habitability. Certainly no air conditioning and, if possible, electricity and running water only added a long time after it was built and only to parts of the house.
Brief notes on family history.
Question the First: So, what is a good neighbourhood in New Orleans for a sizable house and even possibly some grounds around it, that could realistically have been hard enough to sell for the latter half of the 20th century to make it at least
somewhat plausible for a middle-class family of fading gentility to have retained it instead of selling it and all becoming instant millionaires just from the price of the lot, regardless of the condition of the house?
I get the impression that St. Charles Avenue has plenty of the kind of creepy, Southern Gothic, vine-covered, decaying mansions I'm thinking about, but I'm concerned that no matter how much rebuilding would have been necessary for a new buyer, the market value of a sizable lot there would have been so enormous in the 1980s or 1990s that it becomes impossible to justify not selling it.
Where in New Orleans could such a building be located while still keeping the value somewhat in check? I don't mind it being valued at up to maybe half a million or so today, if it absolutely has to be, but I'd balk at the $2-3 millions that seem 'normal' for sizable houses on St. Charles Avenue.
Locating it in a neighbourhood that is prone to flooding and storm damage seems like it would do the job of plausibly keeping the value down, but I would like it if it could include an ancestral tomb, an overgrown garden and all the other accoutrements of a proper Southern Gothic mansion.
I'd love it if someone could suggest an actual townhouse / mansion visible in Google Maps that I could fictionalize into the Lacoste family home.
Q2) Best Neighborhood for Voodoo Beliefs Between 1920-1980?
Q3) Effects of occult things becoming real on crime and the underworld in New Orleans?
*The world is mostly realistic, except for secret supernatural occurances that occur in specific times and places, starting with a handful of occasions in the 1980s and gradually becoming more common. Mana ranges from No Mana in well-lit, modern office buildings or laboratories in cities full of skeptical secular people to Very Low Mana in much of the world at night (-8 to -10) to Low Mana (-3 to -7) in certain areas of the world, dubbed Vile Vortices, ley lines or Places of Power. Individual Places of Power within confluences of ley lines and/or one of the regional Vile Vortices might approach Normal Mana (0 to -2), but usually with some specific flavor of magic and generally only at specific times.
**They are all close to peak human capabilities (often aided by supernatural gifts) and, in addition to that, have abilities that no normal person can match. As such, they are 1,000+ Supers with an occult flavor, albeit ones existing in a world without lenient, handwavy genre conventions to make their vigilante activities easier (though good relations with law enforcement and 100 points in Patron certainly helps).