Character, Theme and Setting notes for Kingdom Come: Los Angeles

Kingdom Come: Los Angeles isn't a straight vanilla Kingdom Come Chronicle - several assumptions have been changed, and the setting tweaked to provide a purposeful experience. These notes are intended to help those familiar with the default Kingdom Come setting understand how KC:LA is different

The Codex has not come to Los Angeles. Though the Last Crusade started around a decade ago, just as in canon KC, the Fallen of Los Angeles have not yet adopted the Codex. Near the start of the Last Crusade, the city was infiltrated by the Horde and one or more Devils set up shop and started creating Demons. Some of the oldest and most powerful Choirs and Murders tried to take on the Horde presence individually, but they were wiped out to the last. The surviving Congregations are those who have steered clear of attracting the attention of the Horde - both reigning in some of their conflicts with other Congregations, and at all costs avoiding antagonizing the Devils. This strategy worked well for years but, as of the start of the Chronicle, is starting to fall apart due to the Horde seizing more and more territory.

Los Angeles’ Fallen organize themselves primarily on the basis of Congregations, not Convictions. Every Congregation has a Conviction, of course - like elsewhere, the traditions of the various Convictions have been passed down and taught until inherited in the modern day, and each Congregation claims allegiance with the Divine, the Infernal, or the Deistical. But each Congregation jealously guards what turf it has claimed in Los Angeles like a criminal syndicate or a vigilante gang, and there is no guarantee that a trespasser from the same Conviction would be treated with any more kindness than those of the opposite side. Congregations normally have their own unique name, customs, style and iconography.

Turf gives the Fallen of Los Angeles power, not Predomination, and it is per-Congregation, not per individual Fallen. So vastly outnumbered by the mortals, and spanning so great a territory, the Fallen of Los Angeles influence the city they dwell in subtly. It is beyond the scope of any simple downtime action to turn a hellish ghetto into a paradise or vice versa in the span of only a few months - turning neighbourhoods around is a venture for dozens or hundreds of mortals over the course of years, not one Fallen murdering a couple people or helping out a few homeless. Instead, the Fallen stake territory as belonging to a Congregation, and seek to keep all other celestial influences out of it. If they can manage this, the Congregation can draw power from its Turf, granting them Inspirations. Though certainly having a group of Fallen residing might shape any neighbourhood, the Fallen gain their strength from being the exclusive supernatural guardians/tempters/tormentors of a group of mortals instead of from changing the character of a territory directly.

The majority of Fallen join the Congregations that find them. This usually means that your personal ethics matter a lot less for determining what Conviction you join than the sheer chance of whose territory you happened to Reckon in. That Congregation has no interest in presenting a balanced view of the other Convictions, and would generally rather you adopt their values or die instead of sending you to their enemies. There might be some exceptions (soft-hearted Divine and Infernal alike might send an unsuitable recruit to the Deistical, and you can always attempt to run from the Congregation who finds you, if they let slip there are others who might take you in), but most Fallen haven’t joined their Congregations and Convictions as a result of some personal choice. That being said, they’ve certainly been trained and indoctrinated, so quite a few are going to be true believers.

The LA Divine start off as exclusively Virtuous, and the Infernal exclusively Sinful. The original divisions that eventually became the Divine and Infernal started off as the Virtuous and the Sinful, and for the most part that has remained the case anywhere the Codex has yet to be adopted, with its easier mixing of Divine and Infernal. Keep in mind, that when a Fallen first Reckons, he or she is in transition between Sin and Virtue, and generally has a few days before he settles on a Path. The Congregation that finds the newly Reckoned Fallen will try to shape that choice (“Resist the darkness within you!”, “Throw off your shackles!”) and if the new Fallen resists influencing, it is usually just easier to get rid of them then putting up with a Sinful Fallen in the Divine or a Virtue in the Infernal. Any Congregation with a mix of Sin and Virtue will find their Turf benefits them less, so they have an additional strategic reason to keep the ranks pure. The Deistical Brood, of course, remains mixed despite the disadvantages.

Morality doesn’t measure good versus evil, but instead the balance between your human life and your angelic soul. In KC:LA, we definitely want to see interesting moral questions occur - and thus eschew having a place on your character sheet that tells you whether you are “Moral” or “Immoral”. Instead the Morality spectrum tells us whether a particular Fallen thinks of themselves as “Joe the plumber who likes baseball, and who has discovered he has an angelic soul” or “Razial, the Wrathful Angel, punisher of the wicked, who recently and briefly wore a lie of a life where people called him Joe”. Are they more human, or more angel(or devil)? Because it distances you from humanity, you’ll still go down the Morality track for things like killing and hurting people and all that, but you’ll also go down for things like using widespread blatantly supernatural power or doing things that strain your conception of yourself like coming back from the dead.

The Divine and Infernal are no longer “Mostly Moral” and “Mostly Immoral”, and thus are more nuanced as a result. With the Morality change, the Divine are more focusedly about Virtue, and the Infernal more about Sin. The Divine are still generally “the good guys”, and the Infernal “the bad guys”, but there tends to be more layers to it and more variation from Congregation to Congregation. Some Divine worry a lot less about protecting humans, and a lot more about bringing righteousness. And the Infernal tend to be less about the playing foil to God, Lucifer, the Divine and everyone else, and be more about their own selfish goals with a “right makes might” and “no one can place limits on me” flavour. The Deistical remain aloof from the struggle between Divine and Infernal because they place far less emphasis on influencing the humans as a whole and more just on protecting themselves and their immediate Companions.

And those Humans? They’re a force to be reckoned with, while the Fallen largely stick to the shadows. The Fallen are not the secret masters of humanity - no one is. Indeed, your average Fallen has less sway than your average mortal - especially with the technology restriction, many Fallen find maintaining a legal identity or even having cash in their pockets an on-going difficulty, never mind masterminding corporations. Some Fallen definitely do have significant sway, but they’re not going to be the famous CEO or the charismatic preacher - they’ll be the angel (or devil) on those humans shoulders swaying them this way and that. And if a Fallen wants a fancy mansion and a limo, they’re going to get it by worming their way into the lives of wealthy humans instead of stacking zeros in a bank account. It is just fine for the Fallen to get involved in important things, they just have to do it from the shadows like the guardian angels they once were - or like the vigilantes and mobsters they now often emulate. Because the Fallen do not want to go head to head with mortal movers and shakers - while a Fallen at their peak might amass ten Secular Power and a legion of thirty Thugs, the mayor of Los Angeles probably has a lot more Secular Power than that, and access to over three thousand Thugs Resources wearing the uniforms of the LAPD.