Vile City is a GENESYS RPG campaign setting.

Imagine a mad, fantasy version of Miami Vice, with a city that’s literally part jungle, and is inhabited by body building trolls, drug dealing dwarves, pop star elves, merfolk surfers, cat people gangsters and skateboarding ‘gritters’ (anarchic creatures, like goblins mixed with gremlins).

The whole of Vile City mixes urban fantasy with 80s parody. Pop songs are spells, the personas of stadium wrestlers give them special powers, magic items might include a pair of sneakers called ‘Air Gorgons’ or a plastic cube of many coloured squares. Everyone worships Lepdeus the rabbit headed god of money. In large arena’s competitors skate across deadly obstacle courses and on stage hair metal bands put on truly magical performances. There are four mercenaries on the run from the law known as the Alpha-Team and a company that hunts the undead known as the Fiend Busters. There are references and easter eggs everywhere. It’s a city that oozes sleaze, wears short sleeved jackets and shades, and covers itself in hot pink and neon lights.

The city is cut in two by the great Western Wall that very literally divides rich from poor. You must own property to live on the beach side, otherwise you can purchase a day pass for $1000. Everything in Vile City has a price. On the poor side of the wall the gangs rule. On the rich side, the VCPD keep order but the cops are merely the cities largest gang. The city’s mayor rules, but he was not elected, he is a dictator, ruling through the support of the police and their deadly arsenal.

A hundred years ago, spores came tumbling off a meteorite. Everywhere they landed, was instantly terraformed into a dense jungle. Whole districts of Vile City have been transformed into 'wild spaces' teaming with strange new creatures. The city is encircled with jungle, cut off from the wider world, if that world still exists? Rangers now make their living exploring the wild spaces and bringing back meats, fruits, herbs and spices. Some of which have strange, medicinal or magical properties.

The meteorite that dropped the spores crashed into the ocean. The resulting tsunami sank the whole island that used to be just off the coast of Vile City and was a wealthy part of the metropolis. It now lies underwater and acts as a home to the merfolk, although some live above the water in Vile City itself.

The old technology (that had reached 1980s level) has been maintained and in some cases improved and adapted. On the rich side of the wall there are sports cars, nightclubs with laser displays, giant cell phones, red taxis and machine guns. On the poor side they have guns but dive bars are dimly lit, phones are all landlines and the cars are put together from scavenged pieces of vehicles of the past.

The city is full of factions that are always a hair's breadth from declaring all out war on one another. The largest is the cops - the VCPD headed by the Mayor and then the are the gangs, their tags cover the districts east of the wall, less obviously there are powerful business interests, the power of the ritual magicians at the university, who the city relies on to run the power plant, and groups with shared interests, from the rangers, who make their living prowling the wild spaces that surround the city, to the workers of Factory Way who regularly riot over the deadly working conditions. Vile City is a stick of dynamite waiting for a light.