Neutral St. Louis is the free starter city for Chrome & Covenant — a crossroads where all four regions meet, no single faction dominates, and every smuggling route, data pipeline, and back-channel negotiation in the central corridor passes through these streets.
GM Note: NSL is detailed at generous depth — enough to run months of sessions. Start your campaign here. Every faction has presence. Every district has hooks. Your characters can find work, allies, and trouble without ever leaving the city limits.
The Six Districts
The Pale
NSL’s administrative heart. Glass towers reflect the city’s performative professionalism while hiding its true business. Corporate executives stride past Accord Hall’s limestone facade discussing trade agreements, their MeshLenses pinging with encrypted communiques from the underground markets beneath their feet. The surface maintains NSL’s diplomatic theater — clean streets, functioning infrastructure, and the careful choreography of neutral governance. Beneath the surface, the real deals happen.
The Exchange
NSL’s commercial heartbeat. Information flows like currency and deals close faster than handshakes. Glass towers rise from converted warehouses, facades bristling with signal relays and automated trading displays. Open plazas accommodate rapid foot traffic between broker offices, while underground passages connect to discrete meeting spaces. The core principle: velocity over everything. If you need something bought, sold, or moved, The Exchange handles it before you finish asking.
The Landing
NSL’s western waterfront where the Mississippi meets the city’s industrial needs. Concrete piers extend into the muddy current, flanked by rusted crane towers and loading equipment that predates the Disjunction. Three parallel zones: the active waterfront with cargo handling, the warehouse district in converted industrial buildings, and the residential blocks where workers live within walking distance of the docks. Smuggling is not a side business here — it is the business.
The Sumps
The largest district, stretching through the city’s central and eastern sections in a network of interconnected neighborhoods built around flood-adapted infrastructure. Multiple elevation levels — from street-level housing blocks to underground tunnel complexes extending beneath three adjacent districts. This is where most people in NSL actually live. Overcrowded, resourceful, and harder to control than any faction admits.
The Arch Quarter
NSL’s most orderly facade. Wide streets, pristine sidewalks, coordinated lighting schedules. The district operates with institutional efficiency that suggests careful management extending beyond municipal oversight. Business cards exchange hands with surgical precision. Conversations conclude exactly when scheduled. What lies beneath this surface order is one of NSL’s most dangerous secrets.
The Margin
NSL’s outermost ring, where the city’s carefully maintained neutrality dissolves into the hostile realities surrounding it. External powers maintain trade missions and intelligence operations. NSL authorities process the constant flow of people, goods, and information crossing the city’s boundaries. This is where factions make their first contact with the city — and where deals that can’t survive the light of the inner districts get done.
Key Locations
Accord Hall — The seat of NSL’s neutral government. Where treaties are signed and immediately undermined.
The Lumen Institute — A research facility with connections that reach deeper than anyone admits.
The Arch Quarter Underground — What’s beneath the most orderly district in the city. Ten sections of content your players shouldn’t see.
Lambert-NSL International — The airport corridor. The fastest way in and out of the city, and the most surveilled.
The Limestone Graves — Columbia Quarry. Where NSL buries what it can’t solve.
Running Sessions in NSL
NSL works as a starter city because every faction has presence, every district has tension, and no one controls enough territory to feel safe. Your players can be CRB operatives passing through the Margin, Rougarou contacts working the Landing docks, corporate fixers in the Pale, or independent operators in the Sumps who answer to no one.
Start with The Milk Run — a simple delivery job that introduces the city. Then let your players pick a district and settle in. The hooks will find them.
Book Expansion: The full NSL City Guide covers 14 chapters, 68 sections — every establishment, every NPC, every secret. The free content here gives you the structure. The guide gives you the details that make sessions sing.
Continue Exploring
Play: The Milk Run — Your first job in NSL
Play: Quickbuilds — Characters ready to drop into NSL
Learn: Factions — Who’s operating in the city
Learn: Regions — What surrounds NSL
Rules: How to Play