Ever use these? Not haunted places, exactly, though they're likely to have ghost stories surrounding them by way of explanation. I'm thinking of places of natural or unnatural psychic chaos. The new Malkavian clanbook gives them brief mention. It doesn't suggest how to use them or offer examples, but it does introduce the concept of mad places. Houses seem the most likely candidate, but abandoned wild areas, shunned for this property, may exist. Theaters, bordellos, and temples/churches also come to mind as possible candidates. Coin- operated launderettes, already-nightmarish 19th century factories and the labyrinthine shelves of bureaucratic institutions or old university libraries follow. And don't think you'll escape from considering the old abandoned penitentiaries and sanitariums of the world. All candidates for mad places, even if some of them do lurk beneath cliches. How are these places mad? First, by their effect on visitors or residents, I should think. One unfairness of rational thought is the ban on judging a place good or bad by the sensation you get when you first visit it. In theory, there's something that sends you reminders of a place you like or dislike from past experience and, like deja vu, that feeling bubbles up through the senses to the conscious mind without having roots in what's consciously perceived. Sanity teaches trespassers to ignore the first, maybe only, warning shot across their bow; the persistence of the sense of wrongness may yet ward invaders off - isn't that how Obfuscate works? In any event, that doesn't always work. The most (in)famous mad places result in death, disappearance, or madness. Naturally, every once in a while, there's a hotel room in which someone will inevitably go insane, driven there by the scent of the perfume of a long lost love, and always ending with a suicide. Always. Every time a new owner takes over the hotel and the room is let out, it happens again. This is only natural. Just as natural, there's a spectrum of mad places. There is one very clean bus stop in a Pittsburgh, for example, which's in one of its more run-down neighborhoods. People stop in to get out of the rain and, while they're waiting, perceive breath condensed on the windows and grime in the corners as not being somebody else's problem. Some use a handkerchief or tissues, some find a frayed, translucent green toothbrush left on the sill and use that. If they missed their bus, perhaps they might notice the obsessive behavior. It seems that punctuality accompanies this compulsive cleanliness, and the only aftereffect seems to be a bit of civic pride at having picked up a stray piece of paper that happened to blow in. People seem to forget this moment of manic cleanliness once outside of the shelter of the bus stop, and those who think something might have been odd about it tend to forget which stop it was. I know I can't be more specific than Pittsburgh, and the stop being in a relatively poor section of town with this little grocery on the corner. I think. There's quite possibly a Chicago theater that shows shadows on its screen when nothing else is playing. Unlike murder houses that demand a repeat performance or hopscotch squares that lure passers-by into a quick game, this is something external to the experience. The shadows are no more substantial than any place else, but everyone who sees them sees the same thing. They also hear them, though they need to strain to hear the whispers. They seem to relate that this is something supernatural to them, too. Some of the staff think there is another movie theater in the United States that has their shadows playing on the screen, but some of the things the shadows have said have been evasive and vague, and other members of the staff have their doubts about the nature of these projections. Quite possibly, though that's not the sort of thing they'd share with strangers, so that's just a supposition. Some of these places probably have origin stories to go along with them. Old Indian burial grounds almost inevitably come up. There's excuses to be found, I'm sure, in ley lines or being in the path of a university particle accelerator, but I'm not convinced everything has an explanation or is better-off having one. Anyway, mad places, ever use these? Vis