1970-1979: The Years of Ash Maps and Missing Names

The 1970s in Cleveland saw sweeping change and mounting uncertainty: the Cuyahoga River caught fire (again), national distrust surged in the wake of Watergate, and the city’s economy wobbled toward collapse. Industries shut down. Families moved out. Whole neighborhoods changed hands—or fell quiet.

In the mortal confusion and decline, the Sidhe of the Five Great Houses turned their attention to Greater Cleveland. What they saw was a domain in disarray: a commoner-led territory, no ruling baron, no clear structure of Concordian fealty. It was a tempting morsel, ripe for the plucking.

One by one, nobles from Houses Gwydion, Eiluned, Fiona, Liam, and Dougal sent emissaries, envoys, and—eventually—enforcers.

What happened next became known only through whispers, secondhand accounts, and dream-shadows: not a single Great House succeeded.

Freeholds that had once welcomed Sidhe guests went dark. In Cleveland’s Dreaming, chimerae once loyal to noble causes vanished or were turned against their makers. Faerie knights who set out to subdue the city’s denizens were said to have walked into the mists of the Flats and simply never come out.

No formal battle was ever logged in the White Court annals. No declaration of war reached the courts of Concordia. And yet, the nobles stopped coming.

“They say the Board turned on them,” an insightful Childing Eshu was once overheard intoning. “They moved their little chess pieces into the city and found out the game was already being played without them.”

Cleveland’s Commoners didn’t speak of strategy, because they couldn’t. Most didn’t know who was pulling the strings. Even today, those who try to piece together what happened find conflicting stories, lost records, and former Sidhe operatives who speak only in riddles—if at all.

A secret war had been fought from behind museum walls, inside abandoned factories, beneath bridges no mortal remembered the names of. Its victors remained cloaked, and its losers claimed it never happened.

Legacy

• The term “The Board” was never written down during this time, and wouldn’t become whispered legend until around the 1990s. At the time, even among Commoners, their victories were attributed to "Cleveland luck" or “The Bridgets getting rowdy again.”
• Several freeholds in the Midwest reference “The Cleveland Example” as justification for local self-rule. No one ever defines exactly what that means.
• The few Sidhe who attempted to challenge the city's silence—like Sir Emory ap Eiluned, who vanished from a gala in 1976—are remembered only in footnotes and the occasional haunting.