Also to chime on with what Mardoc said, death is only really a problem if you commit your character to accomplish a goal where death is possible, and make it clear you'd be okay with your character dying. Completely losing combat means the bad guys get what they want, which could be death, or imprisonment, etc.
This might be a bit generic, but here's what I've been working on for a 3rd theme for the city. Let me know if you like it, wanna change any of it, etc.
An Unsightly Knot
If you've been to big cities that have been fortunate enough to be planned out, you will know that even with great masses of people, a city can run smoothly from commuting to business to recreation. This is certainly not the case in Boston, where everything can be summarized as a multi-level mess that only the really keen can perceive. The roads are the most overt example, hailing from a day where cars could only be dreamed of by witches or drunkards, and causing any visitors who don't pay attention to get turned around every which way.
While the roads are seen to be a jumbled mess every day, the business of the city is just as messy, whether it looks that way or not. You may drive along (heh) the city and see a successful bank, a biotechnology lab, an elaborate chapel, a hole-in-the-wall bar, and a nightclub, all in the space of a few hundred feet. Those wouldn't be a bad mix, if you didn't know what their real stories were. Once you find out how the bank is how the Irish Mob funds most of their operations, the chapel is home to a few Wiccans whose ancestors were treated less than fairly in these parts, the biotech lab scientists don't mind taking a few human liberties into question in the name of making a "greater humanity", and the nightclub is home to some flavor of vampire or the other, you'll be VERY glad that nothing in the bar jumps out at you, you sure as hell could use that whiskey.
It'll be hard to know until you put yourself into the range of danger, but as long as you expect all that you really try to do here to be complex and completely different than it looks at face value, you'll probably survive through some very interesting stuff.
Some ideas kicking around in my head for a character, at this point...
Some sort of magical tinkerer... only access to ritual magic, but makes gizmos both as a service to the magical community and as things that he can use to cover for his lack of evocation magic
Some sort of ice-and-wind oriented evoker... it's not a proper storm if the precipitation isn't going sideways! I'm not sure on the power level for this one yet. (Sorcerers with 7 base refresh make me nervous, though.)
If Mardoc wants to play the subtler type of caster, we're actually kinda short a magical doorknocker. You know, the guy who blows doors off their hinges. This could be done by either of the above, though.
I'm at work now, so I'll look at how I'd represent those template-wise for something that would be functional.
I think this is more useful for the villains rather than as PCs, but I really want some vampires to hang around university workspaces. I used to joke about vampires in the computer lab when I was in school, but I think that architecture studios would be better, actually. With all the X-Acto knives lying around, I'm sure people would chalk it up to suicide if the occasional person turned up dead and completely bled out. A White Court Vampire could get quite a fill of frustration, also, hanging out near somewhere with programmers.
I had an idea, depending on how much you want to bring in the Outsiders for a threat to the city: The Gates of Knowledge
Boston is famous for its research universities, which push the boundaries of the possible. If you want better prosthetics, there's a place building those. If you want smaller transistors there's a place researching that. If you want to cure cancer? Well, we're working on it...
But H. P. Lovecraft was right that there are Things out there that should never be known to this world. He found something out, and wrote books to warn the rest of us. In time, his stories have been treated as a way to scare people around a campfire... but the Things are still out there, and They want us to learn about Them. The problem is, doing so would open the gates to this world, and disaster would result.
Lovecraft set his stories in New England, and the seals are particularly weak here. People are trying to learn about the Outsiders, and they cannot be allowed to learn much.
If you're either inspired by this one or not happy with one of the others, I figured I'd actually write it down. The "You do not want to mess with the Outsiders" vibe is strong in the setting, but there were hints it's something that actually happens even so. (So, yeah, I checked: Lovecraft was from Providence, not Boston, and Arkham is basically Salem, but it's still in the same general area.)
At this point, it seems like maybe we should start tagging our themes with Aspects. That might help us figure out what is good and what is not.
Incidentally, I want to propose The Big Dig as a location to go with "An Unsightly Knot". It's sort of emblematic of the mess that is Boston development that, in order to upgrade the capacity of our city arteries, we built the whole thing underground. I suppose that's the boring side of the knot. It could be fun to give it extra side tunnels and blame its many technical difficulties not on leaks, substandard materials, and questionable engineering decisions but rather supernatural entities living in the walls.
That's awesome Ranamar. First off, I like the character ideas, but I'm going to hold off on discussing those until we get a bit further along in the city creation process, which I'll revisit at the bottom of this post.
I do like the vampires among the academics, maybe even have red and white be involved with different ones specifically based on the culture of the schools? There's a ground for a turf war with roots in history and a lot of pawns for them to move around.
Now, I do really like that theme that you had, and it does tie in to Boston well. My only major concern is that we don't want the campaign to get too close to the outsiders early on; they have the real deal when it comes to power, and our party would probably get wiped out pretty quickly with them. Now, if that theme maybe focuses more on hidden information in general, and not necessarily outsider specific, it would feel like it'd fit a lot better. We could then bring in specifically the "no Outsider knowledge" aspect of it later on, and while we start out still leverage that in with stuff like "scientists wanting to learn how to graft magic forcibly onto people (very bad)" or "the local witch coven wants to learn a fancy new necromancy spell (also very bad)", that isn't quite so campaign-ending early on.
I'd be very okay with having that aspect replace the one I had written about Boston Pride, I kept feeling that that one was weak anyways. And hard to turn into a usable Aspect.
Also, love that about linking in the Big Dig. Seems to be a great way to tie in some monster lairs and such.
So to summarize where we are in the city creation process:
Now: finish nailing down our main themes. These are setup to gie the overall tone of our adventures, we want to all agree with them and use them to know where our story is going.
Next: figure out which factions we want to include in our game. We are already mentioning some in the creating the themes, like witches and vampires, but ere is where you can include anything else you want in the world. Both mundane and supernatural, FBI or ghouls. Probably a sentence or two each saying who they are an what they're up to. Tied in to that, the rules suggest we make a quick graph, where one axis is how clued in I the supernatural they are, and another axis says how much they want to preserve the status quo, and then mark where each faction is on there. Again, that's to help define these groups and bring them to life.
The next thing after that is Locations. This is your chance to either find an existing location or make one up, and to talk about why that location is special. This can be really helpful to set up a place for your character to have background, where something important happened in their past, or just where they work. These places can be somewhere you wanna go to regularly, have an adventure at, or might not end up being used. But it's a chance for you to help create this world and put in some places of meaning.
And finally then, we get to starting character creation. Mixed in with that, we will start creating Faces, the main NPCs of the world. Those will either be tied to a location we've built, or to your character's story somehow.
I hope I am being clear with the process we are going through here to make the world, it is certainly different than how setting up other games work, and the manual isn't the most concise in laying it all out well. The reason we are doing all this edits character creation is that the game doesn't come with specifics to it's setting, and here is where all of us can shape the world to the type of game we wanna play, and to fit our characters into it. Let me know if I'm confusing you with all of this so far, and I'll try and clarify.
More location fun:
"MIThenge": http://www.boston.com/news/local/massach...or_at_mit/
The Infinite Corridor is the main hallway through the original building at MIT. Once a year, on a fairly arbitrary day, the sun aligns and, as it sets, it lights the entire length of the corridor. This has acquired somewhat of a cult following over the years, although the effect has been known more or less since the founding of the university. When an athletic center was built south of those windows, it was moved a few feet over, rumor has so that the sun would continue to shine down the Infinite Corridor. This is an excellent, if rather public, focus for Seelie magic, if I remember the various sponsored magic themes correctly.
Harvard Divinity School is the oldest seminary in the New World. Just how long have there been vampires in Boston? Is there a secret society there devoted to keeping vampires from being too overt in their influence on Massachusetts? (Answer: There ought to be!)
Also, some lesser "forbidden knowledge" hooks:
As an engineer, if I were to learn about the anti-technology hex, I'd want to see if I can design equipment specifically hardened against magic.
Playing on the way it disrupts electronics and even mechanics, can you make the equivalent of a Geiger Counter for magic?
Strong AI is a long way off. MIT has been home to a lot of AI research. How far would you go if you knew a spirit like Bob existed? Would you break the Laws of Magic to compel it to run a web server?
ETA: We should really hash out the balance of power of the city now, I suspect, along with aspects for our themes and threats.
Oooh, I like it. My vote is to push the Boston Proud theme to be sort of a subset of the Knot theme; one of the ways things might be more complicated than they seem. We don't have to use the Forbidden Knowledge threat the same way for the whole campaign, do we? It can start off with smaller things and build to Outsiders, couldn't it?
Regarding the blowing off of hinges: I realize Brick doesn't want to go to character details just yet, but that would make it easier for me, too, to fit my character in the Refresh budget we have. The game explicitly separates Quick and Dirty (Evocation, Channelling) and Slow and Careful (Thaumaturgy, Ritual) powers. I'll probably downgrade Evocation to Channelling to fit into the Refresh budget we have.
Although there remains the question of just how Hulky Lewwyn's werewolf is going to be. Maybe he'll be able to bash the door to splinters.
I'm going to jump ahead a bit and start suggesting a couple factions.
Mortals:
Cops. Mostly looking to establish order. Don't do anything too public or you might just provoke a house-to-house hunt like after the Marathon bombing. Not really clued in?
IRA, maybe? For a while they'd send reps to Boston to fundraise; I imagine they could get rather intimidating if you objected.
City Hall - not sure if the machine politics is still a thing, but this is alternate history! So we can say it's generally corrupt, trying to mainly trade sinecures and permits for votes and money.
Supernatural:
White Court, Red Court, both enjoying their positions of influence and wealth. Probably getting a bit blatant recently.
There's got to be something in the Bay. Not quite sure what fits - maybe some Summer Court influence via the Gulf Stream?
If we have Summer, then the Winter Court is here too.
I went ahead and removed the Proud theme and put Ranamar's in with some slight edits; let me know if that's fine with you Ranamar. I also put in a Factions post section, and added a brief on a group of witches, cause what would a game in Boston be without one?
Also, if you feel like you need to start developing your character concept in order to progress with city creation, go ahead. Assume we're going to use the Chest-Deep power level. Do try and go in order though, to help develop your character around story first, rather than mechanics (progression of template -> high concept -> trouble -> background stories -> skills/stunts)
I was feeling inspired again, so... the Fey:
Most people think human industry is solely to blame, but the Seelie and Unseelie Courts have been waging war in the air and water of the world. On the Unseelie end of the fight, their desire for decay cheers the dumping of toxic chemicals into our waters and the exhaust of coal plants (which leads to acid rain). On the Seelie side, their crusade for warmth is causing global temperatures to rise. Naturally, the Seelie Court opposes and seeks to resist the pollution which is killing the life in our waterways, while the Unseelie Court is not amused by the slight weakening of winter global warming implies.
Location: The Charles River
The Charles River is on the front lines of the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. By 1960, the Unseelie court had declared victory: the river was so unswimmable that mortals who fell in were advised to go to the hospital for tetanus boosters. However, Seelie Court agents allied with environmentalists to fight back, and, these days, while it is still a poor idea to swim in it, one will face a fine, rather than a chance of disease, if one does so without permission. It looks like the Seelie court is winning handily, but the Unseelie court takes another whack at causing trouble every time it rains. (Seriously, go look up the history of the Charles River. It was *nasty* not too recently, and some of the upstream stuff may even still be questionable... and that's before you throw in the fact that, like many old cities, the sewers and storm drains are the same system.)
(so... how badly have I violated the Unseelie Accords here? )
At this point, I think we'd place the Seelie Court on the "status quo" side and the Unseelie Court on the "upset the applecart" side.
Also... monsters, being single-minded, don't mess tech up the way mortal wizards do, right? I'm really liking the idea that the rivalry between MIT and Harvard goes right down to monsters living at MIT while Harvard has a secret society of anti-monster people.
Edit, because I was curious: http://necir.org/2012/03/19/bay-state-corruption/
At a state level (remember, this is a state capital), it seems that big corruption scandals show up about every 10 years for *someone*, and this is apparently one of the top 25% of least corrupt states. However, getting information on what the government is *doing* is tortuous at best. We can come up with something fun for what dark projects the state might be funding.
Also, roll back the clock on this and we've got fodder for a corrupt section of the police force: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2008/03/busted/
Also, while trying to find information on city-level corruption, which is hard to nail down with a simple Google search (clearly it makes the news from time to time, but, I couldn't find much more than that), I was reminded that among the powers we should consider is the Catholic Church: Boston has both Irish and Italian heritages. (My home town has a random street called "Patrick Mazzolli Way". It doesn't get more Irish+Italian than that.) Of course, the Boston Archdiocese handled the child sex abuse scandals about as badly as the rest of the Church did, mostly by closing up and not helping investigations.
I've updated the City of Boston post with some of the new ideas and suggestions for other ones that have been discussed here, as well as started putting in some of those entries on locations.
First off, I like the character ideas, but I'm going to hold off on discussing those until we get a bit further along in the city creation process, which I'll revisit at the bottom of this post. 
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