"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
Thirty years ago there was a bloody war between the humans and the supernaturals. No one really knew what triggered it or how word about the supernatural got out, but it happened and the war was absolutely bloody and brutal: entire clans were wiped out, entire families taken off the map. The Templar order (an order of hunters that have been fighting against the supernatural for centuries and have always operated ~underground) took up arms and trained humans to fight, meaning it wasn't quite as simple as just wiping them out.
In the end, after a decade of fighting, a truce was formed. Uneasy, but it was still formed. The war and time of the truce has ended up being known as The Fall. The supernaturals had the upper hand and declared peace on the basis that they weren't willing to risk losing more people to a shadowy hunter order that disappeared into the shadows again once the fighting was done (though they actively look to recruit more now). The world changed, and not necessarily for the better. A new caste system was created, where the vampires and their like were at the top and everyone else was below, with humans being at the bottom of the food chain. As the economy took a hit following the fallout of all the fighting, creative and archaic ways of handling debt crept back into society, though only for the desperate: humans were able to put themselves into a sort of 'debt bondage': where they allowed a rich supernatural to pay off their oustanding debt in return for a period of indentured servitude. Of course, such things are rarely as clean as that and a booming market of humans who were legally indentured servants were traded, often for more than the price of their bond. There were no laws to stop the more unscrupulous from applying interest to extend the term and, indeed, nothing that stopped parents selling children, or brother selling brother to offset the debt of another.
Twenty years on from the fighting that almost tore the world apart (and it was across the entire globe, a truly global fight) and humanity is once again in a state of unrest. The days have been getting shorter and shorter even as the seasons change: long days of summer are something of a distant dream: the sun sets at 4pm every day and has done for the last five years, and doesn't rise until 9am meaning there are increased darkness hours.
ATF is set in New York City (and state), where the increasing unrest between species is something of a powderkeg waiting to explode. Homeless humans have been going missing in their droves, spates of random werewolf attacks during the day have created an almost orchestrated fear of any shifters. Humans in several boroughs have started claiming the neighbourhoods are 'human only' and have started taking precautions like threading silver and iron through their door handles and, in eateries, their utensils. Others have UV lights above their doors to try and ward off vampires from coming in. The city is divided and on the brink of something...new.