The Hidden World

AX.GHW.01.03

Beneath ordinary society's notice, a parallel world operates. It is not a single community with unified interests; it is an ecology of competing, cooperating, and coexisting parties whose only consistent shared interest is concealment from ordinary society. Everything else is negotiable.

Lineage Communities

Supernatural lineages, Dhampir, Skinchanger, Haunt, Faeborn and Marked, exist in communities that range from tight-knit and highly organized (the Bloodline Courts governing Dhampir community life) to diffuse and informal (Skinchanger families that have maintained relative isolation for generations). These communities have their own internal structures, their own histories, and their own relationships with the broader hidden world.

Lineage communities are not monolithic. A Dhampir who grew up within a Court-recognized bloodline family has a different relationship with their heritage than one who discovered what they were in adulthood without community context. A Faeborn who has integrated into mundane society may have no connection to fae-adjacent community structures whatsoever. Lineage is a biological and sometimes metaphysical reality; community is a choice, a circumstance, and a resource.

Most lineage communities maintain cautious relationships with the organizations in the hidden world's institutional landscape. They know that some organizations exist to protect them and others exist to manage them. They have usually learned, through experience, that distinguishing which is which requires attention.

Human Practitioners

Humans with no lineage distinction participate in the hidden world through knowledge, training, and institutional affiliation like Network hunters, BUA agents, Order members and Aldersham researchers, the hidden world's working population is predominantly human. This population ranges from people who stumbled into the hidden world and chose to stay (the civilian-drawn-in archetype the Network is full of) to people whose families have been operating in it for generations.

Human practitioners are not without power in the hidden world. Accumulated practical knowledge, institutional authority, and the specific advantage of being unremarkable to supernatural perception, Human characters with the Unremarkable perk are genuinely more difficult to sense and track than lineage characters, give human practitioners a distinct and functional niche.

The Threats

Supernatural threats are real and varied. Infernal entities, undead, shapeshifters, cryptids, possessed individuals, fae predators, aberrations from categories that don't fit established frameworks, the hidden world contains things that cause genuine harm. Not all of them are evil in any coherent sense. Some are predatory because that is their nature. Some are dangerous because they are afraid, wounded, or displaced. Some are straightforwardly malicious. Some are doing what the hidden world's various parties have authorized them to do.

The threat compendium provides detailed entries on specific entities. The setting-level point is that threats are not a simple category. The Vanguard's threat-designation model and the Network's more case-specific approach both reflect reasonable responses to the same problem and neither is entirely right. GMs running this setting will encounter situations where the threat is clear, situations where the threat designation is contested and situations where the most dangerous thing in the scene is one of the organized parties.