What Characters Know

AX.GHW.01.04

This section establishes the baseline for characters operating in the setting, what a character with hidden-world experience can reasonably know before play begins.

The Confirmed Baseline

Characters who have been operating in the hidden world for any significant time know:

Supernatural threats exist and are varied. Entities that correspond to vampire, werewolf, ghost, demon, and fae folklore are real, though the specifics often differ from the folklore.
Most threats have documented weaknesses and destruction methods. Generic violence delays problems; knowing the right approach resolves them.
The Veil exists as an active maintenance effort, not just passive human denial. People work to keep the supernatural hidden.
Organizations in the hidden world range from protective to dangerous. Institutional authority is not the same as good intentions.
Lineage-carrier humans are not threats by default. The distinction between predatory behavior and lineage biology is real and significant.

The Operational Variable

Characters will encounter things they don't have a framework for. New threat categories, entities behaving outside their documented patterns, phenomena that don't fit the established classification system. The hidden world contains more than the current body of knowledge covers, and the body of knowledge was assembled by people working under field conditions who could be wrong.

Part of play in this setting is knowledge work: figuring out what something is, whether the established approach applies, and what to do when it doesn't. The Grimoire Compact's research, the Network's lore keepers, and the BUA's classified files exist because knowledge about the hidden world is valuable, incomplete, and contested.

What Ordinary People Know

The mundane population knows the world that the Veil presents: a world without confirmed supernatural phenomena. They know the folklore, vampire, werewolf, ghost and demon are cultural categories, not recognized empirical realities. They know that strange things happen and institutional explanations sometimes feel inadequate.

A meaningful minority of the mundane population has had anomalous experiences, witnessed something, survived something, lost someone to something, that the Veil's psychological and institutional suppression mechanisms have not fully processed. These individuals are not hidden world participants, but they are more receptive to evidence and more likely to investigate when they encounter it. They are also the population that the hidden world's various parties most urgently need to manage when incidents produce witnesses.