GM Setting Guide

AX.GHW.14.01 - Running the Hidden World

This guide is for the GM running an AX.GM campaign. It covers the practical mechanics of running the hidden world: how to maintain The Veil as a living constraint rather than an afterthought, how to structure investigations, how to introduce organizations as employers and complications, and how to manage the social dynamics of a world where humans and supernatural beings share a secret.

Read the setting introduction before this document; this guide assumes you understand what The Veil is and why it works. This document covers how to make it work at the table.

Part One: The Veil in Practice

The Veil Is Not a Puzzle Box

The most common GM mistake with The Veil is treating it as a locked door, the world is secret, and as long as the characters don't make big mistakes, the secret stays locked. This makes The Veil a passive constraint: the characters just avoid doing certain things, and the supernatural stays hidden.

That's not how it works in the genre. In Buffy, X-Files, Supernatural, and the rest, the Veil is constantly threatening to break, not because the characters are reckless, but because the world they're operating in generates exposure constantly. Civilians see things. Patterns accumulate. Someone gets a clear photograph. A threat that's supposed to be contained isn't.

Run The Veil as active pressure, not a passive rule. Every scene should have at least one Veil consideration: who could see this, what evidence is being created, what cover story exists. This is not punishment; it is the genre's native tension. Evidence management is as much a part of the job as the fight.

The Three Layers of Veil Pressure

When assessing Veil risk in a scene, think in three layers:

Immediate Witnesses: Who is physically present or could arrive? Civilian bystanders, late-night joggers, business owners, first responders who are not Veil-aware. Immediate witnesses create acute Veil pressure, the characters need to address them now.

Evidence Trail: What physical, digital, or testimonial evidence is being created? Gunshots on a residential street create a 911 call. A dead body creates a police report. Security footage of something impossible creates documentation. The evidence trail creates ongoing Veil pressure that may not be addressable in the moment but will need resolution.

Institutional Attention: Which organizations are monitoring for what the characters are doing? The BUA tracks certain threat signatures. Local law enforcement investigates violent deaths. Medical examiners document unusual wounds. Investigative journalists follow patterns. Institutional attention is the slowest-moving layer but the hardest to dismiss, a determined detective asking questions is a recurring problem.

Not every scene generates pressure at all three layers. A fight in an abandoned warehouse at 3am generates minimal immediate witness risk but still creates evidence and, if bodies are left, institutional attention. A possessed individual being exorcised in a family home generates enormous immediate witness risk (family members) but minimal institutional trail if resolved cleanly. Calibrate accordingly.

Running Evidence Management

Evidence management is a parallel gameplay track to the investigation and combat tracks. Characters who take it seriously have more operational freedom; characters who don't accumulate problems that come back.

Build the evidence as you run the scene. Don't decide afterward what the characters need to manage, track it during the scene. When a weapon is fired, note the shell casings. When a threat is destroyed, note what remains (or doesn't). When a civilian sees something, note what they saw and how credible they'll be.

Make the evidence actionable. A Veil complication is most interesting when it creates a decision, not just a task. "You need to clean up the scene" is a task. "You need to clean up the scene, but the neighbor has already called 911 and you have six minutes, and there's a dead Revenant in the living room whose family will report them missing tomorrow" is a decision, what do you prioritize?

Use the Veil as a clock, not a failure state. The characters are not failing when Veil pressure accumulates, they're playing in the genre. What matters is how they respond. A BUA team showing up at a scene they didn't clean in time creates new complications, new relationships, new information (the BUA is here because they were already watching this location, why?). Evidence management failures are hooks, not punishments.

Track the paper trail across sessions. If the characters left shell casings at a scene in Session 2 and a shell casing shows up in a ballistics report in Session 6, that's the world being coherent. Players who have been careful about evidence management will notice and appreciate this; players who haven't will be reminded that the world has memory.

Cover Stories

Cover stories are the characters' active tool for Veil management. When civilians see something they shouldn't, the characters need a narrative that makes the impossible possible to dismiss.

Good cover stories fit the available evidence. "Gas leak" works for an explosion with unusual properties; it explains the energy release, justifies evacuation, and gets emergency services involved as scene-clearers rather than investigators. "Animal attack" works for claw and bite wounds if the body dimensions match a large animal. "Lightning strike" works if there's burn damage without an obvious fire source.

Bad cover stories require removing evidence. If the actual evidence contradicts the cover story, the story creates more problems than it solves. A cover story that requires physical evidence to disappear means the characters need to also manage the disappearance.

Organizations have institutional cover story resources. The BUA can issue press releases. The Grimoire Compact can provide academic "explanations" for unusual phenomena. The Network has contacts who can plant alternative narratives in social media. Characters with organizational affiliation can request these resources; the cost is that the organization knows what happened and that the characters owe something.

Unaffiliated characters cover stories are limited to what they can personally construct and sell. They are often more creative for it.

Part Two: Running Investigations

Investigation Structure

Most AX.GM scenarios have an investigation layer, the characters need to find information before they can engage the threat. The investigation structure from AX.C.15 applies; this section adds setting-specific guidance.

Start in the middle. By the time the characters are involved, something has already happened. A death has been reported. A pattern has been noticed. A contact has gone dark. The characters arrive after the inciting event, not before. This creates immediate forward momentum; they are already behind the clock.

Three-clue redundancy. Every key piece of information the characters need should be available through at least three different avenues, physical evidence, witness testimony, and research (Lore or Mediumship tradition). If the characters miss the physical evidence at the scene, they can find the information through a witness or from a Network lore archive. This is not about making the investigation easy; it is about ensuring that bad luck on a single roll does not stall the story.

Let the threat have a life outside the encounter. Between scenes, the threat is doing things. A Vampire Elder is feeding and managing their territory. A Possessed Operative is continuing to gather intelligence. A Necromancer is advancing their project. When the characters arrive at a location, what was happening just before they got there? What will happen if they wait two more hours? Making the threat active creates urgency and rewards aggressive investigation.

Scene Types in Investigation

Physical examination: The characters examine a location, body, or object for evidence. Primary tools: Notice, Lore, Medicine (Forensics), Technical (Forensic Analysis). Structure: what is immediately visible, what requires a roll to find, what requires the right tradition or Focus to detect. Always have at least one clue that is visible without a roll, investigators who fail to find anything at all lose momentum and engagement.

Witness interviews: The characters talk to people who saw or know something. Primary tools: Deceive, Persuade, Wit + Resolve for reading the witness. Structure: what the witness knows (which may not be all of what they saw), how willing they are to share it, what they need before they'll talk (reassurance, evidence that they're not crazy, a specific question to answer). Witnesses in the hidden world often know more than they're willing to admit; they saw something they've been trying to explain away for weeks.

Research: The characters consult archives, contacts, and databases. Primary tools: Lore, Technical (Computer Systems), organizational resources. Structure: what the character's own knowledge covers, what requires sourcing (Network contact, Grimoire Compact access, BUA database query), and what is not in any accessible archive. Research scenes are most interesting when they uncover something that reframes what the characters thought they knew, the threat is not what they assumed it was, or it has a history that complicates the simple solution.

Surveillance: The characters watch something or someone before engaging. Primary tools: Notice, Stealth, Technical (Surveillance). Structure: what they observe, what patterns they identify, whether the threat detects them. Surveillance scenes reward patience and create tactical intelligence that improves subsequent engagement.

Making Rolls Matter

Investigation rolls that fail should not just produce "you find nothing." Failure should produce something, a wrong conclusion, a partial answer, a delay that has consequences, or information that is accurate but misleading until additional context arrives.

Failed Notice at a scene: The characters miss a specific detail. Later, that detail matters, either because the threat uses the thing they missed against them, or because a second-pass examination (after they have more context) surfaces it and changes their understanding.

Failed Lore: The character's knowledge is incomplete or outdated. They identify the threat correctly but believe a weakness applies when it doesn't, or vice versa. This should produce a genuine mistake in the field, not an automatic "you know nothing."

Failed Mediumship sensing: The tradition gave a partial or confused impression. The character sensed something real but interpreted it incorrectly; they detected Shadow presence where the actual threat is a Possessed individual whose shadow compact has a passive resonance. The error is correctable but costs time.

Investigation Tools by Threat Category

Different threat categories leave different evidence signatures. Use this as a quick reference when building investigation scenes:

Category	Physical Evidence	Tradition Sensing	Research Sources
Undead	Bite wounds, drained bodies, cold spots, grave disturbance	Mediumship (Liminal presence), Sacred Fire (undead resonance)	Network lore, Grimoire Compact
Shadow Entities	Cold traces, compact sigils, unusual cold burns, possession behavioral signs	Sacred Fire (Shadow resonance), Hollow Pact (compact signature)	Order of the Warden's Flame, Sovereign Circle, Grimoire Compact
Shapeshifter	Claw marks at unusual height, shed hair/scales, silver-responsive wounds	Pact-Shifting (shared resonance), Acute Scent (Skinchanger)	Network, Compact of Lines, Obsidian Solutions
Fae	Impossible plant growth, temporal anomalies, glamour residue, Rowan displacement	Glamourist (True Sight), Faeborn True Seeing	Threshold Society, Grimoire Compact
Cryptid	Track evidence, electromagnetic anomalies, livestock patterns	Mediumship (Liminal signature), EMF detector	Network, Grimoire Compact field surveys
Cursed/Possessed	Behavioral incongruity, curse marks (tradition-visible), compact resonance	Mediumship (possession detection), Sacred Fire (curse identification)	Grimoire Compact, Hollow Pact practitioners
Aberration	Physics anomalies, Breach resonance, Veil Fracture in witnesses	Mediumship (Breach detection), all tradition practitioners (ambient distortion)	BUA classified files, Grimoire Compact rare archives
## Part Three: Organizations as Employers and Complications

The Employer Model

Organizations are most effective narratively when they are not just resource dispensers; they are stakeholders with agendas. An organization that hires the characters for a mission has its own reasons for the job, its own constraints on how it wants the job done, and its own reaction to the outcome.

Before each organization mission, establish: - What does the organization want as the outcome? - What does the organization want to avoid? - What are they not telling the characters? - What will happen if the characters succeed in a way the organization didn't expect?

A Bureau of Unusual Affairs mission to investigate missing persons in a small town wants: the supernatural threat identified and contained, no civilian exposure, no evidence trail. It wants to avoid: Vanguard involvement (because BUA and Vanguard have institutional rivalry and the BUA wants credit), a political incident, confirmation that the threat is connected to an Annex D signatory. The characters are not told about the Annex D angle. If they discover the missing persons were taken by a Crossroads Demon whose contract the BUA knew about and classified, the mission outcome creates a relationship complication regardless of the tactical success.

Organization Relationship Tracks

Track each organization's current relationship with the characters in three states: Allied, Neutral, or Opposed.

Allied: The organization provides active support, resources, information, backup, cover. They call the characters with information. They smooth things over when evidence management goes imperfect. They have standing expectations of reciprocity.

Neutral: The organization is aware of the characters but not invested. They will deal transactionally, information for services, access for demonstrated usefulness. They will not go out of their way to help or hinder.

Opposed: The organization is actively working against the characters, not necessarily with lethal intent, but as an obstacle. They withhold information. They show up at scenes before or after the characters and create complications. If the opposition is strong enough, they become a recurring antagonist pressure.

Relationships shift based on what the characters do: fulfilling obligations builds toward Allied; working against the organization's interests or failing to deliver on agreements moves toward Opposed. The most interesting relationship state is borderline, an organization that is technically Allied but has one unresolved grievance, or Neutral but showing signs of moving toward Allied if the characters do one more right thing.

Organizations as Obstacles

Organizations become obstacles in three ways:

Institutional competition: Two organizations both want the same outcome but through incompatible methods. The BUA wants the vampire contained for questioning; the Vanguard wants it destroyed. Both are present. The characters have to navigate both institutional pressures while dealing with the actual threat. This is the most common organization-as-obstacle pattern, the threat is not the hard part; managing the organizations is.

Information suppression: An organization knows something the characters need and is actively not sharing it. The BUA has classified files on the Breach the characters are investigating. The Grimoire Compact has an archive entry that would identify the Necromancer the characters are hunting but considers it proprietary research. Getting the information requires either earning it (performing a service), stealing it (Technical vs Security), or creating enough leverage that withholding it costs the organization more than sharing. All three are valid and interesting approaches.

Institutional mandate conflict: An organization's official mission puts it directly in the characters' path. The Vanguard's mandate is terminate-and-redact. If the characters are trying to save a possessed individual through exorcism, the Vanguard Operator who arrives on the scene has orders that conflict with what the characters are doing. This is not personal, the Operator is following protocol. The conflict is structural, which makes it more interesting than a simple villain.

Organization Plot Seeds

The BUA wants a debrief: After the characters handle an incident, a Special Agent contacts them. Not threatening, professional. The Agent wants to know what they saw and how they handled it. The subtext: the BUA is deciding whether the characters are a resource or a liability. How this conversation goes determines the BUA's relationship track going forward.

The Network has a problem: A Lore Keeper contacts the characters about a hunter who went dark two weeks ago. The last check-in mentioned a lead on something unusual. The Lore Keeper isn't asking the characters to investigate; they're asking if the characters have heard anything. The answer is no, but the hunter's last known location is relevant to something the characters are already looking into.

Obsidian Solutions made a mistake: An artifact that Obsidian Solutions brokered three years ago has resurfaced in the wrong hands. The company wants it back, quietly. They're hiring unaffiliated characters because their own people have a conflict of interest (the original client is still a client). The characters have the option of recovering the artifact for Obsidian, or keeping it themselves, learning what it does, and deciding what to do with that information.

The Bloodline Courts need outside help: A matter in the Courts involves a non-Dhampir party, and the Courts cannot handle it internally without creating a political incident. They need someone with no standing in the Courts' system who can act without implication. They are offering significant resources and a favor. The favor's value depends entirely on how much the characters care about Bloodline Court politics, which they may not yet, but will.

The Threshold Society calls in a favor: An Accords Mediator contacts the characters with a complication rather than a job. A Society-brokered agreement between two factions was violated eighteen months after signing, and the Society lacks enforcement capacity. The violation is escalating toward open conflict that will generate Veil pressure across the region. The Society is offering institutional standing, recognized neutral-party credentials, access to Accord agreement intelligence, in exchange for resolving the situation before informal community retaliation makes everything worse.

The Sovereign Circle needs an outsider: A Hollow Pact practitioner affiliated with the Circle has gone missing. The Circle's internal assessment suggests the practitioner's compact source has advanced to Engaged without warning, which means the Circle cannot conduct a safe recovery operation without risking advancing the involvement further. They need someone unaffiliated with any shadow compact who can approach the practitioner's last known location without triggering the Hollow entity's attention. The Circle is offering their full intelligence file on the relevant Hollow entity type, which is worth considerably more than the immediate job.

The Compact of Lines has a registry problem: A Line Keeper contacts the characters about a territorial dispute in their region, two packs both claim Registry standing for overlapping territory, and the records that should resolve it are missing from the archive. The Keeper suspects deliberate removal. The characters are not pack members and hold no position in the dispute, which makes them the only parties the Keeper can trust to investigate without a stake in the outcome.

Lineage Communities

Non-human lineage characters exist within communities that have developed their own social structures, norms, and informal governance. These are not monolithic, different regions, different lineage concentrations, different histories, but some general patterns hold.

Dhampir: The Bloodline Courts provide formal community structure, but not all Dhampirs are Court-affiliated. Unaffiliated Dhampirs exist outside the Courts' protection and outside their obligations. Court-affiliated Dhampirs have access to community resources (safe houses, lineage registry, legal representation in hidden-world disputes) but are expected to respect Court jurisdiction over intra-community matters. The tension between Court membership and operational freedom is ongoing.

Skinchanger: The Compact of Lines provides formal governance at two tiers: Regional Conclaves manage inter-pack territorial disputes, pack recognition, and community representation to external organizations; the Line Registry maintains global records of recognized packs, their lineage histories, and their territorial holdings. Family networks and small packs remain the primary social unit, the Compact governs relationships between packs, not within them. Skinchangers who engage with the Compact as Pack Advocates or Line Keepers operate at the interface between community and institution; those who don't may be unaware of, or deliberately indifferent to, the structures that nominally represent them.

Haunt: Haunts who have found their community typically cluster around Mediumship practitioners who understand their lineage, Grimoire Compact researchers, independent practitioners, occasionally BUA Analysts with the right background. The community is dispersed and informal. Haunts who haven't found others like themselves may not know the full extent of what they are for years.

Faeborn: The Threshold Society has resolved the Faeborn's long-standing institutional gap, its Veil-maintenance and inter-faction arbitration mandate maps directly onto the Faeborn's constitutive relationship with in-between spaces. Threshold Wardens and Accords Mediators are both roles where the Faeborn's perceptual advantages and social fluency are the point rather than a peripheral benefit. Faeborn still exist at the margins of fae court structures (too human for full court standing, too fae for full human trust), and Safe Harbor and the Grimoire Compact remain useful complementary homes. Do not present Faeborn characters as institutionally homeless, the Threshold Society exists and was built, in part, around them.

Marked: Marked characters navigate the expectations of their compact sources — Hollow entities or the Illuminated — alongside the expectations of any human community they belong to. Light-Bound Marked often find a home in the Order of the Warden's Flame, the Warden track requires Light-Bound lineage and provides both tradition training and community infrastructure. Shadow-Bound Marked have the Sovereign Circle: a practitioners' community built around managing shadow compacts with professional standards rather than surrendering to them. The Circle does not resolve the Shadow-Bound Marked's complicated social position in a community that treats Hollow entities as threats, but it provides what the Vanguard's asset relationship and the Hollow Market's commerce model both fail to offer, a community that is actually on their side.

The hidden world's informal norms (from 00-setting-introduction.md) create social pressure that functions as soft rule enforcement. Characters who consistently violate these norms face social consequences, resources dry up, contacts stop returning calls, doors stop opening.

Maintain the Veil: The foundational norm. Characters who repeatedly generate civilian exposure that others have to clean up acquire reputations as liabilities. This does not have to be catastrophic violations, a pattern of careless evidence management is enough.

Don't weaponize the mundane world: Using law enforcement, media, or other civilian institutions against hidden-world parties is a severe norm violation. A hunter who calls in an anonymous tip to get a Dhampir arrested is not just breaking a rule; they're endangering the entire community and will be treated accordingly.

Respect lineage community jurisdiction: Human hunters intervening in Bloodline Court disputes, Vanguard operators acting in Skinchanger territorial disagreements; this creates resentment that outlasts the immediate incident. Organizations that ignore community jurisdiction find that community information channels close to them.

Honor agreements: A given word in the hidden world carries weight. Organizations and individuals who consistently fail to honor agreements lose access to the informal resource networks that make the hidden world function.

Running norm violations: When characters violate these norms, the consequence should be social and proportional to the violation. A single careless evidence event is a warning, a contact is less responsive, an organization makes a note. Repeated violations or a single severe violation should generate a concrete consequence: the Network de-lists their verification credentials, Safe Harbor refuses to place them in a safe house, the Bloodline Courts formally declare them personae non gratae. These consequences create story, how do the characters repair the relationship? Do they decide they don't need to?

Running Inter-Organization Tension

The organizations in this catalog have defined relationships with each other, alliances, rivalries, conflicts. The most productive use of these relationships is not to present them to the characters as background information, but to make them the circumstances characters have to navigate.

The BUA-Vanguard rivalry generates the most consistent practical tension. They operate in similar spaces with incompatible philosophies. When both are present, they are not coordinating, each unit is pursuing its own approach, which means characters in the middle are receiving contradictory direction, watching two institutional forces potentially cross each other's operations, and having to decide which one to work with (or work around). Neither is wrong, exactly. That's the point.

The Network's independence creates a different kind of tension, the Network is not an institutional player, but it has strong opinions about institutional players. A Network-affiliated hunter who watches the Vanguard execute a possessed individual who could have been exorcised is going to have opinions. The character's Network connections are going to have opinions. This creates relationship pressure that is not about any organization being a villain, it is about genuinely incompatible approaches to the same problem.

The Hollow Market as information broker introduces tension because the Market serves everyone, hunters, Shadow-Bound Marked practitioners, government agencies, criminal organizations, supernatural communities. The characters may find themselves using Market resources while knowing that the same Market is serving entities they consider threats. The Market is amoral. The characters are not. Where that line is and how to navigate it is recurring ethical terrain.

Part Five: Running Threat Categories

Brief operational notes for each threat category. Detailed mechanics are in the individual threat files; this covers GM approach and tone.

Undead

Undead scenarios have two registers: horror (the threat is disturbing and existential, someone you care about is now a zombie, the ghost is a murdered child) and action (clearing out a vampire's territory requires methodical tactical engagement). The best undead scenarios use both. The horror register creates emotional engagement; the action register gives it resolution.

Vampire social dynamics reward investment, Vampire Elders and Master Vampires have court politics, history, and long-term agendas. A Vampire Elder is not just a strong vampire; it is a centuries-old entity that has been managing its territory since before the city it lives in had a name. That history can be a hook, a complication, or a resource.

Shadow Entities

Shadow entity scenarios are about cost and consequence. The Hollow operate through compacts; everything has terms. The characters are always potentially at risk of inadvertently entering an obligation, saying the wrong words, accepting something that was offered with strings. Make sure the characters feel the weight of that risk without making them paralyzed by it.

The Crossroads Shadow and Greater Shadow Entity are both negotiation problems wrapped in a combat body. If the characters try to fight their way through a Shadow entity scenario without engaging the compact mechanics, they will solve it incompletely, the entity returns, or a bound individual is still bound, or the Shadow entity simply waits for the next opening.

Shapeshifters

Shapeshifter scenarios often have a victim within the threat. Werewolves were infected; they didn't choose this. The Alpha may have. The Wolf Pack is following instinct. The moral calculus of silver rounds is complicated, and making that complication felt, a player character reloading with silver to take down someone who attacked them, knowing the person on the other end was human last week, is a core genre beat.

Skinwalker scenarios should handle the cultural context with care. The entry in 04-shapeshifter.md includes a handling note; this is a place where player buy-in and table tone matter before the scene is run.

Fae

Fae scenarios reward patience and precision. The party that rushes to cold iron is not wrong exactly, but they're leaving the most interesting options on the table. The Banshee that seems like a threat is providing intelligence. The Trickster that seems like an obstacle might solve two other problems if offered the right deal. The Fae Lord that seems impossible to fight can be bound to a departure through negotiation.

Run fae with the sense that they have been here longer than the characters and know things the characters don't. They are not inscrutable, they have clear desires and follow consistent internal logic, but that logic is not human logic.

Cryptids

Cryptid scenarios are Veil management problems with a creature as the immediate cause. The characters are rarely in danger of not surviving a cryptid encounter; they are in danger of the encounter becoming public knowledge. Build the scenario around the investigative attention as much as the creature. The Sasquatch is manageable; the national news crew that's following up on the reports is not.

Mothman scenarios work best when the disaster it is heralding is something the characters can actually affect. The Mothman is not the problem; the bridge failure (or whatever) is the problem. Give them something to prevent.

Cursed and Possessed

These scenarios are at their best when the human being is present throughout. A possessed civilian who manages to surface for a moment and beg for help is a different engagement than a combat encounter. A cursed individual whose deterioration is visible session to session creates urgency that timer mechanics cannot replicate.

The exorcism as climax has a specific structure: the characters have to create the conditions (incapacitate the host safely, clear the space, give the practitioner time), and then the practitioner has to perform under pressure with the team protecting them. That structure creates interdependence, everyone has a role, and failure at any point changes the outcome.

Aberrations

Aberration scenarios require preparation and commitment. The characters need to understand what they're facing before they arrive (Lore research, Mediumship tradition sensing), they need the right tools (a Mediumship practitioner capable of Breach Closure), and they need a plan for managing the ambient Veil Fracture damage that accumulates throughout.

The Veil Fracture mechanic is the aberration category's unique contribution to campaign health management. Track it carefully; it is the resource the characters are spending throughout an aberration-heavy arc, and hitting 0 Wit should feel like a genuine consequence, not a bookkeeping exercise.

Quick Reference: Scene Construction Checklist

Use this for each scene in an AX.GM scenario:

Setup - [ ] What has already happened here (before the characters arrive)? - [ ] What is the immediate Veil pressure (witnesses, evidence, institutional attention)? - [ ] What information is available without a roll? What requires investigation?

During the Scene - [ ] Is the threat behaving actively (not waiting for the characters)? - [ ] What evidence is being created by the characters' actions? - [ ] What organizational interests intersect with this scene?

Resolution - [ ] What evidence needs to be addressed? - [ ] What cover story is available? - [ ] What did the characters learn, and how does it connect forward? - [ ] What changed in the world as a result of this scene?