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(So, figured that I'd bring this over and make sure it didn't go away. So, he we go, Revlid's Hotel Mascaron!)
Normally I'm more of an Exalted man, but I've fallen a little bit in love with the nWoD setting after reading the Core, and skimming a few other books to varying degrees of completeness. So, since this is my first attempt to do any homebrew for the system, feel free to point out any obvious mistakes or balance errors. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy reading!
HOTEL MASCARON (New Conspiracy)
It wasn’t the evening sun creeping through the blinds on its slow fall down the sky that woke Jackie up, or the yammering of drunken teens elsewhere in the building, or that one spring that was coming dangerously close to breaking through the mattress. These she could ignore - a night shift followed by a morning out on the town will do that to you.
No, it was the phone that dragged her from a twitching, scratchy sort of dream, and her sleep-crusted eyes cracked open to squint-glare at it from beneath her tangled covers. It had been cold when she’d gone to bed, an early-morning chill, but now she was boiling and too awake to simply ignore it and the damn phone was still ringing.
She half-rolled out of bed, moving first one leg out, and then the other before sitting up, reasoning that anyone with anything worth saying would wait for her, if they were prepared to call at – she rolled her neck to look at her bedside clock – seven-thirty in the evening.
Finally shuffling forward over softened pizza-boxes and almost-completely-empty cans, she snatched up the phone and indicated, with a perfectly ladylike grunt, that she was listening.
The answering voice was obscured by thick static, but seemed cheery. Jackie blinked away the last of the cobwebs and mustered her thoughts.
“What?”
The static cleared with a violent whine, leaving a ringing in her ears that almost seemed to carry a tune. Jackie winced, and was ready to put the phone down when the voice spoke again.
“Yes, that’s right. We’re just calling to confirm the delivery to 22 Mabon Road? It’s today, as soon as you can make it. They’ll be expecting quite a big package!”
The ringing vanished, bringing with it an immediate clarity. Of course. That was today, wasn’t it? The delivery! As soon as she could make it. At number 22, on Mabon Road! It was good that she hadn’t forgotten. The helpful caller didn’t wait for a reply, and Jackie clicked down the silent phone in a slight daze at her forgetfulness.
There was no sense rushing out half-cocked, so she tugged on some jeans, her trainers (their soles flaking with last night’s dried remains of Derran’s vomit), and zipped up her lucky jacket over her t-shirt. Gloves, too, despite the heat – she didn’t want to hurt her hands.
Moving through to the kitchen, she grabbed one of the sandwiches she’d stuck in the fridge for work – the other work – and washed it down with water from a chipped glass. Feeling ready for whatever the world could throw at her, Jackie checked her pockets – car and house keys, good. What else... ah, yes.
She reached under the sink, and pulled out a length of metal pipe. Hefting its weight in her palm, she frowned, and resolved to clean the blood off upon her return – she was sloppy, but there were limits, and there was no point doing it now.
Pulling her face out of her jacket pocket and tugging it over her head, Jackie strode out of the door, humming whatever crap had been on the kitchen radio. There was work ahead.
She returned a moment later, expression sheepish beneath a wolf’s mask, to lock her door. There were dangerous people around these days, after all.
Hotel Mascaron is a secretive group, even by the standards of shadowy conspiracies. After all, at least most of the hunters belonging to those world-spanning vigils are trusted to actually engage in the fight for humanity themselves, for all it incurs a toll on their minds and bodies. By contrast, a fair proportion of Hotel Mascaron’s sleeper agents drift through a blissfully normal life, checking in their killer instinct and donning masks to hunt only when called to action by a cryptic phone call or vague note slipped under the door.
The current incarnation of the conspiracy finds its origins in a Cold War research group ostensibly working for the CIA, though Project ThetaNu was at least in part a carry-over from the OSS and its “Operation Paperclip”. The project’s goals were nebulously defined at best, and evolved as constantly as its methodology - whether investigating Soviet psy-ops capability, testing the feasibility of extranormal propaganda techniques, or even providing an alternative to the recently-formalized TFV, by the time the project fully crystallized under the influence one Harold Mandrake, it had strayed irretrievably far from mainstream science.
Mandrake was an agent recently returned from South Vietnam in anticipation of the official Saigon Military Mission, who leveraged what he brought back with him to gain control over the project, renaming it Hotel Mascaron. As far as the American government is concerned, that is where the project ended – records brought out in the MKUltra hearings of 1977 mention Mandrake’s proposal, but go no further, leaving officials to assume the remains of the project were simply left to gather dust.
In truth, Hotel Mascaron is alive and well, albeit entirely off the leash. What Mandrake brought back with him was an eerily beautiful woman of apparently Asian descent, and an array of strange plants. In his lost proposal, he alluded to these (in the vaguest possible terms) as evidence of a psychic threat to America’s citizens. It was his opinion that these beings (referred to as “interlopers” or “advance scouts”) could only be effectively be combated by those they lived among and manipulated – ordinary citizens, made aware of the threat and set to work rooting them out as quietly as possible, so as not to alert their extradimensional masters.
Whatever the reasoning was behind this outlandish conclusion, it was apparently sufficient to convince all but a fraction of the project (the exceptions are best identified through their obituaries). These converts suckled at the teat of their black budget for as long as possible before resigning with an almost suspicious lack of fuss in the early sixties – only the barest traces of them remain in the CIA’s personnel files. By August 13, 1964, Hotel Mascaron was running as a domestic organization, its operations unsanctioned, its budget-source questionable, and its agents oft-ignorant.
What Hotel Mascaron had developed was a method of mental conditioning that mundane science could only strive for, a procedure involving the processed fluids of those strange plants, and snatches of alien song. With it, they found they could develop and unlock an alternate personality, one with no compunction against killing even the most human-seeming of extradimensional interlopers. With such a hardened interior, even a civilian might be considered an agent of the Hotel, a capable defender of humanity who would not need to sully themselves with the bloody tasks necessary to defend their world.
Mandrake died eleven years ago, on the anniversary of the Hotel’s formation, but the conspiracy he formed lives on, and its techniques have become more refined over the years, able to awaken within the psyches of its hunters abilities that might, to the uneducated, seem completely inhuman. The proportion of Hotel members who have undergone the Mandrake Induction has also increased; as more and more of its original staff have died off and newer recruits moved up the ranks, only a bare handful without a secondary personality still remain.
Of course, mere promotions are not the only reason for the Hotel’s steadily-increasing percentage of inductees. Another factor is at work, an unforeseen side-effect of the Mandrake Induction; simply put, the conditioning can be inherited. This inheritance is unreliable, and spits in the face of what most of the conspiracy’s researchers understand about the process, but it does happen, and such second-generation inductees are recruited through any means necessary, handed weapons and pointed towards humanity’s soulless enemies.
Some within the Hotel regard this “conscription” as dubiously moral, but frankly, most of what they do is dubiously moral at best. What’s one more sin in the face of humanity’s potential enslavement?
This is not a hotel you can check out of.
The Enemy
Hotel Mascaron knows its enemy. The upper echelons have a wealth of knowledge on the fae, and even if nothing more than the practical elements (if those) filter down to their field agents, it’s a rare handler who won’t nudge his contacts toward the right pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. This is how the Hotel operates, on every level; hints and suggestions and not-quite-confirmations. It teaches its hunters to work their way around answers more twisted than a corkscrew, the better to deal with their enemy... and their own minds.
While the Hotel’s primary targets are (and always have been) changelings and other creatures from the Hedge, but that’s not to say they don’t hunt other monsters. A hunter who tracks down a mesmerizing cult leader might have located a changeling... or a vampire using similar powers. Reports of man-beasts could point to the more bestial interlopers of the green screen, or werewolves and other skinchangers. Sightings of long-missing persons can indicate one of the fae, entering this world in a stolen shape, or a ghost, or even a mage who has abandoned her mortal life.
Upon entering the conspiracy, hunters are mostly guided by their handlers, used as footworkers or muscle in their regional campaign against the greenscreeners. Of course, they're free to engage in their own, independent investigations, especially as their capacity for detecting extradimensional creatures grows, and those who were hunters before joining the Hotel are likely to continue their normal extracurricular activities. In any case, this relationship survives only as long as the handler remains aloof - once they decide (or are forced) to trust a particular hunter, or one of their charges is smart enough to get some leverage on them, this changes.
Information (given as a reward or tool, withheld as a punishment or to impress) is the only real hold handlers have over their charges, and the best are careful to keep control over its flow. When putting together a cell of local hunters for an assault on a fae hive or bolt-hole, they tend to pick personalities that will clash, or else set mistrust drifting through the group like a bad smell. It is rare, but not unheard of, for a handler to join their charges in the field - generally, they do so only when utterly pressed for time and hands, or to guide them through a goblin market, another alien environment where their superior experience gives them the advantage.
The beings of the alien Wyrd are incredibly varied, such that it takes a skilled hunter to immediately distinguish them from the other things that go bump in the night... though most would continue with the hunt even upon doing so. One less monster in the world is always a good thing.
Hunters
Ever since you were young, you’ve had hallucinations. Seen brief flashes of things that couldn’t be there. You were on medication for that, but none of it worked until you were approached by the Hotel. When you told them about the man with the horns and hooves who lived across the street, they gave you a loaded gun and an alibi, not a new prescription. It’s just what you needed.
You delivered pizzas. That’s all. You were sure that was all. Then you remembered one delivery that you didn’t get overtime for, and the company denied it had ever happened, told you to get more sleep, that you looked exhausted. Then you remembered a few more things, and got a call. A call telling you about things you’d agreed to that you couldn’t remember, things you’d been killing that you could hardly believe.
Your grandmother refused to take you to the doctor for your headaches, or your blackouts. You assumed it was a distrust of medication, some sort of cultural holdover from Muang Lao, but she moved to Florida before you were even born, so you kind of thought she should get over it. One day you woke up standing, with one hand broken and the other clutching a bloody machete. Mae thao was surprisingly understanding – you’ve never been so happy to have a talk about your family history.
You knew. You knew what they really found in Azorian, and what Wintergreen learned from MKUltra, and why Koresh couldn’t be allowed to leave Waco alive. You also knew more about ThetaNu than most of the US government, and that was caught their attention. They contacted you over Network Zero, offered you a chance to pull back the “green screen”. You accepted, Allah help you, and now you know even more.
Stereotypes
VASCU: You know what the Madame said to me? “Be as wary of the woodcutters as the wolves.” Yeah, I talk to her. So I know what you’re thinking – ooh, the police, what are they gonna do, I’m crazy and I fight monsters – well, fucking be wary, because they know what you’re thinking, too. Both of you. You might know the difference between a real person and a pod, but they don’t, and it’s their job to lock up crazy killers like you.
The Ascending Ones: So, you came across someone a bit like you, huh? Dedicated, murderous, medicated out of their skulls? They’re not like you. Trust me on this, if nothing else. I mean, I give you a hell of an odd prescription, but I don't ask you to go fuck up vampires on LSD, right? I just slip it into your coffee when you're not looking. Heh. Kidding, really.
The Union: Could have been you, right? You look like you might have been blue-collar – if you knew a bit less than you do and a lot less than I do, that is. Give them a hand if you like, but don’t get too involved. Sure, we’re all about arming humanity, but there’s a reason we keep it in-house – so we can keep an eye on you nutcases. Those guys clock in and clock out and who knows what the fuck goes on in the meantime. They’re compromised, and we don’t tolerate that shit unless we’re the ones doing it to ourselves.
Division Six: Oh, you think these guys might be onto something with their consensus reality? Well, maybe, maybe, my chickadee, but a little bird tells me they sure as hell aren’t government, and that makes them liars, and what do we do with liars? Make them the handlers of jackasses like you, mostly, hah. Are we with the government? Sure we are. Come on, ask another one – like which government we’re with.
Splinters
Hotel Mascaron has no official departments or chapters, though regions are overseen by a specific number of handlers at any given time, each of whom looks over a specific number of agents. The higher-ups of the conspiracy try to keep the handlers of each region as diverse as possible, matching them to agents who share or complement their approach to the Vigil; of course, no small part of equilibrium is simply an emergent property of philosophical jockeying in the Hotel’s ranks.
The Kesey Agenda are, on a practical level, the fundraisers and information brokers of the conspiracy. They’re the ones who scour through reports of returned missing persons, pick out suspicious concentrations of forged identities, or collate the truth behind fairy tales and UFO abductions. More immediately they’re the ones who set up particularly destitute hunters with work. They’re often involved with organized crime on one level or another, using talents that the Shangyin Concern feel should be exclusively targeted at monsters to instead wring funding out of the criminal element. This information network and lack of illusions also makes them the part of the conspiracy that others – monster or hunter – tend to deal with on a diplomatic level.
Members of this splinter receive a free specialty in Streetwise (Organized Crime).
The researchers of Hotel Mascaron are the Mindszenty Movement, though their methods tend toward wild speculation and idle philosophy as much as actual science. They’re the ones determined to unlock the secrets of the green screen, and – as they acquire more figments – of their own changing minds. As a result, they tend to know more about the history of the conspiracy than its other members, and act as something like internal affairs, keeping an eye on hunters who may have been compromised by the enemy, or simply gone crazy. More handlers come from this splinter than anywhere else, turning their talent at uncovering riddles to lay them before their hunters.
Members of this splinter receive a free specialty in Academics (Psychopharmacology).
The Shangyin Concern do not hold with distractions. Another world is preying upon this one, encroaching on its very soul, devouring its people and regurgitating twisted mockeries. All that matters is ripping it out, root and branch. Not all hunters of this splinter are quite so passionate, but all are focused on the practical elements of the Vigil. Anyone brought into the conspiracy through their existing work as a hunter tends to have caught the eye of a member of the Shangyin Concern, impressing them through their intellect, resources or martial skill – in this sense, it might be seen as the splinter for field recruitment. Though they preach trust for their handlers, most hunters of this splinter form bonds with other members of the conspiracy, sticking together at the lower levels.
Members of this splinter receive a free specialty in Weaponry (Improvised Weapons).
Status
Past the actual induction, status in Hotel Mascaron relies mostly on how much you know about it. A particularly efficient agent might advance fairly conventionally, his handler doling out more information and resources to him as he becomes less and less dispensable. It is, however, more common for those who advance to do so through efforts that would be seen as subversive in any other organization – tailing their handlers to squeeze information from them, creatively editing their orders to try and provoke their superiors, or investigating the organization’s history as best they can in attempt to get more of a window into what’s going on.
• You’re an official member of Hotel Mascaron, inducted through blood of alien fruits. Whether you know that is another matter entirely. You receive your orders through phone calls, emails, and texts... or, if your handler wants a more personal touch, a post card slipped under the door or a note in a takeaway meal. You have the option of spending Merit dots on Figments.
••• You've likely become a handler - if not, due to misfortune or talents that clearly lie in fieldwork rather than management, you at least have consistent personal contact with your superiors. Your time hunting has granted you an instinctive awareness of the green screen and its denizens, a tingling in your hindbrain or whisper in your ear that acts as the Unseen Sense Merit, covering everything from hobgoblins to changelings to the Gentry. If you already have such a Merit, you benefit from a +2 bonus to the usual Wits + Composure roll.
••••• You’ve slain fairies and caught dreams. You’ve met the Madame – Mandrake’s widow – in that strange complex in Miami. You know too much about the green screen to sleep well, and most of it is even true. You give orders to handlers and direct hunters against the machinations of alien Courts; you even have official permission to check in a few of them to aid in your Vigil, equivalent to three dots in Allies (Guests of Hotel Mascaron).
Normally I'm more of an Exalted man, but I've fallen a little bit in love with the nWoD setting after reading the Core, and skimming a few other books to varying degrees of completeness. So, since this is my first attempt to do any homebrew for the system, feel free to point out any obvious mistakes or balance errors. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy reading!
HOTEL MASCARON (New Conspiracy)
It wasn’t the evening sun creeping through the blinds on its slow fall down the sky that woke Jackie up, or the yammering of drunken teens elsewhere in the building, or that one spring that was coming dangerously close to breaking through the mattress. These she could ignore - a night shift followed by a morning out on the town will do that to you.
No, it was the phone that dragged her from a twitching, scratchy sort of dream, and her sleep-crusted eyes cracked open to squint-glare at it from beneath her tangled covers. It had been cold when she’d gone to bed, an early-morning chill, but now she was boiling and too awake to simply ignore it and the damn phone was still ringing.
She half-rolled out of bed, moving first one leg out, and then the other before sitting up, reasoning that anyone with anything worth saying would wait for her, if they were prepared to call at – she rolled her neck to look at her bedside clock – seven-thirty in the evening.
Finally shuffling forward over softened pizza-boxes and almost-completely-empty cans, she snatched up the phone and indicated, with a perfectly ladylike grunt, that she was listening.
The answering voice was obscured by thick static, but seemed cheery. Jackie blinked away the last of the cobwebs and mustered her thoughts.
“What?”
The static cleared with a violent whine, leaving a ringing in her ears that almost seemed to carry a tune. Jackie winced, and was ready to put the phone down when the voice spoke again.
“Yes, that’s right. We’re just calling to confirm the delivery to 22 Mabon Road? It’s today, as soon as you can make it. They’ll be expecting quite a big package!”
The ringing vanished, bringing with it an immediate clarity. Of course. That was today, wasn’t it? The delivery! As soon as she could make it. At number 22, on Mabon Road! It was good that she hadn’t forgotten. The helpful caller didn’t wait for a reply, and Jackie clicked down the silent phone in a slight daze at her forgetfulness.
There was no sense rushing out half-cocked, so she tugged on some jeans, her trainers (their soles flaking with last night’s dried remains of Derran’s vomit), and zipped up her lucky jacket over her t-shirt. Gloves, too, despite the heat – she didn’t want to hurt her hands.
Moving through to the kitchen, she grabbed one of the sandwiches she’d stuck in the fridge for work – the other work – and washed it down with water from a chipped glass. Feeling ready for whatever the world could throw at her, Jackie checked her pockets – car and house keys, good. What else... ah, yes.
She reached under the sink, and pulled out a length of metal pipe. Hefting its weight in her palm, she frowned, and resolved to clean the blood off upon her return – she was sloppy, but there were limits, and there was no point doing it now.
Pulling her face out of her jacket pocket and tugging it over her head, Jackie strode out of the door, humming whatever crap had been on the kitchen radio. There was work ahead.
She returned a moment later, expression sheepish beneath a wolf’s mask, to lock her door. There were dangerous people around these days, after all.
Hotel Mascaron is a secretive group, even by the standards of shadowy conspiracies. After all, at least most of the hunters belonging to those world-spanning vigils are trusted to actually engage in the fight for humanity themselves, for all it incurs a toll on their minds and bodies. By contrast, a fair proportion of Hotel Mascaron’s sleeper agents drift through a blissfully normal life, checking in their killer instinct and donning masks to hunt only when called to action by a cryptic phone call or vague note slipped under the door.
The current incarnation of the conspiracy finds its origins in a Cold War research group ostensibly working for the CIA, though Project ThetaNu was at least in part a carry-over from the OSS and its “Operation Paperclip”. The project’s goals were nebulously defined at best, and evolved as constantly as its methodology - whether investigating Soviet psy-ops capability, testing the feasibility of extranormal propaganda techniques, or even providing an alternative to the recently-formalized TFV, by the time the project fully crystallized under the influence one Harold Mandrake, it had strayed irretrievably far from mainstream science.
Mandrake was an agent recently returned from South Vietnam in anticipation of the official Saigon Military Mission, who leveraged what he brought back with him to gain control over the project, renaming it Hotel Mascaron. As far as the American government is concerned, that is where the project ended – records brought out in the MKUltra hearings of 1977 mention Mandrake’s proposal, but go no further, leaving officials to assume the remains of the project were simply left to gather dust.
In truth, Hotel Mascaron is alive and well, albeit entirely off the leash. What Mandrake brought back with him was an eerily beautiful woman of apparently Asian descent, and an array of strange plants. In his lost proposal, he alluded to these (in the vaguest possible terms) as evidence of a psychic threat to America’s citizens. It was his opinion that these beings (referred to as “interlopers” or “advance scouts”) could only be effectively be combated by those they lived among and manipulated – ordinary citizens, made aware of the threat and set to work rooting them out as quietly as possible, so as not to alert their extradimensional masters.
Whatever the reasoning was behind this outlandish conclusion, it was apparently sufficient to convince all but a fraction of the project (the exceptions are best identified through their obituaries). These converts suckled at the teat of their black budget for as long as possible before resigning with an almost suspicious lack of fuss in the early sixties – only the barest traces of them remain in the CIA’s personnel files. By August 13, 1964, Hotel Mascaron was running as a domestic organization, its operations unsanctioned, its budget-source questionable, and its agents oft-ignorant.
What Hotel Mascaron had developed was a method of mental conditioning that mundane science could only strive for, a procedure involving the processed fluids of those strange plants, and snatches of alien song. With it, they found they could develop and unlock an alternate personality, one with no compunction against killing even the most human-seeming of extradimensional interlopers. With such a hardened interior, even a civilian might be considered an agent of the Hotel, a capable defender of humanity who would not need to sully themselves with the bloody tasks necessary to defend their world.
Mandrake died eleven years ago, on the anniversary of the Hotel’s formation, but the conspiracy he formed lives on, and its techniques have become more refined over the years, able to awaken within the psyches of its hunters abilities that might, to the uneducated, seem completely inhuman. The proportion of Hotel members who have undergone the Mandrake Induction has also increased; as more and more of its original staff have died off and newer recruits moved up the ranks, only a bare handful without a secondary personality still remain.
Of course, mere promotions are not the only reason for the Hotel’s steadily-increasing percentage of inductees. Another factor is at work, an unforeseen side-effect of the Mandrake Induction; simply put, the conditioning can be inherited. This inheritance is unreliable, and spits in the face of what most of the conspiracy’s researchers understand about the process, but it does happen, and such second-generation inductees are recruited through any means necessary, handed weapons and pointed towards humanity’s soulless enemies.
Some within the Hotel regard this “conscription” as dubiously moral, but frankly, most of what they do is dubiously moral at best. What’s one more sin in the face of humanity’s potential enslavement?
This is not a hotel you can check out of.
The Enemy
Hotel Mascaron knows its enemy. The upper echelons have a wealth of knowledge on the fae, and even if nothing more than the practical elements (if those) filter down to their field agents, it’s a rare handler who won’t nudge his contacts toward the right pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. This is how the Hotel operates, on every level; hints and suggestions and not-quite-confirmations. It teaches its hunters to work their way around answers more twisted than a corkscrew, the better to deal with their enemy... and their own minds.
While the Hotel’s primary targets are (and always have been) changelings and other creatures from the Hedge, but that’s not to say they don’t hunt other monsters. A hunter who tracks down a mesmerizing cult leader might have located a changeling... or a vampire using similar powers. Reports of man-beasts could point to the more bestial interlopers of the green screen, or werewolves and other skinchangers. Sightings of long-missing persons can indicate one of the fae, entering this world in a stolen shape, or a ghost, or even a mage who has abandoned her mortal life.
Upon entering the conspiracy, hunters are mostly guided by their handlers, used as footworkers or muscle in their regional campaign against the greenscreeners. Of course, they're free to engage in their own, independent investigations, especially as their capacity for detecting extradimensional creatures grows, and those who were hunters before joining the Hotel are likely to continue their normal extracurricular activities. In any case, this relationship survives only as long as the handler remains aloof - once they decide (or are forced) to trust a particular hunter, or one of their charges is smart enough to get some leverage on them, this changes.
Information (given as a reward or tool, withheld as a punishment or to impress) is the only real hold handlers have over their charges, and the best are careful to keep control over its flow. When putting together a cell of local hunters for an assault on a fae hive or bolt-hole, they tend to pick personalities that will clash, or else set mistrust drifting through the group like a bad smell. It is rare, but not unheard of, for a handler to join their charges in the field - generally, they do so only when utterly pressed for time and hands, or to guide them through a goblin market, another alien environment where their superior experience gives them the advantage.
The beings of the alien Wyrd are incredibly varied, such that it takes a skilled hunter to immediately distinguish them from the other things that go bump in the night... though most would continue with the hunt even upon doing so. One less monster in the world is always a good thing.
Hunters
Ever since you were young, you’ve had hallucinations. Seen brief flashes of things that couldn’t be there. You were on medication for that, but none of it worked until you were approached by the Hotel. When you told them about the man with the horns and hooves who lived across the street, they gave you a loaded gun and an alibi, not a new prescription. It’s just what you needed.
You delivered pizzas. That’s all. You were sure that was all. Then you remembered one delivery that you didn’t get overtime for, and the company denied it had ever happened, told you to get more sleep, that you looked exhausted. Then you remembered a few more things, and got a call. A call telling you about things you’d agreed to that you couldn’t remember, things you’d been killing that you could hardly believe.
Your grandmother refused to take you to the doctor for your headaches, or your blackouts. You assumed it was a distrust of medication, some sort of cultural holdover from Muang Lao, but she moved to Florida before you were even born, so you kind of thought she should get over it. One day you woke up standing, with one hand broken and the other clutching a bloody machete. Mae thao was surprisingly understanding – you’ve never been so happy to have a talk about your family history.
You knew. You knew what they really found in Azorian, and what Wintergreen learned from MKUltra, and why Koresh couldn’t be allowed to leave Waco alive. You also knew more about ThetaNu than most of the US government, and that was caught their attention. They contacted you over Network Zero, offered you a chance to pull back the “green screen”. You accepted, Allah help you, and now you know even more.
Stereotypes
VASCU: You know what the Madame said to me? “Be as wary of the woodcutters as the wolves.” Yeah, I talk to her. So I know what you’re thinking – ooh, the police, what are they gonna do, I’m crazy and I fight monsters – well, fucking be wary, because they know what you’re thinking, too. Both of you. You might know the difference between a real person and a pod, but they don’t, and it’s their job to lock up crazy killers like you.
The Ascending Ones: So, you came across someone a bit like you, huh? Dedicated, murderous, medicated out of their skulls? They’re not like you. Trust me on this, if nothing else. I mean, I give you a hell of an odd prescription, but I don't ask you to go fuck up vampires on LSD, right? I just slip it into your coffee when you're not looking. Heh. Kidding, really.
The Union: Could have been you, right? You look like you might have been blue-collar – if you knew a bit less than you do and a lot less than I do, that is. Give them a hand if you like, but don’t get too involved. Sure, we’re all about arming humanity, but there’s a reason we keep it in-house – so we can keep an eye on you nutcases. Those guys clock in and clock out and who knows what the fuck goes on in the meantime. They’re compromised, and we don’t tolerate that shit unless we’re the ones doing it to ourselves.
Division Six: Oh, you think these guys might be onto something with their consensus reality? Well, maybe, maybe, my chickadee, but a little bird tells me they sure as hell aren’t government, and that makes them liars, and what do we do with liars? Make them the handlers of jackasses like you, mostly, hah. Are we with the government? Sure we are. Come on, ask another one – like which government we’re with.
Splinters
Hotel Mascaron has no official departments or chapters, though regions are overseen by a specific number of handlers at any given time, each of whom looks over a specific number of agents. The higher-ups of the conspiracy try to keep the handlers of each region as diverse as possible, matching them to agents who share or complement their approach to the Vigil; of course, no small part of equilibrium is simply an emergent property of philosophical jockeying in the Hotel’s ranks.
The Kesey Agenda are, on a practical level, the fundraisers and information brokers of the conspiracy. They’re the ones who scour through reports of returned missing persons, pick out suspicious concentrations of forged identities, or collate the truth behind fairy tales and UFO abductions. More immediately they’re the ones who set up particularly destitute hunters with work. They’re often involved with organized crime on one level or another, using talents that the Shangyin Concern feel should be exclusively targeted at monsters to instead wring funding out of the criminal element. This information network and lack of illusions also makes them the part of the conspiracy that others – monster or hunter – tend to deal with on a diplomatic level.
Members of this splinter receive a free specialty in Streetwise (Organized Crime).
The researchers of Hotel Mascaron are the Mindszenty Movement, though their methods tend toward wild speculation and idle philosophy as much as actual science. They’re the ones determined to unlock the secrets of the green screen, and – as they acquire more figments – of their own changing minds. As a result, they tend to know more about the history of the conspiracy than its other members, and act as something like internal affairs, keeping an eye on hunters who may have been compromised by the enemy, or simply gone crazy. More handlers come from this splinter than anywhere else, turning their talent at uncovering riddles to lay them before their hunters.
Members of this splinter receive a free specialty in Academics (Psychopharmacology).
The Shangyin Concern do not hold with distractions. Another world is preying upon this one, encroaching on its very soul, devouring its people and regurgitating twisted mockeries. All that matters is ripping it out, root and branch. Not all hunters of this splinter are quite so passionate, but all are focused on the practical elements of the Vigil. Anyone brought into the conspiracy through their existing work as a hunter tends to have caught the eye of a member of the Shangyin Concern, impressing them through their intellect, resources or martial skill – in this sense, it might be seen as the splinter for field recruitment. Though they preach trust for their handlers, most hunters of this splinter form bonds with other members of the conspiracy, sticking together at the lower levels.
Members of this splinter receive a free specialty in Weaponry (Improvised Weapons).
Status
Past the actual induction, status in Hotel Mascaron relies mostly on how much you know about it. A particularly efficient agent might advance fairly conventionally, his handler doling out more information and resources to him as he becomes less and less dispensable. It is, however, more common for those who advance to do so through efforts that would be seen as subversive in any other organization – tailing their handlers to squeeze information from them, creatively editing their orders to try and provoke their superiors, or investigating the organization’s history as best they can in attempt to get more of a window into what’s going on.
• You’re an official member of Hotel Mascaron, inducted through blood of alien fruits. Whether you know that is another matter entirely. You receive your orders through phone calls, emails, and texts... or, if your handler wants a more personal touch, a post card slipped under the door or a note in a takeaway meal. You have the option of spending Merit dots on Figments.
••• You've likely become a handler - if not, due to misfortune or talents that clearly lie in fieldwork rather than management, you at least have consistent personal contact with your superiors. Your time hunting has granted you an instinctive awareness of the green screen and its denizens, a tingling in your hindbrain or whisper in your ear that acts as the Unseen Sense Merit, covering everything from hobgoblins to changelings to the Gentry. If you already have such a Merit, you benefit from a +2 bonus to the usual Wits + Composure roll.
••••• You’ve slain fairies and caught dreams. You’ve met the Madame – Mandrake’s widow – in that strange complex in Miami. You know too much about the green screen to sleep well, and most of it is even true. You give orders to handlers and direct hunters against the machinations of alien Courts; you even have official permission to check in a few of them to aid in your Vigil, equivalent to three dots in Allies (Guests of Hotel Mascaron).
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