The Hidden World
AX.GM.01.02 — Setting Introduction: The Veil
What This Catalog Is
This catalog presents a contemporary urban horror and fantasy setting for AxiomRPG — a world where the supernatural is real, hidden from ordinary society by a combination of active concealment, human psychology, and institutional suppression. Characters are people who know the truth: hunters who pursue threats, agents who classify and contain, supernatural beings navigating the space between two worlds, and investigators who have seen too much to pretend otherwise.
The tone draws from the genre's established canon: Buffy the Vampire Slayer's combination of horror and functional community, Supernatural's road-weary expertise and mythological depth, Grimm's law enforcement perspective on a world most people can't perceive, Dresden Files' urban magic embedded in a recognizable city, X-Files' institutional ambiguity and evidence management, Sanctuary's position on what "monster" actually means. The catalog does not require familiarity with these sources. It does inherit their core premise: the monsters are real, most people don't know, and the people who know have to figure out what to do about it.
This is a setting of practical moral complexity. The threats are real and dangerous. So are the people fighting them. The organizations with the authority to respond don't always respond well. The beings classified as threats don't always deserve the classification. The Veil that keeps ordinary society safe from knowledge of the hidden world also keeps ordinary society from having any say in decisions made on its behalf. These tensions are not resolved by the catalog. They are the setting.
The Veil
The Veil is not a physical barrier or a magical concealment. It is a social fact: the collective maintenance of the boundary between what is real and what ordinary society acknowledges as real. Supernatural activity happens. The Veil is the ongoing effort — by humans who know, by supernatural communities who prefer concealment, and by institutional structures that have decided concealment serves their interests — to ensure that supernatural activity does not accumulate into public knowledge.
The Veil functions through several overlapping mechanisms.
Human psychology. People are resistant to evidence that contradicts their working model of the world. A person who witnesses something supernatural does not immediately conclude that the supernatural is real — they look for explanations that fit what they already believe. The Veil exploits this. A Skinchanger's involuntary shift witnessed by a civilian is more likely to be attributed to a trick of light, a medical episode, or delayed stress response than to transformation. The first line of Veil maintenance is the witnesses doing it themselves.
Active suppression. Organizations that know — the BUA, the Vanguard, elements of other institutions — work systematically to reclassify incidents, manage evidence, and ensure that documented supernatural events don't accumulate into patterns visible to media or public attention. This work is not seamless. The pattern of classified incidents, sealed autopsy reports, and incidents attributed to gas leaks or collective hysteria is visible to anyone who looks for it. Most people don't look for it. The ones who do either find the hidden world or find that the hidden world has found them.
Community interest. Supernatural beings and lineage communities have generally concluded that Veil maintenance serves their interests. A hidden world is a world where Dhampir communities are not classified as biological threats. A world where the Veil fails is a world where those communities become the subject of governmental and popular attention they cannot afford. This calculation is not universal — some beings don't care, some actively prefer exposure — but the general alignment of hidden-world community interests with Veil maintenance is a significant factor.
Institutional inertia. The BUA has been classifying supernatural incidents for sixty years. The Grimoire Compact has been preserving the hidden world's knowledge in channels inaccessible to mainstream academia for over a century. Religious structures have been managing evidence of miraculous and infernal activity since long before institutional formalization. The Veil persists partly because the structures built to maintain it have accumulated significant capacity and significant interest in continuing.
What the Veil Is Not
The Veil is not absolute. It fails regularly in specific scenes, in specific communities, and around specific events. A Radiant Burst in a public space does not stay contained. A Skinchanger's full shift witnessed by a crowd of people with phones cannot be fully suppressed. An infernal entity's activities over a period of months leave a pattern that investigative journalism eventually follows if no one clears the trail.
The Veil is not a reason supernatural activity is impossible to notice. It is a reason it is harder to notice and easier to dismiss. For characters operating in the hidden world, Veil maintenance is a recurring practical constraint — not an absolute limit but a cost structure for operating openly.
The Veil is also not morally neutral. Its maintenance involves concealing significant truths from the public. People die from threats they don't know exist and don't have the information to protect themselves from. The institutions that maintain the Veil are not accountable to the people they're protecting. These facts are part of the setting and should be part of play.
The Hidden World
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 negotiated.
Lineage Communities
Supernatural lineages — Dhampir, Skinchanger, Haunt, Faeborn, 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 fundamentally different relationship with their heritage than a Dhampir 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. They know that some 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. Network hunters, BUA agents, Order members, 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 (13-threats/) 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 comprehensively 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.
What Characters Know
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 specific weaknesses and specific destruction methods. Generic violence delays problems; specific methods resolve 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, demon are cultural categories, not recognized empirical realities. They know that strange things happen and that 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.
The Social Contract of the Hidden World
The hidden world operates through a set of informal norms that most parties honor most of the time. These norms are not codified, not enforced by any single authority, and regularly violated by parties who have concluded that their interests supersede them. They are, nonetheless, the operating framework of a community that has coexisted with ordinary society for as long as anyone has documented.
Don't create visible evidence. Supernatural activity should leave the smallest possible trace. This is not always possible — threats don't cooperate, incidents develop in public spaces, Veil management sometimes fails. But the norm is minimum evidence, minimum witness, minimum institutional response.
Clean up after incidents. When something visible happens, parties with the capacity to manage the evidence are expected to do so. This is why the BUA exists. It is also why Network hunters don't leave bodies in places that civilian law enforcement will find them. The cleanup obligation falls most heavily on parties with the most institutional capacity to fulfill it.
Don't weaponize the mundane world. Using ordinary society's law enforcement, media, or governmental apparatus against hidden-world parties is generally considered a significant violation. The implicit logic: the mundane world's engagement with the hidden world tends to produce outcomes nobody benefits from, and parties who invite that engagement to settle internal disputes are creating costs for everyone. This norm has exceptions — there are situations where hidden-world parties have decided that exposure is preferable to the alternative — but they are recognized as significant decisions, not routine tactics.
Hidden-world disputes stay hidden-world. Conflicts between organizations, communities, and individuals within the hidden world should be resolved through hidden-world mechanisms. This norm is honored imperfectly; several organizations in the setting have standing relationships with mundane governmental structures, and those relationships are occasionally used in ways that blur the line. But the general principle — that the hidden world manages its own conflicts — is a significant shared norm.
Lineage is not behavior. A Dhampir is not a vampire; Dhampir heritage is a lineage reality, not a behavioral designation. A Skinchanger who maintains community norms is not a shapeshifter threat. A Marked practitioner using their contract is not an infernal incursion. The operational distinction between what something is and what it does is foundational to how the hidden world's more functional parties operate. Organizations that don't maintain this distinction — the Vanguard at its worst, the Network's less thoughtful elements — produce the kinds of incidents that create long-term problems.
Tone and Genre Conventions
Horror
The threats in this setting are genuinely dangerous. Characters can die. They can be wounded in ways that don't fully heal. They can lose people they care about to things they couldn't stop. The horror in this setting is not guaranteed safety with a scare at the end — it is the real possibility of loss against the backdrop of a world that most people cannot see.
Horror in this setting is also social and psychological, not just physical. The cost of knowing: carrying knowledge that isolates you from ordinary life, that requires ongoing performance of normalcy, that connects you to a world you cannot fully explain to anyone outside it. The cost of the work: doing necessary things that ordinary ethical frameworks don't cleanly cover. The horror of institutions: the Vanguard's willingness to accept collateral, the BUA's capacity to classify and compartmentalize indefinitely, the Market's willingness to move anything for a price.
Investigation
Most scenarios in this setting begin with a question: what happened, what is causing this, what is this thing, what do we do about it. Investigation is a primary play mode. Characters find evidence, consult knowledge sources, assess threats against what they know, and develop approaches based on incomplete information under time pressure. The knowledge-work aspect of play — identifying the threat before you can address it — is not a preliminary to the real work. It is the work.
Action
This is also a setting where people fight things. Characters engage threats directly, under dangerous conditions, with specialized knowledge and specific materials. Modern combat is fast, loud, and consequential. Firearms are powerful; using them in civilian spaces creates problems beyond the immediate tactical one. Many threats require specific approaches rather than just effective violence — what works on a werewolf does not work on a ghost, and neither works on a demon in the same way. Action in this setting requires tactical knowledge as well as tactical capacity.
Community
The most durable genre sources this catalog draws from are fundamentally about the community that forms around the work. Buffy's Scooby Gang. The Winchesters' extended network. Dresden's Chicago contacts. The hidden world's organizations exist to provide structured versions of this — the BUA team, the Network's assembled response, the Order's house — but the most significant communities in play are often the ones characters build themselves. This catalog provides the organizational infrastructure. The community that matters most is the one at the table.
Moral Complexity
This setting does not resolve cleanly. The Vanguard operators who follow problematic orders are not straightforwardly villains — some of them are genuinely trying to protect people. The Dhampir community's internal politics involve real harm produced by real structures that real people defend for coherent reasons. The Hollow Market serves clients with genuine needs that legitimate channels cannot serve. The BUA's concealment of significant truths serves interests that include genuine public protection.
Characters operating in this setting will regularly encounter situations where every available action has meaningful costs. This is intentional. The setting's moral complexity is not a complication to route around — it is the substance of the interesting decisions.
Campaign Structures
Monster of the Week
The foundational campaign structure. Individual scenarios focus on a specific threat or incident: something is happening, the characters investigate, they identify the threat, they resolve it. Scenarios can be nearly self-contained or can develop ongoing threads across sessions. The organization infrastructure — employer, resource source, institutional constraint — provides structure for how characters encounter threats and what authority they operate with.
Monster of the Week campaigns work at Street or Regional power levels (6D and 9D generation packages). Characters are effective against standard threats and have to work hard against elites. The ongoing world develops through the accumulation of resolved cases and their unresolved margins.
Conspiracy Arc
A sustained investigation into a hidden-world actor or pattern operating at a scale that individual case work keeps touching without fully surfacing. The conspiracy provides the season-level structure: individual scenarios advance pieces of the larger picture while providing self-contained threat resolution. The conspiracy is revealed incrementally — each scenario provides information that recontextualizes previous events and advances the characters toward confrontation with whatever is behind the pattern.
Conspiracy Arc campaigns work at Regional or National power levels (9D and 12D). The threats scale with the conspiracy's scope. The organizations are involved in the conspiracy, aware of it, or actively suppressing knowledge of it.
Apocalypse Now
A campaign built around a large-scale threat to the Veil, to ordinary society, or to the hidden world's internal stability. The stakes are existential or near-existential. The threat is beyond what any single organization can address and requires coalition-building, information synthesis, and direct confrontation with something significantly beyond standard threat categories. These campaigns are built for National-level characters (12D) and are expected to be the culmination of significant prior play.
A Note on the Veil's Fragility
The Veil can break. Not all at once — sudden global revelation is not a stable scenario for this setting — but locally, specifically, and with consequences. A city where a significant supernatural event has produced too many witnesses and too much physical evidence to suppress is a city where the Veil is compromised. The aftermath of that compromise — government response, media, the hidden world's communities managing the fallout — is a campaign context, not just an inciting incident.
GMs should treat Veil fragility as a resource, not just a threat. Scenarios where the characters are working to prevent exposure are immediately high-stakes. Scenarios where exposure has already occurred and the characters are managing the aftermath are a different kind of interesting: the Veil is broken in this place, and what happens next is not predetermined. The setting doesn't require the Veil to be maintained. It requires the characters to decide how to engage with the world as it develops.
Cross-Reference Summary
| Topic | Reference |
|---|---|
| Lineage mechanics and perks | AX.GM.06 (Lineages) |
| Power traditions | AX.GM.08.00–08.06 |
| Organizations and professions | AX.GM.07.01–07.11 |
| Threat compendium | AX.GM.13 |
| Equipment and specialist materials | AX.GM.09 |
| Character creation walkthrough | AX.GM.00.02 |
| GM tools and campaign frameworks | AX.GM.15 |