This post is extremely spoiler heavy up to S4.0E13
The following is a summary of information about various important polities, factions, and other groups available to the Summers administration through various sources: mostly Willow, CyberWillow, and Giles on Earth, Andrew interdimensionally, and with Anya and the Watchers' Council contributing to both. This summary is in no way exhaustive, and puts outsized focus on those you have already had some interaction with.
All of this information is stuff Buffy already knows, so is fully usable in character. The drawback to this is that this is information Buffy knows in character from in character sources; if those sources are wrong, it may be incorrect or incomplete.
Supernaturally Relevant Earth Factions
Unusually for the Alpha Quadrant, the supernatural and the existence of other dimensions are not well known to the average sentient on Earth, and the most economically significant polities are overwhelmingly mundane. The biggest movers and shakers therefore tend to be ancient and shadowy organizations, and to maintain their relative importance it's generally in their interest to allow secrecy to continue even if they rarely work to maintain it in an active way.
Earth's unusual veil of secrecy is mostly maintained by the unusual properties of the hellmouth. The hellmouth serves as a dimensional nexus, where the walls are thin and travel is relatively easy; this effect partially extends outwards some hundreds of miles, encompassing LA. Outside of this area however, it's difficult to portal to or from Earth, which in turn has made it difficult historically for demon civilizations to project power on Earth. As for the hellmouth itself, the immediate area is typically hotly contested and well defended, with the last stabilizing influence before Buffy of course being the twice-late Richard Wilkins.
Combined with the relatively low mystical size cap of Earth until recent times, this environment has let mundane organizations flourish mostly undisturbed. However, signs indicate that Earth is destabilizing and a merge may be approaching; such an opportunity is likely to provoke interest and the fragile balance of the ignorant mundane world may soon be broken.
The Watchers' Council: The Watchers' Council is an organization consisting of at least 134 'active' Watchers as well as hundreds of support staff with a history spanning back many thousands of years. They have an archive of historical records which is unparalleled on Earth, as well as large holdings of mundane resources and a vault containing many dangerous or significant artifacts. While the middling-powerful Devon coven is not technically under their control, it is deeply entangled with their interests both politically and financially, and rarely takes any action without their approval. They have significant pull with the UK government, though that pull more often takes the form of illicit favor-trading rather than anything else.
Aside from their stated internal goal of providing 'support' for the slayer and protection and training for potential slayers, Watchers and their subordinates are also thinly spread worldwide to combat demons and vampires. However, elements of the Devon coven rarely take the field, and the Watchers' Council is loath to deploy their own more valuable mystical resources, so much of this activity is theoretical rather than practical, with the organization usually prioritizing collecting information over active intervention. The slayer is their standby because she is eminently replaceable, while all the rest of their hoarded wealth is not.
Taking this into account, the Watchers' Council's influence on the world stage is sharply limited, not only due to their own poorly-defined policies of non interference but also their fractious internal nature. Ultimately, the Watchers' Council is a council: while certain members enjoy executive privileges, those privileges are at the whims of the council as a whole, and at the first sign of trouble political disputes can paralyze the organization. After CyberWillow's recent circulation of the Cruciamentum Report, another bout of this routine paralysis seems very likely to occur.
Relations between Buffy's group and the Watchers' Council have been very up and down over the past four years. After her Cruciamentum they took a distinct downward turn, and despite some efforts at patching the divide this fall the new report has scuttled diplomacy again. Either group would likely be receptive to help the other in a true emergency, but things are distinctly chilly at the moment.
The Reptilians: The Reptilians are an extremely secretive demon tribe even by the standards of Earth's nominally secret supernatural world, taking serious effort to conceal even their very existence whenever possible. This is complicated by their distinct appearance and inability to naturally conceal themselves in a human guise; they are instead forced to use elaborate skinsuits, and often have a tell of clammy hands.
The Reptilians immigrated to Earth through the Sunnydale hellmouth shortly after the Sundering and have remained in the general area in the many thousands of years since, hiding themselves among the prominent cultures as time has passed. In the modern day they are a group with significant inroads politically and in the movie industry, with many of them in prominent seats of local and even national influence, the foremost you know about being LA's Congressman Gold [D]. The main goal of the Reptilians is stability: they think in the long term, and don't want to mess up a good thing.
By their own preference, knowledge of the Reptilians specifically is highly classified in the Summers Administration, known only to Buffy, Willow, CyberWillow, and Ian, who is himself a Reptilian. Despite this, you have a very good relationship with them. You've worked together against Wolfram and Hart, and the Congressman has recently planted one of Willow's servers at the Pentagon to enable covert hacking. Though your City Councilor Juan Cortez does not know of their existence as a group, they've also supported his efforts to establish a motion picture industry in Sunnydale.
Sorcerer Clans: There is a tendency among spellcasters of all sorts to specialize in specific types of magic while neglecting others; the eight sorcerer clans of Earth take this to an extreme, dedicating their whole extended families to specific magicks. This focus might or might not aid their individual power over generational timescales, but it certainly allows them to accrue vast collections of knowledge about their specific type of magic to be shared within the family.
The clans vary widely in their places of power, material resources, and even numbers of practitioners (typically in the low dozens), but all of them are much more active on the mystical side of things than the mundane. While not necessarily on the side of good, they are a distinctly human-centric group and often find themselves opposing demons and the like on those grounds alone; historically they have been a persistent counterweight against demonic dominance worldwide.
In antiquity, the clans were more politically unified, under the leadership of a non hereditary sorcerer-king that rotated amongst the clans. This unity has eroded significantly over time, but the tradition of a conclave of the clans has remained, where many members from all eight meet to mediate internal disputes and discuss other matters of great import.
The Summers Administration enjoys a good relationship with Transmuters Material, a clan which in modern times mainly frequents the United States in general and the LA area in specific. Though Buffy was paid $200,000 in cash for helping Nathaniel Smith acquire the crown of the first sorcerer-king (a historic relic without mystical power,) Anya has since mentioned the payment was more of a courtesy from the very wealthy clan than a business exchange: at need, you could probably call in a favor.
The US Government and their Demon Research Initiative: While the US Government as a whole is not read in on the supernatural, a certain sub-sections of Congress (prominently including Congressman Nick Ward [R]) is, and they oversee an agency that has been historically known as the Demon Research Initiative, or more recently, simply "The Initiative." While their understanding of the supernatural world is sharply limited, they enjoy virtually limitless funding and the ability to recruit from any of the military branches or intelligence agencies of the United States. As a highly secret project, the Initiative has not at all been immune to political ebbs and flows: it routinely compresses and expands in frankly ridiculous degrees.
The latest ambitious Initiative project and expansion was under the aegis of Professor Maggie Walsh, who refurbished a bomb shelter under UC Sunnydale with the purpose of studying the extremely high "hostile sub-terrestrial" densities observed in the city. She made multiple risky choices including recruiting Faith, creating Adam, and placing a spy in the SDCW, and those choices ultimately came home to roost. Professor Walsh was summarily executed by Buffy Summers, and her coven effectively disbanded the UC Sunnydale base using a combination of deceptive magicks.
Willow Rosenberg is in control of a server planted deep in the recesses of the Pentagon which allows the Sunnydale government to spy on the Initiative Oversight board and the US military as a whole. Though it is possible that interested parties might keep all communications away from computers as a precaution, a certain amount of informational leakage is typically inevitable and it is thought that you therefore have a good bead on their movements.
While most of the Initiative has been deeply confused and scattered across America, the oversight board still exists, the soldiers are still with the army, and both Oscar Carlson and Francis Angleman have been released with much in the way of pertinent knowledge. It remains to be seen how they will eventually react.
Sunnydale expats in LA and their allies: While not strictly a coherent faction in themselves, a number of supernaturally involved people have left Sunnydale in the past year for Los Angeles and continue to be active there. This group has intermixed with several other groups and individuals who were either already in LA or arrived there from other places recently and become a loose coalition keeping order in the wake of Sunnydale's culling of many of LA's nastier sorts in August. They tend to be friendly with Transmuters Material and both usually (but do not always) act in opposition to Wolfram and Hart.
Angel Investigations is headed by the eponymous master vampire with a soul and is known to be working with Allen Francis Doyle and Lisa Nova; on occasion also Nathaniel Smith of Transmuters Material and local police detective Kate Lockley. The USC Watch are led by Percy West and a number of other SDCW veterans, many of whom also have been seen frequenting Caritas and are believed to be working with the demon seer Lorne (estranged from the Deathwok clan.) Lastly, Charles Gunn leads an unnamed vigilante gang that has been active in LA for most of the '90s. While none of the gang hail from Sunnydale, his sister Alonna has been visiting Sunnydale sporadically on weekends to learn witchcraft from Tara Maclay.
Wolfram and Hart: Wolfram and Hart is not only active in LA, on Earth as a whole, or even in the Alpha Quadrant at large. See their entry under the factions of the Greater Cosmos.
The Alpha Quadrant
The 'Alpha Quadrant' is not a recognized term outside of the Summers Administration, but instead an informal designation by Andrew Wells for a collection of cosmologically 'nearby' dimensions and demiplanes including Earth which tend to allow for comparatively easy portaling and summoning between them. Most relevant interactions reaching outside the Alpha Quadrant involve invoking the power of distant gods with magic spells designed for that specifically.
Despite the name suggesting fourths, the Cosmos as a whole is many, many times greater in scope than the Alpha Quadrant, both in total number of dimensions and in the size and mystical significance of the greatest of those dimensions.
Arashmaharr: Arashmaharr is the most advanced and most mystically large dimension in the Alpha Quadrant, a world of both staggering wealth and desperate poverty. D'Hoffryn, god of vengeance, has ruled supreme there for over ten thousand years, but he did not shape it into a single state: on the contrary, the majority of Arashmahaar is a war-torn mess of sub-nations that fight each other for his amusement.
The vast majority of its population of over ten billion is an underclass of native demons that work in menial jobs or as low foot soldiers. Above them are many layers of stratified wealth and privilege, climbing all the way up to D'Hoffryn's courtiers and functionaries, then his many vengeance demon mantles, and finally himself at the top. These upper levels of the hierarchy control immense amounts of capital and are generally the leading lights of what passes for high culture in the Alpha Quadrant.
While the lesser armies that battle each other on Arashmaharr are quite dangerous by outside standards, the true military strength of the dimension lies in the vengeance demons. With the causality-bending power of the wish, along with lesser 'conveniences' such as instant teleportation and physical enhancements, vengeance demons generally roam the Alpha Quadrant sowing chaos in D'Hoffryn's name, but in the event of a serious conflict their directed efforts would spell doom for any but the most mighty of foes.
In keeping with the mystical size of Arashmaharr, most forms of magic or rare effects local to the Alpha Quadrant (like Mirrorwaves, Kandrona, gunpowder, electricity, and so on) function there at least to some extent. This contributes to the ostentatious wealth and glamor there without really jeopardizing its safety; D'Hoffryn welcomes any challengers.
Being a former vengeance demon herself, Anya knows a great deal about Arashmaharr as a place, the vengeance demons as people, and even D'Hoffryn personally. Her old connections still have value, but in light of her new allegiance to Buffy Summers it's uncertain how far she can push without provoking some kind of response. And Sunnydale is very much not ready to entertain a fight with Arashmaharr.
The Andalite Electorate: The Andalites are a centauroid, telepathic and herbivorous demon race that worships tree gods poorly understood outside of their own semi-isolationist culture. As a species they specialize in biological magic which is especially based around specially grown trees which they use as a form of biotechnology. These specially adapted trees generally serve functions similar to military and industrial technology on Earth, but instead of electricity or internal combustion they use psychic Mirrorwaves as a source of power.
While this technology is quite useful and Andalite examples of airfighters, guns, supercarriers, and the like will generally outperform their Earth counterparts, Mirrorwaves work about as rarely in the greater cosmos as electricity does, which is to say very rarely. The Andalites generally operate in a small subset of Alpha Quadrant dimensions where Mirrorwaves are present; Earth is not one of them. In other dimensions, their tree biotech has a short shelf life at best and is totally nonfunctional at worst.
A recent exception to their restricted effectiveness off their home turf is Andalite morphing, a new type of magic they developed roughly 30 years ago allowing them to take the forms of other creatures, albeit for only two hours at a time. Morphing has made the Andalites into dangerous spies, but the high combat effectiveness their default forms already have means its applications outside that field have been limited.
The Andalites have been at war with the Yeerks for the past 28 years after a failed attempt at inducting their dimension into their sphere of political influence. This ill-fated move resulted in a capture of one of their god-empowered mantles, the theft and subversion of much of their tree-based biotechnology, and quite a lot of embarrassment on the interdimensional stage.
The Yeerk Empire: The Yeerks are a parasitic race of demon slugs that can control the brains and read the memories of most creatures by crawling in through an opening and wrapping themselves around and through the nervous material. They're very new to the scene, having essentially been uplifted out of the swamps of their home dimension by the Andalites a mere 30 years ago. Instead of taking the deal the Andalites offered them, the Yeerks chose to rebel against their control.
Aside from their natural parasitic biology, Yeerks lacked much in the way of advanced magicks or other effects until their uplift by the Andalites. Afterwards, they were able to corrupt Andalite tree biotech into a reliance on their native Kandrona rays instead of Mirrorwaves, trading increased performance in the Yeerk home dimension and some other adjacent ones for reduced performance in the Andalite home dimension as well as some others. This home-field advantage that both sides enjoy with their heavy weapons has resulted in a stalemated war, where most progress must be gained using the advanced espionage abilities they and their enemies employ.
The Yeerks are a heavily militarized culture ruled by the "Council of Thirteen", an oligarchy which further delegates authority to Vissers and Sub-Vissers who might each be in control of their own battlefronts and projects. It is rumored that one of the Council of Thirteen is a hidden god, but their identity is very well shrouded, likely by natural magic extending from the proficiency at spycraft Yeerks have by virtue of their forms.
In contrast to the merely economic shackles Andalites employ to exploit their client demon species, the Yeerks must control the very bodies of their Taxxon and Hork-Bajir slaves on a mass scale. This ugly truth (and the obvious implication that Yeerks are constantly seeking out more valuable demon bodies) has won them few friends in the Alpha Quadrant, but after a relatively peaceful encounter with the Summers Administration and the signing of a non-aggression pact, hopes are high that both sides will at least have one less possible enemy to worry about.
The Mok'tagar City States: The eleven (until very recently, twelve) Mok'tagar City States are all situated in the same dimension: swampy, volcanic Mog'tog'og, only a couple hundred miles across. What it lacks as a scenic destination, it more than recovers with its local advantage of accelerated time, moving eleven (until very recently, twelve) times faster than normal. This makes Mog'tog'og ideal for anyone looking to trade their goods there quickly and get back home before anything goes wrong.
Mok'tagar are very powerful by the standards of everyday demons, with an extreme level of regeneration to backup their already impressive physical prowess. But most of the population of Mog'tog'og isn't Mok'tagar, but a wide variety of other demons and even humans living in each City State under a (very) extended Mok'tagar ruling family. In control of each family (and by extension, city) is a 'Great One', a Mok'tagar carrying a special mantle which passes down to a new family member upon their death. Great Ones are capable of a variety of great magical feats, the most important of them easily opening portals in and out of their city to other dimensions. Indeed, much of a Great One's time is usually spent charging for the use of these portals to move trade goods around, and this expensive service provides most of a ruling family's income.
Mog'tog'og tends to be very sticky about foreign effects and technologies, leaving the physically impressive Mok'tagar with their volcano fortresses at a significant home field advantage. Because of this, and the logistical advantages it enjoys, it tends to specialize in the trade of bulk goods.
Sunnydale's recent history with the Mok'tagar is rife with violence and betrayal. Kathy, daughter of the Great One Tapparich, was recruited in the fall only to be slain by Buffy for her defiance and insolence days later. Sunnydale launched a sneak attack against Tapparich to preempt his own possible retaliation, but succeeded at far more than anyone guessed they could: Buffy did not only kill Tapparich, but she permanently destroyed his family mantle, destabilizing the volcano it was powered by and causing an eruption which obliterated the entire city.
The entire plane was sent into a wild timeslide with the loss of Tapparich that the other eleven Great Ones took months to recover from. They took no immediate action in revenge, but do know Sunnydale is responsible (along with the rest of the Alpha Quadrant.) What they may do in the future is anyone's guess.
The City of Beauty: Mog'tog'og's biggest trading rival in the Alpha Quadrant, the City of Beauty is a massively three-dimensional megapolis of hundreds of millions in Isktal. The city operates as a plutocracy of mostly unfettered capitalism, trading in all manner of exotic goods (including all sorts of foreign magics and technologies, most of which work well there) and even advanced economic instruments such as stocks and insurance policies. While the native Iskoort are by far the most populous demon race there and also make up a majority of the hyper-rich ruling class, a variety of other demons and even the occasional human can be found on all rungs of the social ladder.
What little regulation exists in the City springs from a byzantine system of guilds monopolizing everything from professional shoppers to petty crime. While this may seem like a barrier to entry in many businesses, like everything in the City, the guilds are easily bought, and mostly just want their cut. There is no true central government; any normal functions of one that occur at all tend to arise stochastically from interactions and negotiations between the guilds.
The City itself is not merely one of tall buildings, but tall buildings built upon a great network of giant stacked platforms, those platforms themselves held up by spindly supports that only manage to function because of the dimension's exceptionally low gravity. Ironically, much like Mog'tog'og, the ground level of Isktal is a fetid swamp, but the City of Beauty is raised so high above this and stacked so densely that the surface is entirely invisible from most places in the city.
After Buffy slew Tapparich and the time dilation in Mog'tog'og was temporarily destabilized, the Iskoort contacted Sunnydale and tried to trade for the specialized portal spell created specifically to get around the substantial magical difficulties of a timeslide. They planned an invasion to hurt their rival in a moment of weakness, but Buffy refused to sell, and the possible war was averted. Unfortunately, many of the guilds took this as a personal offense, and trading with the City of Beauty will be difficult for the foreseeable future.
The Rat Kingdom: The Rat Kingdom is a mostly agrarian dimension chock full of nearly endless numbers of rats. While the vast majority of these rats are ordinary, the dimension is ruled by a sentient (and disturbing to look at) swarm of rats that calls himself the Rat King. He has a number of direct servitors which are also sentient rat swarms, called 'rat nobles.' These nobles are smaller than the rat king and lack much of his facility with magic, but do have distinct identities and can learn quickly to form competencies of their own.
The Rat King's major concerns are weird and confusing, but mainly he seems to value spreading his rats to other dimensions. This can cause diplomatic tension, but the Rat Kingdom is mystically small and difficult to invade, which helps to keep it safe despite its weakness in the field of direct combat. The Rat King himself specializes in more logistical fields like portal creation and contaminant control, which also allows him to make a lot of trouble if not forced into open conflict.
The Rat King is unquestionably Sunnydale's closest interdimensional ally, with a Pact of Passage secured between them, not to mention the budding relationship between him and Sunnydale native Amy Madison. The rat nobles were originally subsidized to shop in Sunnydale, but quickly got a taste for consumer goods and now bolster the economy. Many of them have also become important personages in Sunnydale, like Nezumi the movie star, or the late Dancer, a noble that seemed to be everyone's friend before his tragic death. The Rat Kingdom is even a critical weapons supplier for Sunnydale now, providing organic ammunition for the Mycoaerosolizers the SDCW uses as its main nonlethal weapon.
The Rats have brought their share of trouble to Sunnydale's door too though, prompting a demon owl invasion of the city due to frustration with their involuntary rat exports. Buffy and the SDCW dealt with the problem, but damage was severe, and the Rat King was cautioned to be more careful in the future.
The Owl Parliament: The Owl Parliament, a fairly primitive civilization of intelligent demon owls, ruled another minor dimension in the Alpha Quadrant and historically had an upper wing over the rats. The Rat King's alliance with Buffy made him bold though, and he antagonized them with rats in a way he never had before.
The owls counterstruck at Sunnydale, fighting with the magic of darkness trees and owlmerges, but ultimately were soundly defeated. Their losses in the battle were in fact so extreme that it put their dimension into a state of vulnerability, one the Rat King pounced on. He poisoned their water supply with psychoactive drugs, encouraged opportunistic raids by other parties, and even turned the owls against each other with time. Even though Sunnydale was too busy with Adam to help any further, he ultimately succeeded in toppling the Parliament from power and installing his own puppet government, one that would accept their role as the recipient of many many rats.
The Delthrox Kingdom: A highly traditionalist hell dimension full of demons ruled by a single god-king, Delthrox is known for its honorable dealings, prowess in battle, and exceptional skill at torture. Indeed, torture is the primary recreational activity there, whether done professionally in a public setting or privately in the comfort of a demon's home. Many of the victims are honorless dead souls from far and wide across the Cosmos, but others are simple slaves, or even other Delthroxi guilty of some manner of crime or misdemeanor.
The Delthroxi nobility is made up of a great number of mantles of varying power, all ultimately created by the god-king but sometimes assigned in feudal tiering systems necessary to keep proper track of them all. Delthrox is also famous for its steelmaking, weaving arms and armor out of the metallic hair these mantled nobles grow.
The Delthroxi Prince Barvain recently died at the hands of Buffy Summers in single combat, but as his mantle was not destroyed it did not cause any sort of diplomatic incident. His arms and armor, as well as footage of the battle, was eventually ransomed back to Delthrox for a sizable sum of kittens and gold.
Pan's Revel: Pan is a refugee god from the Olympian diaspora who made his home in the Alpha Quadrant some hundreds of years ago. He resides with a large court of satyrs, nymphs, and similar in a thinly populated but mystically significant dimension choked with rivers and woodlands. Pan is quite powerful by local standards, but mostly uninterested in violent conflict and expansion. Instead, he leads his people on a neverending bender of wild parties and drunken excursions, seeking any excuse to make trouble without ever escalating to the point that anyone important finds it worth trying to challenge him.
Sunnydale was the target of some pranking by his people over the summer, but Buffy managed to resolve the matter peacefully with only a medium sized amount of collateral drama. Andrew has kept a line of communication open with the court, but it's unlikely they could be moved to do anything other than party.
The Greater Cosmos
The Powers that Be: An enigmatic race of higher beings that arose towards the end of the Lachrymal era, the Powers fought a vast war against the Old Ones for control of the Cosmos. Though weaker than all the Old Ones considered together, the harmony of the Powers let them hold out against the squabbling and uncoordinated efforts of their enemies. It was never enough to win the war outright though, and a relative stalemate resulted.
The Powers broke this stalemate by attacking the structure of the Cosmos itself, Sundering what had been one unified world into the countless splinter dimensions that make up reality today. These relatively tiny universes were far too mystically small to contain the whole of any Old One, and so their tyranny over reality was broken even as trillions of sentients died in the disaster and the chaos that followed.
The Powers themselves barely fared better than the Old Ones in the new world however: their great harmony was shattered, and their ability to directly affect any but the very largest of universes greatly curtailed. The Powers that Be now must act through agents across the cosmos to support their agenda of "Balance."
On Earth, the Powers generally act in the interests of humanity and against the interests of aggressive demons and vampires; this is most obvious in the inflammatory reaction vampires have to symbols of their various monotheistic cargo cults. However, their help in more serious matters has a troubling tendency to often be only-just-barely-enough, which leaves many who have worked with their agents suspicious of their ultimate motives.
Wolfram and Hart: Often working as a counterweight to the Powers, the Wolf, Ram, and Hart are a trio of extremely powerful gods that reside in a similarly extremely high cap dimension very far away from the Alpha Quadrant. They represent the epitome of that which is unquestionably both Lawful and Evil, and their tendrils of authority are spread far and wide across the Cosmos.
Their total number of official client dimensions are practically countless, though most of these are the more backwards or unimportant sort of dimension, like nearby Pylea. More importantly, even in dimensions they don't fully control, they often have puppet organizations advancing their agendas and gathering power. The sum of all this influence makes them a force to be reckoned with in the Alpha Quadrant, even while lacking any true gem in the crown that competes with the homeworlds of the other major powers.
Their puppet organization most known to Sunnydale is of course the Wolfram and Hart law firm on Earth, featuring six major branches and a large collection of minor satellite locations. Sunnydale in particular has dealt with the LA branch in the past, concerning their support of rival candidate Carl Gervais in the recent special election for mayor.
As is usual for Wolfram and Hart, they tried to get their way by means more foul than fair, but unusually for the lawyers Sunnydale struck back at them hard. After a cyberattack on their infrastructure followed up by a vicious cleanup of their client assassins, Holland Manners (head of Special Projects at the LA Branch) decided to fold rather than raise. He offered up a favorable peace agreement with a very hefty monthly bribe to Buffy and Willow to keep out of his business, and strapped for cash at the time, they accepted without much fuss. They aren't bound contractually, but Sunnydale is still pretty busy, and $150,000 monthly to do nothing at all is quite the enticement.
The Shadow Realm: The Shadow Realm is a faraway dimension which is especially large mystically and physically, resulting in it being a home to many powerful gods and other entities. Competition there is fierce but mainly political in nature, owing to the extreme devastation open conflict could cause. Even far across the cosmos, different polities of the Shadow Realm will often conduct puppet wars, each supporting opposite sides in a conflict between local powers.
Buffy has recently made an enemy of the powerful witch Scáthach, an important follower of the Shadow Realm god also named Scáthach. To what extent this will become a problem, and if Scáthach-the-witch will ever actually show up in person, is uncertain.
The Olympians: The Olympian pantheon were big movers and shakers thousands of years ago, but since then have broken up, splitting into multiple cliques and subgroups and radiating out over a much larger range than they originally controlled. Most of the individual gods of the pantheon are still extant, and their relative power and fame means they tend to be common as magical patrons. This allows spellcasters across large swaths of the cosmos to call upon them in invocations.
