How strong would a Masquerade have to be to survive in the modern world?

[Guessmyname]

So, take your typical Urban Fantasy setting; folks with magic / whatever powers are running around, magic / whatever creatures are running around, there are secret societies, shadow wars, whathaveyou. The exact specifics don't matter so much as compared to how you would need to design the Masquerade to keep everything under wraps in the modern cell phone / internet / social media age.

Assumptions that can safely be made:
Magic has always existed, and has always successfully been kept secret without changing history (magic may have been the real reason behind / involved with given events, but no functional differences to the timeline are made). Accuracy of myth and fairytale variable / irrelevant.
Secret magic battles can leave collateral damage, people injured or killed and so on, that will need covering up.
Probably some magical critter(s) of some sort that feeds on innocents and need hunting down (werewolves, vampires, ghosts, shadow monsters, whatever)
Secret societies of magic users exist here and there, may squabble with each other, probably aren't large scale organisations (though may exist within large scale organisations like the Catholic Church etc).
Due to their size, turnover and risk of leaks, governments are not aware of the shenanigans going down, and the various societies are wary of informing them.

Secondary assumptions that can also be made:
Memory editing allowed.
Someone Else's Problem Field / 'Ignore Me' magic allowed.
Large scale rituals etc to help maintain the Masquerade allowed.
Raising the dead / magic 'repair all damage' buttons optional but not encouraged (since SECRET MAGIC FIGHTS is an assumed part of the setting, you don't want to risk destroying the consequences of that).
Magic is probably based around mucking with physical laws, which makes messing with electronics tricky and limited in scope but not wholly impossible. Hacking computers / forging paperwork etc likely needs to be done the old fashioned way.

So, SV, how would you design your Masquerade? How strong would it need to be and how would it affect the lives of those 'in the know'? How could it be broken, or wind up with people in the fold? You can go everywhere from 'ironclad to the point of social isolation' (ie Neverwhere, for example) to 'leaky enough for interesting plots' as you wish. What challenges could it face? Look at it anywhere from 'how to design a masquerade that will not break' to 'how to design a masquerade that will be narratively interesting' as you like.

This is just personal curiosity talking; I have my own ideas on it and obviously it depends on the setting and themes of the specific story you're aiming for.

 

[kahn1234]

Essentially, to survive in the mdoern world, the Masqurade would require some Illuminati-like secret organisation working the background whilst also controlling every major media outlet and every intelligence agency on the planet.

Without both of these, the Masqurade would not last long.

If they failed to control governments and/or the intelligence services, you would extremely quickly find supernatural beings and people 'in the know' getting hunted down by intelligence agents and special forces.

If they failed to control the media, the antics of the supernatural would quickly get uncovered, however people would be naturally more distructing of the media due to the high amounts of lying in the media, especially these days.

So, they could maybe get away with not controlling the Media, but they would certainly need to control governments, or at least their attack dogs (intelligence services and Special forces).

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

It's getting much more difficult now everyone is carrying a video camera.

 

[Morphic Tide]

To be blunt, you have to have some form of law of the universe keeping it in place or have free will be a particularly bad joke. You need global magic to keep it under wraps, because the population explosion that came with industrialization makes keeping all the people under control functionally impossible.

In the modern world, you still need global, or at least continental, scale magic to actually get everything under wraps. You have to have absolutely everyone be agreeing to enforce SEP use in fights, and even then it takes a grand total of one guy working out a counter that wants it to go public or one of the many secret societies not wanting to play along. If a group is trying to Take Over the World, then why the hell would they be covering up the fact that magic exists? You are bound to have people trying to break the masquerade, and it takes only partial success for later groups that don't know about all the stuff behind the Masquerade to show up with an interest in breaking it.

I can't fucking stand the Old World of Darkness because it literally just flat out says that mundane people are incapable of realizing that magic is at play because "modern people don't believe in magic." Like, if large-scale magic happens around people who refuse to believe in it, that magic use is retroactively prevented. People have been removed from existence by the forces that keep the masquerade up. Which are fundamental laws of the universe for some reason, making it so sufficiently disbelieved things don't work around disbelievers.

And that setting ignores that modern science became popular due to people disproving the stuff that, according to the OWoD setting rules, would work because it was commonly believed to work and nobody had a coherent system of physics that didn't allow it to work. Alchemy was disproven by people actively wanting to make it work who had no concept of chemistry outside of alchemy. Astrology was disproven by people who wanted it to work and believed it did before testing it. A lot of magic was debunked by scientists who actively wanted it to work, from societies that largely believed in it, but were willing to give up on it if the results of testing said it wasn't real. Sometimes, they did dozens of tests to try to prove the thing worked, but failed.

It also ignores that, unless the entire goddamn world is industrialized, there are going to be plenty of cultures with lots of people who take magic as a fact of life. Lots of African nations still give serious weight to magic, even having official laws governing it and taking old superstitions as serious considerations in criminal investigations. These cultures shatter the Masquerade wide open for visitors, because the OWoD setting rules dictate that these things would work, and one European/American in the crowd wouldn't be enough to turn off the magic.

 

[The Fourth Monado]

Tl;dr it wouldn't work.

 

[Morphic Tide]

Tl;dr it wouldn't work.

Click to shrink...

It can, if you have it set up the right way. It needs to have magic be extremely rare, with stuff that makes it so that the secret societies are the only place proper magic users can be, and have said societies carefully keep themselves under control to hold up the Masquerade. Then focus the story on the Masquerade starting to fall apart due to the advent of smartphones being common.

The key thing that ends it is smartphones. Having cameras be something the majority of people have on them at all times makes it so things get extremely touchy, and SEPFs as constantly active items set to trigger when magic is being used as standard-issue makes the breaking a bit more difficult. You can, with enough thinking, set up a magical society that keeps everything under wraps where it can reach by properly using SEPFs to make people not care about the magical events, at least to the point of making them not record it. From there, a crack-team of mage-hackers use magic to assist in hacking their way through the remaining records to cover it all up. Slip ups don't need media control, so much as they need people to spin the evidence to make it so it doesn't reach the media.

SEPF means Someone Else's Problem Field.

 

[HeavyBane]

Tl;dr it wouldn't work.

Click to shrink...

This. A setting remotely similar to White Wolf stuff makes it automatically fail.
More seriously, this setting would require to not to have too many supernatural creatures to count, nor these simultaneously being strong enough to wipe out the planet several times per week while still being outnumbered by humans.

A world-wide "reality manipulation" field is a must, but even this one is bound to fail sooner or later by technology (as mentioned by the smartphone issue).

Basically, the setting would invariably change into something else as soon as the Masquerade is broken. Then you can follow up with a post-apocalyptic setting.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Have all supernaturals possess Arcane 5.

"Oh, you have yet another link to a video of a werewolf? Funny that this is the fifth time I click on such a link from you, and it goes to a 404. It was mildly funny the first time, it's getting outright annoying now."

 

[Sarissa]

Most murder plots between a grand total of two people fails and are unraveled because one talks to the police, even though the both of them have everything to lose from it. The idea that a fantasy underworld made up of thousands or even millions of people can remain under wraps longer than the time it takes to send a tweet simply isn't viable.

People are really awful at keeping secrets.

 

[Guessmyname]

Oh I'm aware you'd need an extra-strength Masquerade to get away with it; I'm just curious to see the various ways said Masquerade could operate.

Some examples off the top of my head:
Neverwhere features people 'falling in' to the magic world quite literally being erased from existence in the mundane one (to the point of being ignored by taxis, all their credit cards not working and their apartment being resold because it was 'empty').
Negima memorably had a world-sized ritual based Masquerade to act as a global SEP field / make normals ignore magic or accept it being fake with flimsy excuses ("It's CGI!")
Bleach entirely/mostly revolves around spirits of the dead and shinigami, both of which are invisible. Short rare humans with the ability to see them, the Masquerade is justified because there is simply never any evidence, ever. Here it's less a magic field / masquerade thing more that 99% of the magic world is invisible anyway, so maintaining secrecy is easy.

Depending on the scale of the magic world it can get a little more plausible but the more that has to be hidden yeah, the worse it gets.

In my own case, I've been toying around with having an extra-strength 'ignore me' field at work, to the point where it's actually a bit of a problem (need to evacuate a building? Good luck, everyone is literally ignoring you, not to mention all the things a criminal can get up to when people are literally incapable of paying attention to them)
Another plot idea involved people trying to set up one... because it's in the middle of the Cold War, keeping the secret keeps escalating tensions (because of the disappearances etc) and the last thing anyone in the magic world wants is a nuclear arms race with magic in it.

 

[bird_poison]

It can work with a trivial solution: People cannot notice magic.

There, simple as that. A solar system-spanning field capable of editing memories, convincing people to overlook evidence to the point of cognitive dissonance and fooling big-data algorithms as if they were sentient minds (because the field must affect all sentient life, not just the sapient bits) should be enough.

Werewolf walking on the street? People will either forget it or not even see it. Dead awakening? must be the weather. Nations dissapearing? They never existed.

Now, and that's an important bit, the effect must not be controlled by any one faction. It must be either a permanent fixture, or controlled by some inhuman intelligence, so things like change of regimes, rebellions or the sheer timespan have not resulted in the field changing in any way.

 

[Ironanvil1]

It can work with a trivial solution: People cannot notice magic.

There, simple as that. A solar system-spanning field capable of editing memories, convincing people to overlook evidence to the point of cognitive dissonance and fooling big-data algorithms as if they were sentient minds (because the field must affect all sentient life, not just the sapient bits) should be enough.

Werewolf walking on the street? People will either forget it or not even see it. Dead awakening? must be the weather. Nations dissapearing? They never existed.

Now, and that's an important bit, the effect must not be controlled by any one faction. It must be either a permanent fixture, or controlled by some inhuman intelligence, so things like change of regimes, rebellions or the sheer timespan have not resulted in the field changing in any way.

Click to shrink...

To account for historical progression, you can also have said field be the result of a concerted ritual sometime around the Renaissance/Enlightenment.
In an old RPG setting I had it as European mages whipping up a barrier that made blatant magic far more difficult, in order to assist imperialism by hampering their mystical opponents and letting the guns of their mundane pawns prevail.

 

[Pandemonious Ivy]

It needs to have magic be extremely rare

Click to shrink...

Here's actually the point I was coming here to make:

Make magic seem fake and commonplace.

Take the fantastic and make it seem like a trick, a falsehood, a hoax, a joke. Then replicate the effect in many different varieties so people come to expect it to be a joke. This makes it so that lower-level magics are seen as "cool tricks" and high level things and/or rogue creatures cause people to be skeptical and suspect some sort of nonsense.

So no need to go out of the way to try to hide the magical world. Just make it so utterly mundane that nobody would ever really suspect more from it.

 

[Heaven Canceler]

Well, if magic has been around and magical beings exist everywhere, you would need to have some amount of control over the government. Alternatively a weirdness censor like there is in for example Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the Mist in Percy Jackson.

If stuff like magical organizations with different opinions exist, you would need groups that are capable of erasing evidence to a great degree. If someone goes public and tries to show their magic off, there must be people ready who show up and make the person in question appear as a fraud quickly.

The question is also how universal you want the thing to be. There is no real way to keep it 100% under wraps. That wouldn't even have worked in ages past. The one real thing you need is to keep proof from popping up and make sure the mundanes don't find way to discover magic or how to counter it. How do you deal with people who find out? Are they mind-wiped ala Harry Potter? Spirited away and disguised as suicide? Switched out for Wechselbälger? Or maybe there are ghosts wandering around possessing people who find out too much? Or are they simply left to make their claims and laughed out as lunatics?

There is a Novel where a giant monster (Niddhogr) rampages through Paris and by the next day the groups who want to keep the magic secret have hidden all hints to it. All footprints have been made non-identifiable as such etc... government is pushing the idea that it was some sort of earthquake with gas escaping which led to mass hallucinations. Even the videos of the thing that were made on phones are shaky and actually look more fake than some stuff that is made in Hollywood these days. Yes, there are many people who believe there was a monster... but what are they honestly gonna do with that knowledge? They may talk on forums in the net, try to keep the belief by conversing with neighbours and friends. As the years go by the experience will fade away or they will rationalize it away.

Something like magic couldn't really exist, right? It couldn't exist directly under our nose at the very least? That simply isn't possible, right?

That is one of the big strengths in this modern worlds. Magic can never be guaranteed to be real unless you experience it yourself. And even even if you see a unicorn and makes a video of it and everything, who will genuinely believe you? Who won't think you faked the film in some way or another? Would you seem legitimate to mankind as a whole? Or would your movie simply end up on some blog about the newest paranormal nonsense of the week? We have people hunting mystical stuff in real life too, but no one takes them serious except for a small group of people. If someone got a video of a Angel fighting a wizard we would think it was a fake unless we were there. Even if there is a giant hole where the supposed battle was most people would simply not buy it.

Honestly, functioning Masquerades come in various flavors. Some depend on human arrogance... others are more extreme in that normal people straight up cannot find out about that stuff the vast majority of the time. Nobilis is an example of that and these that do find out go insane from the point of view of normal humans. Because yes, your toaster can really talk with you, but the rest of the world won't buy it no matter how much you try. And honestly, it is better that way anyway. (Unless you live anywhere else than earth, because that is the only place with that shit apparently)

 

[bird_poison]

That is one of the big strengths in this modern worlds. Magic can never be guaranteed to be real unless you experience it yourself. And even even if you see a unicorn and makes a video of it and everything, who will genuinely believe you? Who won't think you faked the film in some way or another? Would you seem legitimate to mankind as a whole? Or would your movie simply end up on some blog about the newest paranormal nonsense of the week?

Click to shrink...

Enough evidence chips away at doubt, drop by drop. You also believe more what people you know tells you that what a stranger tells you, and 6 degrees of separation means there's not that many strangers, relatively speaking.

That puts a hard number on the amount of "contact events" per year that can possibly be. Paris has millions of people at any given moment, we can have the luxury to claim magic doesn't exists because there's next to zilch evidence of it, and thus almost no claims. But if suddendly a million+ oppinions on media claim a giant something rampaged through paris, that erodes a lot of incredulity fast.

Something like magic couldn't really exist, right? It couldn't exist directly under our nose at the very least? That simply isn't possible, right?

Click to shrink...

Humans have roamed the earth for 200 thousand years. Let that number sink in, two hundred thousand years. hundreds of generations, each one knowing a bit more than their parents, each one discovering bit by bit things, each one telling their children their most important tricks, their most vaunted achievements.

There must be a damn good reason people hasn't stumbled upon magic in the last quarter of million year, and "it surely isn't possible" is not a good one.

A masquerade based on "people won't believe such things" is not a very good explanation.

 

[Sailor Midgard]

It's getting much more difficult now everyone is carrying a video camera.

Click to shrink...

The sheer number of cameras and other sensors is indeed a very hard limit.
Unless the masquerade is some kind of 'problem of other people' effect, some things will get viral.
Of course, as it has been pointed out, the existence of information is not per se a reason for believing it. Remember, there are people out there who still do not believe in the moonlanding.

 

[Heaven Canceler]

Enough evidence chips away at doubt, drop by drop. You also believe more what people you know tells you that what a stranger tells you, and 6 degrees of separation means there's not that many strangers, relatively speaking.

Click to shrink...

To a degree yes, but then these theoretical magicians/vampires/mystical nonsense would work to counter this by for example flooding youtube with "fake" videos of magical stuff. For every "real" video of a troll attacking someone there would be a hundred advertisements of Grubble the friendly troll living under brooklyn bridge.

That puts a hard number on the amount of "contact events" per year that can possibly be. Paris has millions of people at any given moment, we can have the luxury to claim magic doesn't exists because there's next to zilch evidence of it, and thus almost no claims. But if suddendly a million+ oppinions on media claim a giant something rampaged through paris, that erodes a lot of incredulity fast.

Click to shrink...

Oh yes, it wouldn't work if they kept doing this sort of stuff all the time. Having a giant monster rampage through a major city would have to be a very rare thing that happens at most once a generation (Though it could work if say they can disguise it as natural disasters more easily than my earlier example. A giant fire spirit being the real reason for a huge city wide fire could be a explanation that would work much better than Godzilla attacking Tokyo every few weeks.) and preferrably spread out across the world when it does happen. And yes, of course it cannot happen all the time, otherwise it isn't even really a masquerade, just a bunch of people not believing what they see for some weird reason. (There is another type of Masquerade too, the type where everyone knows that there are horrible things out there, but they ignore it because no one can actually do anything about it and ignoring it is the best they can do.)

But again, there isn't really that much random civilians can do if there is no actual proof and the government does not give support. (And this assumes the magical groups can keep any permanent proof away or can quickly discredit it and they have enough pull in the big and important groups to push things through. Some of the magical organizations in fiction are older than most modern nations, so it wouldn't be that weird for them to have a lot of pull in many places. If these groups fail the entire Masquerade is basically doomed from the start though.) Even if million of people think they saw some giant monster, what are they gonna do? Are they all gonna abandon their life to go monster hunting? Are they all going to spend the next decades searching for further "proof" of the supernatural? People are busy, real life is busy. Work, relationships, family, children, love and a hundred other things happen that keep us busy every day. As long as the number is kept below the crazy threshold it can work.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

To be blunt, you have to have some form of law of the universe keeping it in place or have free will be a particularly bad joke. You need global magic to keep it under wraps, because the population explosion that came with industrialization makes keeping all the people under control functionally impossible.

In the modern world, you still need global, or at least continental, scale magic to actually get everything under wraps. You have to have absolutely everyone be agreeing to enforce SEP use in fights, and even then it takes a grand total of one guy working out a counter that wants it to go public or one of the many secret societies not wanting to play along. If a group is trying to Take Over the World, then why the hell would they be covering up the fact that magic exists? You are bound to have people trying to break the masquerade, and it takes only partial success for later groups that don't know about all the stuff behind the Masquerade to show up with an interest in breaking it.

I can't fucking stand the Old World of Darkness because it literally just flat out says that mundane people are incapable of realizing that magic is at play because "modern people don't believe in magic." Like, if large-scale magic happens around people who refuse to believe in it, that magic use is retroactively prevented. People have been removed from existence by the forces that keep the masquerade up. Which are fundamental laws of the universe for some reason, making it so sufficiently disbelieved things don't work around disbelievers.

And that setting ignores that modern science became popular due to people disproving the stuff that, according to the OWoD setting rules, would work because it was commonly believed to work and nobody had a coherent system of physics that didn't allow it to work. Alchemy was disproven by people actively wanting to make it work who had no concept of chemistry outside of alchemy. Astrology was disproven by people who wanted it to work and believed it did before testing it. A lot of magic was debunked by scientists who actively wanted it to work, from societies that largely believed in it, but were willing to give up on it if the results of testing said it wasn't real. Sometimes, they did dozens of tests to try to prove the thing worked, but failed.

It also ignores that, unless the entire goddamn world is industrialized, there are going to be plenty of cultures with lots of people who take magic as a fact of life. Lots of African nations still give serious weight to magic, even having official laws governing it and taking old superstitions as serious considerations in criminal investigations. These cultures shatter the Masquerade wide open for visitors, because the OWoD setting rules dictate that these things would work, and one European/American in the crowd wouldn't be enough to turn off the magic.

Click to shrink...

You are aware that the "people actively wanting to make it work" in real life are the people who were secretly making alchemy fail to deny their enemies tools (while recreating it in the guise of chemistry) in the oWoD, right? Most of modern physics in oWoD is very specifically a 'coherent system of physics that doesn't allow magic to work,' the rest of modern physics is an emergent property coming from the absolute and utter hubris of trying to impose this order onto the structure of the world.' Modern physics isn't something that passively exists out of sheer coincidence in the oWoD. It is an actively created tool that is used to empower the masses and depower mystics, created by a group of very powerful reality-warpers as part of a war for reality itself.

Like, all your statements as to how "these cultures shatter the Masquerade wide open for visitors" ignore that there wouldn't be any visitors, because if they actually believed in magic the Technocracy would very rapidly paint them as places no westerner would ever want to be or they would get freedomed the fuck out of, and their wizards would probably end up suffering cases of Primium poisoning.

 

[bird_poison]

As long as the number is kept below the crazy threshold it can work.

Click to shrink...

And what is the modern crazy threshold? What's the background noise? We all agree one godzilla event per year is way above that, but what about one bigfoot event per year? One per month?

Then there's things like archeology and other fields, we as humans are basically made to walk, eat, f*ck, talk and understand the universe. And we are the best there is at the last 2.

Any masquerade must be manned by individuals capable of supressing universal knowledge from all people, wage a war, and consistently do that job for millenia at the very least. Humans cannot do that, not even with magic short of D&D wish spell.

 

[Morphic Tide]

Having a giant monster rampage through a major city would have to be a very rare thing that happens at most once a generation

Click to shrink...

That is much too frequent, these days. Keep in mind that people currently have an average lifespan of four or five generations, going by 20 years per generation. And global news has been around for three or four generations. A major magical incident 20 years ago would be subject to the level of news coverage capabilities that were present during 9/11. Unless it was in bum-fuck nowhere, which is actually quite plausible if the Masquerade has better enforcement in more modernized areas.

Like, New York City's Masquerade people would probably be able to stop anything short of a Greek God showing up from getting noticed by either making it not happen or by covering it up fast enough to stop the media from catching it.

 

[Heaven Canceler]

That is much too frequent, these days. Keep in mind that people currently have an average lifespan of four or five generations, going by 20 years per generation. And global news has been around for three or four generations. A major magical incident 20 years ago would be subject to the level of news coverage capabilities that were present during 9/11. Unless it was in bum-fuck nowhere, which is actually quite plausible if the Masquerade has better enforcement in more modernized areas.

Click to shrink...

I meant it like when one generation dies. Though I guess that is not the correct definition.

And yeah, given how big the world is there is a good chance that such things could equally happen in a tiny city in the middle of nowhere as with a big place. We only really see big and important cities as the main place for such stories in books because many authors know these places. There is a long running short book series in germany called "John Sinclair Ghost Hunter" which has the MC basically travelling all the world to deal with everything from vampires, werewolves, demons and other shit. Sometimes he is in big cities, but a lot of the time he is in some tiny village barely anyone knows. Or in a neighbourhood or something etc...

And what is the modern crazy threshold? What's the background noise? We all agree one godzilla event per year is way above that, but what about one bigfoot event per year? One per month?

Then there's things like archeology and other fields, we as humans are basically made to walk, eat, f*ck, talk and understand the universe. And we are the best there is at the last 2.

Any masquerade must be manned by individuals capable of supressing universal knowledge from all people, wage a war, and consistently do that job for millenia at the very least. Humans cannot do that, not even with magic short of D&D wish spell.

Click to shrink...

I don't know, this isn't something that we can really find out because... well we don't have a masquerade as far as we know. And we have no statistics on how much it takes for people to believe into something and stuff. This is one of these things where you can just guess. It is presumably not a thing you need to know exactly for a story. I guess you could take Real Life Yeti "sightings" and similar stuff and consider how often that happens. How often does it happen that someone in Real life writes an article about bigfoot, or some guy says he saw a Chupakabra or some other thing? And how good their "proof" is on average. That is the absolute minimum I guess.

As for stuff like Archeology, of course that has to be dealt with somehow. Presumably dragon bones aren't found everywhere, otherwise again, there is literally no point in the whole masquerade and it may as well not be done at all. How that works can be various, maybe non-humans turn to dust ala Percy Jackson when they die, or their bodies fully fall apart. Maybe the bodies spontaneously transform into animal/human forms. Maybe monsters universally eat each other including bones and everything and the only exceptions are so rare as to be considered fake.

Maybe a major part of Archeologists are actually magic users of some kind who make sure nothing gets out that is too real.

Other things are the same or maybe not.... like if a physics professor can actually find out about magic, there honestly is no point in keeping it secret at all. Presumably magic is actually magical and somehow removed from the rest of nature enough that it cannot be discovered through mundane research.

It honestly depends on the specifics of the series again, how powerful are the individiuals in question, how much of the setting is predisposed to be hidden and how much do they need to do by hand? Are there easy to use spells that keep mundanes out? Is memory wipping super easy on mundanes? Are magical creatures likely to run into normal people or is this more a once in a blue moon thing?

There is too many factors to say anything for sure. To be honest, at this point I am not sure how to answer the question, because a lot depends on the world and the things you are trying to hide and how much of it hides itself.

 

[The Fourth Monado]

As for stuff like Archeology, of course that has to be dealt with somehow. Presumably dragon bones aren't found everywhere, otherwise again, there is literally no point in the whole masquerade and it may as well not be done at all. How that works can be various, maybe non-humans turn to dust ala Percy Jackson when they die, or their bodies fully fall apart. Maybe the bodies spontaneously transform into animal/human forms. Maybe monsters universally eat each other including bones and everything and the only exceptions are so rare as to be considered fake.

Click to shrink...

Or dragon bones are so similar to dinosaur bones that whevever they show up, people are like 'oh thats a dinosaur'

or else dragon bones and dinosaur bones are the same thing, and we're being hoaxed as we speak

 

[Sivuel]

The best masquerade I ever wrote depended on magic simply not functioning on earth. Magic was only allowed in the story's parallel world, most complicated technology (cell phones, cameras, Walkmans) did not work in the parallel world, and the parallel world still needed to be both intensely isolationist and have internal agreement on the isolation to justify the (relative) lack of knowledge leaks.

 

[jacobk]

Check it out, somebody broke the masquerade:



More seriously, the level of masquerade required depends on what you want to have going on in the setting. Anything like the Buffy-verse where supernatural beings regularly hunt mortals requires a ludicrously massive and all-encompassing forget-me-not field. Otherwise one vampire eating one person a week would be enough to noticeably spike Chicago's murder rate.

If the magic is more like "humans with superpowers" then it depends on what they are. If it's moderately enhanced strength and agility then you almost need somebody to deliberately volunteer in order to break the masquerade. Full on wuxia will be harder to hide in the modern cell phone era although even then a lot of stuff will be plausibly deniable until cell phone cameras get really good. I mean, a lot of parkour videos right now show stuff that I thought was impossible, so you could rationalize a lot of stuff under the heading of "camera angle makes it look harder than it is" or the like.

Once you're talking full on physical transformations and beam warfare things get tricky. You need something like the Nanoha barrier system where all the big fights happen in a dimension shift that leaves out all the non-magicals. Alternatively something like Blindsight or your traditional Fae where they just can't operate around modern technology so all of the action happens off in the domain of the magical creatures.

 

[101001101]

The Unknown Armies setting simply has most magick plausibly deniable. Adept schools are the only magick type to be blatantly unnatural on a regular basis, and adepts are very very uncommon. And plenty of adept spells don't do anything weird-looking from the outside. Avatars usually only have clearly unnatural powers at their higher levels. The majority of rituals rarely do anything noticeable at all (and it's implied rituals lose power the more people know about them).