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

OverlordZovreign · May 25, 2017

Just thought I'd mention a in my opinion pretty well made masqurade. The Alex Verus series is about a mage with divination magic living in London. What I like about the settings masqurade is that it is multifaceted with several different reasons for why it exists. First on a social level people with even a hint of magical talent have some form of sixth sense for magic and that usualy isolates them from ordinary people and makes them seek out others who share their experience naturaly forming isolated "odd" subculturs. Then there is the general knowledge that magic "doesn't exist" making a lot of people willing to axcept alternativ explanations. Then there is the active masqurade where one of the Three branches of the magical goverments police/military has the job of maintaining the masqurade and have their tendrils in basically all goverments.

The justifications for why the mages bother with having a masqurade is also well thought out. The world heavily features that strength in numbers and "dogpiling" is the strongest. There is no character that can threaten the status quo on their own through power alone. The real powers in the setting are politicians among mages who can inflence other mages. The entire world have gone trough a form of the magic goes away because just like in the real World where humanity exterminates our predators, parasites and diseases the mages had as a fundamental reason for their goverments to hunt down and exterminate magical predators who preys on humans.

There is several exampels of the power the mages have when working together. The main character manages to blackmail a semidivine being to back of by treathening to reveal that he have murdered some mages that were decendants to the mages who killed his wife. The being is forced to agree to those terms because otherwise all mages in brittain will come together to hunt him down and eventally succed in killing him. A wishgranting artifact is suggested to possibly be powered by the remains of a dead god killed by mages.

So after the mages more or less exterminated all other magical creatures in the world during the dark age and decided to withdraw from the public during the renesance the modern mages came to the conclusion that just as they together defeated much more powerfull creatures by working together so could the normal magic less people usurp them since they outnumber them ten thousand to one. Therefore basically all factions tries to maintain the masqurade because they know that with modern technology normal humans would win a potential war between them trough sheer numbers.

Space Penguin · May 25, 2017

Partizan said:
5. What kind of economic impacts does this have on those who are being hidden by the masquerade?
One of the biggest single factors that most authors miss is the simple fact that, for most people who are caught in the cracks of society, money is...well...hard to come by. And anybody who is covered by the masquerade is, almost by definition, caught in society's cracks...or, at the very least, suffers from a major handicap when competing in our world. Harry Potter, again, deals with this by making the wizards have their own, parallel world, with its own quite powerful economy, and has the main characters operate primarily within that world. In most World of Darkness games I've seen, the implication conveyed is that money, and other resources, are seriously difficult to come by, especially if you take the time to try to develop your otherworldly abilities. The obvious solution--use your supernatural abilities to try to overcome other lacks--runs into the masquerade. Usually, another means will have to be found. You can sort of slide over this, mind you--but if you do, you will have to go into more detail elsewhere, so this may not be something you wish to do. Plus, the idea of a vampire trying to handle the stresses of a nine to five (at night) job is just...well...not something most people think about.

Why do you think lots of settings have groups or organizations already existing? To cover for this issue. Taking Technocracy for an example, they either control or have large power over both government, academia and companies. Money is not an issue. it depends on the setting.

Partizan · May 26, 2017

Space Penguin said:
Why do you think lots of settings have groups or organizations already existing? To cover for this issue. Taking Technocracy for an example, they either control or have large power over both government, academia and companies. Money is not an issue. it depends on the setting.

Ah. You misunderstand. The organizations that are depicted are wealthy, yes, but typically their wealth is never explained. One is left to imagine that it is from...I don't know, maybe from the drug trade, or something similar. No explanation is ever given for how a Prince of the Camarilla is able to wield so much wealth and influence, despite being utterly unable to move around in the daylight hours in which business is conducted. He simply is wealthy.

Plus, all of this avoids the basic, fundamental reality of the situation: most businesses operate on a nine to five schedule. If your pipe bursts in the middle of the night, there really isn't an all-night plumber you can call...but would a vampire be able to look for any other sort? When a single window opened at the wrong time could lead to instant death, and a complete rupture of the masquerade? How do you go to the bank, and put your savings someplace safe, if you cannot set foot outside during bankers' hours?

How does a werewolf find a job to earn a living? Understand that most werewolves are greatly restricted in terms of where they can go--they have a territory, and leaving that territory can cause problems. So how does a werewolf find a job in today's society? I can testify from experience that, if you are restricted from travelling, that can be extremely difficult. For werewolves, it would likely be even more difficult.

How does one cover one's unexplained disappearances on longer adventures? How does a mage explain injuries sustained during an adventure, come the start of the work week? How does an obviously inhuman creature make it through a job interview...and how do they attend meetings without raising alarms in their muggle co-workers, or clients? How does a vampire (or a werewolf) find a good dentist, and where on earth would one go to school for vampiric dental hygienists? And how does any being caught within a masquerade get affordable health insurance when they've got all these enemies looking to take shots at them?

I could go on, but you get the point. These are minor things, that the big organizations aren't really mentioned as having to deal with, which, as I understand it, is part of the point of the role playing...but they are something that can be incorporated into a story to make it seem more realistic, to help readers understand that the seeming monster they are supposed to empathize with has the same problems and concerns that they do.

Partizan · May 26, 2017

OverlordZovreign said:
There is several exampels of the power the mages have when working together. The main character manages to blackmail a semidivine being to back of by treathening to reveal that he have murdered some mages that were decendants to the mages who killed his wife. The being is forced to agree to those terms because otherwise all mages in brittain will come together to hunt him down and eventally succed in killing him.

Oh jeez, I remember this story. It was the first time I ever really thought about what being able to foresee the future in a controlled manner would let you do, and I have to admit that it was awesome.

Space Penguin · May 26, 2017

Partizan said:
Ah. You misunderstand. The organizations that are depicted are wealthy, yes, but typically their wealth is never explained. One is left to imagine that it is from...I don't know, maybe from the drug trade, or something similar. No explanation is ever given for how a Prince of the Camarilla is able to wield so much wealth and influence, despite being utterly unable to move around in the daylight hours in which business is conducted. He simply is wealthy.

Investments? Front companies? Gold stocks. We are talking about organizations centuries old here. For all we know, they have entire vaults filled with diamonds waiting to be pawned when needed.

Plus, all of this avoids the basic, fundamental reality of the situation: most businesses operate on a nine to five schedule. If your pipe bursts in the middle of the night, there really isn't an all-night plumber you can call...but would a vampire be able to look for any other sort? When a single window opened at the wrong time could lead to instant death, and a complete rupture of the masquerade? How do you go to the bank, and put your savings someplace safe, if you cannot set foot outside during bankers' hours?

Thats why they have ghouls aka human workers for that. Taking World of Darkness as the example of course. I may be mistaken, but a kindred getting hit slightly by sunlight while running past a window would be hurt badly but still live. Its when taking full brunt, they die.

How does a werewolf find a job to earn a living? Understand that most werewolves are greatly restricted in terms of where they can go--they have a territory, and leaving that territory can cause problems. So how does a werewolf find a job in today's society? I can testify from experience that, if you are restricted from travelling, that can be extremely difficult. For werewolves, it would likely be even more difficult.

Taking again OWoD as an example, they are part of clans who have been here for some time, work can be criminal activities, kinfolk aka families of the werewolf who cannot turn into werewolves support them through jobs and all.

How does one cover one's unexplained disappearances on longer adventures? How does a mage explain injuries sustained during an adventure, come the start of the work week?

You can't be serious right? Healing magic, again part of organizations where they may even have jobs with.

How does an obviously inhuman creature make it through a job interview...and how do they attend meetings without raising alarms in their muggle co-workers, or clients?

Why would an inhuman creature want a job working for humans?

How does a vampire (or a werewolf) find a good dentist, and where on earth would one go to school for vampiric dental hygienists? And how does any being caught within a masquerade get affordable health insurance when they've got all these enemies looking to take shots at them?

Organizations that they are a part of take care of this. Werewolves in OWoD are re generators.

I could go on, but you get the point. These are minor things, that the big organizations aren't really mentioned as having to deal with, which, as I understand it, is part of the point of the role playing...but they are something that can be incorporated into a story to make it seem more realistic, to help readers understand that the seeming monster they are supposed to empathize with has the same problems and concerns that they do.

They probably do all this in the background and is not talked about cause no one wants to be bored listening to a narrator narrate about inconsequential doctor visits.

biscuitz1 · May 26, 2017

linkhyrule5 said:
That's pretty much how the Nasuverse works, though the time scale is rather longer than a few decades.

Masquerade still holds because any Mystery that gets witnessed by that many people very shortly gets drained into uselessness, though it's not completely impenetrable. There's not much point, though, since as you say it's going to be irrelevant in a century or so anyway in moth timelines.

As you said in the nasuverse thread though, It still makes 0 sense.
Nasuverse magi are tech-phobic morons to say the least, so them trying to hide themselves at any rate of competency is ludicrious when Rin doesn't even understand what the internet is.
We have dead apostles eating entire hotels in tsukihime, we have the forest literally eat entire villages or towns, we had roa eat, rape and murder a entire town in ciel backstory.
You cannot cover that up with simple media control.
Bills would get unpaid, relatives would suddenly wonder 'why the fuck is my brother not calling me' probably a politician would be among those who go missing.
Scientists would eventually notice something like 'hey what is controlling the body' even if the soul is in another dimension so they cannot directly detect it.
We can infer things from absence y'know.
I know Waver says that the masquerade will be broken within 5 years in nasu, But It should've been broken decades ago.

Partizan · May 26, 2017

Space Penguin said:
Investments? Front companies? Gold stocks. We are talking about organizations centuries old here. For all we know, they have entire vaults filled with diamonds waiting to be pawned when needed.

Sure, that'll help the big dogs, at the top of the food chain, but how does it help the peons, who are slaving away at being 13th generation vampires? You think the Prince is going to include them on his payroll just because they look pretty?

Well, okay, maybe some Princes. But most? Not hardly. For one thing, they don't have the money to do that--not unless they get some kind of value in return. Which brings us back to the same question as before. Gold stocks may be enough to keep the rich vampires (and others) rich, but it won't do a thing for the ones who aren't rich, which would be the bulk of the population. Same thing for front companies--they'll work fine, if you've already got the money, but to already have the money, somebody had to take the time to earn the money in the first place. Truth be told, the reason the Ventrue hold so much influence in either World of Darkness has always been because they recruit from the already rich. But even then, you have problems, since they can only maintain that wealth if they're awake--go into torpor, and your ability to maintain that wealth vanishes, often for hundreds of years, meaning that when you wake up, you've probably got to start all over again. Even when you stay awake for several centuries, however, you still run into the same problem: conducting business at night is still hard, because everybody you need to meet with is active primarily in daylight hours. To maintain your business dealings in those circumstances, you are more or less forced to either be so damned brilliant that you border on the uncanny, or you have to play on unique strengths that your business rivals simply cannot hope to counter, such as being able to psychically manipulate others. But doing that runs the risk of your rivals discovering what is going on--these are NOT stupid or weak-willed men or women, after all--and if they DO find out...well, they've got resources far beyond those of the average vampire hunter. Add to this the inevitable ossification that sets in when one has been doing the same thing for years, and it has always worked before, and therefore will always continue to work. Most of the time, this is successful...but when it isn't, the results tend to be catastrophic, and most companies that have failed after many years of successful operations have done so because the times changed, and they didn't.

For beings that are not immortal, the task becomes even more challenging, because you don't have centuries to master your powers. You have to master your powers, run the risks, and learn to handle money in three score years and ten, or any money the organization has built up will drain out over the space of about a generation or so.

Space Penguin said:
Thats why they have ghouls aka human workers for that. Taking World of Darkness as the example of course. I may be mistaken, but a kindred getting hit slightly by sunlight while running past a window would be hurt badly but still live. Its when taking full brunt, they die.

They have ghouls for dentists?! And full-fledged hospitals, where everybody involved would need to be briefed that Person A, when they're brought in, don't do the bloodwork on him, send it off to company B, who does the weird blood work? Plus carpenters and plumbers and all that jazz? Plus spare safehouses, etc?

Actually, an immortal plumber probably isn't a bad way to accumulate wealth, come to think of it. Mind you, the night-time hours might be a bit of a problem, but you'd still make a lot of money.

Space Penguin said:
Taking again OWoD as an example, they are part of clans who have been here for some time, work can be criminal activities, kinfolk aka families of the werewolf who cannot turn into werewolves support them through jobs and all.

Gotta tell you...if my brother suddenly started turning into a werewolf, I'd be...disinclined to support him. And criminal activities...well, that's more life on the margins for you. Most crooks don't bring in a whole lot of cash, and that's not even counting the individuals who are so honest that they can't do something crooked to save their lives.

Presumably, vampires can somehow tell when they're biting somebody with autism, and know not to turn them. Especially the Malkaivians, who, being the paragons of mental stability and sanity that they are, never turn anybody into a vampire who has any kind of brain-related issues.

Space Penguin said:
You can't be serious right? Healing magic, again part of organizations where they may even have jobs with.

Okay. Simple way to explain this. You're part of a werewolf pack, right? Only your pack bit off more than you could chew, and your last adventure had casualties. Your healer is dead, your pack leader is in a minor coma (eh, it's fine...he should be out in a couple of days), and you, personally, happen to be missing an arm. Oh yes, and you have three hours before you need to be at work, because you work for a construction company, and if you don't show up, your job will be taken by a Mexican who will do twice the work you do, and for half the cost. This is all assuming, of course, that you don't pass out from blood loss, which would leave the local police to find you, and take you to a hospital. Because you're werewolves, you don't associate with any other faction in the World of Darkness...but your boss at the construction site is going to have a few questions as to why you're not all there when you show up for work. Among them will be "What the f---? Why the hell are you here, and not in a hospital? And what the hell happened to your arm?"

How do you answer?

Space Penguin said:
Why would an inhuman creature want a job working for humans?

Because humans have this weird thing we call money, and it will buy you these other weird things called food, a home, and, frequently, internet access. Although that last is going to be something of a challenge if you live in one of those areas served by Comcast, I'll grant you.

Space Penguin said:
Organizations that they are a part of take care of this. Werewolves in OWoD are re generators.

In all probability, the organizations are likely to be a tad busy covering up all the damage you lunatics caused in the last adventure when you BLEW UP A FREAKING WAREHOUSE FULL OF SABBAT WITH AN ILLEGAL INCEDIARY BOMB!!!!
Or so my experience with the computer games tells me, anyway. Mind you, Sebastian LaCroix was a bit of a dick, but that's neither here, nor there.

Seriously, there is an upper limit on how many people the organization can include, before the conspiracy starts having more people on the inside, than on the outside.

Space Penguin · May 26, 2017

Partizan said:
Sure, that'll help the big dogs, at the top of the food chain, but how does it help the peons, who are slaving away at being 13th generation vampires? You think the Prince is going to include them on his payroll just because they look pretty?

Well, okay, maybe some Princes. But most? Not hardly. For one thing, they don't have the money to do that--not unless they get some kind of value in return. Which brings us back to the same question as before. Gold stocks may be enough to keep the rich vampires (and others) rich, but it won't do a thing for the ones who aren't rich, which would be the bulk of the population. Same thing for front companies--they'll work fine, if you've already got the money, but to already have the money, somebody had to take the time to earn the money in the first place. Truth be told, the reason the Ventrue hold so much influence in either World of Darkness has always been because they recruit from the already rich. But even then, you have problems, since they can only maintain that wealth if they're awake--go into torpor, and your ability to maintain that wealth vanishes, often for hundreds of years, meaning that when you wake up, you've probably got to start all over again. Even when you stay awake for several centuries, however, you still run into the same problem: conducting business at night is still hard, because everybody you need to meet with is active primarily in daylight hours. To maintain your business dealings in those circumstances, you are more or less forced to either be so damned brilliant that you border on the uncanny, or you have to play on unique strengths that your business rivals simply cannot hope to counter, such as being able to psychically manipulate others. But doing that runs the risk of your rivals discovering what is going on--these are NOT stupid or weak-willed men or women, after all--and if they DO find out...well, they've got resources far beyond those of the average vampire hunter. Add to this the inevitable ossification that sets in when one has been doing the same thing for years, and it has always worked before, and therefore will always continue to work. Most of the time, this is successful...but when it isn't, the results tend to be catastrophic, and most companies that have failed after many years of successful operations have done so because the times changed, and they didn't.

We were talking about organizations and those who worked for them. And Yes the CEO ubermensch will of course be able to defeat a vampire who can mind control you and has networks all over the city and blackmail your ass to kingdom come all without you knowing they are a vampire, right

?

At any rate, I actually have no idea how newly made vampires function and get money being honest.

For beings that are not immortal, the task becomes even more challenging, because you don't have centuries to master your powers. You have to master your powers, run the risks, and learn to handle money in three score years and ten, or any money the organization has built up will drain out over the space of about a generation or so.

Cause you say so rather then being running for centuries of existence, they have lots of wealth they have not used they can then funnel into stuff to create more money

.

They have ghouls for dentists?! And full-fledged hospitals, where everybody involved would need to be briefed that Person A, when they're brought in, don't do the bloodwork on him, send it off to company B, who does the weird blood work? Plus carpenters and plumbers and all that jazz?

Yes. The Vampire the Masquerade bloodlines had someone who is a ghoul working in a hospital doing stuff for his vampire masters and why the hell do you think the carpenters and plumbers need to know anything? They come in fix whats needed and get out.

Plus spare safehouses, etc?

Being wealthy means they can buy lots of these things.

Gotta tell you...if my brother suddenly started turning into a werewolf, I'd be...disinclined to support him. And criminal activities...well, that's more life on the margins for you. Most crooks don't bring in a whole lot of cash, and that's not even counting the individuals who are so honest that they can't do something crooked to save their lives.

There was a nice little quote of some mafia guy bragging about how having a family member as a werewolf made things so much easier and money for all. Sounds like they are doing just fine.

Presumably, vampires can somehow tell when they're biting somebody with autism, and know not to turn them. Especially the Malkaivians, who, being the paragons of mental stability and sanity that they are, never turn anybody into a vampire who has any kind of brain-related issues.

*shrug* magic?

Okay. Simple way to explain this. You're part of a werewolf pack, right? Only your pack bit off more than you could chew, and your last adventure had casualties. Your healer is dead, your pack leader is in a minor coma (eh, it's fine...he should be out in a couple of days), and you, personally, happen to be missing an arm. Oh yes, and you have three hours before you need to be at work, because you work for a construction company, and if you don't show up, your job will be taken by a Mexican who will do twice the work you do, and for half the cost. This is all assuming, of course, that you don't pass out from blood loss, which would leave the local police to find you, and take you to a hospital. Because you're werewolves, you don't associate with any other faction in the World of Darkness...but your boss at the construction site is going to have a few questions as to why you're not all there when you show up for work. Among them will be "What the f---? Why the hell are you here, and not in a hospital? And what the hell happened to your arm?"

How do you answer?

You do realize that you can just go to the rest of the garou right? The Garou have moon bridges that allow them to travel the world and there is the umbra travel. And again, regenerators. have your forgotten?

Because humans have this weird thing we call money, and it will buy you these other weird things called food, a home, and, frequently, internet access. Although that last is going to be something of a challenge if you live in one of those areas served by Comcast, I'll grant you.

And why would an inhuman monster want any of this? what if the inhuman monsters food is people?

In all probability, the organizations are likely to be a tad busy covering up all the damage you lunatics caused in the last adventure when you BLEW UP A FREAKING WAREHOUSE FULL OF SABBAT WITH AN ILLEGAL INCEDIARY BOMB!!!!
Or so my experience with the computer games tells me, anyway. Mind you, Sebastian LaCroix was a bit of a dick, but that's neither here, nor there.

Seriously, there is an upper limit on how many people the organization can include, before the conspiracy starts having more people on the inside, than on the outside.

Technocracy for example is a world spanning and beyond conspiracy. And why do you assume that they need the entire resources of the organization to fix up these little messes?

Partizan · May 27, 2017

Space Penguin said:
We were talking about organizations and those who worked for them. And Yes the CEO ubermensch will of course be able to defeat a vampire who can mind control you and has networks all over the city and blackmail your ass to kingdom come all without you knowing they are a vampire, right ?

The problem with using vampiric mind control on the Tony Franzetta, CEO of EvilCorp, Inc (the world's leading supplier of evil-related products and services...not to mention the owner of Heroes.com), is that Tony doesn't approve of deals straight up. He approves of deals in principle, and than has people get together to work out the details. And then, once they're worked out, more people go over the details, in private, to make sure that nothing goes against EvilCorp's best interests. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether EvilCorp is worried about mind control, blackmail, bribes, or some other means of subversion. What matters is that, even without knowing that mind control or some other supernatural means can be used to influence their actions, the company is worried about their people's decisions and/or actions being influenced...and they take steps to make sure it doesn't happen. This is standard practice in our world--I can't see why it would not be on other worlds.
And even if you do manage to slide an unprofitable deal through all this scrutiny...remember, the CEO can be replaced at any time, if either the stockholders, or the Board of Directors decides to do so. You don't see this happen very often, because CEOs know this is possible, and tend to limit their actions to make sure it doesn't happen, but it does happen...and a CEO who is being controlled won't last too long once his actions come to light, because their deals will show less than maximum profit, and no CEO can afford that.

His replacement's first job, naturally, will be to find out why his unfortunate predecessor agreed to such bad deals, and then to change the procedures to make sure it doesn't happen again. Hence, the reason why you have major business leaders poking around in places where your average globe-spanning conspiracy of any type really doesn't want them poking.

Space Penguin said:
At any rate, I actually have no idea how newly made vampires function and get money being honest.

Neither do I, and that's sort of what I meant--how does a young vampire get money, and contacts, and what he needs to get by? I mean, honestly, as a novelist, or as a gamer, I don't really care about the old guys, because I'm not going to be one of them. How do the young ones do it?

Space Penguin said:
Cause you say so rather then being running for centuries of existence, they have lots of wealth they have not used they can then funnel into stuff to create more money .

Are you going to trust somebody to handle seventy plus billion dollars, without having some means to determine whether he or she is doing a good job? And without having some means to remove a manager who does a bad job, and find a replacement?

If your answer is "yes," then please...I have some experience in these things, and would be happy to manage your money for you. Please, get in touch. I promise you, it is at least 60% safer than responding to a Nigerian email scam.

Seriously--even if they do hire a money manager, which would be the smart thing to do, they will still find themselves having a full-time job just...well...being rich. There's a lot more to wealth than you'd think, and making sure that you stay in control of all that money very rapidly gets to be a full-time job. There is a reason why most big fortunes rarely last for more than 3 generations. It is known as "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves," and it is very real.

Space Penguin said:
Yes. The Vampire the Masquerade bloodlines had someone who is a ghoul working in a hospital doing stuff for his vampire masters and why the hell do you think the carpenters and plumbers need to know anything? They come in fix whats needed and get out.

Said ghoul is a standard nurse, however--his ability to help you if you got brought into the emergency room would be much more limited. Even for just that clinic, you'd need at least two more ghouls to successfully maintain the masquerade, out of a staff of probably no more than twenty to thirty people. At that rate, you would need a minimum of 2,000 ghouls in the medical industry alone to cover the LA area, and even then you'd be running a pretty severe risk of exposure. Personally, I'd want more...but that's just me.

Space Penguin said:
Being wealthy means they can buy lots of these things.

No, actually, it doesn't. What being wealthy means is that you've got a lot of assets. But to see assets capable of generating a $50,000 income (which is the median for the USA) on a 5% annual return on investment, you'd need at least $1,000,000 in invested assets. If you want to see those numbers grow at a rate concurrent with inflation, you'd need somewhere north of $1,500,000. This is just for an average(ish) family, by the way--if you have somebody who is to express power and influence, you'd need a lot more money.
The tower you saw in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines? The one that La Croix owns/lives in? That cost him north of $500,000,000, meaning that for him to have purchased it without making a heavy sacrifice in terms of his long-term money-making ability, he would have to be worth anywhere from $5,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 at a minimum, and probably worth a good deal more than that. The Camarilla which backs him could likely have afforded the tower with much less effort, but even then, they have multiple demands on their resources, so they will only shell out that kind of money if he is seriously powerful, and has significant influence within the group.

Being rich doesn't mean that you have lots of money, I'm afraid. It means that you can come up with lots of money in a hurry, if you're willing to throw away everything. Maintaining your assets for the expected centuries of existence, unfortunately, is not easy, and it costs heavily. The Camarilla may be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but the simple effort of maintaining that money means that they will still have a surprisingly limited budget for things like safehouses, and the like. Shelling out a half-billion to get rid of La Croix isn't going to be worth it unless their American holdings are worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars.

Given the size of the US economy, that would mean that the Camarilla in the United States would be worth about 1% of the American economy, which I would suspect would be well beyond what you could expect to hide in the shadows. In effect, that kind of money automatically breaks the masquerade, just because of the tax and political implications.

Space Penguin said:
There was a nice little quote of some mafia guy bragging about how having a family member as a werewolf made things so much easier and money for all. Sounds like they are doing just fine.

Yeah? And said werewolf is still around? I would have thought that his rivals would have taken steps to eliminate his werewolf family member as soon as he was dumb enough to say something about it. Of course, that's just me. Maybe most mafia guys are perfectly happy to see an eight-foot furry killing machine at their rival's beck and call.

Space Penguin said:
You do realize that you can just go to the rest of the garou right? The Garou have moon bridges that allow them to travel the world and there is the umbra travel. And again, regenerators. have your forgotten?

Yeah? How close is the nearest friendly pack? This goes back to the previous comment about population, you see--if there's enough werewolves in the area for that to be viable, there's enough that the odds of detection start rising dramatically.

And keep in mind that werewolves don't just mind the area around the caerns--not all werewolves have immediate and ready access to moon bridges. Which is a problem, because there's not a huge amount of stuff that can threaten an entire werewolf pack that doesn't live within the Umbra...which means that Umbra travel may or may not be practical.

And all of this assumes that the healing rituals required to regrow your freaking arm don't take more than two or three hours--if they do, you're going to be late again (assuming you can make it at all), and you can't do that but so many times before your boss fires you anyway.

Space Penguin said:
And why would an inhuman monster want any of this? what if the inhuman monsters food is people?

Why wouldn't they? They're intelligent, right? Intelligence means the ability to get bored. Best cure for boredom? Other intelligence. And, in today's world, that means money, or some other means to measure value, so that you have a viable medium of exchange. But the problem is that, for the more humanoid supernaturals, money is a medium of exchange that they can use when dealing with humans, as well as non-humans, which means that they have little incentive to use anything else.

Plus...you know...YouTube. I mean, come on. How can anything resist videos of cute kittens?

Space Penguin said:
Technocracy for example is a world spanning and beyond conspiracy. And why do you assume that they need the entire resources of the organization to fix up these little messes?

In Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, the blown up warehouse is still mentioned by the news come the end of the game. Admittedly, there is reason to believe that things are rapidly going to hell as the game progresses, and that the Camarilla's ability (or possibly desire) to suppress the news is edging towards the non-existent.

And the problem isn't how much resources are required for a single incident. The problem lies with the sheer number of incidents. As noted above, there is an upwards limit on how many resources the organization can have available, and, again, as mentioned, they have other demands on their time and resources (which is why they kill you if you become too much of a threat to the masquerade).

Aside from the Technocracy, which has literally rewritten the laws of reality, I really don't see any other group managing to operate on this kind of scale.

bird_poison · May 28, 2017

Space Penguin said:
At any rate, I actually have no idea how newly made vampires function and get money being honest.

Drug money. As in, they prey on kinpings, drug lords and other sources of easy cash. When you are a night horror, sneaking and stealing become easier.

The contacts and stuff comes with the help of said cash, and decades of work.

MJ12 Commando · May 30, 2017

Partizan said:
Yeah? How close is the nearest friendly pack? This goes back to the previous comment about population, you see--if there's enough werewolves in the area for that to be viable, there's enough that the odds of detection start rising dramatically.

And keep in mind that werewolves don't just mind the area around the caerns--not all werewolves have immediate and ready access to moon bridges. Which is a problem, because there's not a huge amount of stuff that can threaten an entire werewolf pack that doesn't live within the Umbra...which means that Umbra travel may or may not be practical.

And all of this assumes that the healing rituals required to regrow your freaking arm don't take more than two or three hours--if they do, you're going to be late again (assuming you can make it at all), and you can't do that but so many times before your boss fires you anyway.

Two to three hours? Try twenty seconds to regenerate from "pretty much about to be declared dead on the spot" to "perfectly healthy" outside of breedform, and if you're getting into a fight as a werewolf, you're going to be doing it out of breedform. Werewolves regenerate ludicrously fast. If you get ambushed in breedform, and shot several times, you are probably dead, and if you survive a fight outside of breedform you don't need to worry about lasting injury because there's no such thing, unless you have literally had to power through being actually dead through the power of sheer anger, at which point you might suffer a permanent scar, but that means you have literally died already, and werewolves are tough motherfuckers who are immensely hard to kill.

Werewolves are guerilla supersoldiers from hell, and part of that is because they do not need weapons, logistics tails, or medical care.

Partizan said:
In Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, the blown up warehouse is still mentioned by the news come the end of the game. Admittedly, there is reason to believe that things are rapidly going to hell as the game progresses, and that the Camarilla's ability (or possibly desire) to suppress the news is edging towards the non-existent.

Yes, a regular old blown up warehouse, with no vampires. The Masquerade isn't about suppressing the consequences of all vampire actions, it's about making sure that people don't suspect the supernatural. Claiming it was terrorists, yes, indeed, terrorists (and everyone is telling you that because the Cammies control all centers of power, private and public) is going to be adequate for a lot of things. The Camarilla do not actually 'suppress' the news, they just make sure that the line is something plausible that fits into a world without vampires and supernatural powers.

"Gang war in gang-ridden city leads to massive bomb attack on gang stronghold" is a pretty good line.

Now yes, this means the Camarilla conspiracy is pretty much world-spanning and massive, but fuck, we're dealing with people who can have, as powers, supernatural abilities to bind others to their words, to understand the truth, and grossly superhuman intelligence, perceptiveness, and foresight. They're not limited to the capabilities of regular humans.

king208 · May 30, 2017

MJ12 Commando said:
Two to three hours? Try twenty seconds to regenerate from "pretty much about to be declared dead on the spot" to "perfectly healthy" outside of breedform, and if you're getting into a fight as a werewolf, you're going to be doing it out of breedform. Werewolves regenerate ludicrously fast. If you get ambushed in breedform, and shot several times, you are probably dead, and if you survive a fight outside of breedform you don't need to worry about lasting injury because there's no such thing, unless you have literally had to power through being actually dead through the power of sheer anger, at which point you might suffer a permanent scar, but that means you have literally died already, and werewolves are tough motherfuckers who are immensely hard to kill.

Werewolves are guerilla supersoldiers from hell, and part of that is because they do not need weapons, logistics tails, or medical care.

Yes, a regular old blown up warehouse, with no vampires. The Masquerade isn't about suppressing the consequences of all vampire actions, it's about making sure that people don't suspect the supernatural. Claiming it was terrorists, yes, indeed, terrorists (and everyone is telling you that because the Cammies control all centers of power, private and public) is going to be adequate for a lot of things. The Camarilla do not actually 'suppress' the news, they just make sure that the line is something plausible that fits into a world without vampires and supernatural powers.

"Gang war in gang-ridden city leads to massive bomb attack on gang stronghold" is a pretty good line.

Now yes, this means the Camarilla conspiracy is pretty much world-spanning and massive, but fuck, we're dealing with people who can have, as powers, supernatural abilities to bind others to their words, to understand the truth, and grossly superhuman intelligence, perceptiveness, and foresight. They're not limited to the capabilities of regular humans.

Agreed, supernatural mind control goes a long way towards making any level of masquerade viable.

Partizan · Jun 5, 2017

Quick question, then: for the warehouse? Where are the bodies? And how come none of the local gangs are showing holes in their ranks? For that matter, how come none are showing the behavior you'd expect of a gang that just took that kind of heavy losses?

My whole point is that the masquerade doesn't start breaking down on the big stuff, like leaving a dead werewolf in an observatory where just anybody can find it. THAT can be taken care of using mind control, bribes, or, if need be, outright assassination and character defamation. The problem comes when you start running into the little shit. Details don't match up, and somebody who wasn't mind controlled starts doing the math, and coming to the conclusion that something isn't right. Talking to the police who investigated, or even the journalists who wrote the news story, is going to allay concerns for a bit, but eventually the numbers will get to be too big to be ignored...and then you've still got all those things like that exploded warehouse to dig into.

As for the werewolf regeneration...notice, I didn't say that you were missing part of your arm. Nor that you had gotten all beat up, and were probably going to lose the arm. I said that your arm is flat-out gone. As in, the whole thing, from the shoulder, all the way to your hand, is no longer attached to your body, and you don't know where it is, or what became of it. You have just taken what, for many humans, would be a fatal or near-fatal wound, particularly if it was not the result of a hospital amputation, but something caused by a creature literally ripping your arm off and then beating you over the head with it, and you're still moving around under your own power, and the only thing that's giving you problems is the question of what your boss will say. Give me some credit, please. We are not talking about a run-of-the-mill near-death injury, like somebody taking a jackhammer to your rib cage, or pulverizing your spinal cord. We are talking about something serious enough that even a werewolf acknowledges the need for a healer. And the nearest healer is a four hour round trip away, plus whatever time the likely very complex healing whatsit requires, plus whatever time is needed to eat something, change your clothes, and get to work for a job that may well no longer be there when you get there unless you have a damn good excuse for why you are running three hours late. THAT'S why you need to figure out what to tell your boss--not because you're going to be in a hospital ward for the next week, but because you're going to be a few hours later unless you delay this whole thing until after work, and you need an excuse to be late that even your asshole boss will accept as being beyond your control, and not something that he should fire you for.

MJ12 Commando · Jun 5, 2017

Partizan said:
As for the werewolf regeneration...notice, I didn't say that you were missing part of your arm. Nor that you had gotten all beat up, and were probably going to lose the arm. I said that your arm is flat-out gone. As in, the whole thing, from the shoulder, all the way to your hand, is no longer attached to your body, and you don't know where it is, or what became of it. You have just taken what, for many humans, would be a fatal or near-fatal wound, particularly if it was not the result of a hospital amputation, but something caused by a creature literally ripping your arm off and then beating you over the head with it, and you're still moving around under your own power, and the only thing that's giving you problems is the question of what your boss will say. Give me some credit, please. We are not talking about a run-of-the-mill near-death injury, like somebody taking a jackhammer to your rib cage, or pulverizing your spinal cord. We are talking about something serious enough that even a werewolf acknowledges the need for a healer. And the nearest healer is a four hour round trip away, plus whatever time the likely very complex healing whatsit requires, plus whatever time is needed to eat something, change your clothes, and get to work for a job that may well no longer be there when you get there unless you have a damn good excuse for why you are running three hours late. THAT'S why you need to figure out what to tell your boss--not because you're going to be in a hospital ward for the next week, but because you're going to be a few hours later unless you delay this whole thing until after work, and you need an excuse to be late that even your asshole boss will accept as being beyond your control, and not something that he should fire you for.

Okay, so what did you get into a fight with which is powerful enough to either kill you so fucking dead that you suffered the loss of the arm because you had to rage so hard you came back to life, or deal the shit-ton of crippling aggravated damage necessary that you can't just regrow the arm within 30 seconds (and need a few days instead)? There are a handful of things which can do that. Very high-tier combat vampires, absolutely dedicated fitemages, and super-powerful Pentex goons. All of them are backed by a shit-ton of soft power, even in a werewolf-primary setting. You will not be considering what excuse you will give to your boss because if you were taking on something like that, you will probably have spent so much time in werewolf society that you are not going to be concerned about mundane affairs because you've become a full-time terrorist. And moreover, even if you weren't, they're probably going to have far better mundane connections than you do.

Furthermore, you overestimate the rarity of werewolves capable of Healing Gifts. Mother's Touch is a Rank 1 Theurge gift, which means that literally 20% of all werewolves will have trivial access to it from birth alone. The Glass Walkers, Children of Gaia, and Black Furies all have access to it above and beyond that. And moreover, its most important ability to heal battle scars only works when used immediately. Either you're going to buy it and have it available right there and then-or you're not going to buy it, and you won't spend time seeking out people who have it because it's worthless.

Oh yeah and Mother's Touch is literally applicable in battlefield time. So even if the nearest healer was 4 hours away, it would take all of 3 seconds. You can go "I have really bad diarrhea or whatever, I'm taking the day off" and most bosses would accept that. I do not think you understand how ludicrously optimized werewolves are for terrorism, on a base level.

Partizan said:
Quick question, then: for the warehouse? Where are the bodies? And how come none of the local gangs are showing holes in their ranks? For that matter, how come none are showing the behavior you'd expect of a gang that just took that kind of heavy losses?

My whole point is that the masquerade doesn't start breaking down on the big stuff, like leaving a dead werewolf in an observatory where just anybody can find it. THAT can be taken care of using mind control, bribes, or, if need be, outright assassination and character defamation. The problem comes when you start running into the little shit. Details don't match up, and somebody who wasn't mind controlled starts doing the math, and coming to the conclusion that something isn't right. Talking to the police who investigated, or even the journalists who wrote the news story, is going to allay concerns for a bit, but eventually the numbers will get to be too big to be ignored...and then you've still got all those things like that exploded warehouse to dig into.

The Sabbat use ghouls, and ghouls are perfectly fine bodies. As to 'showing holes in their ranks' who exactly is going to be talked to who will confirm that theory and play it on tape? The Camarilla have immense control over all aspects of modern life. The entire point of the masquerade is that people believe what they want to believe, and will reason

Most people don't want to believe they are powerless peons who exist in lives heavily controlled by malicious supernatural beings, and thus don't.

Partizan · Jun 6, 2017

MJ12 Commando said:
Okay, so what did you get into a fight with which is powerful enough to either kill you so fucking dead that you suffered the loss of the arm because you had to rage so hard you came back to life, or deal the shit-ton of crippling aggravated damage necessary that you can't just regrow the arm within 30 seconds (and need a few days instead)? There are a handful of things which can do that.
Very high-tier combat vampires, absolutely dedicated fitemages, and super-powerful Pentex goons. All of them are backed by a shit-ton of soft power, even in a werewolf-primary setting. You will not be considering what excuse you will give to your boss because if you were taking on something like that, you will probably have spent so much time in werewolf society that you are not going to be concerned about mundane affairs because you've become a full-time terrorist. And moreover, even if you weren't, they're probably going to have far better mundane connections than you do.

Add to the above list a half-dozen assholes with SPAS-12 shotguns loaded with Dragons Breath rounds, which basically turn the shotgun into a flamethrower. Alternatively, they could be firing Armor-Piercing Incendiary rounds, miniature grenades, or a variety of other rounds. This does not include the damage that would be done by, say, one lunatic with a decent machine gun, which is fully capable of cutting people in half with every burst, and which can and usually do fire phosphorous tracer rounds, which would deal aggravated damage. And Heaven help you if you run into an enemy smart enough to string mines to prepare an ambush, or any of dozens of other scenarios. All of these scenarios are the sort of thing that could easily be encountered by a werewolf that is only just beginning to enter werewolf society--somebody who let the wrong hints drop around the local Hunters, or who just accidentally ran afoul of a lunatic, for instance. And this is just off the top of my head--I'm pretty sure that if I were to actually sit down and game it out, I could come up with all sorts of enemies who could do that to an entire pack, particularly if they were unfair enough to work in tandem. A vampire playing along with some of the local Hunters, for instance, would likely be more than happy to lead said Hunters into picking a fight with the local werewolf pack--he could get rid of two problems with one maneuver, and be well-positioned to finish off the survivors. Werewolves are dangerous, yeah, but they're not dangerous enough to go blind into every fight and be able to expect to come out on top.

Plus, terrorists need money too. Unless you're going to do it like the Punisher, which has its own set of problems and risks, than yes, you need to maintain some sort of cover, and make sure that you have a visible source of income. It does not necessarily have to cover all of your expenses, but it DOES have to be there, so that you don't get picked up for failure to file income taxes when some random audit picks up that you're spending money that you don't appear to be earning. And yes, that will punch through most connections--Al Capone had some pretty impressive governmental connections of his own, before the auditors got him arrested for failure to pay taxes, and they didn't do him a lick of good when the hammer dropped.

MJ12 Commando said:
Furthermore, you overestimate the rarity of werewolves capable of Healing Gifts. Mother's Touch is a Rank 1 Theurge gift, which means that literally 20% of all werewolves will have trivial access to it from birth alone. The Glass Walkers, Children of Gaia, and Black Furies all have access to it above and beyond that. And moreover, its most important ability to heal battle scars only works when used immediately. Either you're going to buy it and have it available right there and then-or you're not going to buy it, and you won't spend time seeking out people who have it because it's worthless.

I seem to remember reading that the basic pack size of a werewolf pack is 5 members, which basically means that every pack has at least one healer, and possibly more. Problem is, we're talking a basic pack here--just one healer, who is currently in a coma. Presumably, whatever went after our hypothetical pack, be it werewolf hunters, a mad scientist, or a particularly powerful creature of the supernatural, either got lucky, or they specifically targeted the healer first. So there IS no immediate healing available--you have to go out and find somebody, who is two or three hours away, minimum, and have them do something quite a bit more advanced than Mother's Touch to erase the scars that are left on you, since you can't get to a healer until two or three hours after the battle is over. That, as I recall, is a MUCH more complicated ritual and/or ability, which I believe takes a good bit more time to accomplish.

MJ12 Commando said:
Oh yeah and Mother's Touch is literally applicable in battlefield time. So even if the nearest healer was 4 hours away, it would take all of 3 seconds. You can go "I have really bad diarrhea or whatever, I'm taking the day off" and most bosses would accept that. I do not think you understand how ludicrously optimized werewolves are for terrorism, on a base level.

Which, as long as none of the OTHER groups have elected to pick a fight with the pack, will do a great deal of good. Otherwise, the werewolves, optimized for terrorism or not, are going to be caught fighting too many enemies, and with not enough resources. This is a classic problem, one that is particularly pressing on a terrorist or urban guerilla organization (such as a werewolf pack, for instance), because their base of supply is so insignificant, and their margins tend to be so razor thin. Once the pack's immediate resources are exhausted, the casualties are going to start to climb, and climb rapidly. Plus, optimized or not, they will still be fighting a shadow war, which will rely upon having good intelligence more than anything else. Werewolves are NOT optimized for that kind of activity--they are primarily a combat race, with all the weaknesses that entails. Vampires, mages, and others are much better-suited to that sort of thing than werewolves, which means that our hypothetical werewolves will need to take careful steps to maintain their information network...which cannot be done except in breedform.

And a smart enemy would know that, and move to take advantage of that fact. Which, logically enough, would lead to a battle with the werewolves in breedform...and unable to regenerate.

MJ12 Commando said:
The Sabbat use ghouls, and ghouls are perfectly fine bodies. As to 'showing holes in their ranks' who exactly is going to be talked to who will confirm that theory and play it on tape? The Camarilla have immense control over all aspects of modern life. The entire point of the masquerade is that people believe what they want to believe, and will reason

Um...almost any gangster? You know, the guys who are trying to avoid getting locked up for life, or even the death penalty, and thus trying to make sure that they're not on the hook for murders they didn't commit? Hell, there are street urchins who could tell you that much, even under oath. And once it's under oath, it's recorded, it's going to have to be censored. For...what...hundreds of courts just in the United States? Maybe thousands? Any one of which will store their records in triplicate, and then keep a backup copy handy?

Even without that, people notice when their neighbors disappear. Like I said, the masquerade doesn't break down on the big stuff, like an expert coming out with credible evidence that vampires exist. It breaks down on the little stuff, like your next door neighbor suddenly vanishing off the face of the earth. Once or twice can be explained, sort of. But if that happens to you on a semi-regular basis, it's going to arouse suspicions, no matter how pure your drugs might be, and how often you might hallucinate conversations with imaginary beings. And if enough people in an area start to have those suspicions, than things start to go awry. You may have noticed that, in my breakdown of the numbers, I cited the threat to having one in 10,000 individuals being supernatural creatures as being that those creatures will start to gather in communities? Well, this is what I mean. A few questions can be shrugged off, and ignored. A few dozen will start to make paranoid people suspicious, and start to attract hunters and conspiracy theorists. But a community of even a half-dozen vampires (such as it is) will attract far, far more than just a few questions.

And yes, the Sabbat do use ghouls, but they also have a bad habbit of turning people into vampires whenever they need extra muscle. Which means that, after a war between the vampire clans, a certain number of the local gangsters just...vanish. Which, again, feeds back into what I said above--it's not the big things that break the masquerade. It's the little details that you can't possibly cover, because you don't have the information to predict them all.

MJ12 Commando said:
Most people don't want to believe they are powerless peons who exist in lives heavily controlled by malicious supernatural beings, and thus don't.

If people are powerless, why the masquerade? If there is truly nothing they can do, than surely the vampires, mages, werewolves, and all the rest risk nothing by revealing themselves.

The whole point of the masquerade is that humans are NOT powerless. They are, and will always be, deadly dangerous, and if any of the supernatural groups or powers reveal their existence, there is every chance in the world that the humans will find a way to exterminate them completely. The vampires of VtM aren't hiding to be able to prey more efficiently upon humans, like lions hunting gazelle. They're hiding to make sure that the humans don't find them and obliterate them. Lions hunt gazelle, not elephants, and that's what humanity as a whole is to vampires: so many elephants, ready, able, and willing to completely exterminate the vampires if they ever discover the predators' existence.

Blueeyedsidhecat · Jun 8, 2017

To me, it seems to boil down to three types of masquerade.

1. Universal masquerade. This would be masquerade that isn't enforced, but is an actual part of universe, with only minor number of people being capable of seeing it. It can range from magical beings being invisible, appearing as mundane equivalents ( for example, werewolf looks like bear) to memories being retroactively changed to fit with reality. Your decision whether masquerade extends to technology. Depending on magic system and lore, it is either natural ( if your magic is primarily concerned with working with spirits and ghosts, for example), or artificial ( world's deities got fed up with mages and made ban).

2. Memory alternation. Either mages have special taskforce that detects use of magic and covers up evidence (physical, virtual, memories) or all mages are trained to do such things.

3. Organizations with fingers in everything. Government, media, what do you have. Get money as combination of experience, influence and use of magic ( for example, healing mage gets medical degree and mixes potions and charms with medicines and treatments, or mages simply create money). Most likely to break.

In my opinion, when making masquerade, you have to consider what is your world like- what can magic do and how it works then figure out how to hide it.

Nolrai · Jun 8, 2017

Nasu: Yeah, a masquerade that weak .. when could it come into being? Go too far back and your in the age of heroes, don't go far enough and tax info starts to make it impossible.

WoD: The Technocratcy is an interesting example because the masquerade is a huge part of not just it's practice but it's being. It's a big part of why it's magic works, and pervades it's social structure, they aren't hiding from a world that would exist without them, the entire structure of the modern world /is/ their masquerade, as is most of their internal structure (just in layers..there are always more secrets).

They don't rule the world because a world they don't rule is how they rule the world.

And while 4 of their 5 parts could and maybe would drift away from it... the NWO can't without becoming something fundamentally different.

(As the Progenitors and Iteration X have doubled down on a reductionist and material universe where souls and spirits and even intelligence are just naive views of what matter does. Or VE the that the universe is hostile, dangerous, and we must exploit it. )

(Well the modem world consists of their masquerade, reactions to their masquerade by other groups, and the some what common fuck ups magic has, and magic people have. )

And of course the TU exerts control of things through the channels they priorities and understand, and that does not mean no one else has channels that control things.

Also believing in the necessity and effectiveness of masquerade level n, is part of level n+1.

MJ12 Commando · Jun 8, 2017

Partizan said:
Add to the above list a half-dozen assholes with SPAS-12 shotguns loaded with Dragons Breath rounds, which basically turn the shotgun into a flamethrower. Alternatively, they could be firing Armor-Piercing Incendiary rounds, miniature grenades, or a variety of other rounds. This does not include the damage that would be done by, say, one lunatic with a decent machine gun, which is fully capable of cutting people in half with every burst, and which can and usually do fire phosphorous tracer rounds, which would deal aggravated damage. And Heaven help you if you run into an enemy smart enough to string mines to prepare an ambush, or any of dozens of other scenarios. All of these scenarios are the sort of thing that could easily be encountered by a werewolf that is only just beginning to enter werewolf society--somebody who let the wrong hints drop around the local Hunters, or who just accidentally ran afoul of a lunatic, for instance. And this is just off the top of my head--I'm pretty sure that if I were to actually sit down and game it out, I could come up with all sorts of enemies who could do that to an entire pack, particularly if they were unfair enough to work in tandem. A vampire playing along with some of the local Hunters, for instance, would likely be more than happy to lead said Hunters into picking a fight with the local werewolf pack--he could get rid of two problems with one maneuver, and be well-positioned to finish off the survivors. Werewolves are dangerous, yeah, but they're not dangerous enough to go blind into every fight and be able to expect to come out on top.

"One lunatic with a decent machine gun" is the kind of shit a werewolf laughs right the fuck off. Werewolves in Crinos are effectively immune to small arms fire between their ludicrous soak and regeneration, ignoring any Gifts that they start with. Since we're talking Homid werewolves, all of them have easy access to Master of Fire, which means you might as well have loaded your SPAS-12 shotgun with rubber slugs for all the good it'll do (since that effectively turns fire damage to bashing), and even if they didn't they have enough soak that they can pretty reliably survive things like 'shotguns shooting incendiary ammunition' without giving a shit. Meanwhile, these humans are going to be suffering from Delirium, which means they might well be shooting each other in panic or just committing suicide the moment they end up facing the wolf, and otherwise disorganized. I specified supernatural kill-teams for a reason, because mages, vampires, and most high-level Fomor are immune to the most powerful tool a werewolf has-the fact that almost any organized paramilitary team turns into a disorganized bunch of dumb horror movie protagonists with guns the moment they see the werewolf in warform.

Plus, terrorists need money too. Unless you're going to do it like the Punisher, which has its own set of problems and risks, than yes, you need to maintain some sort of cover, and make sure that you have a visible source of income. It does not necessarily have to cover all of your expenses, but it DOES have to be there, so that you don't get picked up for failure to file income taxes when some random audit picks up that you're spending money that you don't appear to be earning. And yes, that will punch through most connections--Al Capone had some pretty impressive governmental connections of his own, before the auditors got him arrested for failure to pay taxes, and they didn't do him a lick of good when the hammer dropped.

Which is of course why al-Qaeda funds itself via people working regular 9-5 jobs rather than illegal activities. Of course, given the actual facts of werewolf, like how the First Change tends to manifest in times of great stress and lead to tragedy, how both the Wyrm and the Garou seek out and recruit werewolves, if you're fighting on the side of Gaia you're not going to be working a mundane 9-5 job. Your boss is probably kinfolk at worst, if you're Glass Walker (and thus if you tell them "shit I lost my arm because of a scrap with the Wyrm" they'll understand) and if you're not Glass Walker you're probably either a scavenging hobo or part of a militant tribe which would probably kill your boss for the sake of cutting off your ties to Weaverscum. The Garou don't need a 'source of income' either. You can't buy the magical ingredients they need for their artifacts, and they are innately, without any equipment, super-commandos from hell capable of taking on men with guns, even men with guns firing silver, which is basically Kryptonite for Garou, and win.

The rest of the time, they can get their actual income from illegal activities, which is good because the things they might want to buy are also illegal.

Also, I'd love to see a government inspector try to arrest a Garou. The only sort of G-Man who might be able to do that is a tricked-out Syndic Enforcer or NWO commando, and it's not going to be an 'arrest.'

The whole point of the masquerade is that humans are NOT powerless. They are, and will always be, deadly dangerous, and if any of the supernatural groups or powers reveal their existence, there is every chance in the world that the humans will find a way to exterminate them completely. The vampires of VtM aren't hiding to be able to prey more efficiently upon humans, like lions hunting gazelle. They're hiding to make sure that the humans don't find them and obliterate them. Lions hunt gazelle, not elephants, and that's what humanity as a whole is to vampires: so many elephants, ready, able, and willing to completely exterminate the vampires if they ever discover the predators' existence.

The whole point of the Vampire masquerade is only that vampires are relatively vulnerable during daylight hours-it's trivial to blood-bond a bunch of Secret Service agents so that you have a loyal force of ass-kickers who exist solely to kick ass. And even then, the point is that humans control almost nothing about their lives. The Camarilla basically controls all corporate and governmental affairs to a ludicrous degree. They are hardly 'in hiding.'

The Werewolf masquerade is because literally 98% of humanity is utterly incapable of even acknowledging the existence of werewolves, because werewolves are so good at genocide that they make Hitler look like the most noble, heroic pacifist who ever existed and in a short period of time left humans with a pathological, innate phobia of werewolves. And you know, the whole spirit world thing which humans literally can't see.

The Mage masquerade is because a group of demigods has imposed a set of artificial, arbitrary rules on reality to empower themselves.

Wizard_Marshall · Jun 17, 2017

This thread brought up the issue of population numbers, specifically lower numbers equating to easier hide, and I was wondering, if there were a low population of magical individuals what sort of issues might have limited their growth throughout the ages? I'm not talking about singular events though I suppose they could be valid. I was thinking more along the lines of constant issues like genetics but was interested in what different ideas other people could come up with.

Umi-san · Jun 17, 2017

Steps 1-infinity: Own Google.

Jace911 · Jun 17, 2017

I'm not familiar with the specifics of WoD's masquerade, but one thing I always keep in mind when toying with hidden supernatural goings on in the modern day is people will find any excuse to disbelieve what they don't want to be real, and vice versa.

You could post a YouTube video of a real undead vampire (Assuming they show up on video) actually drinking a person dry, and the comment section would flood with "experts" who point out all the details that "prove" the video is a fake, and a poorly made one at that! It's obviously viral marketing, or a hoax, or something far more plausibly believable that doesn't require the viewer to alter their worldview. The first people to convince us not to believe are often ourselves.

This effect won't protect against significant exposure, whether via crowds of eyewitnesses or airing on the nightly news, but it's an easy way to handle isolated supernatural incidents being "exposed" without breaking the masquerade.

Morphic Tide · Jun 17, 2017

Another note about the WoD masquerade: It's incompatible with scientific theory overhaul. Newtonian physics would be correct and absolute under its rules, without the holes that led to the overhaul of physics we got IRL. Generally accepted theories become actual fact, without the holes that later disprove them.

I mean, unless the Technocracy decides to go through the frankly immense effort of duping the scientific community into overhauling their theories and then making sure the public gets the update, which gets... complicated. Even for the Technocracy.

Although the Technocracy's thing opens up opportunities of storylines centered on Science versus Magic, rather than technology versus magic. Scientific comprehension offers power to the masses, which, from what I recall, is actually part of their goal.

Q99 · Jun 17, 2017

Grrlpower (as briefly mentioned upthread, but expanding more here) has an interesting solution-

One, magic users and supernaturals have a giant 'someone else's problem'/memory field in effect to protect themm combined with stomping down hard on offenders, plus many having their own individual tricks like hypnosis or such.

Two, it only partially affects supers so, if something happens, they can blame it on a super. I.e. it's not a supernatural werewolf, it's a superhuman with animal powers! It does have something of a muting effect on supers so news of supers doesn't really spread as far as they should, but the government's had at least some supers on covert payroll since Lincoln, and in the modern media age the enchantment couldn't keep up.

The supernaturals can maintain a masquerade by being smallish in number, have multi-layer defenses, and allowing it to leak onto someone else who's only behind a weak masquerade and who they don't care about protecting.

Q99 · Jun 18, 2017

Wizard_Marshall said:
This thread brought up the issue of population numbers, specifically lower numbers equating to easier hide, and I was wondering, if there were a low population of magical individuals what sort of issues might have limited their growth throughout the ages? I'm not talking about singular events though I suppose they could be valid. I was thinking more along the lines of constant issues like genetics but was interested in what different ideas other people could come up with.

Dance in the Vampire Bund: Vampires tend to lose their sense of self-preservation. They've got this rush of power, they know they'll live forever, and they find stuff that once might've been dangerous can now be healed. So they get reckless very fast and die a lot- often to each other. Only a minority of vampires are at all suited to long-term living rather than 'live fast, die young.' And most vampires have enough of a conscience that they don't set out to infect many... and more ruthless vampires are often likely only going to to make cannon fodder to kill off anyway. That's the vampires. The werewolves in the setting? Only about one in three kids become a werewolf, most are just human kids, and they don't reproduce by biting, so there's never going to be a werewolf population explosion. They don't die easily and live twice as long as a normal human or more, but that's it.

Depending on the universe, supernaturals could simply be slow-reproducing... like, what if you had a setting where only vampires over 100 years old can make new ones. Or maybe it takes strength, it's not just a bite or even a week-long ritual, and thus vampires absolutely don't want to 'waste' it.

Partizan said:
Then you'd still get the anomalies. Death is pretty hard to cover up--if you get a certain number of people dying to statistically unlikely causes, than people are going to start trying to figure out why the boiler exploded in such and such a manner in over a hundred cases, or any of a dozen other potential causes. It doesn't really matter what the investigators attribute it to--all that matters is that they twig to the fact that something is happening that should be impossible according to the known laws of probability and science. That, right there, would be enough to provide employment for scientists, and that would mean that you have people seriously investigating the possibility of the supernatural. You would literally have to erase the actual consequences to avoid this. Decoupling the data wouldn't work--sooner or later, a scientist would stumble across the possibility, and then the general public would accept the idea almost without hesitation, because it would be the only way to describe what they've seen with their own two eyes. All a decoupling of evidence from conclusions could achieve at that point would be to make them come to the WRONG conclusions, which could easily become quite, quite dangerous...that way lies witch hunts, after all.

Flipside, if the masquerade is long-lasting, investigators may have a skewed perception of what 'normal' causes are because that death rate has always been there. "Well of course this is probable, I can examine data from a dozen countries and it doesn't vary by more than +/- 10 percent."

Remember Hot Fuzz, "Accidents happen all the time!"

Partizan · Jun 18, 2017

Q99 said:
Flipside, if the masquerade is long-lasting, investigators may have a skewed perception of what 'normal' causes are because that death rate has always been there. "Well of course this is probable, I can examine data from a dozen countries and it doesn't vary by more than +/- 10 percent."

Remember Hot Fuzz, "Accidents happen all the time!"

That's actually the basis of the whole numbers argument--so long as there are not enough supernatural critters or beings gathered in one place to create a statistical distortion, you can hide, and most of humanity will do the work for you. You get comments like "Those numbers are well within known statistical variance" or "Yes, I realize that your autopsy photographs show obviously non-human humanoids, but that's impossible, and I have a degree from Johns Hopkins to prove it, so your documented physical evidence is clearly wrong, and we're going to have to have you committed to an insane asylum until you agree." As long as supernatural events don't clear a certain threshold, everything is hunky-dory. Once they clear that threshold, however, that changes--and it doesn't change slowly, it changes almost immediately. I don't know why that happens, either. I know it's a known element of politics, mob formation, all kinds of stuff, but I don't actually know enough to know the how, the why, or even what, exactly, I'm seeing. All I know is that it happens. A certain percentage of people get caug*- up in things, and can't explain it away, and the masquerade gets blown wide open, with absolutely no warning whatsoever. Heck, your average denizen of the supernatural world probably isn't even going to know that they're leaving clues. To your average vampire, he or she is taking every precaution they can, and doing all they can to remain out of sight. It's just that once you get over a certain very small number, the dynamics change. Even 1 in 10,000 is going to be too many--at that rate, according to the Law of Degree, almost everybody on the planet would know somebody who was directly involved in the supernatural in some way or another. Even if only a quarter of them know it, and only a quarter of those that do can successfully communicate that fact to even one friend, that is still something like 0.05% of the human race, or something like 150,000 people, just in America, who have this knowledge, and are completely outside the control of the masquerade. That's basically an unrecoverable breach--too many voices would be too public about it, and that would start making people think that there really is something behind all that smoke besides just a couple of mirrors.

The weird side of this is that, as long as a vampire (for instance) was careful, and circumspect, he or she would have a very good chance of hiding their identity--or even their existence--even if the masquerade was broken. As a lot of people on this thread have mentioned, a lot of people are very willing to ignore evidence if it points to something that they don't want to be true--see before, where I mentioned a critical mass of voices and/or evidence being required--and while most people probably wouldn't deny it if vampires were discovered on the other side of the planet, a vampire in their neighborhood would be a lot less "believable". Even if it were true, mind you. "Sure, them Chinese vampires is a real problem, but we don't have any here. Oh that guy that Jenny's dating? He's just a little weird, is all. On some kinda vegetable juice diet, I reckon. Some kinda weird shit where he's gotta drink a lot of tomato juice, I figure. I tried that shit once, but it don't work for me. But them Chinese suckers...man, I tell you, something's got to be done about them things."

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

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