The Gaming Den

It's a staple of many urban fantasy stories (tv, books, rpgs) that somehow, people don't know about the supernatural. There are some bad masquerades, and some not so bad ones. When designing an RPG, or running a game with one, what makes for a good, credible masquerade?

The participants must have a good interest in maintaining it. Yes, even the bad guys. Alternatively it must be automated worldwide mind wipe system that maintains the masquerade by itself.

Well, there's got to be some reason why someone interrupting a parade with a blatant display of supernatural power doesn't break it. Because there's pretty much no way that isn't going to happen eventually. Either the people who have a vested interest in maintaining it can in fact suppress that, or some supernatural effect will keep people from noticing.

You also need to compensate for the xkcd bigfoot problem.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:You also need to compensate for the xkcd bigfoot problem.

That or go with the lazy route - "There used to be a masquerade; it started disintegrating between '05 and '10 due to the growing number of smartphones, so the monsters came out into the open on their own terms rather than run to the ends of the earth."

Omegonthesane wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:You also need to compensate for the xkcd bigfoot problem.

That or go with the lazy route - "There used to be a masquerade; it started disintegrating between '05 and '10 due to the growing number of smartphones, so the monsters came out into the open on their own terms rather than run to the ends of the earth."

I'm not sure how the big foot problem is a problem though, while yes people have access to more cameras, people also have access to more video editing and image editing software. Any paranormal still picture is attributed to photoshop. Any paranormal video is attributed to good special effects.

You could post a video of a vampire and a werewolf duking it out in a bar and it could have a million views and not one of the people watching it would think for a moment it was really happening. That really only leaves high profile masquerade breaches, aka the things that happen in front of a large group of people aka the things that would still be problems in a world without camera phones.

Plus if an incriminating video goes up on youtube all a creature has to do is file a bogus copyright claim and the bots will do the rest.

A masquerade isn't impossible in a contemporary RPG, but it does require a little more awareness about what would be involved with a masquerade - the sort of thing Frank played with in Doubt - and the thing is, there's a whole internet community that deals with that sort of thing over at the SCP wiki.

The problem isn't that any individual video could be discredited, it's the difficulty of discrediting the aggregate of all videos that would go up. The ones that come in from all over the world and apparently all have the same special effects direction, as well as rendering so good that pros can't figure out how it's done. The conspiracy theory becomes unmanageable quickly, especially when you figure in how many people want to believe in supernatural crap.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:The problem isn't that any individual video could be discredited, it's the difficulty of discrediting the aggregate of all videos that would go up. The ones that come in from all over the world and apparently all have the same special effects direction, as well as rendering so good that pros can't figure out how it's done. The conspiracy theory becomes unmanageable quickly, especially when you figure in how many people want to believe in supernatural crap.

Well if a group of people that large saw a vampire and a werewolf duking it out in a bar it would have been a breach regardless, it's just harder to do cleanup and coverup after the fact. VtM is set before widespread cell phones/Internet but it's still considered a breach if you go out into the middle of the road and turn into a swarm of locusts.

Technology necessitates that the masquerade be more carefully maintained maybe but it doesn't make it impossible.

shinimasu wrote:Well if a group of people that large saw a vampire and a werewolf duking it out in a bar it would have been a breach regardless, it's just harder to do cleanup and coverup after the fact.

I'm not talking about a single incident in front of a lot of cameras. I'm talking about multiple incidents, each in front of one camera.

There are already multiple videos from around the world of various supernatural phenomena. Including one where a woman seemingly picks up another human being via telekinesis and hurls her across a room in the middle of a cafe. I can't imagine a few hundred more trickling in would do that much damage. This was my point, the internet is already saturated with convincing monster vids, anything else might get lost in the shuffle.

"Production values no one can figure out" is a myth now, everything has a plausible explanation. From CGI to practical effects there is very little that cannot be made to look convincing. You could say "Well I'd know the real thing if I saw it." But since we have no actual real thing to compare it to that's kind of a baseless assumption.

shinimasu wrote:"Production values no one can figure out" is a myth now, everything has a plausible explanation. From CGI to practical effects there is very little that cannot be made to look convincing.

This is false. Even state-of-the-art CGI rarely actually fools the eye (unless it's backdrop scenery) and actual pros know a hundred tells that distinguish the virtual from the physical. If a random someone put up a video that stumped the pros, that someone would be contacted for recruiting purposes because they have apparently cobbled together something in their home that can outdo what takes Industrial Light and Magic literal hours-per-frame to render.

And if people actually get turned into human confetti during a supernatural fracas then that isn't going to be swept under the rug. People on youtube comments will say it is fake, but obviously it will get picked up by the news thanks to survivors, victim's family, investigators and people who had to clean up the body parts.

This was part of the dumb about a Dresden File where a werewolf tears apart a Chicago police station full of officers and is caught on video. That's a nationwide news event and the stupid excuse that the raw video footage disappeared is weak since still there's a pile of dead cops and that doesn't get ignored. A follow-up of a team of FBI agents dying in the same area also would be big news.

In that setting things are hand-waved by the author simply declaring that people don't want to believe and just keep their heads under their covers. Which can work for a masquerade, but that's totally antithetical to human nature. I think Masquerades will require some level of bullshit, maybe amnesia mists, men in black with mind wipers, or just change how the masses behave entirely.

IIRC, that particular incident was eventually blamed on the FBI team, both because that was kinda true and because they were conveniently too dead to refute it.

Also, I don't think the police station attack was caught on any video that survived the rampage and concluding massive explosion; what got disappeared was a grainy video shot in bad light on a handheld camera and badly corrupted during the interesting bits.

Overall, in the Dresden Files supernatural murders get officially written up as freaky mundane murders, freak accidents, or mysterious disappearances.

That is the main reason given in the Dresden Files and it is stupid but there are less stupid factors as well.
A) The various factions police their own. If a wizard is going too far the Wardens show up and cut their head off.
B) Wizards and their magic fuck up technology so surrounding phones/cameras stop working.

Yeah, the disappeared video wasn't about the attack on the police station, but rather in the book finale, where Murphy shoots the loup-garou.

At least in the Dresden Files, wizards magic screws with modern technology (the more modern, the more prone it is to fizzle and break in the presence of magic). However, the other supernatural creatures don't have that same kind of aura, so the excuse "people just don't want to believe in the supernatural" is wearing a bit thin. Especially with the big event in Changes, which launched the entirety of Latin America into political chaos.

However, rumors are that the next book, Peace Talks, will finally bring out the supernatural creatures to the mundane world.

Your basic ones are that magic is really new, magic removes records of itself, and the magic creatures take a whole lot of trouble to prevent people from knowing about it. Every masquerade that is even vaguely credible does at least one of those.

Now personally, I don't think that technology interference fields is a particularly satisfying answer. Indeed, that's actually just an extra measurable magical effect that needs to be explained away. If a werewolf tears someone up during a televised parade, the masquerade keepers have got some fast talking to do. But if a thousand people see a werewolf tear someone up during a parade and all the cameras fritz out at the same time, then the masquerade keepers have two things they need to explain.

The Doubt thing was an attempt to make a set of magic that actually could pass the smell test for simply passing under the radar. And I think it does. The people who have magic are literally incapable of presenting hard evidence to the public that anything supernatural is afoot, and the magic users sound a bit like crazy people so the public writes them off. That works. But it requires that magic actually be things that you can't present evidence for. Probability manipulation, empathy, dousing, and shit like that. Such a system cannot and will not sustain more traditional supernatural shit. You can't explain away shape shifting or shooting fire bolts in that way.

-Username17

I think it's been mentioned before, but one thing you could do in contemporary Masquerade fiction is move back to misdirection rather than doubling down on cover ups. If there are tons of videos with super high grade "special effects" popping up online, it's a lot easier to set up a fake company and take credit than to squash each and everyone. If you set things up right, you could say the company is big on flashmob and viral stuff, and is run by some crazy method actor type who may or may not explicitly say "oh yeah, that was one of ours" about any given video. Then everytime a vampire and a werewolf tear each other new ones at a bar and its caught on smartphone, people just think "Man, MasCorp is fucking amazing."

Throw out some blockbusters with SFX done by your local illusionist (assuming cameras don't thwart visual illusions) and say the SFX were done by your company, and you could be a lot worse off.

erik wrote:And if people actually get turned into human confetti during a supernatural fracas then that isn't going to be swept under the rug.

Why?

erik wrote:People on youtube comments will say it is fake, but obviously it will get picked up by the news thanks to survivors, victim's family, investigators and people who had to clean up the body parts.

Every major terrorist attack over the last 20 years has conspiracy terrorists attributing it to the government of the country in question, sometimes with pretty solid arguments. Nobody cares and admitting that any of them might have a point is considered a sign of bad taste.

Nobody would care about a new brand of concpiracy theorists attributing major crimes to supernatural beings, either.

There also would be multiple dedicated false flag teams of supernaturals, working to flood Internet with supernatural conspiracy theories full of obvious holes, and plently of mundane conspiracy theory conmen doing the same just for fame and clicks.

erik wrote:In that setting things are hand-waved by the author simply declaring that people don't want to believe and just keep their heads under their covers.
Which can work for a masquerade, but that's totally antithetical to human nature.

The current state of, say, US politics, suggest that it is perfectly in line with human nature. People really, really, really don't want to accept unpleasant truths, such as the fact that their society and government are subverted by vampires big money, if accepting that means they cannot continue to do nothing and keep living their relatively comfortable lives with good conscience.

For a credible masquerade, you need a credible reason for why both monster people and monster hunters both want to keep the masquerade up.

I think most solve the monster hunter problem by not having them. The whole point of a masquerade is to prevent monster hunting.

A past-time I've recently started is whenever I see weird news I like to try and imagine that it is due to a supernatural brawl, and being covered up for the masquerade.

http://www.livescience.com/52676-giant- ... ained.html

An invasion of undead through a shadow gate put down by a team of supernaturals that buried the zombie horde under the earth.

The crack isn't near any commercial or residential establishments, but it could pose a danger to curious adventurers, Wittke said. He advised people to stay away from the gash, as the ground may be unstable if it's still settling, he said.

"If you walk around on the edges of the landslide and they were to catastrophically fail, you would have nowhere to go," Wittke said. "That's the danger of it. That, and the zombies buried underneath."

OgreBattle wrote:For a credible masquerade, you need a credible reason for why both monster people and monster hunters both want to keep the masquerade up.

I think it's usually that the monster hunters like or are some of the monster people and are worried about the general public's target selection criteria in the event of a Masquerade breach.

erik wrote:I think most solve the monster hunter problem by not having them. The whole point of a masquerade is to prevent monster hunting.

A lot of masquarade settings have monster hunters. And in a lot of settings those hunters would be arrested for murder if the truth came out.

The best reason for vampires to hide their existence is not to prevent vampire hunters from finding them, it's to prevent vampire fans from finding them. That is to say, the number of people who will want to become vampires themselves will far outstrip the number of vampires that the world can successfully sustain.

This is also the reason why the vampire hunters keep it quiet. If people knew the truth then there would just be more vampires, and the police would stop them from doing any vampire hunting.

hyzmarca wrote:

erik wrote:I think most solve the monster hunter problem by not having them. The whole point of a masquerade is to prevent monster hunting.

The best reason for vampires to hide their existence is not to prevent vampire hunters from finding them, it's to prevent vampire fans from finding them. That is to say, the number of people who will want to become vampires themselves will far outstrip the number of vampires that the world can successfully sustain.

This is also the reason why the vampire hunters keep it quiet. If people knew the truth then there would just be more vampires, and the police would stop them from doing any vampire hunting.

Nope.

It is far easier to cope with groupies that you can just say "no" to, than people trying to kill you That doesn't pass a simple smell test, nor does it fly for any of the non-communicable supernaturals either. Fans won't ask a golem to make them into a golem too.

But while it makes no sense to be scared of fans, you can change that just slightly to make it work. Monsters *and* monster hunters can be scared of spawning other monster hunters with different motivations.


All supernaturals can be worried about being captured, studied and exploited. Hunters might not expose them for the same reason, because they don't want that power falling into other hands either. Only thing worse than a tiny vampire cabal or lone frankenstein creation would be an army of them created by a powerful government.

erik wrote:Only thing worse than a tiny vampire cabal or lone frankenstein creation would be an army of them created by a powerful government.