Remember that the World of Darkness is not like the real world. The world of darkness is far nastier than reality. It is a cold, unfeeling, uncaring place where your average human lives in depression and denial, chasing a life they can never have, or desperately seeking to escape the one they’re stuck with.

When a mortal discovers the supernatural, most fall back on denial and continue to live their empty existence. Some people, however, can’t escape what they’ve experienced. These are the people the Mortals Venue is about. Regular human beings who have discovered a little bit of the truth about what the World of Darkness hides, and who have reached out to their fellow human beings in order to protect themselves and each other.

The mortals venue is about people cooperating with each other. A community gives a person the chance to feel safe once they have discovered that the supernatural is real, and it also gives them a higher purpose and makes their life a little less bleak.

Global Chronicle

The Mortals Venue is challenging from a Storytelling perspective because it is difficult to take different local games from all over the world and knit them into a single chronicle. To help, we have a "venue paradigm" which outlines the basic themes of every mortals game, which are secrecy, paranoia (of the supernatural), and community.

There are also four international secret societies that characters can join, providing some level of international play. These societies have formed themselves into a single association called the Round Table. Members from different societies work together according to principles laid out in the Charter of the Round Table. It should be remembered that a secret society is not a job, and mortals must still find some way of supporting themselves (and their family), while also fulfilling duties and obligations to their secret society.

The four societies are:

The Scarecrow
Project Garnet
Circle of Hermes
Priory of Scions

The Scarecrow

The Scarecrow is an organization of mortals who have banded together to stop the supernatural from taking advantage of the world of man. They act as the first, last, and only line between the unspeakable thing in the night, and the world we know and love. They may never be thanked for their acts, but they are not in it for thanks, or fame, or money. They are in it to protect the things which matter most to them. The Scarecrow are investigators, not hunters, but they will use force when there is no other choice.

The Scarecrow is a loosely organized group. A local unit is called a Post. The leader is called the Head. There is no leader above the Head, and each Post has its own way of running things. Every Post has a Safehouse which is uses as a base of operations. All the Heads communicate with each other, and there is an e-mail list which all Scarecrow can use. There are rules of etiquette for visiting another Post, and all Scarecrow swear to a common Code.

Project Garnet

Project Garnet knows the truth: aliens are real, they’re here on Earth, and they don’t like us. Project Garnet works to hide the truth and discover as much as it can about aliens, so that when the invasion comes, they’ll be prepared, and can release the information to the governments of the world.

A secret society that only wishes it were a government agency, Project Garnet is highly centralized. There are 5 ranks, and people must earn their way to higher rank. There are also 5 divisions, representing a division of labor within the agency:

1. Garnet - Agents who run the organization and do most of the public relations work
2. Anasazi - The technology people, responsible for the Project’s technology needs.
3. Matterhorn - Agents in Matterhorn work to discredit UFO culture, so that no one takes it too seriously and accidentally discovers the truth.
4. Apocyrpha - Media agents, they scour the media for things to investigate and work to suppress and cover up anything that reads too close to the truth.
5. Paperclip - Alien and humanity both rely on technology. Paperclip is the back up. Agents who communicate through old fashioned means, they’re responsible for building a human network through which to pass information.

Each section has a Section Leader. The entire organization is managed by a 5 member board, with one member from each Section.

The Circle of Hermes

The Circle of Hermes knows the one simple truth of the universe: Knowledge is power. First rate researchers and academics, they have organized themselves into 5 colleges, and they hold each other to the strictest standards of hermetic scholarship. With the biggest occult libraries and the best occult scholars, only one question remains unanswered: just what is it you DO with all that knowledge?

The Circle of Hermes founded the Round Table in 1947. At the local level, the Hermetics are organized into Forums, led by a President. If there is a local Round Table, the President is also leader of that.

Each College is led by a Lord Rector. The Lord Rectors form a Senate to oversee the Circle of Hermes. Each College meets once a year in a Congress made up of its most influential members.

The Five Colleges are:

Oudemans: Cryptobiology
Cryptobiology is the study of all life forms not covered by normal biology. It follows the same principals as biology, and cryptobiologists are dedicated to preserving the ‘life’ and ‘habitat’ of the creatures they study.

Myers: Mortology
Mortology is the study of death and all its facets. This sometimes leads to strange and dangerous experiments involving extreme conditions such as near-death, undeath and resurrection.

Gurney: Parapsychology
Parapsychology is the study of all types of "psychic phenomena." It also researches other area of the occult from a psychological perspective.

Sidgwick: Esoterology
Esoterology is the study of all things occult. Sidgwick College is more self-important and arrogant than it is specialized.

Barrett: Divination
Divination is all means of ascertaining information that can not be explained by orthodox empirical science. This extremely diverse field of research entails such subjects as geomancy, necromancy, tarot, clairvoyance, prophecies, etc.

Priory of Scions

The Priory of Scions are also occult researchers, but with a very specific purpose. They research the darkness so they know what forces will be at the disposal of the Antichrist at Judgment Day. They research and document as much information as possible about this, so that when the Messiah comes to initiate the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth the Priory will be able to insure it all runs smoothly. The Priory takes an interest in all occult knowledge, but what they consider to be "important" knowledge is very different from the other societies. Part of their duties in preparing for the end times includes protecting the descendants of Aaron and David, since from those the lineages the Messiah will be born.

The Priory is the most secretive of all the societies, hiding themselves under layers and layers of hoaxes and false information. The Priory has a central hierarchy, but most of the day to day work is done in small, local groups led by one or two people of advanced rank. Title reflect a person’s responsibilities in the Priory of Scions.

The Priory of Scions is the only group which makes communal living a practice, bringing together its lower ranking members in dwellings called "monasteries," though a monastery may be any type of building that suits the community’s needs. The Priory is not a religious organization and enforces no doctrine or faith on its members. It is a secular organization devoted to a common belief in ‘one God’ and ‘Judgment Day,’ though there is a great diversity of belief about what those ideas mean.