Masquerade in the age of the Surveillance State

[Cervantes]

targeting this at urban horror/fantasy set in the present day. examples include VtM, Unknown Armies, After Sundown, Dresden Files (i don't know enough abt Dresden Files so bear w me here)

so: how do you maintain a hidden conspiracy of supernatural beings in a time when there are more cameras than people? it's a weird time for me atm so im just gonna put bullet points and maybe, sometime, write up more details

most of these use a Perceptual Model of the Surveillance State, where the State is a body with thousands of eyes and millions of ears and that sensory input gets processed in the State-brain (NSA supercomputers or whatever).

• supernaturals are really good at avoiding detection: basically a nonstarter here but - supernatural beings don't get noticed by the State because they're really, really good at being sneaky. except it takes a single rogue supernatural to fuck this up so ignore this one
  
  supernaturals can directly influence the State's sensory organs: basically everyone can wave a hand and fuck up all cameras and electronic recording devices without issue. maybe non-digital cameras still work, but who the fuck would believe a grainy photograph of a vampire?
  
  hacker werewolves: the flow of information into the State is tampered with by Hacking Werewolves/some disparate collection of groups and the supernatural elements are eliminated/edited before they reach the processing centers. a herculean task, though
  
  shadow government: werewolf edition: the State does know. or would know, if not for the secret conspiracy of werewolves within the State that does the Hacker Werewolf thing from within the house!! a bit more plausible
  
  shadow government: X-Files: the State does know, but it's a guarded secret with a conspiracy of malevolent agents who have Agendas for that knowledge. one of the better possibilities here
  
  hacker AI: see Person of Interest. there is some artificial intelligence which does the work of processing the sensory organs of the State. this AI might have its own agenda, serving either the supernaturals (and hiding the information), the shadow government (and helping keep up the conspiracy), or its own agenda (UA3e did something like this with GNOMON. actually i dont think they EXPLICITLY say that but i just assumed that because why wouldn't you have the surveillance AI with its own agenda hide information abt the occult from the mundanes)
  
  the supernatural doesn't look supernatural: basically just Doubt, here. doesn't matter what you record because even the PCs aren't even sure that they're really supernatural and all of their stuff is explainable via coincidence. included for completeness

e: obviously a lot of these are the same and only differ wrt to the "who's responsible for maintaining the Masquerade"

[Chamomile]

The past few years I've started to lean on "the Masquerade is falling apart" for this kind of thing, but the deeper we get into the age of the ubiquitous cell phone camera the harder it is to run that plot without people wondering why it's lasted this long in the first place, so another one I've started to rely on is "the Men in Black know more every day, but they're looking to get a supernatural monopoly and don't want the public in on it." I forget their name, but After Sundown has an antagonist syndicate who can slot into this role pretty well.

[hyzmarca]

The basic handwave is that they don't try to avoid detection, but there are so few of them that no one is going to notice unless they do something very public and very obviously supernatural.

Like, if there are five wizards in the world, and none of them are particularly inclined to seek fame, then it's easy to not believe in wizards. Tiny populations work best.

The important thing to remember though is that with tiny populations you don't have a massive globe-spanning conspiracy, you barely even have a country club. Anne Rice's vampire stories work this way. It's not that Vampires go out of their way to hide, it's that there are only a few dozen of them globally.

Another alternative is a parallel reality. You've got the real world and the magic world, and they don't interact much except at certain places, and all the supernatural live on the magic side, for the most part. The Wizarding World does this by building hidden enclaves. But it's easier to accomplish by going Link to the Past Dark World with it.

Third, most magic is invisible to muggles. This is similar to but distinct from doubt. You might be able to see demons possessing people, but proving demonic possession requires cooperation that the demon probably doesn't want to give. In this model, most magic is done by spirits, which non-magicians simply cannot interact with or perceive.

Fourth, willful denial. This only really works in a comedy. But tragic barbecue fork accidents and gangs on PCP are things that you might blame for vampire attacks so that you don't have to deal with the fact that vampires exist.

Fifth, everyone knows, they're just humoring you. Basically, muggles don't want to deal with supernatural bullshit, so they let you think you have a functioning masquerade when you really don't.

[tussock]

Vampires don't cast a reflection, and turn to dust if exposed to sunlight. This implies there's not really anything there to record. So yes, people can see them, when they choose to be seen and aren't busy being a cloud of colourless gas or a random animal like a rat or raven. They can kill people, because people are living creatures on which the evil Vampire spirit-thing can feed. But record them with a camera? No, that's not what Vampires are, they really don't get on with light like living things do.

Werewolves are basically people, that look like people almost all the time, and sometimes look like a big dog instead. Having photos or recordings of people, or big dogs, is not news. Guy got hit by a truck, bounced, and walked away? Yeah, doctors have seen that before, some people are super lucky with that sort of thing, or you know, adrenaline hit and he's probably dying in a storm drain somewhere right now.

Wizards who alter reality at their whim, well, presumably they also alter the recordings of that reality to match at the same time, because that's just how magic works. Sort of, if you have magic that is hidden, in your story, it should probably do that, as part of the magic in question.

What else, Ghosts? People who can see ghosts are schizophrenic and can be medicated to mostly not see ghosts any more. Obviously what most people can't see isn't a real thing in the first place.

Killer robots from the future? That guy just had body armour on and was hopped up on PCPs. You know, they hit him in the head and exposed his skull, he's probably dying somewhere in a storm drain right now.

--

Identity theft is somewhat harder than it used to be, immortals need to file taxes too, that's maybe more of a problem than cameras. But it's also, you know, on a computer somewhere and nothing is perfectly secure.

[Username17]

The changing nature of how data works and news is shared means that a masquerade today would have to function very differently than a masquerade of the past. There is no longer a simple answer available for why or how supernatural creatures could exist in the modern world as you know it and you not know about it.

Probably the best place to fit it in is in the world of Alternative Facts. Right now, a substantial number of people believe in magic. A majority of the people in the world believe in magic of one form or another. The president of the United Fucking States linked to the following conspiracy flow chart for the entire world to scratch their fucking heads about:



You've been warned! It's not like the most powerful person on Earth didn't tell you that the pope uses Luciferian sorceries to empower Jewish banking families to control the world. The fact that you don't heed that warning and do... whatever it is you're supposed to do... about that... has to do with your epistemic closure. You instantly discard information related to the vast sorcerous cabal because it's fucking insane and the people who promote it are evil and also crazy. But for literally millions of people this gibberish is the literal truth. Alex Jones has 2 million unique listeners every week, and most of them are not listening ironically.

On the flip side, there are straight up people who claim to be Vampires and Wizards. And some of them have quite significant followings. The Secret was made into a fucking movie that rants about how spellcasting is supposed to work in the real world for an hour and a half, and it made sixty five million dollars at the box office in 2006.

All in all, the number of people who are pretty sure that Wizards actually exist numbers in the tens of millions. People are divided about whether Wizards are good or bad, but Creflo Dollar uses his divine magic powers to get people to send him money and he flies around in a $65 million Gulfstream G650.

If there were actually people who had magic powers, and they used those magic powers to awe and mystify people by the thousands, would you even know?


This is a Mega Church. Thousands of people go here to watch people perform miracles and incantations every week and you don't care.

So the story has to be one of denial in depth. Yes, supernatural creatures exist and you should do what they tell you to do, but no we don't mount any society-wide programs to deal with them because that would be silly.

-Username17

[rasmuswagner]

As a corrollary to that, the church-backed anti-vampire squad is really just a murder squad that rounds up gypsies, homeless, homosexuals, foreigners and other undesirables and see if they float or make them confess on video to being vampires or werewolves or whatever it is we're hunting.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Would you call that the "True Detective: It's Too Bad We Didn't Get A Second Season" approach, Frank? Ie, you have actual Wizard Whately out mowing peoples' lawns, but the rest of the world is so unrelentingly fucked up that nobody notices?

[Username17]

Would you call that the "True Detective: It's Too Bad We Didn't Get A Second Season" approach, Frank? Ie, you have actual Wizard Whately out mowing peoples' lawns, but the rest of the world is so unrelentingly fucked up that nobody notices?

Maybe? I haven't actually seen True Detective. I get my TV watching done in a delayed fashion based on binge watching downloads. True Detective was definitive on my radar, but everyone was pissed at season two apparently so I never bothered.

But basically it seems like supernatural creatures can operate pretty much as-is so long as there isn't a sufficient weight of concerned believers to push actual policy through that would impact them. Like, it's perfectly OK for there to be people who believe there are Witches and even for there to be people who want to hunt and kill Witches - just as long as courts don't start letting people off the hook for murder due to "witch hunting" and police departments don't start getting (effective) witch hunting gear.

Right now in the real world, it is apparently possible for a police psychologist to straight up tell the police that various women arewitches who are in regular contact with demons and have nothing actually happen one way or the other. You might think that the police would go arrest the demonologists if they believed or at least fire the doctor if they did not believe, but apparently neither thing happens. People just bumble on as if a completely insane conversation with huge and terrifying implications regardless of whether it is true or false didn't just happen.

So I think the masquerade in the modern world looks really weird. You got to manage the occult knowledge and the misinformation pretty harshly or you might hit a tipping point where national news starts reporting werewolves as true creatures that the government needs to invest in silver bullets to kill rather than quirky human interest stories about how werewolves are a thing that various minority groups believe in.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

I haven't actually seen True Detective. I get my TV watching done in a delayed fashion based on binge watching downloads. True Detective was definitive on my radar, but everyone was pissed at season two apparently so I never bothered.

It's an anthology show, so the first and second seasons aren't connected. And season 1 is solid gold awesome.

[Judging__Eagle]

I had to GIS that "The Swamp" image to find one that's legible, and it's a clusterfuck. It overly presumes that any sort of 'global' conspiracy is:

-Ideologically disparate groups are colluding without competitive leaking to 'out' the opposing faction in order to increase their own power (e.g. The Freemasons & the Jesuits/Opus Dei; are in bed w/ each other)

-A confirmation of the creator's (probably well past borderline-racist) Eurocentric ideology (Saudia Arabia is listed as a "funder", but is crossed out; no mention of the fact that continued US propping up of the Saudis is linked w/ the fact that Saudi petroleum is sold for US dollars, no Rubles or Yuan). No real mention of Russian criminal-oligarchies funding Trump as their trojan horse on the US. No mention of Chinese corporations/private individuals global investments into real estate, finances, petroleum and mineral rights around the world)

It feels like an weak attempt to update conspiracy theories from a century ago; more than anything else.

[nockermensch]

It feels like an weak attempt to update conspiracy theories from a century ago; run-of-the-mill conservative propaganda more than anything else.

Do you remember when one of USA's major parties wasn't an unhinged force of chaos?

[hyzmarca]

I'm reminded of Swamp Thing volume 3, in which the teenage daughter of a politician accused him of being a transvestite serial killer mad scientist who wears the clothes of women he's killed and runs a secret government agency that kidnaps and performed tortuous medical experiments on small children and that he is planning to destroy the world.

Eventually, she came out and said that he molested her, instead. At which point people started believing her.

The stinger is that no, he never molested her. He is a transvestite serial killer mad scientist who runs a secret government agency that kidnaps and performs torturous medical experiments on small children, and also murders a lot of people, and he's planning to destroy the world.

There's a certain type of evil that is believable, and a certain type that isn't. No one thought that Hitler would actually kill all the Jews, because you know, he said that he was going to kill all the Jews, but no one would actually do that so it must have been hyperbole and theatrics.

As a general rule, its a lot easier for people to assume that vampires are just sex perverts who like to bite people.

If your going to be a monster, then don't go small. Be a comic book level of supervillain.

[kzt]

With Dresden, human magicians tend to cause "issues" with technological gear just by being near it, and the effects get stronger and larger if they actually do magic. Firearms are fairly reliable even with major league sorcerers, but not completely. Cell phones and integrated circuits are pretty much dead around them when they are doing stuff you might want to film, so unless you are carrying around an 8mm film camera you are not going to be getting anything to post on youtube, and even then I wouldn't bet on it working.

[hyzmarca]

With Dresden, human magicians tend to cause "issues" with technological gear just by being near it, and the effects get stronger and larger if they actually do magic. Firearms are fairly reliable even with major league sorcerers, but not completely. Cell phones and integrated circuits are pretty much dead around them when they are doing stuff you might want to film, so unless you are carrying around an 8mm film camera you are not going to be getting anything to post on youtube, and even then I wouldn't bet on it working.

In Dresden, that only applies to human magicians, who are not the most common things for you to run into. Human spellcasters are heavily outnumbered by things that don't disrupt technology. Like two out of four known flavors of vampire, one of which consists primarily of porn stars, and so appear on camera quite a bit.

Second, we know that the existance of vampires is a pretty open secret because of the pogroms against the Black Court following the publication of Dracula. They were almost wiped out by hoards of mortals with torches and pitchforks and garlic.

[tussock]

Hitler was aiming to kill all of everyone, pretty much, Jews were just closer.

Even Stalin couldn't believe that until it was demonstrated clearly and repeatedly. There wasn't a siege at Leningrad, as such, it was a make-shift extermination project: the Russians didn't defend the city, the Germans did, to cut off the food and fuel over the winter so three million people would die. Hitler planned to build a dam to flood Moscow and kill five million people, because that seemed to be the cheapest way to do that.

The Japanese were going the same way in China, running experiments on the cheapest method of killing hundreds of millions of people A couple billion killed was the aim in the end, just about everyone. At some point, if that insanity had been functional instead of self-defeating, they'd have set into each other as well. Nationalism had a bad start and it got a lot fucking worse before international Communism kicked its ass.

And yes, a whole lot of people everywhere figured Hitler probably wasn't really genocidal, it's just that when he did prove to be, folks got very, very serious about stopping him. I think if people proved Vampires, it would be not good for them.

[Username17]

With Dresden, human magicians tend to cause "issues" with technological gear just by being near it, and the effects get stronger and larger if they actually do magic. Firearms are fairly reliable even with major league sorcerers, but not completely. Cell phones and integrated circuits are pretty much dead around them when they are doing stuff you might want to film, so unless you are carrying around an 8mm film camera you are not going to be getting anything to post on youtube, and even then I wouldn't bet on it working.

This sort of thing doesn't really help the masquerade. All the stuff where wizards disrupt computers and shit is just one more set of weird events that people might notice. Like in Stranger Things Season 1, when people figure out that the monster is nearby because the lights start flickering. Or in Supernatural where the Winchesters are able to track Pestilence on the security cameras by the fact that one guy leaves a distorted image.

Bodies doing weird shit when creatures die doesn't make it harder to convince the police that you're dealing with something magical. It's one more piece of evidence you could use that might convince the police that you're dealing with something magical.

Magic is easier to hide if it's subtle. Having weird passive secondary effects on the stuff around you is the opposite of that.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Like, if there are five wizards in the world, and none of them are particularly inclined to seek fame, then it's easy to not believe in wizards. Tiny populations work best.

The important thing to remember though is that with tiny populations you don't have a massive globe-spanning conspiracy, you barely even have a country club. Anne Rice's vampire stories work this way. It's not that Vampires go out of their way to hide, it's that there are only a few dozen of them globally.

Another alternative is a parallel reality. You've got the real world and the magic world, and they don't interact much except at certain places, and all the supernatural live on the magic side, for the most part. The Wizarding World does this by building hidden enclaves. But it's easier to accomplish by going Link to the Past Dark World with it.

Yeah, those seem to be the only good ways of doing it.

And yes, a whole lot of people everywhere figured Hitler probably wasn't really genocidal, it's just that when he did prove to be, folks got very, very serious about stopping him.

Disagree there. Mass murder was nothing new, Hitler just revved up the scale. People knew that the Third Reich was collecting people and sending them off somewhere and they weren't coming back. And, like you say, Leningrad. OTOH, the Nazis did try covering things up when the war went against them.

Folks didn't get serious about stopping him because he was genocidal, they got serious when he threatened their country, either by invading Poland and triggering French and Britain et al to declare war, or by invading the USSR or declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbour.

I think if people proved Vampires, it would be not good for them.

Agreed.

[Cervantes]

I have to say, I'm very amused by the fact that the third post had "willful denial" as a comedy option and then Frank argued that, in fact, willful denial is the coin of the realm here. And he's right.

Video and photographic evidence is all suspect nowdays since we can fake basically anything now. I'd add in apathy as well - anyone who cares is just nodded to and everyone else just sort of shrugs and goes about their lives, a little more open-minded to the supernatural than before.

Which basically just means, now, that you need a basic level of "not raising suspicions" and you're okay. Non-human looking things have disguise magic, don't do too much flashy shit around too many witnesses, and you suppress information not as much to preserve the Masquerade but to make sure that your savvy enemies don't find that information and use it against you.

Also, some thing about how it's still a huge faux pas to act against the Masquerade and that asshole rival of yours is going to show the big head vampire that video he erased from the city's camera footage in order to curry favor and make you look like a real dumbass. Being reckless about the Masquerade makes it so that more prudent, careful people don't want to work with you.

[Lokathor]

There's also the classic copout: "run the game in the 1990s instead of the 2010s".

Or the 80s, if it's Stranger Things

[Username17]

The biggest thing that could cause society to act like the masquerade was over would be a murderer escaping because the police had insufficient firepower.

Right now the Republicans are openly blocking investigation and research into the causes and solutions to mass murder. Seriously. It's 2017, and that is a thing that's happening. but based on what a shit storm it was when a couple yahoos tried to rob a bank with double-layer body armor on, I can only imagine that if the cops failed to take someone down due to lack of silver bullets that there would be some freak out and some push back.

The Sutherland Springs massacre was the 308th mass shooting in the US in 2017. And Donald Trump sent his condolences to Sutherland Springs twice, because a short while later he lost track of which mass shooting he was supposed to be talking about and ended up copying the wrong location into one of his tweet rants. There are even mass shootings that go unsolved, but most of them end up with the shooter being dead.

So the Vampire Conspiracy clearly has access to an effective and reusable system of getting rid of people or bodies that are inconvenient. What's one more dead dude in today's mass shooting? Or as is frequently the case, today's other mass shooting? But there are also some pretty severe limits:

• While the number of gun murders is very large in absolute terms, it's not much in terms of demographics. You couldn't have a significant number of vampires bumping off people at any significant rate. The United States has several hundred mass shootings every year, but it also has over a hundred metropolitan areas with over half a million people. If there's a supernatural presence in every major city, your personal share of the hidable bodies isn't one per week, one per month, or even one per year.
• A significant number of mass shootings are going to slip through the cracks without the conspiracy getting to add any extra corpses to them. Some take place in extremely public areas and are on film. Some are quite small and self contained. Remember that every time some dude (it's almost always a dude) kills his children and his wife and then kills himself it's a mass shooting. Even though there's more than one mass shooting per day, the entire national conspiracy doesn't get to hide bodies every day by that means.
• Shootings are hard to use as cover for more bizarre causes of death. Like, putting a few bullet holes in someone that has had a vampire bite seems sufficient. But if someone has been like turned partially to stone or some fucking thing it's not going to cut it.
• Making people disappear doesn't actually make events disappear. Making some would-be Van Helsing go down the memory hole with a few bullet holes is certainly valuable, but it doesn't make pyrotechnics vanish off national television.

Which is perhaps a long walk to say that you're just not going to be able to cover up the kind of serial killer monsters you get in tv shows, nor are you going to be able to cover up really flashy shit like dragons. But you could have a vampire conspiracy like the one in Blade and have that trundle along just fine.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

On the one hand all that shit about mass shootings only applies to the USA, on the other hand there are plenty of even less stable places where dead bodies being shot aren't that suspicious and maybe the stable parts of the world export their dead.

Or maybe the stable parts of the world don't have fucking vampires in them if you're willing to write off whatever section of the non-US market wants to only play things set at home.

[Mord]

It's very plausible that no amount of supernatural evidence will shift the Overton window sufficiently to get the culture at large to acknowledge the tangible threat posed by the supernatural, much less to do something about it. However, it's not CBS 7 News that is the biggest reason to keep up the Masquerade. Major news outlets always have existed and always have been controllable or at least constrainable by the local puppetmasters. That's probably a huge reason why the tradition of the city Prince has such longevity; there needs to be someone who has the responsibility and authority to coordinate the efforts that keep Masquerade breaches out of the headlines and keep any crusading journalists co-opted, misled, or found dead in a storm drain.

No, the real problem is all the people who come across the undoctored footage, like the mall security guard who actually reviews the tapes. Once he tells his boss and the local PD gets involved, the tapes will vanish in the evidence locker quickly enough, but he will always wonder just what that was about. Some people will naturally be exposed more to this kind of thing than others, and there will eventually be a critical mass of such people talking to each other on the Internet such that you'll eventually get the Alex Jones of vampirism.

Belief in the threat of vampires probably spreads like alt-rightism. No one takes it seriously until you literally have a guy stab a Senator in the heart with a wooden stake and the Senator turns to dust. Then you have a real fucking problem. Up until the point where you have a real tipping point moment like that where the rhetoric turns into undeniable concrete action, there can be a billion Werewolf Breitbarts, Vampire Infowars, and Changeling Milos and no one important will care. You could probably have Trump tweet "#vampiresarereal" and no one who didn't already personally believe would have their opinion swayed at all.

[deaddmwalking]

Bubba Hotep.

Feeding on people in nursing homes won't cause many people to start asking questions.

[Prak]

RE: Mass Shootings as a means of cover up-

Really, what vampires (and other functionally immortal supernaturals) would probably do is set up Guy What We Need Disappeared as the shooter, and a bunch of vampires (or w/e) as the "victims."

GWWND goes on a rampage, everyone who is shot is a vampire. GWWND is killed by police (or mind controlled into suiciding), vampires go through the motions of pretending to be dead/grievously wounded, and all go to the nearest hospital, which has already been compromised for the syndicate. Only one body really needs to be "hidden," and the state takes care of that.

[kzt]

So the Vampire Conspiracy clearly has access to an effective and reusable system of getting rid of people or bodies that are inconvenient. What's one more dead dude in today's mass shooting? Or as is frequently the case, today's other mass shooting? But there are also some pretty severe limits:

Well, what if the mass shooting is really the coverup?

Ringo/Correa had that in a recent book. The father gets killed trying to stop his gone furry kid from killing everyone in the house with a shotgun and fails. Hunters show up, zap the werewolf. When MCB gets there it all turns into "father goes nuts and kills his family".

They also had the wiseass who took down a werewolf in view of a load of passengers on a jet at the airport. The MCB agent who had to murder one of the witnesses who would not shut up was not very happy about that. But it's amazing how many people have terrible accidents happen to them in their bathroom.