The primer.
A field guide to the world that contains Pluto Beach — the powers, the territories, the currency, and the long history that produced the containment regime.
You do not need to read any of this to play. The world is easier to live in if you have, but the game does not test you on it. Read what catches your eye, skip the rest, come back for the corners that matter to your character.
The Three Powers.
Three organizations divide the present-day supernatural world. None of them is the good guys. None of them is the villain. Their dossiers, in order of how often they appear in everyone else's paperwork.
The Authority
Probably correct about Delirium. Also harms real people doing it.
The Syndicate
Organized crime in the shape of the old courtly order. Not a resistance.
The Unnatural Front
Revolution, classified as terrorism. The labels are both correct.
The world.
The structures the three powers exist inside — the territory that is shrinking, the currency they fight over, the corporation that supplies all of them, and the West's slow road from vampire lords to a federal liaison wing in a state prison.
The Otherworld
A liminal reality, once the seat of faerie civilization. Being consumed from within.
Lachryms
Crystallized units of suffering used as supernatural currency. Informally: larks.
NextGroup
Samson Day's corporate empire. Supplies the Authority, deals with the Syndicate, profits from both.
The Occidental Arc
How the West got from vampire lords to the containment regime, century by century.
The town.
The Three Powers, the wider world, the long history — all of it lands somewhere. Shadow Beach lands in one Gulf-coast county seat. This is the dossier on the town the game is set in.
Regional traditions.
The Franklonian system is the dominant framework only in the places it was built for. Everywhere else, magic developed under different rules — courtly, bureaucratic, religious, communal, hidden. The containment regime has had decades to reckon with the gaps, and has not finished.
The Americas
Vodou, Santería, Lucumí, Indigenous traditions. The Authority's home turf, and its weakest grip.
The Middle East
Not a separate tradition. The origin of Western magic, and what survived Islam's arrival.
East Asia
Tianshi Dao, Onmyōdō, Shingon. Magic as licensed bureaucracy. The Franklonian system never quite arrived.
South Asia
Vedic ritual, tantra, and millennia of practice openly carried inside religious life.
Southeast Asia
Sak yant, dukun, babaylan, empu. Traditions the Authority cannot suppress without naming them.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Yoruba, Vodun, Bantu cosmologies. The source streams that the Atlantic diaspora carried west.
Oceania & Australia
Polynesian navigation, Aboriginal songlines. A world the West never finished documenting.
Read the next dossier, or step inside.
Start with the Authority.
The first of the Three Powers. The bureaucracy that contains everything else in this index. Local handle: JTFO.
Open the dossier For playersMake a character.
Create an account, build someone who lives in Pluto Beach, and log in. Free, persistent, no client to install.
Register and connect