[Nightwatch Campaign Setting] The World that we live in

The Others are individuals who can tap into the Greyzone. There is no explanation why some humans are Others but others are not. The Gift, as the ability to draw from the Greyzone is known, could appear in people with no Other parentage.

The Others are categorically divided into three kinds: Dhampirs, Shifters and the Awakened.

Using the Gift gave Others the opportunity to control other humans or to help their fellow mankind. A faction, the Light Others , sought to use their gifts to help while the Dark Others wanted to use it to satisfy their own selfish goals. This caused millennia of conflict and war.

The Shadow

However, the Others were not the only supernatural creature that is living amongst our world. In fact, there are many worlds outside of this plane. Like apartments in a building block, what separates one world from the next is a barrier. Sometimes, the walls between the worlds are so thin that something slips from one to another.

For millenniums , extraplanar creatures have arrived to Earth and made it their home. Some of these visitors were benign while others were not so kind. Earth was like a ripe fruit ready for harvest. The immense pool of energy offered by the Greyzone was likened to the sweet nectar drizzled on top.

When the Others first made contact with these visitors, they dubbed them the Shadow Creatures collectively. However, it seems that the Shadow Creatures were not from the same plane. Ancient enmity still exists amongst the different types of arrivals.

The Mundane

To most people, the world is a mundane place; ordinary, predictable, easily divided into categories. People generally walk around in a state that can fairly accurately be referred to as “autopilot.” They do not pay close attention to the people or things around them. 

Unless something odd or strange happens, most people interpret the world as a series of ordinary, explainable events and pay little or no attention to the details. But what about when something odd or strange does happen? Say, for example, that a person sees a gang of zombie on the rampage, or a ordinary man committing arson by breathing on an apartment building. Surely that person would notice that something odd was going on. Absolutely. But the minute the bizarre stimulus disappears, human nature takes over.

We are assured as children that monsters don’t exist. So even when someone sees a monster, he still doesn’t remember seeing a monster. In his mind’s eye he sees a “big dog” or a “large man” or a “blur at the edge of vision”—anything except a creature that he “knows” doesn’t exist. A magic fireball is remembered a gas leak. A werewolf becomes a howling drunkard. The easy answer completely papers over what really happened, and the world continues on, blissfully ordinary.

In the Nightwatch setting, we refer to the vast majority of people, who view the world through this self-generated veneer of normalcy, as “mundanes.”