• Citizenship: Active Players are expected to GM Contracts from time to time. If you have played as a Contractor in your most recent six Contracts, you are barred from playing in The Illumination again until you GM. I dunno, have fun. If you wanna GM, gm. If you don't, don't.
  
• Supernatural Powers: All non-mastery, non-concealed Powers must be obviously supernatural when activated or grant a mutation that marks the wielder as supernatural or bizarre if discovered. Unless it has a drawback that says otherwise, all powers are not obviously supernatural, but are not concealed unless you have a gift or improvement that says otherwise.
•  Free Gift Point: All contractors within this playgroup may start with a gift point at character creation.
  
• 1 Seasoned Gift Per Win Level: It says right there on the tin, you have 1 seasoned enhancement/Gift per your win levels. 1 at newbie, another at novice, and you unlock 2 more at seasoned, and 2 more for each win thereafter.

An Earth, but different.

The year was 1995. Until that point, the Earth was as we had always known her. A silently cruel and blue ball, that had nothing we hadn't seen of her before. Overly mundane.... Until one day, a rift-

No two? Three? Hundreds? Thousands of rifts within reality appeared, bringing with it an excitement never seen before. Monsters, demons, and dragons with impossibly large wings. And with that, a new age on the blue rock came, one of monsters and madness, factions forming, the geography of the world altered in response to the havoc brought onto her. And she responded, the world responded, in a way. The people and animals from its old age, all rapidly declining and facing near extinction, evolved.

They received her gift, the Gaia protocol, some call it. Some may even say it was a release of supernatural energy that affected every being, the power to push through it all, to swing fate in your favour. Everyone received her gift, to even out the playing field... And that brings us to the current day, Mankind is slowly recovering, parts of the world have been taken over, but there returns that stagnancy. In comes the Harbringers, middlemen tasked by the Powers That Be to keep the world moving, to shake up the world every so often, hiring the most well-equipped or unwell-equipped people to 'Contracts', jobs where they are asked to solve problems presented in this supernatural world. Stop a super plague, deliver a Phoenix's feather to a wizard before his guild finds out, stop an assassination plot of a blood cult, things of that manner. The Contractors, these people, could be anyone, or anything, really. The Harbingers have a sense of humour after all, party tension is all the more fun. 

The world, resembling our modern day, yet so shattered apart and different, with some places with current technology, some with severely less, some lands of pure mysticism. To describe those that exist here would be to have them put into 6 categories:

Rifters/Rifted Beings: Those whose existence is only possible due to the rifts, their bodies having differing rules and limitations on what they can or cannot do in this world. Imagine Demons, Vampires, Fae, things of that sort. Purely Supernatural creatures that may have existed in the world's texts as fantasy or as fiction, yet seem to mirror those beings in some respects.

Otherworlders: Those who come from another world, dimension or reality and have found themselves stuck here. Aliens, dimension hoppers, time travellers stuck in the current day, most fit here.


Curse Bearers: Those whose bodies couldn't handle the World's blessing, their bodies reacting in ways unexpected. Demonically possessed, Uncontrollable flames, etc, etc.

Factions like the Shadow Court, which wish for the conflict to continue, stir the pot wherever they deem fit, yet must stick close to the dark, lest the world respond in a way they dislike.

The Ravagers, who wish for simple chaos and pleasure from the suffering of others, wish to bring the humans to extinction. Most Rifters, beings who did not exist until beforehand, find themselves aligned with the Ravagers to a certain degree.

The United Houses: who only desire peaceful cohabitation between all species, even through less... dishonourable means in comparison to their overall goals. As pure as they are, they are also the ones who run most of the SuperPrisons, blackbagging anyone who draws too much of a certain type of attention.

The Empire of Man, which wishes for all Rifted beings to be destroyed, for their world to be brought back into the prosperity of Man's Gods and have a fresh start. Some wish for peace, which evolved into this extremist belief; others simply want to be above any species they view as lesser. What's racism when we can all agree to hate someone else, after all?

The Conglomorate, a newly formed faction that only sees profit in the chaos, uses this newfound magic, this nigh infinite resource, to gain more profits at the cost of many people's lives.

and many countless more....

The world was brought back to current-day technology with obvious advancements where necessary, magic becoming more commonplace as well as many other modern fantasy tropes alongside it. 

Countless new religions and beliefs were made, the change in the socio-political sphere, the powers that certain Nations bear over others, as well as the prevalence of the supernatural and 'other' would make it quite easy to have countless contractors, yes? Wrong. Some never get the deal, no matter how blessed the world made them, and most people either bear one blessing that is a slight convenience in their mundanity, but otherwise, not many have 'The Mindset' to be Contracted, barely anyone knows about Contracts, only those who have been taken into this job before are aware. Contractors are special, they grow in power just that ever so faster than the average being, that it's like watching a fast-paced Coming Of Age show with each one, while the average are more so like 30-year-old Telenovelas in their level of progression.

So come, shape the world together, and let us save the world from stagnancy.