Local, Cultural, and Factional Concerns of the Tunnelers Campaign

A document of things outside the scope of immediate player knowledge to act as guidelines for how certain groups act and react to each other in the Tunners Campaign

The Town
Dundarave Washington has a population of just over 2000. As a small town in 2004 rural washington, it is overwhelmingly white and largely conservative, though a past influx of hippies ensures that a complicated network of (sometimes conflicting) complaints about the state serve as common ground for a spectrum of more radical and utopian ideas among the less enfranchised of the populace. In the political climate of the Iraq war, a libertarian-inflected anti-interventionism cautiously allies with pacifist social reformists, a voice of discontent that is discontent with its very self to stand in pseudo-opposition to more stolid hawkish national pride.
Nonwhite members of the community are subject to the banal cruelties of a town that prides itself on normative American meritocracy and not having a Klan presence and sees those two features as the height of tolerance.
Dundarave was founded as a mining town, but pivoted to timber after the mines ran dry and the state stepped in to regulate them. The local castle for which the town is named was a vanity project of a wealthy founder in the mining years who dreamed of a return to feudal structures and thus family glory beyond the reach of the US Government.

The Video
The Dundarave Video which has electrified the Tunnelers chatroom has been reuploaded many times, but was originally posted by someone with the username SammyStarWars. SammyStarWars, aka Samuel Early (he/him, 16), claims to have been given the video by an anonymous forum acquaintance to digitize — this is false, he dug it up in his personal project (a basement tunnel), though he has convinced himself it is true. He has not in Dundarave nor has he ever been, living his whole life in Utah. He will not volunteer any personal information or facts about how he acquired the video until he is furnished with proof that other tunnelers have died in Dundarave.
The video was taken by a Tunneler who’s name and history have been eaten by a void in the psychosphere, accessed in the labyrinth below Dundarave Castle. The woman in the video is Jane Novikov (she/her, 29, hinterland on the forums and chatrooms). SammyStarWars was friends with Hinterland, and while he never saw a picture of her he suspects this is her (correct) and that she sent the videotape to him (false). The videotape was in fact hurled through the void beneath the earth by Bruce McDiarmid, in the hope that it would resurface and attract more victims to his great work. He did not consider that it would end up in the hands of a child, among other ramifications.

The Tunnelers
The influx of Tunnelers into the town is disorganized, and while they aim to find the source of the video specifically, most of them are likely to form small groups or set out on their own to dig where they can get away with it uninterrupted. Inevitably some of them are going to get in trouble without good plans to get out of it.

The Great Work beneath Dundarave
Bruce McDiarmid, occultist in a syncretic european theosophy-neodruidism tradition, has identified a void in the psychosphere that he hopes to bind to geography and fill. He believes it to be a new opportunity brought on by the hollowness of modernity. He is wrong, similar voids have happened many times under various circumstances through human history, he simply was not there to see them and his historical sources lack a perspective that acknowledges them. His plan is to use the castle as a focus for colonizing the psychosphere — a structuring principle to write across the world of the mind, planting his families European syncretic occultism values as a universal constant as the mirror of the castle is spread through the void below the earth. He does not understand the full extent of what he has touched, as the void beneath the earth attaches to more than the human psychosphere alone, but he does not need to when asserting his mode of monomythical meaning-making.
His current plan is to convince the naive and disorganized Tunnelers, an occult sect he only recently became aware of, to extend the tunnels below by convincing them they are excavating the secret passages of his design — if they believe they know what they will find, he hopes they will shape it by that belief before the oppositional forces within drain them of their self.
He prepares for open war with the CIA Occultists, but will not make the first move. It would be ideal for him if they came into conflict with other parties first.

The CIA Occultists
Those agents in the know, who bravely stand between the state and that which sits past the mundane, have considered Dundarave of mild interest for decades. Since its inception, some portion of its timber industry has been a valuable example of capital supported by sacrificial ritual, and it only required brief intervention in the 70s to paralyze a would-be right wing insurgent group that was dangerously close to discovering the substance that lies beyond the substantial. Since then, the primary reason to monitor it has been the goings on at the Castle itself, but from the outside Bruce McDiarmid seemed simply like the sort of occult businessman who is healthy for the american economy and potentially useful as an asset.
The sudden influx of Tunnelers, a disorderly organization of no great influence but unknown metaphysical implications, has brought greater scrutiny to the town. What did they miss? Are these Tunnelers perhaps terrorist assets? Is this the doing of an extant force in the town? Who is their leader? Can they be turned to a new purpose?
The agents are willing to do anything to answer these questions. Priorities include securing Dundarave Castle and its residents for interrogation, and identifying other local supernatural events and practitioners.

“The Resort”
Increased attention is the last thing Grant Calhoun of The Mossy Getaway Camp Ground And Spa wants. He is the kingpin of local crime, and while his occult practice is smaller than McDiarmid’s he puts it to use enabling a mundane crime empire he is proud of, entertaining a particular swathe of rich visitors to the region by both owning the luxury hotel and monopolizing high end sex work and the drug trade in town. He and his employees would love for this to all blow over as fast as possible, and have no time for nosy dirt-digging hooligans who are likely to interrupt a clandestine transaction or scare off a rich customer as they swarm about looking for somewhere to put a shovel. He will cooperate with the CIA if it will save his ass.

Other Local Occultists
Their imagination not yet crushed out of them, the children and teens of Dundarave find it easy to conjure forth thoughtforms, most of them short lived but some with staying power. The core of the local young mall goth clique (nicknamed “The Soultakers” by just enough of its members for the name to stick) is currently dedicated to vampire imagery and has created a rich shared dreamscape in that vein. When they grow up, it is easy for many to dismiss their time spent making dreamscapes as a youthful fancy. Teen cliques with access to magic aim to protect their own from rival social groups and work out the complex turmoils they are encountering.
The Howells-Rush Logging Company has, since its inception, taken seriously the idea that they are trading human life for profit and aimed to come out on the good side of that trade by means more mundane capitalists only dream of. They used to facilitate workplace disasters at great scale to ensure bountiful harvests in return for blood spilled. New generations of owners have forgotten the rituals, but a secretive group of loyal employees continue on a smaller scale, convinced that when they finally reinvigorate their towns economy it will all have been worth it. The realities of business mean that some of those who remember the rites have gone to work for the McKinnon logging company as well. Timber company occultists want to protect their business interests from outside forces, protect their supernatural interests from outside occultists, and keep their practices secret from anyone they deem untrustworthy.
Some people stumble into the supernatural unattached to other organizations, becoming lone practitioners or bringing in small circles they trust — friends, family. Their desires run the full breadth of possibility, but the value of keeping that sort of thing to yourself is strong in Dundarave, and so they will act to maintain outwards normalcy.

Indigeneity in Dundarave
The Nooksack people lived here before any mining town was built. Some Nooksack live here now, and efforts to preserve the Nooksack language have prompted linguists to visit the area in the past. A current concern is that future development of the town’s industries might further restrict access to Nooksack fishing sites, already damaged by intervention to the river lake — enforcement of and expansion of these land rights has been foregrounded in local politics.
Breaking kayfabe for a second here, one of the big pitfalls of the small town supernatural investigation genre, including some that I quite like, is stereotyping indigenous characters as inherently magical in a depersonalizing way, especially by homogenizing what should be a breadth of thoughts into a single cliché of “primitivity” giving special access to the supernatural especially as it relates to tracking and hunting in service to others. Aim to do better than that. Nooksack members of the community can exist with all sorts of attitudes towards the magical elements of this campaign.