Lore¶
51 pages, grouped by the case they belong to.
Main cast and recurring¶
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| Alternate history | The alternate history of PITF is the campaign's version of 1992 and 1993: an early-1990s United States that looks like ours until the Paranatural Incident Task Force starts to change it. |
| The paranatural | The paranatural is the catch-all term for the creatures, technologies and unexplained events that the Paranatural Incident Task Force is sent to investigate. |
| The show | The show is the framing device of the whole campaign: every session of PITF is played as an episode of an early-1990s television series about the Paranatural Incident Task Force. |
| Timeline | The timeline is the chronology of in-fiction events in PITF, from the backstory of its towns and characters to the latest recorded session, Radford Horrors 04. |
| Unresolved mysteries | Unresolved mysteries collects the questions the campaign has left open as of the latest session, Radford Horrors 04. |
Across several cases¶
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| The Masters | The Masters are the benevolent, ascended beings at the center of Andrew Howard's faith, who in his account have guided humanity since the Stone Age and whose number includes Jesus Christ. |
| Moby-Dick book cipher | The Moby-Dick book cipher is the code system, keyed to a 1980 reprint of Moby-Dick, through which the Biz's Russian correspondents send him numbered messages by recorded "sweepstakes" phone lines. |
Radford, Virginia¶
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| Acceptable fact pattern | The acceptable fact pattern is the phrase Rudy Giuliani uses when he orders the task force to produce a presentable official account of the first Radford case, after President Perot rejected the original reports. |
| Bivens lawsuit | The Bivens lawsuit is the legal action Rudy Giuliani warns the task force to expect after the shootout at the Safe Environment Fund's fence in the woods near Radford, Virginia. |
| Cosmic microwave background surge | The cosmic microwave background surge (CMB spike) is a burst of cosmic microwave background radiation that Soviet detectors recorded and triangulated to the Marblehead nuclear incident, giving Boris Yeltsin his... |
| Crucifixion MO | The Crucifixion MO is the pattern in the first Radford case in which victims were sedated with opiates and Xanax and nailed up, a method the team traces to the three stations in the old church and to a body in the... |
| LA treatment cover story | The LA treatment cover story is the official excuse for the new disappearances in Radford, Virginia: letters and claims that the missing people have gone to rehab or psychiatric care in Los Angeles, backed by lawyers... |
| Moth life cycle | The moth life cycle is what the team pieces together, mostly from Wilbur Whateley, about how the Radford Moth grew from an oversized caterpillar into a telepathic creature that is born pregnant and uses women as... |
| Radford's missing dogs | Radford's missing dogs are a long-running pattern in Radford, Virginia, in which large dogs vanish from houses bordering the national forest, an unexplained phenomenon that the team eventually ties to the Radford Moth. |
| Radio Shack spacesuit robbery | The Radio Shack spacesuit robbery is the break-in, about three years before the main Radford case, in which Abelforth "Abe" Whateley smashed the Radio Shack window wearing a homemade spacesuit and stole modems and a... |
The Summer Service¶
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| The glow | The glow is the first sign of the worm infection that spreads through Marblehead's congregation and, eventually, the task force: a staged condition running from vigor, muscle and regrown hair with a healthy sheen, to... |
| Lemuria | Lemuria is a discredited lost continent from real-world fringe history that, in the Marblehead case, surfaces in the Sons of Adam's modified Bible as a sunken Eden and fills a fringe shelf in Amos Shaw's house. |
| The Marblehead explosion | The Marblehead explosion was a 3 a.m. |
| Melted shoreline | The melted shoreline is the stretches of Marblehead's coast, and a crater and wall at the lighthouse, that were fused to volcanic glass by something extremely hot, and the subject that makes the town's chief of... |
| Second coming and eschaton | The church theology of the Sons of Adam is the creed of Marblehead's ocean-obsessed congregation: an imminent second coming ("game day"), angels as terrifying monsters, holy water behind heaven's floodgates, and an... |
| Synthetic nerve agent | The synthetic nerve agent is a poison close to VX that contaminates the sea off Marblehead and sickens anyone who touches the water, and which a radio contact at the end of the arc says leaked from his own group's... |
| Terrorist cover story | The terrorist cover story is the official account of the Marblehead incident that the task force gives the National Guard after Big Bill tells them to stick to the conventional facts: a religious group of... |
| Tropical Storm Andrew 2 | Tropical Storm Andrew 2 is the Atlantic storm that arrives over Marblehead during the Summer Service case, flooding roads, grounding helicopters and delaying the National Guard, and whose name is a gag on the name of... |
The Things in Appalachia¶
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| The Bigfoot Hoax | The Bigfoot Hoax is the staged series of Bigfoot sightings, footprints and photographs around Dahlonega, Georgia, which Jan Martense's gold-mining ring used to discredit real sightings of escaped ape-men. |
| Clinton Surveillance Scandal | The Clinton Surveillance Scandal is the October 1992 news story, announced by a Georgia State Police official, that FBI agents had been spying on presidential candidate Bill Clinton in Dahlonega, Georgia. |
| Covenant Beliefs | Covenant Beliefs are the doctrines and rites of the Covenant, the religious community led by Elijah Ray in the Georgia ghost town of Auraria: a holy meteor, Auraria as the Garden of Eden, a coming apocalypse, visions... |
| The Crack in the Air | The Crack in the Air is a hard-edged rift in space in a side tunnel of the Dahlonega mines, with a metal pipe running through it that pumps gas into the mine. |
| Enemy Action | Enemy Action is President George H. |
| The Land Dispute | The Land Dispute is the year-long campaign of eviction letters and pressure by unnamed "corporate goons" to push the Covenant off its land in Auraria, Georgia. |
The Walkers in Skin¶
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| Ballard water contamination | The Ballard water contamination is a separate FBI case, first seen in Walkers 02, in which the public fountains and tap water of Ballard, Utah contain live sperm and arsenic, a mystery the task force warns locals... |
| The beam | The beam is an invisible, switchable line of heat and magnetic force at the fence of the Sherman Ranch, discovered in Walkers 06, which flings ferrous metal along a long arc toward Roosevelt. |
| Black Sun | The Black Sun is the symbol that Robert Bigelow names when he shows the party a strange white ring recorded by his sky camera, tying it to its pagan roots, its appropriation by the Nazis, and to Revelation 6:12. |
| Disappearances in Ballard | The disappearances in Ballard are the unexplained absence of more than half the town's high school students and many other residents, noticed by the task force in Walkers 06 and tied in Walkers 07 and 08 to the... |
| The dusk event | The dusk event was an electrical and atmospheric anomaly that struck the party's rental van near the gate of the Sherman Ranch at dusk on October 30, 1992, killing every electronic device in the car and sliding the... |
| Exhumation of Shelly Wilmarth | The exhumation of Shelly Wilmarth is the errand that brings the task force to Utah: a client's request to dig up her dead mother's grave in Ballard, which stays pending as the town falls apart around it. |
| Livestock mutilations | The livestock mutilations are a string of unexplained animal deaths on the Sherman Ranch in Utah, in which sheep burst apart and cattle are found boiled or split open, which the local FBI office blames on lightning. |
| The night event | The night event was a nocturnal anomaly over the party's guest house on the Sherman Ranch, in which each agent suffered a different hallucination, Andrew Howard levitated, the Biz lost every dental filling, and the... |
| Pilot and host biology | Pilot and host biology is what the party learns, mainly from Donald McManley's autopsy in Roosevelt, about how the skinwalkers of The Walkers in Skin are built: engineered, childlike "vehicle" bodies piloted by a... |
| The portal | The portal is a roughly 20-foot gateway in the cavern beneath the community center near Roosevelt, Utah, used by the skinwalkers to evacuate through to a burned, blasted world; the party wrecks it in the finale of... |
| Replication | Replication is the process by which the skinwalkers of Ballard and Roosevelt replace people with copies, working from tissue samples taken in advance and from memories probed through tendrils in the mouth. |
| Sherman Ranch phenomenon | The Sherman Ranch phenomenon is the umbrella name for the cluster of unexplained happenings centered on the Wilmarth family ranch near Ballard, Utah: a night hum, heat and electromagnetic anomalies, lost time,... |
| Sugar clues | The sugar clues are the trail of sweets, from Doug's Jell-O to the mayor's lemon candies to a padlocked fridge of sugar at Ballard City Hall, that gives away the skinwalkers of The Walkers in Skin long before the... |
| The vanishing car | The vanishing car incident is the night in the first days of November 1992 when the party's rental Plymouth Voyager rose straight up from the guest house parking spot at the Sherman Ranch and was later found miles... |
| The white ring | The white ring is a luminous ring with a faint purple glow, first caught on Robert Bigelow's sky camera over the Sherman Ranch during the night event, and seen again in the finale as a burning circle about a... |
The Roulet Estate¶
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| Andrew's Condition | Andrew's Condition is the set of physical changes in Andrew Howard after the Utah disaster: bullet resistance, a craving first for rare steak and then for human blood, and a healing power that fails at a crucial... |
| Chimney Passages | The Chimney Passages are a network of secret climbing routes cut into every chimney of the Roulet House, which let the intruder reach any major room from his hidden attic lair. |
| The Drugged Water | The Drugged Water is the stored water in the Roulet House, which gives the agents hallucinations after they drink it. |
Philosopher's Fist (non-canon)¶
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| The 1992 OVA Framing | The 1992 OVA framing is the conceit that Philosopher's Fist 3.J/2: Unchainable is an anime original video animation, a show within the show, that Huell Kendrick watched on hotel cable TV during The Things in Appalachia. |
| The Flag Contest | The Flag Contest is the national-holiday event at which children from disadvantaged communities show the president their designs for the tournament's logo, and the way Mirabeth schemes to get the over-age Derk into... |
| Game System | The Game System of Philosopher's Fist 3.J/2: Unchainable is a Powered by the Apocalypse game whose stats, conditions and playbooks follow the superhero game Masks, in contrast to the Monster of the Week rules of the... |
| The World of Philosopher's Fist | The World of Philosopher's Fist is a small, low-gravity planet that is a single country under a werewolf president, and is not the alternate-1990s United States of the main campaign (compare Alternate history). |
Minor entries¶
Smaller subjects are collected on list pages, one per case.