Introducing your Sponsors
There are five organisations with a particular interested in what happens in Treowen with different goals and interests. Each have chosen to sponsor a number of outsiders to step into the space, and wear the mask of a previous guest They want the mysteries and secrets that can be found during the Locksmith’s Dream. However, once a guest is at Treowen, their motivations and agenda are their own. Some focus on learning the mysteries of Treowen and the histories of its guests; others have been known to put their feet up in the Flint & Wheel pub, enjoy a cocktail or two, and watch everyone else get into trouble.
Preserving the order of things, with current Hours at the top and humanity safely at the bottom
Not quite an esoteric order, not quite a think-tank, Lighthouse was established after World War 2 by the notorious Arun Peel to ‘keep humankind from the rocks of endless night’: that is, to ensure the invisible world stays in balance, and that people don’t get inhabited by Worms, eaten by fallen immortals, cursed by curses, etc. Lighthouse is the most benign but arguably the least effective of the Sponsors. They’re better at policy documents than they are at exorcisms. Solid research and safety protocols, though.
Sponsoring:
A major occult library in probably Peru dedicated to learning what shouldn’t be known
What do you get if you cross an excommunicated Catholic friar with a renegade Incan magician? A religious foundation with a mission to ‘preserve that which would not otherwise be preserved’, and a commitment to ‘interfaith symbiosis’. Or, if you listen to Church authorities, ‘a depository of blasphemies’ committed to ‘mongrel heresies’. Haustorium provides a welcome home to renegade clergy from Christian and other backgrounds who’ve developed too keen an interest in dangerous knowledge. To their credit, very little of that knowledge ever leaves the Haustorium archives.
Sponsoring:
Conservative, pro-British, occult smiths, technologists and alchemists
Smiths, technologists, alchemists, patriots. The Endeavour Club has a reputation for snobbery, largely because so many of their members are snobs. Of all the Sponsors, they’re the oldest and most traditional — ironic, really, that they’ve changed so over the centuries. From their birth as a martial order in the fires of the War of the Roads; to their time as a gentleman’s occult lodge; to their conspiracies of Empire; to their current, laudable, funding for education and research initiatives… their only constants are their bravery, their determination and their ingenuity. And their snobbery.
Sponsoring:
Something between an occult tabloid and the Erotic Review
Kerisham is a British coastal town whose physical reality is occasionally disputed. In the 1920s, the Review could reasonably be described as a literary magazine for those with specialised tastes. The world moved on, the Review moved on with it, and it is sometimes now described as ‘an occult tabloid’. This is wildly unfair, if only because it can boast nothing like the circulation of even the feeblest actual tabloid. It also, now and then, publishes real investigative journalism, from reckless contributors willing to risk being arrested or devoured.
Sponsoring:
