Merits & Flaws

You’re innately familiar with a social environment that most folks never visit, much less understand. They know you there, and so even when you haven’t met a given person (human or otherwise) in that environment, they consider you to be an insider. Thanks to your familiarity, you can navigate certain elements of the physical environment there too – the security apparatuses, the “secret handshakes,” the hidden corners that an insider would know about and an outsider would never think to look for, and other obstacles that a subculture puts into place to make certain that only the “right” people can get around. When moving through your subculture of choice, subtract -2 from the difficulties of rolls that grant social or physical access to that subculture’s established turf.

The subculture in question can be any kind of exclusive social environment that also includes the physical surroundings employed by that particular group: country clubs, drug cartels, the international mercenary network, the global espionage un­ derworld, high-level finance executives, the fetish community, homeless transient communities, clannish rural communities, hip-hop networks, the jet set, rave festival culture, fantasy fans, the touring road-dog musical community, world financial leaders, “gypsy” Travelers, and so on. Although it can include mages and other Night-Folk, the community must be essentially “mortal” in terms of the majority of insiders. You can buy this Merit several times to reflect membership in several different communities. That insider status, however, takes time to acquire and a lot of attention to maintain. If you neglect your community, you’ll soon find those familiar doors slammed in your face.