The cosmos are vast and dangerous. Like

the savage frontiers of old, the many

dimensions must be tamed, catalogued, and assimilated into a safely controlled cosmos. At worst, they should be sealed away so that the monsters on the other side cannot disrupt the Consensus… which they have a nasty tendency to do whenever they get the chance. That void must be engineered – not merely tolerated, but transformed. And since the Renaissance, this Convention has understood that goal and worked to shape chaos into stability.

In the tenuous balance between humanity and the Void, this Convention maintains a careful (and sometimes unsuccessful) foothold. Originally founded as two separate groups – the Celestial Masters and the Explorators (a.k.a. the Void Seekers) – the Convention discovered that the promise of Heaven Above was a lie; instead, a trackless Void stretched off into infinity, ripe with horrors that made the hells of Dutch painters look insignificant. As Explorators mapped out the mysteries of the human world, Celestial Masters began exploring that Void. In the late 1800s, the groups merged into a single faction. Its duty: to chart the mysteries and keep them from polluting the Earth.

On one hand, the Engineers pursue an imperial agenda of conquest and sterilization; on the other, they’re not wrong about the threats they confront. No Technocracy Convention has nearly as much hands-on experience with the unspeakably counterrational Otherworlds and their equally ineffable hosts. The brain-twisting expertise of this Convention has allowed the Technocracy to shut down Nazi invocations, Marauder reality storms, and Reality Deviant strongholds. The Technocracy owes its Horizon Constructs, ectoplasmic disruptors, machine realms, and sentinel satellites to these Engineers, whose Border Corps Division steps in where cyborgs fear to tread. Most of all, perhaps, the Union owes its supply of Quintessential energies to this convention. And so although the Wanderers (an old name that still applies) might be the loosest cannon on the Technocratic gunship, they’re a damn powerful force, politically and otherwise.

The Void Engineers hold one goal above and beyond all others: defend humanity against everything beyond the Gauntlet. To that end, high-tech laboratories maintain barriers against unauthorized crossings; heavily armed marines seek and destroy anything that crosses that line. Alien incursions, mystical spirits, astral entities, and ghostly apparitions all pose threats to the safety of the human race, but the Void Engineers possess the

Nightmares live among us,

even as humanity remains asleep and dreaming.

• Fellow Conventions: A fractured collection of useful allies to be guided, placated, feared, ignored, and occasionally destroyed as necessary.
• The Traditions: An unstable bunch of cosmic riff-raff whose antics have done more to endanger humanity than every pack of aspiring Nephandi combined.
• The Disparates: The last holdouts of essentially extinct primitives. Sad, really. Their day in the sun ended centuries ago, and yet they still act as though they speak in coherent sentences.

Stereotypes

tools and talent to oppose them all. And although most Technocrats hate to admit this, legions of extradimensional entities already hide throughout the human world, entrenched on the Front Lines of the battle for reality. Void Engineers track them down, using specialized training to hunt exotic prey.

To tip the balance between order and chaos, Void Engineers prefer to know their foes. They lead expeditions to extradimensional realms to study impossible creatures in their unnatural habitats. For the sake of survival, they’ll recruit Technocrats from other Conventions to assist them, but Void Engineers insist on leading the way. Research provides a common goal, of course. When the fate of the world’s at stake, however, a preemptive strike can buy a little more time for humanity.

Given these alien environments and pursuits, it’s not surprising that Engineers seem kind of odd. All too often, operatives return from off-world assignments as hollow-eyed malcontents in need of social processing. Indeed, the Wanderers have their own sanity division, the Descartes Institute of Mental Health, where Earthbound Social Processing is broken and replaced with a more suitable mentality. Despite their longstanding image as freewheeling space hippies or hammerheaded star-grunts, this Convention boasts many of the Union’s most dedicated and accomplished members. Each Engineer, regardless of her post, is a scientist; all other duties remain secondary.

Organization: Especially in the wake of the Dimensional Anomaly, Void Engineer groups follow military-style ranks: Technicians, Marines, and Cadets form the lowest echelon, graduating upward to become Enforcers (who guard the borders), Explorers (who chart new territory), Investigators (who pursue scientific inquiries), or Researchers (who develop new tech). Higher-ranking personnel within these levels assume command of individual units. At the highest level, a series of Coordinators handles the logistical and administrative responsibilities, overseeing the Convention as a whole. (Note: In an Avatar Storm metaplot, this Convention changes drastically; see Convention Book: Void Engineers for details.)

Initiation: Recruiting personnel from among top-level researchers, tech geeks with an eye for unconventional applications of science, and folks who feel disappointed by science program cutbacks, the Engineers bring their Cadets off-world to specially designed training and research facilities. From that point onward, a Cadet is considered initiated whether or not she ever achieves Enlightenment – she’s seen too much to ever be considered mundane again.

Affinity Spheres: Dimensional Science (Spirit), Correspondence, or Forces.

Mind-bending quantum physics, and the machines created to channel those physics, form the core of Wanderer beliefs. To that end, they adapt alien technologies and sanitized versions of ancient spiritual Arts, incorporated through reconciliation theories that bind those ideas and energies to scientific methods. In the Realms beyond Earth’s limited reality sphere, Void Engineer technologies have all the subtlety of a big-budget science-fiction film. Blasters slide out of holsters, power-armor suits become essential, and titanic Universal craft (that is, spaceships) are the order of the day.

Focus: As every Engineer knows, only Tech Holds All Answers in A World of Gods and Monsters. Without imposed order, Everything is Chaos. And so, hypertech melds with cybernetics, craftwork, cosmic reality hacking, and a formalized type of weird science.

Organization

Especially in the wake of the Dimensional Anomaly, Void Engineer groups follow military-style ranks: Technicians, Marines, and Cadets form the lowest echelon, graduating upward to become Enforcers (who guard the borders), Explorers (who chart new territory), Investigators (who pursue scientific inquiries), or Researchers (who develop new tech). Higher-ranking personnel within these levels assume command of individual units. At the highest level, a series of Coordinators handles the logistical and administrative responsibilities, overseeing the Convention as a whole. (Note: In an Avatar Storm metaplot, this Convention changes drastically; see Convention Book: Void Engineers for details.)

Focus

As every Engineer knows, only Tech Holds All Answers in A World of Gods and Monsters. Without imposed order, Everything is Chaos. And so, hypertech melds with cybernetics, craftwork, cosmic reality hacking, and a formalized type of weird science.