Editing LeviathanTempest:LlenlleawchDumpingGround (section)

==The Season Letters==

===Founding===

It began with little more than a desperate hope and a postage stamp. On a dark, wild night in 1912, Dr. Rupert Season of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote to his good friend Eamon Campbell. Season was an alienist who had been treating a patient so strange, so self-possessed and so haunted, that Season himself felt he was coming close to the edge of the abyss. Campbell, a professor of mythology at Trinity College Dublin, immediately wrote in turn to several friends of his, until one day, a few weeks later, a grim former medical surgeon knocked on Season's door. It was too late: the good doctor had already succumbed to the infectious madness his patient propagated, and was turning into a mindless monster.  Season stalked his visitor throughout the night streets of Providence until he was cut short by a runaway train.

After this tragic experience, Campbell decided to look deeper. He structured his network of epistolary contacts into an intelligence-gathering information and tried to locate Season's original patient. But Campbell was not after revenge; it was curiosity that motivated him so. He finally found the man and, armed with certain precautions suggested by his friends, went to meet him. He survived the experience, and although he was plagued to the end of his life by nightmares, went on to write his most brilliant work.

Over the years, other cases have popped up of similar supernatural cases, and Campbell's group (now known formally as the Season Letters) reported them, corralled them and studied them. Originally mostly made up of academics in the fields of psychology and history, it has expanded into several other fields, including a number of officers and businessmen. It still works mostly at a distance, with email and postage mail representing most of the work, until it is time to meet the creatures that go bump in the night.

===The Enemy===

Unlike some groups which want to explain the supernatural, the Season Letters take its existence largely for granted. They don't want to study monsters, but to learn from them. What insights on history can be learned from an immortal creature of the night? What aspects of psychology can be revealed by an inhuman intellect? Can spirits of the hive teach us why humans work together as they do?

The Season Letters tend to follow the same methodology repeatedly: identify a supernatural element, ask their contacts for any information they might have on it, gather the right precautions, and finally organise a meeting. They are not fools, and are very aware that sometimes a monster must be subdued before it can be questioned. And if they kill, it's usually only to protect themselves from possible retaliation.

===Hunters===

When you came home from the war, they gave you psychological counselling and told you your mind could betray you if you didn't take care. Well, they were wrong. You're solid as a rock. It's your wife who'd gone insane while you were away, falling under the sway of something you couldn't even face. You had to ask for help. 

There's a side of your work in archaeology that is so very frustrating, building hypotheses and never being able to test them unless a lucky find came your way. It used to keep you awake at night. You would have done anything for a bit of certainty. In fact, you have. And it's felt good.

You've been a hack for years, writing formulaic books by the page count for a negotiated fee, an industrial purveyor of platitudes for bored housewives. Until you met her. Until you found inspiration. For the first time in years, you've created something that is good and true. It's so sad you had to kill her in the end. You have to look somewhere else for your next book.

===Factions===

The network is too disorganised for structured factions to emerge. Nevertheless, for people who meet very rarely, reputation is everything, and certain tendencies have been clear for a long time.

You won't find '''Larks''' in the field. They're happy to serve as sounding board, to provide advice and analysis, but they never get more involved than that. Most use pseudonyms and are only know to those who have recruited them into the network. Because more proactive elements resent them somewhat, they spend their time currying favor to get feedback on fieldwork.

'''Cuckoos''' favor deep fieldwork, sometimes going so far undercover that their loyalties shift and they come to obey those they wanted to study. Nevertheless, much of the Letters' most important data has been gathered by them, and they inspire respect as well as fear.

'''Starlings''' are experts on meeting sessions. They routinely travel from location to location, setting up safehouses and wards to assist the local members. They generally stay during the meetings and are rewarded by information as much as money.

Free specialties: '''Larks''': Academics (Reviewing);
'''Cuckoos''': Subterfuge (Blending In);
'''Starlings''': Streetwise (Safehouses).

===Status===

The Letters are a very informal network, but reputation is everything to people who rarely meet.

0: You have provided information on request by a member, and have been kept appraised of the result of the Investigation. You are also starting to work at a distance through contacts. You gain a free Written Word specialty in the Expression or Persuasion skill.

000: You have participated in at least one meeting session, and are well-known for your insight within the network. You have come across dozens of reports from across the world. You gain two dots in the Allies merit.

00000: You are one of the central hubs of the network, and those members that you don't know personally you can probably investigate and discover. You have survived several meetings with creatures, and not all of them have gone well. You gain the benefit of the Encyclopaedic Knowledge merit, if you have the time to ask your contacts in the network and receive their feedback.