Circles of Gray Harbor

Gray Harbor, like any other town, sports a number of more or less legitimate 'sets', ranging from the police department to Town Hall, from the upper crust to the underworld, from the established old families to the trailer trash. Some of these groups are in opposition to one another; the true challenge for a person with Glimmer is navigating the conflict between who you are in society and the fact that to the Veil, we're all walking bowls of chow. Sometimes, you need to make friends in unexpected places.

Gray Harbor is not a game of factions contesting each other's dominance. These are social circles, sets of people who overlap one another. While law and crime are often opposed, they are just as often forced to work together.

Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
--Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Law Enforcement

The GHPD works much as you would expect in a small town where it's not unlikely that the guy processing your speeding ticket is your mother's cousin Moe. The local police is competent but not omniscient. There's the occasional cop on the take or bigoted jerk, but on the whole, police can be trusted to be doing their best -- or at least not their worst.

Unfortunately, doing your best is not enough in a town where the annual ratio of non-natural death and disappeared people is higher than in the rest of Washington State put together. With the Veil retconning the perception of people without Glimmer, the GHPD will never get the kind of funding and professional assistance required to actually make a lot of difference. After all these years, the FBI has still to send anyone out to ask about the numbers, and they likely never will; the Veil's ability to 'revise' reaches far beyond the town limits.

There are a number of people with Glimmer in the GHPD. They are often busy trying to help others like themselves who are struggling to explain what they were doing in someone else's backyard at 3am with a shotgun, screaming about killer gremlins.

The Underworld

Organised crime in Gray Harbor is named Monaghan -- Felix Monaghan. Don't say that aloud, though -- Mr Monaghan is a respected businessman, a friend of Margaret Addington, and a pillar of the local community.

Monaghan started out small and worked his way up. These days his interests lie mostly beyond the scope of Gray Harbor, but his presence is still felt every day in the fact that no other gang or group has managed to grab a slice of the pie and live to digest it. Attempts have been made and will be made again; it always gets messy. Monaghan does not believe in negotiations; the fact that he does not shine sometimes complicates matters further for those of his crew who do.

The hierarchy of Monaghan's operation is divided. No one man runs his operation when he's out of town; a number of people run their own parts of it. Making sure that you're not accidentally screwing with another branch of the Monaghan organisation is considered good for a member's life expectancy.

Name	Position	Information	Status
Felix Monaghan	'Legitimate' Businessman	Successful businessman and investor. Implicated involvement in organised crime; never actually sentenced. Upstanding citizen, pillar of the community.	Alive
Paul Cochrane	Private Security	Owner of private security firm for upper class homes. Rumoured to be a man to see about a problem (try to not become a problem).	Alive

The Addingtons

The one old, moneyed family in town, the Addingtons are the local gentry in all but name. Matriarch Margaret Addington, somewhat a recluse after a series of tragic family deaths, is the unofficial queen of Gray Harbor. While not officially in a position of power, the mayor is an Addington, Addington money funds the hospital, the park, the museum, the high school -- she's got the town right where she wants it.

Fortunately for Gray Harbor, Margaret seems to largely want to be left alone. No charge has ever been brought against such an upstanding member of society, but she is known to be protective of a certain Felix Monaghan. Moreover, the local grapevine is adamant that a lot of the strange goings-on in Gray Harbor is the work of Margaret, or of her predecessors. The Addingtons somehow caused all of this to happen, and looking at the tax bracket Margaret is in, they're still profiting from it, too.

Not all Addingtons are members of the upper crust; Mayor Clyde Addington rose up from a poor branch of the family. Few of them know a lot about their family history; most do not want to know. There's some kind of Hatfield-McCoy thing going on with the Baxters that most don't care much about (never trust a Baxter though), but on the by and by, all of this old stuff isn't worth rehashing, surely.

Name	Position	Information	Status
Clyde Addington	Mayor	Mayor of Gray Harbor; a promising young politician fast on the rise. Rumours of corruption and nepotism have so far not been proved.	Alive
Margaret Addington	Businesswoman	Matriarch of the Addington family. Said to rule the town with an iron fist in a velvet glove. Largely reclusive nowadays.	Alive

The Baxters

The Baxters are the true founding family of Gray Harbor, or so they claim. There aren't a lot of actual Baxters left these days -- but over the years, many Baxters have left Gray Harbor, marrying or changing their name for other reasons. Descendants of those often find themselves drawn home to the ancestral grounds for reasons they cannot quite explain.

Whatever happened in Gray Harbor nearly two hundred years ago, it left the Baxters penniless and the Addingtons sitting firmly on the lumber industry. Add to that that an unlikely amount of Baxters seem to struggle with mental issues and inexplicable violence, and it is no wonder that the locals talk of a Baxter Curse.

These days, most Baxters aren't actually named Baxter. Those in the know distrust the Addingtons, claiming that the town's leading family isn't done trying to wipe them out. There's probably more to the story than that.

The Upper Crust

Gray Harbor is a small town on the coast, too far from Seattle to be a proper suburb. It's a town in financial decline, nestled between Nature Parks and Native reservations. With the lumber industry dying out, efforts are being made to rebrand the town; there's the Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula, replete with national and state parks, in easy driving distance, and a lot of scenic landscape in between. One of these efforts is the Grand Olympic Casino on its artificial island in the Bay. Other efforts include new, high end housing on Bayside, and the Marina, attempting to draw in the yachting crowd.

Gray Harbor attracts people with Glimmer, and given how people with resources find it easier to travel than people without, the town does have a number of wealthy people that surpasses what you might otherwise expect in a nowhere town like this. Over time, a number of successful people have come to town and decided to stay for reasons that are not always obvious, even when this means fading from the public eye (something which can be problematic for writers, influencers, and media darlings).

There's no one famous in Gray Harbor. There are people who used to be famous. There are people who own famous brands but are no longer of interest to the public themselves.

The Trailer Trash

The majority of people who are drawn to Gray Harbor are people from the middle class and down. From small business owners to wage workers, from suburbian picket fences to trailer park residents, they are the salt of the earth. Many are drifters, moving from one town to another until they finally reach Gray Harbor and realise that this is where they were going for all this time. Some come here to hide from something or someone elsewhere. Many are just passing through for whatever reason, and fail to keep on moving.

And Everyone In Between

Gray Harbor is a lumber town in decline; it has a generally dilapidated atmosphere, and real estate is cheap compared to towns closer to Seattle. There was money here in the past -- and if changing the town's direction to tourist trap works out, there will be again. For now, though, the largest demographic in town are white working class families, many of whom depend on the Addington lumber mill and related businesses for their wages.

Gray Harbor's community of people who Glimmer tends to transcend normal boundaries. Once in a Dream, you might have a bestseller author on your right and a trailer trash weed pusher on your left, and you depend on each other for your mutual survival. Money, skin colour, gender, religion -- these are boundaries that often matter less because as far as the Veil is concerned, everyone is prey.