Neither vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, or mortals exist in a vacuum. They’re all part of one another’s world, and, in a game where all of those sorts of beings are available for play, it’s basically inevitable that at some point you’re probably going to end up playing with someone who belongs to a different sphere than your character does. People make friends, people are going to want to help out their friends, and trying to prevent that is like ordering the tide to turn back.

At the same time, all of the supernatural factions in the game have a vested interest in limiting how much others know about them and how much contact there is between them — often for very good reasons. As friendly as individuals may be with one another, the establishments are not likely to share the same level of trust for outsiders, and we want to maintain some degree of that attitude in-game.

The NPC leadership of the various spheres and factions are all at least generally aware of the existence of other groups — vampires and werewolves have a long history of animosity, mages and vampires have actually fought a war with one another, and so on. None of them think it’s a good idea to get into a protracted struggle with one of the others. This isn’t because they’re worried about losing; they’re all pretty confident that they’d win, partly because of their own ignorance when it comes to the other groups. Rather, it’s because they think that they’d gain very little from such a conflict (which is generally true), and that they’d lose ground to their real enemies in the process (which is also generally true). They’re all willing to sacrifice some scapegoats if necessary to avoid it, and an excellent way to get onto the list of potential scapegoats is to start trouble with another sphere.

And, of course, the World of Darkness games are not really balanced against one another, mechanically speaking — some challenges that would be deadly threats to a group of magi might be mere annoyances to a werewolf, and vice versa. Where cooperation across spheres is desirable, it’s often a better idea to have several smaller groups divided up by sphere who are all working on different sides of a larger problem, rather than one big multi-sphere group all doing the same thing — it makes it easier to set up appropriate challenges and ensures that everyone can have tasks relevant to their own areas of interest.

Therefore, when it comes to inter-sphere play, we’ve adopted the following general guidelines with the goal of allowing interaction between characters from different spheres, without having them mix together so much and so frequently that the spheres lose their individual flavor. Please read this entire list.

• Revealing the existence of the supernatural, or specific types of supernatural creature, to individuals is not something that will cause you trouble.
• Exchange of information between consenting characters is also fine. If you want your character to tell their boyfriend that they’re actually a werewolf, no one is likely to care — unless the boyfriend starts telling a lot of other people. If the information does find its way out, however, the character who revealed the information will be in at least as much trouble as the character who they revealed it to. After all, they’re supposed to know better.
• Revealing information about other characters against their will or without their knowledge may put you (and them) at risk of in-character consequences. It might be nothing — if a vampire accidentally outs his vampire best friend to his mage girlfriend and the best friend doesn’t care, nothing is likely to happen. On the other hand, if a werewolf tells another werewolf about their vampire girlfriend, and said other werewolf does not share their warm feelings toward the undead, the Garou hierarchy is likely to ask some hard questions and impose some sort of punishment.
• Revealing in-depth information about supernatural organizations can lead to serious consequences. Telling your mage girlfriend that your best friend is also a vampire is bad, but telling your mage girlfriend details about how the Camarilla is organized, who the Primogen are, and so on is much worse, particularly if the two factions involved have any history of mutual hostility … which almost all factions in the game do in fact have. If someone in authority on either side finds out, there will be consequences, which may range from a penance all the way up to — if the scale of the breach is large enough — removal of the offending character(s) from the game.
• Publicly revealing information about the supernatural is likely to fail — the Camarilla and the Technocracy are both very keen to keep this from happening, and they’ll do their best to squash it if anyone tries. In terms of IC consequences, it’ll be treated as revealing in-depth information about an organization.
• Combining supernatural abilities from more than one sphere (e.g., a mage casting enhancement spells on a werewolf, or a changeling casting cantrips on a vampire) may have unpredictable results. What this means in practice is that if a combination seems likely to be so strong that it’ll be difficult to find challenges that are reasonable both for characters who have it and characters who don’t, it will probably be disallowed. Please check in with staff if you plan to make this a significant part of your play.
• Characters from different spheres who intrude on one another’s places of power may cause those places to weaken. Bringing your vampire boyfriend back to your apartment won’t harm anything, but bringing him to the chantry and showing him around your Sanctum or the local Node is likely to negatively affect the strength of those locations. Similarly, mages visiting a werewolf caern will probably cause it to lose some strength, which will gradually return if the caern is kept private thereafter. Sometimes this may be worth the risk, but it may also anger other characters who are relying on that strength. Supernatural characters can feel something uncomfortable happening when they approach such a place, although they probably will not understand why, exactly.
• Spending too much time near another sphere’s place of power may also cause the character to weaken temporarily.