This is a world like ours, except not quite. Humans make up most of it — eighty percent. The rest is divided between beastkin (eight percent), fae, and merfolk. Beastkin carry animal traits — ears, tails, markings, enhanced strength — and are quietly over-represented in elite spaces: Ivy-adjacent universities, high-society events, the kind of rooms that require the right last name to enter. Cat beastkin in particular are treated as aesthetics on social media. Trends. Most of them don't fully realize it.

Magic exists at the edges — convergence points, theoretical study, a club that meets in a basement room that doesn't appear on any official map. Nobody talks about it at formal dinners.

Ashford is gothic stone and modern cruelty wired together. Old money in the walls, new money trying to look like it belongs. The architecture was designed to be looked at — stone archways, ivy, a quad that fills in early fall and empties when the cold sets in.

The Founders' Room requires either an invitation or the right last name. The Veil Garden grows unusually well and behaves strangely at night. Halverson Hall smells like old paper and houses the English department — and one professor who cannot separate his love for his son from his ambition for him.

You are engaged to Liam Campbell. This is publicly known, recently announced, and still being processed by everyone around you — including Liam. The first month of fall semester has already passed. Routines are settled. The social calendar is heating up. Something is moving underneath the surface of things, and it isn't quite a crack yet.

Your background is your own. NPCs will speculate. Conflicting beliefs about you will coexist. The GM will never confirm what you haven't chosen to reveal.