Office of Gates

Record type: secret royal program; campaign antagonist organization.

Record

• Origins: Decades before the campaign, the Office learned to move a prison entrance without moving the prison. It removed the prototype First Gate from the Ninth Gate complex and buried it below the future Corvin Farm. Corvin helped build the first moving gate, later regretted his role, and used a lawful inheritance to prevent activation without the three heirs' unanimous free consent.
• Population / scale: Unknown. The story names officers, a diviner, observers, scouts, and field units, but provides no complete membership or force count.
• Alignment: No collective alignment is stated. Individual alignments belong to individual NPCs; Maelin Thorne is lawful neutral in Appendix B, while Vance is lawful evil.
• Leaders: No director or head is named. Captain Orlan Vance is a field captain; Maelin Thorne is an architectural diviner. Neither is established as overall leader.
• Goals: Seize Corvin's land and seal, recover the three heirs alive, and control the First Gate mechanism. Thorne's stated rationale is that controlled atrocities prevent worse disasters; the organization seeks forged consensus or force where needed.
• Territory: No formal territory is given. Known operations center on Corvin Farm, Idlewood, the eastern boundary, and the Ninth Gate route.
• Resources: Covert agents, forged or sealed orders, observers, trained divination, scouts, soldiers, and the three-tower counterseal. Documents invoke “property recovery,” “structural contagion,” and “living keys.” Agents have no common badge.
• Relationships: It operates behind ordinary Crown institutions. Vance's soldiers know only they are collecting dangerous escapees; the wider Crown is unaware of the active First Gate. Corvin was a former collaborator who turned against the project. Idlewood's residents can resist through public proof and protection.

Identifiers and limits

The three-tower counterseal is the known documentary mark. A missing shared badge is deliberate campaign lore, so do not invent one. The Office is a hidden program inside the Crown, not a synonym for the entire Crown or its soldiers.

Unknown / do not infer: founder, full command chain, membership count, collective alignment, or all agents' knowledge of the Gate.

Source: content/idlewood-campaign-book.md (The Truth Behind Idlewood; The Office of Gates; Chapters 1–3 and 11; Appendix B); lib/idlewood-campaign.ts (IDLEWOOD_GM_BIBLE).