The 90s

“The time is now one minute to midnight. At the sound of the bell, the date will be Tuesday 1st January, 1991. The Cross Foundation would like to issue a special thank you to all of you for volunteering to keep this night as safe as any other. Happy New Year.”

The year is 1991.

The World Wide Web has been announced but not adopted for public use. Information travels much, much slower than people will come to take for granted in the present day, and it will take close to thirty years before “doomscrolling” is classified as an X Category Anomaly.

Pop culture, driven by Hollywood and MTV, is undergoing a monumental shift. Cracks are showing in the Soviet Union and the idea of its dissolution grows more plausible by the day. The UK Conservative government promises that any day soon, the country will see an end to the recession and the steady rise of unemployment. And against this backdrop, equally pinned between bleakness and optimism, the Cross Foundation exists.

The Foundation and the people within it represent an insular – and often fiercely protective – community of misfits, and it is not uncommon for its most devoted employees to have a shaky-at-best grasp on events beyond the Foundation's walls. Water cooler talk is more likely to concern the nightmarish entities contained a few floors below one's feet than how many of one's colleagues caught Terminator 2 at the weekend, and slight deviations from the accepted timeline in casual conversation can be explained away easily enough: perhaps your colleague who referenced AbFab a year before its debut was caught under the influence of a precognitive Anomaly?

Also arising from the disconnect between the Cross Foundation and the cultural landscape it has found itself surfacing in, the Foundation as a whole is significantly more socially progressive than the world outside. As an organisation dedicated to researching incidents that the wider world chooses to ignore or disbelieve, inflexibility and intolerance run counter to the Cross Foundation's aims. With the threats posed by reality-warping entities in constant focus for Foundation employees, workplace bigotry is considered not only unacceptable but completely devoid of sense.

Though much of the Cross Foundation's equipment looks rather outdated, there are ways in which its technology might be considered highly advanced for 1991 standards. Anomalies such as Y-83 - "The Filing Cabinet" or Z-236 - "The Floating Platform" could be viewed as miraculous in the eyes of the general public, while devices such as Z-2 - "The Audio Tape" may appear old-fashioned (given the innovation of the Compact Disc) to those unaware that written records of its use go back over 100 years before the invention of the compact cassette tape. And, of course, even verifiably mundane items may behave in highly unusual ways under the influence of sufficiently powerful Anomalies – much to the dismay of the department responsible for the maintenance of this equipment.

There are many 1990s pop culture figures who are, in the modern day, associated with behaviours or beliefs that are considered Sensitive or Restricted under our Acceptable Themes policy. We ask that you avoid making meta-jokes that rely on attendees having knowledge of harmful behaviours that their characters do not have knowledge of - e.g. a character professing they're a huge fan of a popular celebrity who would later become associated with abuse or bigotry. Please be aware that references to pop culture figures who are associated with a Restricted Theme is in itself a Restricted Theme.

So, what does all of this mean for you and your Character?

• Answers won't arrive immediately. It would be unreasonable for any employee of the Cross Foundation to expect records to be accessible with a single press of a button even from the very heart of the Foundation's campus. In the field, staff will need to sift through archives of written records and reference books, perform experiments, and consult more knowledgeable Anomalies in order to find the answers to their questions.
• Community is harder to come by. In the absence of chatrooms or forums, people who have experienced strange and unsettling events turn first to the people around them – and then to the whispers that say somewhere in the world, there's an institution that exists to explain the unexplainable. For all that life as part of the Cross Foundation can be its own flavour of strange and unsettling, it is for many employees the only place they've been able to connect with people who truly believe them.
• 90s style, not 90s values. It is not acceptable to play a character who is discriminatory on the basis of real-world and modern-day protected characteristics. While we will not erase discrimination it is not a core theme of Anomalous and though references to it may appear (e.g. in documents) this will never be targeted toward Characters at Events. Please see our Acceptable Themes for more information on how to roleplay this within our policies.
• Minimal research is required. You don't need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of how the world looked in 1991. It is perfectly acceptable to play a character who hasn't picked up a newspaper in years or has no idea that “grunge” means anything other than a bit of dirt. Equally, it's not the end of the world if your cultural references are a year or two off – blame the inherent weirdness of the Cross Foundation and move on.