Once the ruling civilisation of The Dark Peak, the clowns were reduced to a fraction of their former number by a pandemic whose nature and cause remain unrecorded — and when a civilisation loses most of itself to a disease no one documented, what survives is generally not the best of it. They operate now as couriers and mercenary spies, concentrated around Hathersage, loyal only to their own kind. Their elaborately decorated bodies are a legacy of insect origins, and they hatch from eggs raised by their biological parents, which is, comparatively, the least unsettling thing about them.

Path 7 through the Wisewood — one of the designated routes maintained for housing assessors — displays waymarkers whose instructions escalate with proximity: *Do not acknowledge. Do not stop. Do not look at what is looking at you.* A crosslander assessor followed these instructions for seven and a half hours while something the psycmask logged as an unlabelled amber outline walked ten metres to his left, killed the trees it passed, and froze the left half of his face. The return journey took thirty-eight minutes.

rooter flesh has a dedicated psycmask advertisement — arriving mid-conversation, unannounced, describing the experience of eating it with the sensory enthusiasm of something that has been told what enthusiasm is. Rooterskin scratchings are available as a bar snack; Van Hallam orders them without reflection and notes they are "all protein." What the protein was before it became a scratching is not a question the advertisement addresses.

boggarts — or hobs, the terms are interchangeable — are location-specific supernatural presences associated with liminal places (riverbanks, caves, sharp bends in roads) and cannot be left behind. There is a documented case of a family loading their possessions onto a handcart to escape their household boggart quietly at night, only for the boggart to answer a passing neighbour's enquiry with "why, we're flittin'." They will perform household chores in exchange for a saucer of milk, making them, by Dark Peak standards, a relatively negotiable presence.