The Sentries are a worldwide organization that watches for monsters and carries word of them to The Garrisons and the hero teams.

Membership

A Sentry is a paid member of a cell. Every settlement with a relay has at least one Sentry.

Ordinary people report what they see. A farmer who finds strange tracks tells the Sentry in the settlement, and the report enters the network there. Reporting is free, and people everywhere do it.

Structure

The Sentries are organized in cells. Every major city has one, each cell follows the work of the others, and each cell manages itself independently of the others.

A cell is about twenty people. A few of them follow what the other cells report, and a few work the reports coming in from the settlements the city covers. The rest maintain and run the relays in the city and in the outlying settlements.

The coordination office holds the cell's reports. It ranks them and gives its own settlements more attention than the rest of the world. One Sentry in the office decides which reports become advisories, the recommendations that go to the hero teams.

Funding

The settlements a cell serves pay for it, and nearly every settlement contributes. Cells also pay for each other, so a settlement that cannot pay keeps its relay.

The Network

The Sentries run the relays. Sentry business is prioritized ahead of any other message on the network.

The Courier Ships

The relay network lacks the strength to broadcast across oceans so the Sentries own courier ships that carry information between the continents. The Sentries have established specialized ports for this at the narrowest passages between continents.

Hero Teams

The Sentries gather the reports, decide where the need is greatest, and tell teams which of the advisories are highest priority. Hero teams have the final decision about where to go.

The Liaison

Each hero team travels with a Sentry attached to it. That Sentry carries a portable relay. It is short range and reaches the network only from inside a settlement that has a working relay. The Sentry works it without needing the settlement's relay operator. The Sentry passes the advisories to the hero team and arranges its travel. A hero team away from a settlement is out of contact until it reaches the next one.

Relationships

The Sentries tell The Garrisons where monsters are moving. Most of the network's traffic is garrison traffic.

Local Variation

Cells differ from one city to the next.

Pallas has relays inland as well as along the coast, so the cell in Rann is the largest and the only one that follows settlements behind the frontier.