The Federal Special Research Division (FSRD) is the premier, clandestine and ultra-violent Paranormal Research 🎃 agency of The Oceanykan Federation. While an average citizen may perceive the Federation as a fragile bureaucracy struggling to maintain order in what is, by all accounts, an authentic anarchy, the FSRD operates in the shadows with a concentrated, near-infinite authority that bypasses all law and jurisdiction. The FSRD are tasked with ensuring that the terrifying truths of the world behind the theatre's curtains do not rip apart the delicate social fabric of the 1960s. They are a hybrid entity: half of them are laboratory eggheads, the other half are elite hunter-killers, trained in both bleeding-edge special forces tactics and in traditional countermagic. Their presence is neither felt nor seen, but for those who know more than they should, it is apparent in the sudden silence of a jammed news report, the arrival of unmarked black aeroplanes in a remote wetland, and the rush of men in HAZMAT suits with automatic weapons into an abandoned building for "contaminant cleanup", typically under the auspices of an Atomic Regulations Enforcement Section anti-fissiles raid.
The FSRD’s lineage can be traced to the Anti-Paranormal Secret Societies, which are much more ancient than it is. Its founding core consisted of veterans from Task Force THAUMIEL, a clandestine unit formed during World War II to fight and hunt down the Ahnenerbe, foreseeing an eventual nazi rebellion that did manifest itself as the National Socialist Uprising. In 1948, as the Federation realised that the Precursor ruins beneath the Black Valley held the key to new technologies which could keep the Federation safe from foreign intervention, and advance mankind as a whole, the FSRD was founded as the operative branch of Project GREYMAN. Their original mandate was simple: secure GREYMAN's facilities, salvage any and all technological residue they asked for, hunt down whatever the Secret Society Trackers couldn't, and make sure nobody knew what the government was doing.
The most defining moment in the FSRD's history was the Oceanykan Revolution of 1961. However, the "Mad Scientists" who led the project viewed the political class in Cestlep as corrupt and short-sighted. When Alan Redfort's revolution ignited, the vast majority of Project GREYMAN's scientific elite, as well as many of the FSRD's own agents (including the whole 2. Commando Regiment) defected to the Australian Emergency Committee. They fled into the interior, taking prototypes, archives, and nearly a decade of research with them. All of the Projects' remaining scientists and infrastructure was absorbed by the FSRD and put under its military command structure.
The FSRD today operates through a compartmentalised structure to prevent internal contamination or mass defection. Their headquarters is hidden underground somewhere in the Outback and is denominated Alpha Base. They possess a myriad of black sites throughout the country, all of them underground. These bases have multiple purposes. All of them, with the exception of Alpha Base, are specialised in a particular field of research relevant to the FSRD. Their geographical locations are spread so that Redactor Teams emerging from them have easier and faster access to the site of a reported anomalous incident. Through the use of minefields, camouflaged sniper nests and underground elevators for their aircraft, these locations appear to be tracts of uninhabitable badlands at first sight, and are invisible to satellite imagery. While no more than two dozen bases exist, perhaps a little less than a hundred listening stations are spread throughout the country, quietly observing the lives of four hundred million citizens and reporting any suspicious activity to their mother base.
This agency holds a very close relation with the ancient Anti-Paranormal Secret Societies. While FSRD agents represents a cold, industrialised form of anomalous containment, the Secret Society Trackers are the intuitive, traditionalist heart of it, yet their objective is ultimately the same. Information flows both ways, cross-training is common, and the FSRD draws most of its manpower from recruiting elite Trackers. However, many Trackers view the FSRD as a dangerous government overreach that seeks to "science away" the inherent horror of the paranormal, while scientists within the FSRD tend to view the Societies as a chaotic, unregulated variable that should ideally be institutionalised or dismantled. In the end, these differences are meaningless when faced with a very severe reality: the FSRD cannot be everywhere. Trackers have an extremely wide informational network of Adventurers, can operate with far less funding, and have a much greater manpower pool at its disposal. When faced with something they cannot deal with, the FSRD's black helicopters are quick to arrive, authorised to bring it down with any weapon at the Federation's disposal, including and up to atomic weapons, of which they possess a sizeable arsenal for the direst of emergencies, as well as a far more significant stockpile of chemical weapons which they are more trigger-happy with.
In the mid-1960s, the FSRD is engaged in a brutal, unseen war on two fronts. On one side, they serve as the last line of defence against the otherworldly. On the other, they wage a relentless counter-insurgency campaign against the Australian Emergency Committee. Every time an AEC agent attempts to activate a Precursor relay, or a rogue cultist tries to tear a hole into the Dreamspace, the FSRD is there, armed with suppressed rifles, psi-disruptors, and a total disregard for human rights, to ensure that the 1960s remain exactly as the history books say they were.
The FSRD is the price Oceanyka pays for its safety. They are the men who stare eternally into the abyss, and when the abyss dares to stare back, they've got a tactical nuclear strike on the hotline.