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Old 02-12-2020, 12:57 AM   #20
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: [RPM] Cultists of the Cold Ones (Apocalyptic Cult of the Path of Nonexistence)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
In the first decade (1980s) paranormal phenomena started being witnessed by a few people in the world, almost all incidents involved either prophetic dreams or visions by people with the appropriate inborn Advantages or interactions with spirits by those with Medium and other Advantages allowing them to perceive the incorporeal.

No one really knows if spirits are an ultraterrestial species of pure energy shaped by psychic impressions to act as people around them expect spirits to act or if they truly are, as some of them seem to believe, the souls of the departed, ancestral spirits, totems, genius locii, angels, demons, gods and all the other things the more powerful and coherent of them present themselves as.

One theory is that the supernatural emerging was connected to other worlds bleeding into our world and the first world to touch ours was the Spirit World. Later on, as more Mana entered the world, though generally only in specific areas, at specific times, and rarely anywhere there were witnesses that didn't already believe in magic, otherwordly beings that had some kind of (mostly temporary) physical existence could be encountered, or more likely, brought into being by a ritual enacted by someone who had made a pact with a spirit.

In the world of the 2010s, most magicians and other people with supernatural powers come from cultures that had a strong surviving tradition of spirit worship and/or some kind of shamanism, having learned their magic from spirits who started responding to their traditional rituals. A smaller group are academics who have studied some historical tradition of paranormal powers, whether that is Mesopotamian sorcery, Western Hermetic Magic (itself an attempt to syncreticise many older traditions into a coherent whole), alchemy of some sort or any number of other traditions.

The Keepers of the Last Hearth are unusual to a degree in that they don't appear to be built on any traditional religious, shamanistic or scholarly sources from a previous time when the supernatural may have been real. Rather, they seem invented whole cloth within living memory, even to the point of not using any of the traditional dead, esoteric or obscure languages for their rituals, but rather an obviously consciously created ConLang with some similarities to Ithkuil.

From what the PCs can gather, the Hidden Masters, at least some of them, might have somehow been in contact with entities from Outside, not from any worlds recognized in traditional mysticism or what scientific thaumatology has emerged. The PCs believe that the origins of the cult have something to do with scientific research at Vostok Station, in Antarctica, of the subglacial and ancient Lake Vostok. They don't yet have any firm ideas about the relationship between anyone who might have been present there and the South American wing of the cult that appears to be behind this ritual, but given that two of the cultists they've captured do have a connection with Antarctica (one was born there, one did graduate work as a geophysicist at Vostok Station), they expect to find one.

As for these specific 25 cultists and seven pishtaco, they will probably be mostly people who were either already aware of the supernatural (and even possibly already studying ritual magic by one means or another) or vulnerable, at-risk people of the kind that cults in our world tend to recruit. The leaders are people who, in the course of their dabbling in the occult, came across the Hidden Master in South America or someone close to that figure, and were eventually initiated into the cult.

Indeed, the very presence of the pishtaco suggests that among the upper echelons of the cult in South America, there are people who were practising some form of magic based on traditional Andean myths and legends. Which reminds me, one of the leaders really needs to be someone with traditional Andean magical lore, so I might need to add another leader figure. I'll add that one to the pishtaco group and demote Lopéz, who is not much of a leader anyway (just someone so consistently terrible that in a world with dark spirits and functioning sacrificial magic, he has amassed quite a bit of raw power despite lacking the intellect and education to be much of a ritual magician).
Do any of the bad guys of your world know about Kessler? ISTM that if they did, taking him out might be a priority. Has Kessler made any provisions for his untimely demise? Or for his own natural death, for that matter, which is probably not too far away if he's over 100?
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