my new campaign ideas

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by patchwork

The Euthanatoi are proponents of cosmic Law, and order. They perceive Law as more fundamental to the universe than gods - when gods break the Law, they must and shall be punished or even destroyed for it. They have never been the dominant ethos of a civilization, but obviously they are more tolerated among some than others - with Indic civilization leading the pack, followed by chthonic Greek (many Hades and Persephone cultists among the Euthanatoi), ancient Celt, and Mayan. There are some Orthodox Christian Euthanatoi, the Golden Chalice, but they're small, secretive and weird to the point of near-heresy by Euthanatoi standards (the Golden Chalice are not fully committed to the idea of individual responsibility and punishment, and the concept of shared or collective guilt would make most Euthanatoi practices quickly devolve into horrific nonsense). They are a fundamentally synthetic Tradition, with Law devotees from many cultures crammed together and declared a single Tradition by the Council of Nine.

Nephandi are something different. You've surely noticed that Mage's construction of reality is profoundly anthropocentric, with human will and perception being the final arbiter of reality. The Nephandi reject that, and think Things From Beyond are entitled to a vote as to what's real and what isn't also. There's a lot of variety (and inconsistent portrayals) of them, but that tends to be the root - you could make a deep green Verbena Nephandus, for example, but the unifying feature seems to be a rejection of anthropocentrism (to a much greater extent than even the Celestial Chorus). They have a variant praxis for the sphere of Entropy (which I personally reject as unnecessary slop; I prefer the differences to be purely philosophical) that reverses the mind and matter positions for Entropy 3 and Entropy 5; Nephandi learn how to break down thought and reason in others relatively quickly, but have a surprisingly difficult time affecting insensate matter (unlike the Euthanatoi or the Technocratic masters of Entropy, the Syndicate).

The Nephandi seem kind of incoherent. On one hand their association is with the Primordial, which appears to be the original energy of creation. But on the other, they're associated with entropy, in the sense of breaking things down and destroying them. But entropy is the sphere of the Euthanatoi, who seem to be bitterly opposed to the Nephandi. But there also seems to be a connection of the Nephandi with the Wyrm, and yet the Wyrm does not seem to fit Primordial at all—that seems to go better with the Wyld.

And don't things from beyond fit better with Spirit than with Entropy? As I understand it, Beyond is the Deep Umbra.