Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - The Shadow Court of HM Queen Elizabeth II

Icelander · 01-08-2013, 10:32 PM

Foreword

An earlier thread by yours truly on these very forums was originally designed to be about what kind of martial arts would be used by the active field agents of a British secret society in the Modern World with Secret (Emerging) Magic.

Concealed by the clever subterfuge of a martial arts themed thread, the discussion has thus been poorly accessible to anyone with an interest merely in conspiracies, the Royal Family or secret magic in the modern world, assuming said person was not also a fan of martial arts. Consequently, when eluciation of elements specific to the campaign world in which this society is to be found, not to mention speculation and useful brainstorming about the society itself, began to creep into the conversation, this was cause for alarm.

I am concerned that a thread titled 'British Combatives...' is not the right place for such subjects and therefore hereby create a new thread more suitable for discussion of the organisation as a whole, as opposed to just the precise form of the combatives style used by its people. I'll try to keep the other thread more closely on topic henceforth.

Setting

The world is our modern world, at first glance. The differences are subtle, in that they appear to be caused by the supernatural returning to the world after an absence of more than a century. In fact, the evidence suggests that the supernatural waxes and wanes according to some not-yet-understood laws, but it seems fairly clear that ever since the Industrial Revolution, it has been much less relevant to the course of history and the daily life of citizens in the richest economies.

The return of magic seems to have started in the early 1980s, become obvious to those who knew what to look for (or were already experiencing strange things caused by innate gifts of which they were unaware) by the 1990s and been far enough advanced by 1995 or so that in the right circumstances, people who had caught on early and had been studying a legimate system of magic for enough years could use it to accomplish impressive and undeniable feats of magic, as long as they had time for substantial preparation and could afford expensive paraphernalia.

By 1998-2000, the evidence of supernatural powers in the world started to become far more unsettling. Hostile spirits, deluded dabblers or even strange and mysterious creatures briefly appearing from Elsewhere started to turn up and leave behind more than just an interesting story. People got hurt and killed. While the people who studied magic in a formalised way also found that their powers were much more reliable and able to affect the physical world in ways they hadn't been able to before, this was little consolation when weighed against the new threats.

By 2002, it was clear to Her Majesty and most of her close advisors on the subject that the supernatural posed a dire threat to the British people. The rate of violent supernatural events was rising steadily and at this rate of increase, even the imperfect statistical analysis possible with the limited data could forecast that by 2020 at the latest, non-supernatural human-on-human violent crime would be eclipsed by injuries, deaths and other harm caused by paranormal factors. In the current day, 2010-2012, supernatural murders are already outnumbering 'ordinary' ones in areas of storied connections with the paranormal, most notably and seriously, in London.

That is, in the setting, the rate of violent crimes everywhere in the world is higher than it is in our world today, with the divergence starting in 1990 or so and becoming marked by 2000. This means that numerous people outside the conspiracy of the Queen's Shadow Court had become aware that something was very, very wrong in the world. And by the late 1990s, the Queen and some of her advisors started to feel compelled forced to consider stronger measures than merely study of the supernatural in preparation for the eventual discovery (and initial controversy and mockery in the press) made by someone else.

This post goes into some detail about the workings of magic the setting in relation to rules found in GURPS Thaumatology. A note on magical languages in the setting and what all this means for the adventuring use of magic is to be found here. While a sufficiently powerful magician might in 2002 (and certainly by 2005 or so) be able to perform acts of magic that affect the physical world in concrete ways impossible to rationalise away, they could not do so in front of too many skeptical witnesses or within the most advanced scientific laboratories, the majority of which remain effectively No Mana Zones once the modifier for technological factors is figured into the local mana level.

Publication of the secret was a realistic possibility by 2005 at the latest and would not be all that difficult by 2010 or so. What has so far stopped the Shadow Court is a combination of a delicacy of feeling about the Queen taking an active political role in the public eye, a lack of personal rapport between the Queen and recent Prime Ministers and the reasonable assumption that the media, political and law-enforcement furor that would follow such an announcement by them would have unpredictable negative repercussions for the future. Not only would it effectively freeze their operations for months at least, possibly forever, thereby placing responsibilty for what they do in the hands of an unprepared government, it might also serve to poison the well when it came to the validity of their data, analysis and scholarship.

Thus the perception among the Shadow Court is that going public amind a media firestorm focused on their existence as much as on the news about the supernatural, would almost certainly also damage their ability to influence the transition period in British politics by quietly making various suggestions that senior people involved with the Court have been planning for new legislation, organisations and methods of supernatural law-enforcement and national security.

There are other power groups and a few individuals in the world who are not aligned with any group but possess sufficient power to perform undeniable supernatural feats in a public setting. It is not always clear what prevents them all from going public. Many among the Shadow Court are hoping that someone else will blow the lid off and thus save them from the need to draw such public atttention to what is essentially an illegal conspiracy to subvert the elected government of the United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent many Commonwealth nations). Some may even be planning such a revelation by manipulating other power groups or unaligned magicians or spirits.

What is the Shadow Court?

The Shadow Court of HM the Queen is one of the many terms used to refer to an informal secret society dedicated to the investigation of the paranormal and, starting in 2005, active, but covert defence against supernatural threats, both on the behalf of HM the Queen Elizabeth II. Other terms that have sometimes been used include the Dee Club, the Bacon Appreciation Society and the Symposium on Newtonian Concepts. The senior people are sometimes refered to as Wardens, Rhodes Scholars, Custodians or just Courtiers.

Academics associated with the society are variously (and with tongue in various degrees of cheek) refered to as Walsingham Fellows/Readers, Marlowe Fellows, Readers in Invisible Writings or Librarians of Time and Space. There are also legitimate trusts and charities that do fund them, in which case any discussion of them in even a quasi-public setting will usually confine itself to using the mundane names of those organiastions. Doctors involved with the Court are generally called Blacklock Residents, Witch-Doctors Junior or Hemlocks. The active chaps who go looking for things that go bump in the night are starting to organise into quick-reaction teams usually called either QPR or the Rangers, short for the Queen's Paranormal Rangers.

While the first members of the organisation formed an informal network of people in the know, without any central meeting place or chain-of-command, a lot of the activity took place at Birkhall and Balmoral. Eventually, the organisation needed some permanent place of its own that was out of the way of all press and even the rest of the Royal Household. The solution would be for the Queen to acquire a castle somewhere out of the way and renovate and decorate to taste. Here are some posts with ideas for what kind of castle, where, what it would cost and how it could be done.

Please post any further discussion of the setting or the organisation in general in this thread.

To be continued with more detail on the history of the society and ideas for what real-world people would be important players in it.

01-08-2013, 10:32 PM	#1
Icelander Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Iceland*	The Shadow Court of HM Queen Elizabeth II Foreword An earlier thread by yours truly on these very forums was originally designed to be about what kind of martial arts would be used by the active field agents of a British secret society in the Modern World with Secret (Emerging) Magic. Concealed by the clever subterfuge of a martial arts themed thread, the discussion has thus been poorly accessible to anyone with an interest merely in conspiracies, the Royal Family or secret magic in the modern world, assuming said person was not also a fan of martial arts. Consequently, when eluciation of elements specific to the campaign world in which this society is to be found, not to mention speculation and useful brainstorming about the society itself, began to creep into the conversation, this was cause for alarm. I am concerned that a thread titled 'British Combatives...' is not the right place for such subjects and therefore hereby create a new thread more suitable for discussion of the organisation as a whole, as opposed to just the precise form of the combatives style used by its people. I'll try to keep the other thread more closely on topic henceforth. Setting The world is our modern world, at first glance. The differences are subtle, in that they appear to be caused by the supernatural returning to the world after an absence of more than a century. In fact, the evidence suggests that the supernatural waxes and wanes according to some not-yet-understood laws, but it seems fairly clear that ever since the Industrial Revolution, it has been much less relevant to the course of history and the daily life of citizens in the richest economies. The return of magic seems to have started in the early 1980s, become obvious to those who knew what to look for (or were already experiencing strange things caused by innate gifts of which they were unaware) by the 1990s and been far enough advanced by 1995 or so that in the right circumstances, people who had caught on early and had been studying a legimate system of magic for enough years could use it to accomplish impressive and undeniable feats of magic, as long as they had time for substantial preparation and could afford expensive paraphernalia. By 1998-2000, the evidence of supernatural powers in the world started to become far more unsettling. Hostile spirits, deluded dabblers or even strange and mysterious creatures briefly appearing from Elsewhere started to turn up and leave behind more than just an interesting story. People got hurt and killed. While the people who studied magic in a formalised way also found that their powers were much more reliable and able to affect the physical world in ways they hadn't been able to before, this was little consolation when weighed against the new threats. By 2002, it was clear to Her Majesty and most of her close advisors on the subject that the supernatural posed a dire threat to the British people. The rate of violent supernatural events was rising steadily and at this rate of increase, even the imperfect statistical analysis possible with the limited data could forecast that by 2020 at the latest, non-supernatural human-on-human violent crime would be eclipsed by injuries, deaths and other harm caused by paranormal factors. In the current day, 2010-2012, supernatural murders are already outnumbering 'ordinary' ones in areas of storied connections with the paranormal, most notably and seriously, in London. That is, in the setting, the rate of violent crimes everywhere in the world is higher than it is in our world today, with the divergence starting in 1990 or so and becoming marked by 2000. This means that numerous people outside the conspiracy of the Queen's Shadow Court had become aware that something was very, very wrong in the world. And by the late 1990s, the Queen and some of her advisors started to feel compelled forced to consider stronger measures than merely study of the supernatural in preparation for the eventual discovery (and initial controversy and mockery in the press) made by someone else. This post goes into some detail about the workings of magic the setting in relation to rules found in GURPS Thaumatology. A note on magical languages in the setting and what all this means for the adventuring use of magic is to be found here. While a sufficiently powerful magician might in 2002 (and certainly by 2005 or so) be able to perform acts of magic that affect the physical world in concrete ways impossible to rationalise away, they could not do so in front of too many skeptical witnesses or within the most advanced scientific laboratories, the majority of which remain effectively No Mana Zones once the modifier for technological factors is figured into the local mana level. Publication of the secret was a realistic possibility by 2005 at the latest and would not be all that difficult by 2010 or so. What has so far stopped the Shadow Court is a combination of a delicacy of feeling about the Queen taking an active political role in the public eye, a lack of personal rapport between the Queen and recent Prime Ministers and the reasonable assumption that the media, political and law-enforcement furor that would follow such an announcement by them would have unpredictable negative repercussions for the future. Not only would it effectively freeze their operations for months at least, possibly forever, thereby placing responsibilty for what they do in the hands of an unprepared government, it might also serve to poison the well when it came to the validity of their data, analysis and scholarship. Thus the perception among the Shadow Court is that going public amind a media firestorm focused on their existence as much as on the news about the supernatural, would almost certainly also damage their ability to influence the transition period in British politics by quietly making various suggestions that senior people involved with the Court have been planning for new legislation, organisations and methods of supernatural law-enforcement and national security. There are other power groups and a few individuals in the world who are not aligned with any group but possess sufficient power to perform undeniable supernatural feats in a public setting. It is not always clear what prevents them all from going public. Many among the Shadow Court are hoping that someone else will blow the lid off and thus save them from the need to draw such public atttention to what is essentially an illegal conspiracy to subvert the elected government of the United Kingdom (and to a lesser extent many Commonwealth nations). Some may even be planning such a revelation by manipulating other power groups or unaligned magicians or spirits. What is the Shadow Court? The Shadow Court of HM the Queen is one of the many terms used to refer to an informal secret society dedicated to the investigation of the paranormal and, starting in 2005, active, but covert defence against supernatural threats, both on the behalf of HM the Queen Elizabeth II. Other terms that have sometimes been used include the Dee Club, the Bacon Appreciation Society and the Symposium on Newtonian Concepts. The senior people are sometimes refered to as Wardens, Rhodes Scholars, Custodians or just Courtiers. Academics associated with the society are variously (and with tongue in various degrees of cheek) refered to as Walsingham Fellows/Readers, Marlowe Fellows, Readers in Invisible Writings or Librarians of Time and Space. There are also legitimate trusts and charities that do fund them, in which case any discussion of them in even a quasi-public setting will usually confine itself to using the mundane names of those organiastions. Doctors involved with the Court are generally called Blacklock Residents, Witch-Doctors Junior or Hemlocks. The active chaps who go looking for things that go bump in the night are starting to organise into quick-reaction teams usually called either QPR or the Rangers, short for the Queen's Paranormal Rangers. While the first members of the organisation formed an informal network of people in the know, without any central meeting place or chain-of-command, a lot of the activity took place at Birkhall and Balmoral. Eventually, the organisation needed some permanent place of its own that was out of the way of all press and even the rest of the Royal Household. The solution would be for the Queen to acquire a castle somewhere out of the way and renovate and decorate to taste. Here are some posts with ideas for what kind of castle, where, what it would cost and how it could be done. Please post any further discussion of the setting or the organisation in general in this thread. To be continued with more detail on the history of the society and ideas for what real-world people would be important players in it. __________________ Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 01-14-2013 at 09:31 AM.