Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
From about 1930 onward, Hollywood has been the Occult center of the world or at least Western Civilisation. Widespread religious groups headquartered there, especially the more cultic ones, would be great. New Age religious groups almost always fixate on either Atlantis, Mu, or Lumeria, if not all three.
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One PC was a part of an, as-yet-unspecified, fictional cult at UC Berkeley. While the eventual end of her involvement came after she became the centerpiece sacrifice of a demonic ritual, presumably they didn't
lead with their demon-worship. It wasn't any kind of international deal, though, it was just a circle of college kids gathered around a charismatic, older guy who'd graduated a few years ago and now had some sort of researcher/lecturer/assistant position at the university.
The cult was meant to be a generic New Age sort of deal, with a wide syncretic field of rummaged concepts and names, with a generous dollop of 'Do As You Wilt' Satanism-as-Individualism, but to have come across
Something of true power in its naive picking-and-choosing from any number of traditions. It's important that the player is not able to be certain about anything when it comes to the true source of any supernatural events connected to the group.
Any flavour is welcome, as is a connection to some real group, cult or religious idea, though I imagined that the inner circle of friends who were involved had eventually settled on some variation of Satanism in the end, complete with a heavily annotated version of the
Satanic Bible, but obviously, they'd have been a profoundly heretical version and with no actual connections with the official Church of Satan. And it would remain entirely obscure whether the entity they ended up summoning had anything to do with Satanism or any Abrahamic religions, or whether it simply liked the decor and style.
In any case, no one there started out worshiping Satan or any similar entities, though they may well have slipped demonic names into their lists of Ascended Masters, alongside all sorts of names cribbed from any number of religions, to show how edgy they were.
One villain introduced is a former member, but he has obviously joined some sort of new organisation, cabal or cult by now, as his chanting and mystical symbols weren't the classic bad Latin and movie-demonology, but some incomprehensible language, not related to any language that the PC anthropologist who heard it could recognize and signs that she didn't, either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
One group I'd look at would be Elizabeth Clare Prophet's followers. She proclaimed that Count St. Germain was an Atlantian prince and one of Theosophy's Ascended Masters. There is even an old TV show were Elizabeth Clair Prophet claims that St. Germain teleported into Independence Hall to make sure the Declaration of Independence was signed. The show was called In Search of.... It's for sale on Amazon. You'd love it and it is a goldmine for the things you're looking at. |
Ah, yes. The CUT has already made terrifying villains as a New Age cult co-opted by Mythos-esque entities, in S.M. Stirling's
Emberverse series.
Should I cast the Church Universal and Triumphant in an important role?