Conspiracies in a Monster Hunters game

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

I'm sort of stumped on how to do the shadowy government conspiracy thing, though. I know previously on the forums, some people have spoken up in favor of this sort of thing being less harmful to willing suspension of disbelief than I'd be inclined to think, so I'd like to hear from those of you in that camp.

"The CIA. You don't know what we do. You don't wanna know."

The fact is, even though we know that the CIA does stuff, we don't know exactly what stuff. The CIA is already home to many shadowy government conspiracies and it's highly unlikely that we find out about everything they have done, even many years later or that when real stuff does leak out, that we can tell the real stuff apart from the products of mental illness, financial opportunism and deliberate disinformation. And, needless to say, having telepaths and vampires on the payroll would give them cover-up options not available to real life organizations, and the CIA is actually one of the leakiest intelligence agencies on Earth because of it's sheer size, congressional oversight and a White House that will frequently reveal for political gain what would be kept very secret in other nations. There are in fact other, less scrutinized agencies even in the United States.

[Lamech]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

. I have GURPS: Cabal, and am going to be thinking of ways to adapt it to a Monster Hunters game. Suggestions there?

Well the cabal at its heart wants to a) provide mutual protection for its members b) increase the magical power and general power of its members and the cabal; including stabbing competitors in the face c) do research, especially magical research and especially research to gain true immortality (as in unaging and unkillable III). Also of note they try to direct the world away from things like world wars, and operate under the belief wide-scale revelation of the supernatural is bad for them and the rest of the world.

So on the good to evil spectrum they range somewhere between neutralish self-interested corporation that occasionally does good in narrow areas to evil conspiracy directing everything behind the scenes with packs of evil monsters.

They are a clearing house of all things supernatural (including people simply very knowledgeable in it) and also high-tech, so their members can include sages, experiments, and anything blatantly magic, they certainly have techie's working for corps they own. And its super easy to justify any other template working for them as security people.

So where do you want the PC's in this? They could be working for the cabal; low level members or contractors who basically hunt down the supernatural that hasn't joined up with the cabal. Or they could be fighting to unravel the cabal (or one lodge in particular) and stop some evil scheme. They could also just be fighting a part of the cabal, a rogue lodge or something; either as members of the cabal investigating members who don't follow the rules, or outsiders. (The outsiders will need to figure out who is a friend and who is a foe.)

Finally their hermetic magic system. If you don't want to increase the power of magic much I recommend having it replace (only for cabal members other people can still use the same MH system) grimoires and sacred places. They can instead rack up bonuses from the correspondences and any sacred architecture the cabal has. (Although you will need to reassign the decans to work with the new magic system.) Hopefully the bonuses will be comparable to what the cabal could hand out for the bonuses for a sacred place and a library of grimoires.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by vitruvian

Um, no. Ellsberg was the guy working for RAND and the government who leaked the papers to the press.

That's just what we're meant to think!

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Back in the 1950s, the US Air Force (and RAF) had a program of sending aircraft over the Soviet Union on reconnaissance flights (this was before the U-2; that latter program was just a continuation.) The Russians tried to shoot down these aircraft and succeeded on a number of occasions.

Even though hundreds of people in three different nations knew about this (the flight crews, the ground crews ["Sir, why is there cannon damage to 52-04801?" "Don't ask, Sergeant."] intelligence analysts, and others, this did not become general public knowledge until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.

Why didn't the Russians publicize it? Well, apparently the Soviet Air Force didn't want to admit that ANY US and British aircraft could penetrate Soviet airspace and get away with it, so they didn't talk publicly about the event.

So, while I tend to disbelieve most conspiracy theory, I do have to admit that on at least this one occasion, it happened.

Oh -- the Ultra/Enigma project stayed a secret from the public for 30 years. It was released by a book, "The Ultra Secret," in (IIRC) 1973, some 33 years after the project began. As a rule of thumb, virtually every Second World War history written before that date was rendered obsolete at a stroke.