Illuminati Mambo

[Rhamnousia]

You are an agent of the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Black Nobility: all names for the vast and shadowy cabal of power-brokers who control the course of human history. The list of groups who comprise the Illuminati (or are at least suspected of comprising it) is enormous: there are at least half a dozen alien species (from Reticulans to Reptilians to Nordics), ancient prehuman "root races" from lost continents like Lemuria and Atlantis, the Yetinsyny, the Merovingian dynasty, the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, the Church of Satan, the Society of Assassins, the Gnomes of Zurich, the Bilderberg Group, Anonymous, the Discordians, "Time Meddlers", the Cathars, unspeakable elder gods like Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, the British Royal Family, the Trilateral Commission, the Nephilim, the actual literal Devil, etc. If they've been accused of covertly manipulating world events to suit a sinister agenda, there's at least an outside chance that they're real and they've got a position within the metabyzantine power structure of the Unfinished Pyramid.

Anyone can become an agent of the Illuminati, or a "Man in Black", as you're sometimes known. Maybe you used to be an intelligence officer with the CIA or MI6, or an FBI special agent, already trained to work within webs of half-truth and intrigue that you can barely comprehend. Maybe you were recruited straight out of college when you accidentally joined an Illuminati front organization, like the obscure Zeta Gamma Tau sorority. Maybe you were an al-Qaeda operative or an IRA gunrunner who got a peek at the full picture and decided that power trumped philosophy. Maybe you were raised inside the Unfinished Pyramid, whether trained from childhood in a paramilitary chapter house run by the SMOM or indoctrinated into a hereditary cult worshipping the long-forgotten gods of the Bosnian pyramid-builders. Hell, maybe you're not exactly what we might call "fully human": you could be the product of a joint Grey-CDC hybridization experiment, a genetically-engineered clone, the psychic end result of an MK-ULTRA successor program, or an android with synthetic skin and synthetic memories. Or maybe you were just an average sheep who got caught reading the wrong thing on the wrong website and had a couple of scary-looking men in dark suits and mirror shades show up at their door the next day. A training course at an Illuminati "finishing school" made sure you'd have the necessary skills to be a Man in Black, but what really separates an agent from the legions of tools unknowingly doing the bidding of the NWO is perspective: the tool is so ignorant that he fools himself into thinking that he has grasped the bigger picture, but the agent, like Socrates, knows enough to know that she knows nothing at all.

Your work isn't all that different from that of an ordinary intelligence officer or special agent, only weirder. Gathering intelligence, running assets, infiltrating mainstream institutions, spreading disinformation, conducting counterespionage, plugging leaks, occasionally getting your hands wet with sabotage and assassination, etc.; the field work necessary to keep the vast machinery of the Illuminati from grinding to a screeching halt. You get your orders from someone higher than you on the org chart and maybe you have some idea of who they're working for and what their angle is, but when it comes down to it, it's immaterial. Doing what you're told by someone you may or may not know and not seeing anything while you do it is basically you're whole job description. You're well-compensated for your work in the twin currencies of the Illuminati: cash and secrets. Sure, a solidly middle-class lifestyle is how they keep your morale up, but the secrets, those are how they keep you motivated. You could probably ask to retire at any point and live out the rest of your days in comfortable, well-supervised anonymity, but that would mean that you will never, ever discover the truth behind the curtain and once you've known the feeling of true understanding, it's damned hard to walk away from that. Of course, getting handed briefcases full of unmarked Euro notes and uncut Colombian cocaine has its own addicting quality too.

You've got a team. Men in Black tend to work together in groups of three or five, for numerological reasons. You might even have a sense of who exactly they're working for and maybe, just maybe, it's the same people you are, but you'd be a pretty awful bunch of clandestine operatives of the sinister shadow government if you let something as petty as conflicting loyalties keep you from doing their job. You also have minders to make sure that you don't try to slip the leash, but your minders probably have minders of their own. And don't worry about them killing you for your first (or even your fiftieth) failure; policies like that just create Stalinist situations where the most successful agents are the ones who are the best at concealing their mistakes, not correcting them. Agents are generally only liquidated when their survival would risk exposing the Illuminati as a whole. If anything, it's your successes that'll put a target on your back, but that's something else altogether...

You've got a gun (probably something small and compact but still powerful) and you've got some fancy spytech, but your most powerful weapon is a smartphone with a well-developed contacts list. See, for all its enormous wealth and influence (and it cannot possibly be understated just how enormous the conspiracy's reach truly is), the Illuminati is surprisingly lousy when it comes to things like bureaucracy and infrastructure. Sure, you have things like the secret base on the dark side of the moon or the vast North American headquarters located underneath the Denver International Airport, but most of its day-to-day operational needs get outsourced to puppet organizations. Out there in the wilderness of mirrors, an agent lives or dies by her own networking skills, her own personal web of tools, pawns, and contacts in positions of information or influence. If the only thing that can save your life is a drone strike, you'd better hope you have the number of somebody at Langley that owes you a favor.

Here's a secret about the Illuminati, something that people on the inside are only too aware of: the Unfinished Pyramid has no top. The leaders of the various factions and sub-conspiracies all sit on "steering committees" like the Committee of 500, the Council of 33, the Council of 13, and the Council of 5, but even at the highest levels of power, the members of those governing bodies (whose rosters are always changing and up for debate even within the Illuminati itself) have essentially Three Stooges'd themselves just short of the position of ultimate authority. And here's another secret: despite whatever positions of temporal power they might officially hold, within the structure of the New World Order, the power players of the Illuminati are basically warlords. Whatever influence and assets they have they must constantly defend from the advances of their ostensible peers. Like the ouroboros consuming its own tail, the Illuminati is in a constant state of low-level internal warfare against itself, with its agents caught directly in the middle. Being at a gathering of Illuminati power-brokers is a lot like what the afterparty for the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact must've been like. Everyone sips their drinks and smiles at their opposite numbers, knowing full well that everyone else's plans necessarily demand their own ruination, submission, or extermination, but until the literal moment that the long knives come out, all parties involved content to continue playing along with the charade of cooperation. And make no mistake: when the knives do come out and the invisible warlords rally their armies, the results can be spectacularly, historically bloody.

So, this is the horrible, disjointed pitch that I have going for a high weirdness Illuminati technothriller conspiracy setting. GUMSHOE, and in particular Night's Black Agents, is the obvious choice of system if I were ever to run a game based off of this, but I was hoping for a second opinion. My biggest worry is that it is too broad and/or inaccessible to inspire any one.

[sparkletwist]

It's a neat idea! It's quite evocative, and conspiracy theories provide all sorts of great plot possibilities, and there seem to be a lot of options for the sorts of weird and wonderful characters that could be played in a world like this. I could see a variety of different "feels" working here: both a game with more of a spy thriller espionage feel or a game based more around raw Lovecraftian weirdness would both seem to fit right in, or a combination of both depending on which way the story goes.

As for being inaccessible, my biggest worry is that it might end up suffering from the same problem as a lot of WoD did-- you're this small piece of this very big and vast conspiracy that has so many layers that nobody can possibly hope to understand, that what you actually can do starts to feel really unimportant. If there's some powerful NPC around every corner, then the question becomes why they don't just do everything themselves and what the PCs are even there for. As a one-shot or a very episodic game, where the quest giver gives you your mission and you go do it, it could work well, but as something more campaign-oriented where the PCs are expected to grow in power and drive the plot with their own ambitions, I feel like the atmosphere might be a bit stifling.

I'll chime in that I like Fate, but this isn't news. It seems to have the necessary open-endedness to make a game like this work, for what it's worth.

[Rhamnousia]

As for being inaccessible, my biggest worry is that it might end up suffering from the same problem as a lot of WoD did-- you're this small piece of this very big and vast conspiracy that has so many layers that nobody can possibly hope to understand, that what you actually can do starts to feel really unimportant. If there's some powerful NPC around every corner, then the question becomes why they don't just do everything themselves and what the PCs are even there for. As a one-shot or a very episodic game, where the quest giver gives you your mission and you go do it, it could work well, but as something more campaign-oriented where the PCs are expected to grow in power and drive the plot with their own ambitions, I feel like the atmosphere might be a bit stifling.

That's a very valid concern and I sort of had a second thesis on the Illuminati that I left out was that one of the reasons that the Illuminati as a whole are so obsessed with micromanaging the lives of every single person in the entire world is because a single highly-motivated actor, to say nothing of a group of them, has unlimited disruptive potential. Just look at Lee Harvey Oswald or Gavrilo Princip. Now, you will never bring down the Illuminati as an institution; the Eye of Providence is, after all, as much metaphor as metaphysics, but it's individual components are not so unassailable. Assuming that they survive long enough to enjoy the spoils of their victory, there's nothing stopping the players from seizing as much power as they can get their hands on. Are they likely to end up as the sole Secret Masters of the world? Probably not. Can they blow the heads off a few major power players and celebrate with the contents of their looted offshore accounts? Absolutely. Will sacrifices have to be made along the way? Almost certainly. Does that take away from the victory? It depends. If that was too meandering an answer, the gist is this: it is completely within the realm of the idea that players can achieve considerable wealth and power in their own right if they're willing to do the horrible things necessary to get it.

Part of why I really, really enjoy the system in Night's Black Agents is that it's possible to leave very little to chance when it comes to critical showdowns. Do the necessary investigative legwork, identify and exploit the enemy's weaknesses, and spend your points liberally when you roll and you can cripple or kill powerful opponents surprisingly easily.

[Steerpike]

I love this idea, and actually I don't hate the idea of being swallowed by the conspiracy in a bleak, nihilistic, Lovecraftian/Ligottian way, though I take sparkletwist's point about WoD - for me where WoD went wrong was the rigidity of the metaplot's spine, so to speak, which is obviously connected to a lack of character agency but might not be quite the same thing. I really dig this though - it feels like a more developed, expanded version of your Black Chamber/Commision setting. It also reminds me a bit of Paranoia, especially the idea that the Men in Black might all be working for different cryptic powers and never being fully up front with one another.

I think GUMSHOE is pretty much perfect for this - I'm mostly familiar with Fear Itself but from what I've read Night's Black Agents seems basically tailor-made for this sort of game. I haven't seen Esoterrorists but my understanding is that NBA has more detailed espionage mechanics and Esoterrorists is more setting-based.

[sparkletwist]

Just look at Lee Harvey Oswald or Gavrilo Princip.

Even in the real world, these individuals are surrounded by conspiracy theories, so I figure that would only be heightened when it's a game that is about conspiracy theories-- and then they stop being highly motivated actors, and start being pawns. They may be disruptive to someone's plans, but it seems fairly reasonable (again, especially in a game like this one) that some puppet master behind the scenes had this all planned out and is going to benefit from it. I mean, you even said, "Doing what you're told by someone you may or may not know and not seeing anything while you do it is basically [your] whole job description," which doesn't seem like it leaves a lot of room for motivation. Maybe a well-timed backstab of your employer, but then it just seems like you're changing whose pawn you are, and making a powerful enemy in the process.

[Steerpike]

It seems like the motivation is learning more and slowly disentangling some part of the great, complex web of conspiracies, and eventually, perhaps, getting "promoted" from pawn to some other piece. As the description says you're in it to get a peek at "the truth behind the curtain" even if that peek is fleeting and unclear.

Anyway, no mission is going to survive contact with PCs. People are going to go rogue, disobey orders, have ethical dilemmas, defect or work as double-agents. I imagine the longer a character plays the more they'd accrete personal goals.

[Rhamnousia]

Steerpike, first of all, I'm so glad that somebody remembers the Commission. Both are definitely the product of my fixation on conspiracy lore, but while the Black Chamber/Commission was pretty unrelentingly pitch-black in its tone, with Illuminati Mambo I'm aiming more for a mix of surreal humor to accompany the still-dark elements of the setting. High weirdness and comedies of error that still have real body counts, if that makes any sense.

sparkletwist, you're right that it's a mixed metaphor. To frame it another way, regardless of the conspiring and planning that took place behind the scenes, in the case of both JFK and Archduke Ferdinand, one of the most powerful men in the world was publicly assassinated out of the blue and in broad daylight. No matter how secure their positions might be, no member of the Illuminati is untouchable, especially by the same sort of people they trust to do their most delicate dirty work. True, the players aren't completely free agents, but one of the primary features of the Illuminati is that everybody is slaved together and nobody, not even at the highest levels, can be entirely sure that they aren't being manipulated by someone. I'd say what separates agents from true pawns is that while the people higher up on the food chain probably stand to profit more from their activities, the agents aren't without, well, agency. Knocking out the Chechen heroin pipeline that an Illuminatus master is using to fund his other schemes is most beneficial to his rivals, but the agents who actually get their hands dirty still driving away with a trunk full of pure Afghan horse; they find a some way to flip that and now they're in a stronger position than they were before. The New World Order runs with all the transparency and efficiency of a Soviet intelligence agency, so finding ways to quietly skim as much profit as you can off of your work is a key part of gathering strength and positioning yourself to eventually take the big leap to a higher tier. Is that intelligible to humans or am I just talking in circles here?

[Steerpike]

Yeah, the whacky absurdist/surrealist feel definitely comes through, if only through the sheer lunatic excess of everything.

This seems like a challenging setting to describe in a standard way, since so much of it is cloaked in mystery and uncertainty by design. Not that I'm not eager for you to proceed!

[Rose-of-Vellum]

I'm a big fan of your Black Chamber/Commission, so if this is anything like those settings/concepts (which it heartily seems to be), I'd love to hear more.

At the same time, I do see sparkletwist's concerns. With the Commission/Black Chamber, one could play BPRD-esque PCs trying to save the world -and the setting allowed them to succeed (if only to avert the Big Unbang for a little bit longer). Basically, what is the draw for players of long-term characters? Do secrets of the setting serve to motivate players as well as PCs? Or is it basically Grand Theft Auto on an international scale with supernatural mojo thrown-in? Are there ideological factions and patron personalities you plan on detailing?

From the little I've seen, I prefer the Commission to this project -but regardless, I'd like to see more of either.

[Rhamnousia]

Vellum, asking me some biting questions. I am actually really enjoying this encouragement to reevaluate the ideas I've put forth. As for what drives characters forward in the long-term, I'm tempted to just say "spy stuff", but I know that's not a wholly satisfactory motivation. I would hope that uncovering the secrets of the Illuminati conspiracies would motivate the players as well as the characters, but there's also the personal drama of working within the wilderness of mirrors: intrigue, betrayal, maneuvering, etc. You know, spy stuff. And then there's the fact that there are a lot of extremely bad people within the New World Order (even by the internal standards of a conscienceless ultrainvasive global shadow government) who the players might just want to try and take down on principle. But I guess that it's hard to easily and succinctly frame conflicts because the characters are part of the same organization as most of the people they'd be fighting. Does that make any sense?

I totally intend to at least briefly flesh out some of the more iconic and/or influential factions within the Unfinished Pyramid; that's mostly a matter of deciding what groups warrant the most attention, which I guess is a problem that every "all myths are true" idea has to deal with.

Also, everyone should check out Steve Jackson's amazing "50 Awful Things About The Illuminati" and these organizational charts made by actual conspiracy theorists if you want a sense of my inspiration. Just ignore the bits about World Zionism. Antisemitism is like the dark matter of conspiracy theory.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Hopeful the bites come across as helpful and good-natured (since that is their intent) versus petulant or caustic.

As for spy stuff, I think one of the major themes of many spy plots is "Us vs Them", and the the difference between what happens if They or We win. Take Cold War fiction (rather than reality). The methodologies of spies on both sides may have been similar, but the ideological (if not pragmatic) goals (even if half-hearted or not) were distinct. The Commission and Moscow Hotel were mirrors, but clearly gave the Us vs Them vibe. Moreover, you described how the post-Hotel Commission deals with rogue esoterrorists and irrational states, and that if the former don't stop the latter, all realities are in serious jeopardy. Even if some Commission plots and personas might sometimes be similar jeopardies, there is at least a meta-plot or assumption that players can fight to save the world. That if they don't act and succeed, the singularity apocalyptic disco will begin, and it will be very bad. With this Mambo, I currently don't get any of that. It's just Us vs Us(es), and everyone yet seems to crave the same thing (pursuit of control devoid of ideology). Sure, the factions and their bosses likely do have differences in aspirations, ideologies, and methodologies, but none of that is currently presented.

Basically, in many spy stories, you have these salient differences from the get-go. Sure, many of these plots end up showing that the differences are actually pale and insignificant, which creates a whole other set of tropes, because loyalty (and disloyalty) is part and parcel to spy fictions (moles, counterespionage, duty, temptation, etc.). But with the current (and understandably nascent) presentation of Mambo, it seems like we don't have any Thems, just an unclear Us, with loyalty and disloyalty all defined by personal gain, and there isn't even an illusion (much less reality) that it matters which of the Us(es) win the constant infighting and intrigue.

Granted, more material might rectify those issues. Or those issues might be mine alone and not in need of rectifying.

[Steerpike]

I think what Rose is partly getting as is the potential fuzziness of the stakes of any given mission when so much is nebulous and opaque. But I do think if there are salient differences between factions within the Unfinished Pyramid then this could be mitigated a lot.

One thing perhaps to note here is that most games have very clear stakes, including most occult/horror games. If there's a way to pull off a game where figuring out the stakes themselves is actually part of the fun... that could be really unique.

Part of this would be very DM dependent. If a given mission is super bizarre, with just enough clues to suggest that something strange and interesting is going on behind the scenes, most people will probably bite. In my experience most PCs like mysteries provided they're presented well.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Aye, very GM dependent and largely setting independent. The mysteries and their path(s) to revelation (i.e., individual adventure plots) become the draw, rather than the setting, characters, and the influence of the latter upon the former.

My two cents prefer a game where the setting, characters, plot, and their interactions are all reinforcers/motivators to players (and GMs).

[sparkletwist]

I would hope that uncovering the secrets of the Illuminati conspiracies would motivate the players as well as the characters

It would, and should! Except... maybe I'm reading too much into the way you've framed it, but it seems like it's never really going to be possible to uncover the truth, if only because nobody actually knows it. Like, every time you peel back a layer, there's another one, which I think is at the root of my worry that the PCs might not ever feel like they're able to get a handle on anything. And maybe that's just the style of game it is! I'm perfectly willing to concede it is just my preferred play style at odds with what type of game this is supposed to be, if that ends up being what it is.

Just ignore the bits about World Zionism. Antisemitism is like the dark matter of conspiracy theory.

I'm not trying to start any political or religious arguments here, but I don't think that it's necessarily inherently anti-Jewish to include Zionist conspiracy theories-- any more than it is inherently anti-Christian to include the Knights Templar, or inherently anti-Muslim to include the Assassins, or whatever. I won't deny that the people initially writing the conspiracy theories probably thought nasty things about the groups they were portraying, but that's probably true of most conspiracy theories, and that is the kind of thing that can be neatly excised from your setting by focusing more on the actual shadowy conspiracies and not assuming large groups of people are automatically up to no good.

[Ghostman]

What if among all the myriad secrets, there are some that are very special. Occult secrets. Profound cosmic secrets. The pieces of some kind of supernatural puzzle that, when all put together, result in something incredible happening to the people that did so. Maybe it's the vaunted place on the top of the pyramid. Maybe it's apotheosis. Maybe it's the singularity. Maybe it's the end of the world as we know it. Actually, none of those things are mutually exclusive, are they? :P Initially the game would be about discovering that these special secrets exist. After that it would be about collecting them all before anyone else. You could even have the measure of character advancement (xp/levels/skillpoints/whatever) be based on acquisition of secrets - the more you know, the more you grow.

I realize that's venturing pretty far into the supernatural and gonzo, so it may not be appropriate for the style and feel you're going for. But it would present a definite victory condition for the game, a long-term goal for player characters to pursue.