Illuminati Mambo

[Rhamnousia]

Yeah, the setting doesn't really allow for the players to ever assemble a "unified field theory" of how all the pieces of the Illuminati fit together, especially since by their actions, they're necessarily causing changes and realignments within the power structure. But I'm not aiming so much for a quasi-Lovecraftian "you cannot know these secrets because they are arbitrarily incomprehensible to humans" (to frame Lovecraft's cosmicism in the harshest possible manner); the characters can absolutely uncover, for instance, who is secretly pulling the strings behind the HAARP program, what their ultimate endgame is, and how the Reticulans and the Hyperboreans factor into things. You can find the answers to your questions if you look hard enough, but what you won't find is a single answer to all of your questions because that's not the way the system works. Peel back enough layers of the onion and eventually you'll find the truth, but there will still be lots of other onion-filled compartments.

Rose, I completely understand where you're coming from and like I said, I do plan to flesh out individual power players as soon as I can. I would say that people you don't know trying to murder you for reasons that you don't understand is a pretty big trope in espionage fiction that can serve as an excellent motivator, but, you're right, there really needs to be enough of a sense of what makes the various factions different enough that you'd ever bother killing for one over the others. The confusion is probably my own fault for not emphasizing enough the mutually exclusive differences in the Illuminati endgames. Some want to radically reduce the human population to a smaller and more easily-controlled number, while others want to drive us right to the edge of a Malthusian extinction so they can provide the largest possible blood sacrifice. Some promote eugenics and ethnic cleansing out of a sense of racial superiority (but not necessartily races we'd recognize) and some are only using that ideology as a front for what is essentially a vast monocropping scheme. Some want reascended Christendom, some want totalitarian Global Communism, and some just want a lawless world of libertarian chaos. I haven't exactly worked out who wants what (and if everyone within every sub-conspiracy even want the same thing) but hopefully that it's not that ideology isn't important to the Illuminati, but they're such a bucket of crabs that nobody has a realistic chance of ever implementing their master plans while their peers drag them down out of spite.

And maybe this is my personal preference totally coloring the concept, but I've always thought that getting some payback on the people who tried to kill you before "selling out" for a cushier office job (or the closest equivalent) was one of the better ways that a spy story could possibly end. Like the best fate that a PC can achieve is to become an NPC.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

I look forward to reading more.

[Rhamnousia]

In many ways, the Bilderberg Group is the face of the Illuminati. Sharing much of its membership with connected think tanks like the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, it is a conference of political, business, media, and military leaders, primarily from Europe and North America, that has been meeting annually 1954. The Group's objectives are simple: to leverage its members' enormous collective influence to manipulate world events in favor of authoritarian neoliberal corporatism and thereby ensure the oligarchs' continuing power and prosperity. This ideology is fundamentally atheist, which puts the Bilderbergers at odd with the more alien and esoteric elements within the Unfinished Pyramid, whose value conventional economics has difficulty quantifying. The Group is perfectly aware of the fact that the system it is profiting off of cannot be maintained indefinitely but most members are content to delay the inevitable meltdown for all long as absolutely possible before implementing any alternatives. However, a small number of alternative working groups within the conspiracy would prefer the collapse come sooner rather than later and are actively plotting to disengage the safeguards and drive the global economy straight into the ground.

The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, known more commonly as the Knights Templar were not, as is popularly believed, completely disbanded in 1312. Arguably the history's first multinational corporation, even when the lion's share of their assets were seized by the Church, the surviving Templars still had a vast network of secret chapterhouses hidden throughout Europe where they could hide and regroup and stockpiles of treasure looted from the Temple of Solomon itself with which they could fund renewed operations. There are two ideological strains within the Knights Templar: some have retained loyalty to the ideals of Christianity despite their persecution, while others worship a gnostic deity they discovered in the Holy Land that came to be known as Baphomet. These two sub-factions, known as White and Black Templars respectively, nevertheless maintain a pragmatic working relationship even as they vie for the position of Grand Master, who still oversees the operations of the Order. Templar influence can be found in the practices of two of their offshoot conspiracies, the more temporal and politically-inclined Freemasons (the Templars were among the many groups rumored to have bankrolled the Protestant Reformation) and the occult Rosicrucians, who inherited much of their knowledge of alchemy and black magic from Solomon's Temple. The Knights Templar do not dictate (at least directly) the activities of their successors and instead remain a separate organization. The Order maintains a now-global network of chapterhouses where they continue to train paramilitary forces, funded by their activities in investment banking and antiquities trafficking.

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, otherwise known as the Knights of Malta or SMOM, are the direct descendants of the medieval Knights Hospitaller, who benefitted immensely from the excommunication of the Templars when they absorbed many of the latter's assets. Officially, SMOM is Roman Catholic lay order, as well as a sovereign body that maintains permanent observer status at the United Nations, that engages in charity worldwide through its relief corps, Malteser International. Unofficially, SMOM uses its charity work as a convenient cover for its role as an intelligence apparatus of the Vatican; literal Knights even function as wetwork teams for the Holy See. The Knights of Malta control numerous Catholic organizations, such as the Knights of Columbus and the Society of St. Pius X and have deep working relations with Italian criminal syndicates and fascist movements throughout Europe, including the CIA-backed Operation GLADIO; SMOM even continues to secretly own several island nations in the Caribbean. SMOM has historically been an extremely reactionary organization and this has only barely tempered overtime: the objective of most of its leadership continues to be the reestablishment of Christendom a political force and the total destruction of Islam. To this end, it is willing to back far-right conservative parties and politicians even in majority Protestant countries like England and the United States.

The Society of Assassins emerged out of the medieval Nizari Ismaili Shia Muslim sect known as the Hashishin for their use of narcotics to indoctrinate their fidai operatives. Though their historic headquarters at Alamut were destroyed following a failed attempt to assassinate Möngke Khan, the Assassins survived by taking refuge in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Their goals are surprisingly restrained for the Illuminati: to defend Shia Islam (and to a certain degree the MENA region as a whole) from its adversaries. What makes them so formidable is their reach. The Assassins have had centuries to refine their practices and hone their techniques; today, the fidai are quite possibly the finest (human) killers in the world, an order of magnitude above even the likes of SEAL Team 6 or Kidon. Their only limit is their fanatical avoidance of absolutely any form of collateral damage. Short of that, they can and will use any and all means to eliminate their targets, even at the cost of their own lives. The headquarters of the Society is believed to be an impregnable subterranean bunker complex in northeastern Iran, not far from the ruins of Alamut Castle, constructed from them by the Iranian government as thanks for their assistance in overthrowing the Shah; other bases of power include Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Assassins have close working relationships with the Iranian VEVAK, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence, and the Russian GRU, whom they use for funding and intelligence gathering; in exchange, the Assassins train these agencies elite operatives. It is rumored that for the right price (running into the tens of millions), you can have a fidai eliminate any literally target in the world, no questions asked.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Glad to see more. Upon reading this, I am seeing less of a supernatural presence in the Mambo compared to the Commission/Black. Is this correct?

[Ghostman]

Is it intended that player characters should be affiliated with just one faction, or can they be a more mixed group? In the latter case, how would you prevent potential conflicts between PCs -- or is that even desireable, in a game focused on paranoia?

[Rhamnousia]

Rose, you would be correct about that. Supernatural and occult elements are a big factor within the Illuminati but they're not the central one. Where the Commission uses temporal institutions as a cover for deeper occult weirdness, the Illuminati Mambo is a lot more about how alien and occult weirdness interacts with the real world. Let me know if that makes no sense.

Ghostman, the Night's Black Agents version of GUMSHOE has a Trust mechanic that gives players bonuses for cooperating with their team mates, which they can also spend for well-timed backstabs. They can also buy various sorts of relationships with Icons (originally from The 13th Age) that represent major powers and personalities: the CIA, the Templar Grandmaster, etc. It's expected that every member of a group will have their own allegiances, even if they are all ostensibly working for the same faction. As for how to handle conflict of interest between PCs, it's less a matter of avoiding it than it is keeping it manageable – not forcing them to make any major choices between their superiors and their teammates until the campaign's been going on for a while. I'm envisioning there being a lot of conflict when it comes to "optional objectives." For example, the players have to eliminate a target but their various superiors have differing designs on what to do with them: silence them permanently, hand them over to another team, etc.

Their name derived from a Hebrew word meaning "apostate" or "those who fell", the Nephilim are the hybrid offspring of humans and foreign entities identified as "fallen angels", though whether or not they were true angelic beings or some other manner of alien is up for debate. Regardless of their origins, the Nephilim have a well-deserved reputation as Gibborim or monstrous giants: averaging around eight feet in height and weighing several hundred pounds, their vast physical strength is rivalled only by their vast wickedness. They are difficult to interact with because they rarely see any need to restrain their often-violent urges, but at the same time, they are often extremely intelligent. Nephilim, even those who have achieved positions of considerable authority, are often "active" conspirators who prefer to tackle issues in a hands-on manner whenever possible. While effectively ageless and able to regenerate from all but the most grievous of injuries, the Violent Ones are few in number after millennia of conflict, but they are supported by their own half-human offspring, known as Elioud. The Elioud are much smaller in stature but share their progenitors' physical and intellectual prowess, as well as their penchant for aggression and sadism.

When discussing pervasive Satanic conspiracies, it is important to distinguish between two related but distinct personalities that are often collapsed into one. Satan is the Adversary who was cast out of Paradise for his rebellion against the Godhead and as result rages against all that is good and holy. Lucifer, on the other hand, is the gnostic Shining One who stands in opposition to an evil and controlling Demiurge. So while they both represent rebellion against the status quo, they do so for radically different reasons. Satan rebels as an act of spiteful sabotage, Lucifer as an act of liberation. Lucifer would give humans the freedom to embrace their true potential beyond the commandments of an abusive cosmic patriarch, while Satan would grant them freedom only so they could destroy themselves with it. Satan in a troll; Lucifer is an SJW. As with libertarians and leftists, their differences can seem academic to outsiders, but the conflict between the Father of Lies and the Son of the Morning can be cutthroat. Further blurring the lines between the two, both Satanist and Luciferian groups can be either atheist or mystic and often employ similar rituals and practices.

The Atlanteans are the third of the four so-called prehuman (or perhaps previous human) root races that inhabited now-lost continents in previous epochs. Physically-speaking, Atlanteans closely resemble modern humans of ambiguously Southeast Asian-Amerindian extraction, but closer examination reveals an utterly alien genetic structure. Atlantis supposedly reached its golden age roughly one million years ago, with an empire that spanned much of Asia and the Americas. They were masters of both science and magic, employing mysterious vril energy along with psychic powers, but they were also utterly without morality; they practiced a sort of "anti-Buddhism" centered around the worship of the dragon Thevetat. They were particularly accomplished in the field of biological manipulation, which they used to breed all manner of human-animal hybrids as both shock troops and sex slaves. While their civilization collapsed without a trace more than ten thousand years ago, the Atlanteans are somehow still very much active. What exactly they want is a matter of debate: involvements in mystical secret societies, globalization initiatives, and Third World development seems to suggest that they want to restore their old empire. How the Atlanteans are still extant is even more debatable: theories abound from classic hibernation chambers to a viral "stay-behind program" that implants modern hosts with millennia-old memories and genetics.

In the same way that the CIA uses Skull and Bones to groom future leadership candidates, the Illuminati uses the unassuming Zeta Gamma Tau sorority to identify and induct its future field operatives. There could be a chapter of ZGT at your alma mater and you'd never know it, but that's kind of the whole point, isn't it? With entry standards that are absolutely arcane and a hazing process that's more MK Ultra than Animal House, ZGT doesn't look to recruit the best or brightest candidates: it looks for weirdest, or rather, the ones most open to weirdness. ZGT alumnae can universally look forward to promising careers of pretending to be a market analysts or a political consultants. The sisterhood, and fraternities and sororities like it, are not beholden to any particular power within the Illuminati; everyone agrees that the benefit of starting agents off so early is important enough to not risk compromising with their internal squabbling.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Rose, you would be correct about that. Supernatural and occult elements are a big factor within the Illuminati but they're not the central one. Where the Commission uses temporal institutions as a cover for deeper occult weirdness, the Illuminati Mambo is a lot more about how alien and occult weirdness interacts with the real world. Let me know if that makes no sense.

Makes perfect sense. Thanks.

[Rhamnousia]

What do you think of the individual elements I've presented so far?

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Man, I really don't know (or know how to explain my feelings). They are all good, but... I'm likely just crying over the spilt milk (i.e., Commission), as none of them give me a flavor-punch-in-the-face like your work from Bastard's Bastards, Manticore Gardens, or  Commission. Perhaps that's because they seem to me to be less original or innovative, as most don't deviate from common lore (e.g., the Nephilim, Atlanteans). Granted, there are some cool little nuggets like the anti-Buddhism (tell me more about that!) and the viral stay-behind-program, but I really don't feel inspired as a player to want to fight for any of these factions. Also, I don't buy the ultra-sectarian Illumunati respecting the ZGT's neutrality.

But maybe this setting just isn't my cup of tea, and that's okay. There are many other tea drinkers (for the cup you're brewing) and many other cups of tea (for me), including your all your other past work. 

[Steerpike]

While Bastard's Bastards and The Plateau are my favourites of your work I think I prefer this one to The Commission... de gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose. I liked The Commission a lot, especially the code-words (SKULLFUCK ROULETTE!?), but I dig the frenzied superfluity of competing powers here.

Just the fact that Lucifer and Satan are different entities is super cool, for example. Nothing reduces in this setting, it's a real conspiracy kitchen sink.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Aye, include The Plateau in the list of settings I love and would love to hear more about!

[Rhamnousia]

I actually have a reworking of the Bastardverse in mind, but I'm waiting until real-life responsibilities have been fulfilled before I try to tackle another project. I'm thinking of dividing the Unfinished Pyramid into anarchist and hierarchical tiers to give it some semblance of intelligibility, with the mass of independent cells and covens eventually collapsing into barely more stable chains of command. Don't know if that'd be better or worse.

The difference between Satanism and Luciferianism is based off of a real ideological difference and it's interesting (read: surreal) to see members of the old-school Church of Satan pen actual op-eds in Breitbart about how the Satanic Temple are social justice liberals who're blaspheming the name of Devil-worship by culture-jamming in the Bible Belt.

And I really need to run a Plateau game once I graduate in December.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

And I really need to run a Plateau game once I graduate in December.

Why yes, yes, you do. :)

[Steerpike]

I would be very interested in a Plateau game.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Also, I'd humbly recommend you add it to your signature link-list of settings, Rhamnousia.