The Campaign Builder's Guild

Let Me Put It This Way...

There's a secret world you didn't even know existed.

Yeah, how many times have you heard that before? The same recycled crackpot conspiracy-theory paranoid-schizophrenic bullshit about the invisible monsters living in the shadows of every major metropolitan area. Those card-carrying members of the Tinfoil Hat Society forgetting their antipsychotics and claiming they say ran into Bigfoot or a werewolf or the cross-dressing ghost of J. Edgar Hoover way out in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. That worn-out wannabe New Age neopagan spiel saying that magic really does exist and you can unlock your own mystic potential if you buy this book for just three easy payments of 19.99! You'd have to be an idiot or insane to believe any of that garbage.

Well fuck you, because it's true.

Everywhere, in every single city mankind ever built since the day we first ventured out of the cave, things have been lurking in the shadows our lizard brains still tell us to be terrified of. Monsters. Do I need to break this down for you? Do you not watch TV? Because this shit should really be self-explanatory by now. Witches. Vampires. Ghosts. Psychics. Spirits. Faeries. Werewolves. Dragons.

Welcome to the Occult Underground, motherfucker.

Don't you know there's a war on?

The Quick and Dirty Lowdown

The Occult Underground is exactly what it says on the tin. Simple enough. No? See, the word occult used to mean "the knowledge of the hidden" and specifically referred to science back in the days before Aleister Crowley (the limey fuck) went and associated it with Hermeticism and tarot cards and summoning demons and all that fuckery. Get the double meaning? The Underground is both a secret and it's full of the supernatural shit that freaky goth chick in your high school totally got off on.

Now that I've dropped some knowledge on your ass, let's get to the good stuff. There're a few pieces of essential information everyone should get through their heads if they don't want to get fucked in the least pleasant and most federal prison-y sense of the word.

Allow me to break it down like fractions.

There Is Indeed A War On: If you want to know the history of the Occult Underground, here you go. The entire thing, the entire goddamn thing going back to the dawn of fucking civilization, has been one colossal clusterfuck of violence and conflict and man's inhumanity to man. Well, more like inhumanity's inhumanity to inhumanity, but fuck you. And this is not some invisible struggle between Good and Evil over the souls of mankind or for control of the world's governments. It's one part mob war, one part blood feud, one part crusade. Shake well. Serve over ice. You want to know why I think we're doing this? Crabs. We're all just crabs in a bucket that can't stand to see anyone else climb out so we all keep dragging each other back down. We're like a bunch of South American cannibals eating each other's heart for power while the Spanish burn down our village and give us all smallpox. Personally, I don't have a clue how any of this has managed to stay a secret, because it ain't fucking subtle. People get gunned-down in drive-by shootings. Heads get sawed off on video tape. Houses burn down. Cars-bombs go off in the street. Curbs get stomped. And nobody who's not part of it notices a thing.

Occult Underground, Not Occult Mainstream: We are not 500 year-old vampires lounging around in our ivory towers and invisibly manipulating the course of world events like the undead Bilderberg Group. Not that they don't exist, but who the shit really gives a fuck about those Great White Brotherhood motherfuckers when the werewolves next door are trying to muscle in on your turf?

The Government Isn't In On It: What, you really think the government has a secret bureau dedicated to dealing with the occult? Bitch, do you watch the news? At all? It took us ten fucking years to find Osama Fucking bin-Laden and that asshole couldn't even turn invisible! So no, the BPRD is not coming for your ass and the Men in Black are just a criminally-underrated television show and a couple of campy action flicks. Now don't get me wrong, there's people in the 5-0, the FBI, the DA's office who all know what's what. But they have real lives and real jobs and don't get paid nearly enough to deal with this shit so as long as you don't actively step on their toes they'll leave you be and may even be willing to trade a few favors.

Made in America: The war's everywhere there are people and thus the monsters who prey on said people, but the good ol' US of A seems to be a hotbed of violence. Lots of theories as to why exactly that is. A lot of the old countries like the ones over in Europe, they've had a couple hundred years to figure of their shit out and now they have all these accords and pacts and agreements that keep things simmering without boiling over. But America, Land of Opportunity , was like a great big invitation for every Tom, Dick, and Dracula who wanted to get a slice of the apple pie and there's nothing to keep them from ripping the throats out of anyone who gets in their way. It's straight-up Wild West in some places and having the majority of the world's supply of firearms floating around certainly doesn't help keep things gentlemanly.

It's Not Business, It's Personal: The Occult Underground might seem like a great big place where you can just slip under the radar, but believe me when I say it isn't. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows everyone else and you better believe you are on one of those someone's shit-lists because this place is too goddamn crowded to not step on a few toes. So when the gloves come off and the knives come out everyone goes at it with so much relish they wouldn't spread it on a Coney Island hot dog.

They Write Romance Novels About This Shit: You think we don't know the collective soaked-panties the modern media has when it comes to things like "urban fantasy" and "gothic romance"? We know all about Twilight and Harry Potter and those trashy little vampire novels they sell in grocery stores. It's incredibly fucking convenient too, lets us hide behind the shield of human incredulity. So many motherfuckers walk around trying to look like vampires that nobody would even know a real bloodsucker if it looked them in the eyes and said "Blaaagh!" Plus, I get so much pussy at those book releases...

Real Punks In A –Punk World: All these genres chocking on their own post-modernism and jilling-off to Isambard Kingdom Brunel and William Gibson and you know what crucial element they've forgotten in their obsession with steam and cyber and a million other interchangeable aesthetics? The Punk. The anger and the disdain for any king you didn't vote for and the refusal to obey any laws you didn't write in your own goddamn blood and tears. Not us. The Occult Underground is all about that barely-contained anarchy, DIY attitude, and self-expression so radical Anton LaVey would tell you to back the fuck up and cool it.

The First Rule Is Looking Cool: Call us a shallow bunch of motherfuckers, but we all knows the importance of weaponized fashion sense. Everyone's got their own personal aesthetic and biting someone else's shit is almost as bad as biting someone else's throat. Bodies tattooed with alchemical formula from Paracelsus and Jabir. One-percenter colors with Solomonic pentacle-patches. Ear lobes pierced with coffin-nails. Denim jackets embroidered with grimoire-text. Go crazy.


[ooc]More to come soon, including a list of the major supernatural types and a breakdown of the cosmology, but for right now I'd like to hear anyone's thoughts on the general premise so far. [/ooc]

>>Occult Underground, Not Occult Mainstream: We are not 500 year-old vampires lounging around in our ivory towers and invisibly manipulating the course of world events like the undead Bilderberg Group. Not that they don't exist, but who the shit really gives a fuck about those Great White Brotherhood motherfuckers when the werewolves next door are trying to muscle in on your turf?

I like the idea of Neo-Nazi Vampires... even though I don't think you were literal about that, but still, It seems like it would have a good place in a Tom Holt novel. :)

I'll admit I find it a little difficult to read with all the f-'s, but I do note cleverness especially with your references and entendres regarding Crowley.

I'd like to know why the Government isn't involved, but I suspect that will be revealed later.

This reads, as someone noted in the other thread, a lot like World of Darkness, but it also reminds me of Shadow Chasers from D20Modern. I am looking forward to reading more and welcome to the site!

I like this. Daring writing too.
Keep it up!

Yeah, brilliantly written, and I for one appreciate the f-bombs, they texture things nicely.  It actually seems more like a subversion of World of Darkness to me.  In WoD the Masquerade is this tentative, fragile thing that has strict penalties for being breached and that takes a lot of effort to maintain, and vampires definitely have their fingers in a lot of pies.  Here, not so much.  Shadow Chasers (as I remember) had more of a Good versus Evil vibe, too (the Shadow vs us), whereas this has more of an "occult relpolitik" thing going on.

I love it.

So there's a few more quick little bites about the Occult Underground. Hopefully you're starting to get a better picture of the style and character I'm going for even if the substance is still a little bit murky. Coming up next: a breakdown of the types of monsters pounding the streets of the OU.

Quote from: SteerpikeBodies tattooed with alchemical formula from Paracelsus and Jabir. One-percenter colors with Solomonic pentacle-patches. Ear lobes pierced with coffin-nails. Denim jackets embroidered with grimoire-text. Go crazy.

Oh FUCK yes.

Wrong "too" in this passage "too goddamn crowded too not step on a few toes."  Tiny nitpick.

The Unusual Suspects

The Gifted have too many goddamn names to count. Witches, magicians, warlocks, sorcerers, necromancers, spiritualists...every culture has at least one word for the people who can do scary shit that no one else can. They look like humans and act and feel like humans and they sure as fuck die like humans but they're definitely not the same thing as humans. The Gifted, they have The Gift, which is a convenient little catch-all way of saying they can do fucking MAGIC. I know we can all do our own special little magics but not like the Gifted can. Not even close. Not that they can all do everything or even-mostly everything but you can bet your tits they can do a lot and the Gifted are nothing if not a varied bunch. Every one of them does magic a little differently or puts their own unique spin on it.

Vampires are the poster-children for the Occult Underground and have been since the Victorians realized that mysterious foreigners sticking their fangs in the soft virgin flesh of Englishwomen's necks was a great way to express their deeply-repressed masturbatory fantasies. Chances are you already know the basics of them. They're undead. They (usually) feed on the fresh blood of the living. They're (usually) killed by fire or daylight or a stake through the heart and not really a whole lot else. They can reproduce by fangfucking some (un?)lucky human. What you never want to forget about vampires: no matter what they look like on the outside, there's power in those dead veins of theirs and just like a good whiskey it only gets more potent with age. Because wine is for pussies.

Shapeshifters shift their shapes. Go fucking figure. But no for real, they've got animal-spirits or something inside them because one moment they look like an average Jane on the street and the next moment they're eight feet of fanged, slobbering atavism. People like to focus on werewolves because they're a nice balance of our primal fears and our primal lusts, but there are a whole fuck of a lot more were-beasts than just that. Were-cats. Were-deer. Were-spiders. Were-hyenas stalking the Sudanese ghettos of Seattle. Albino were-crocodiles living in the New York City sewer system. Whatever it is that lets them turn from man to beast or something in between is some sort of hereditary trait, so most of those stories about the bite of a werewolf turning you into a monster are bullshit. Most.

Faeries are very strange and special little fuckers. Whether or not they intentionally ape human folktales or those human folktales were inspired by them is pretty much a chicken-egg debate. What we can all agree upon is that most look like they stepped out of the pages of Grimm's Fairy Tales as directed by Takashi Miike. They seem to have great difficulty acting contrary to their own "character" so that ogres will almost always be physically powerful but have massive impulse-control issues and lantern-eyed drow will never be as comfortable in the light as they are in the dark. It's all very, very...meta, in an absolutely terrifying way since you don't know if you figure into their story.

[ooc]Coming soon: The Possessed, Psychics, Spirits, Ghosts, and Demons. Is there anything anyone thinks I should toss in there while I'm at it? I wouldn't be putting this up here if I didn't want to hear your creative input as well!

Fuck it! I'm doing breakdowns of American cities next and I'll come back to this shit when I feel inspired.[/ooc]

I'm liking this very much, so far. Are all shapeshifters of the animalistic were-being type, or are there others that don't conform to that?

[ooc]Okay, so, I'm stuck. My original plan was to take the following list of cities and write up a blurb about each before I flesh them out one-by-one, but then I realized that wasn't nearly as simple as it sounded and I hit a wall. I'm awful at blurb-writing. So what I'm asking is if anyone has a suggestion for which city I should start with. I mean, I have ideas for all of them, but nothing helps me make a decision like someone else pointing and saying "Try that one."

Boston, MA.
Chicago, IL.
Dallas, TX.
Detroit, MI.
Las Vegas, NV.
Los Angeles, CA.
Miami, FL.
New Orleans, LA.
New York City, NY.
Nashville, TN.
Philadelphia, PA.
Seattle, WA.
[/ooc]

I live in Miami, so I suppose I'm curious what you'd have to say about it.  I'll gladly tell you what it's like from a resident's point of view, too, if it'd help.

Personally, I'm far more interested in places like New Orleans, Detroit, and Seattle, though.

I think New York and especially New Orleans are a bit over-done when it comes to things like this. Anything in the South makes me automatically think of True Blood.

I think Seattle, with all the rain would work good, as would Detroit, with it's plethora of problems and urban wasteland (while not a Detroiter, I am a Michigander, so I can help there.)

One thing I'd like to offer to that list is Saint Louis, MO. Partially because I'm a native here, but also because there's a pretty big history of ghost stories that take place here - the movie The Exorcist was based on something that happened in Saint Louis, and part of it took place on Saint Louis University's campus (I managed to "sneak" into the room where it happened on the closed off 4th floor, and I have some stories to tell.) There's a pretty active occult community here, and a ton of big catholic churches for set pieces - not to mention it has the crime rates like Detroit a big urban wasteland across the river from the main town.

EDIT: But that wasn't the question - and I'm with Leetz and would go with Detroit or Seattle for your first one. :P

Nashville- I'd like to see you take on the most challenging one first. I'm assuming moonshine will play a part. And music?

Then Vegas for the faeries.

I love it. I enjoy the subject matter and especially the voice. It's a style that so few have the desire (or the balls) to shoot for, and many that try fail, but you pull off nicely. It actually makes me want to go back to the Key City Punk Rock Horror Show idea I had for a game. Don't let anyone get to you about the language, either. I don't think anyone here is ignorant enough to disregard something that is obviously quite good just because they don't like a couple of words (for no good reason).

Are you familiar with the Top Cow comic books? They're published by Image and include Wicthblade, The Darkness, Artifacts, and the Magdalena, among others. Sort of occult super heroes. Some of those might interest you. Above all others, I would suggest checking out the collected edition of Tom Judge The Rapture. You could practically be writing this as Tilly from that.

As for cities, if you just want someone to point at one I would say Detroit. Because I love Robocop.

Pending my fleshing-out of some new ideas of mine and posting them up here, I wanted to know if people thought a) that this was an idea worth continuing and b) whether I should go with a setting where the supernatural exists in it's own highly-secretive world (a la the World of Darkness or Underworld) or where it is public knowledge (more like True Blood or the Anita Blake series)?

I have a suggestion.  Split the difference.

No game I know of has set an 'occult underground' campaign in a World of the Rending Masquerade, but really that makes a lot of sense.  Up until the mid-20th century supernatural creatures could keep themselves a secret by killing any credible witnesses they couldn't intimidate, and it also makes sense that as of the '70s and '80s such creatures would try to makes themselves part of emergent technological industries in a way that would permit them to control information access on a large scale, but it seems inevitable that such a policy would eventually fail. 

So consider making the setting about that failure.  I live in Savannah, GA, widely touted as the Most Haunted City in America, and I have a number of contacts with the local tourism industry.  How might that industry change if the local ghosts held a meeting and said, 'You know what?  We could have some real fun with this.' and started posing for pictures?  How might the Catholic Church handle it if some bishops held a press conference in the Vatican and announced that it was unfair not to tell people that they had been vampires for decades?  What if a pro wrestler stood up in the ring after pinning his opponent and turned into a bear before leaving the arena?  ...or before the match started, whatever might have the more amusing result...

I can easily imagine the Libertarian candidate fielding a question about whether his party is a front for the Fairie Queene by saying 'What if we are?  We pay taxes too!'

I know, I'm somewhat losing the Punk ethos, but that general concept doesn't stress my suspension of disbelief the way the various 'it's all a well-kept secret' settings do.  And as for True Blood and Anita Blake, there's something kind of staid about them.  It's like we enter the setting with all the disbelief kind of settled down, and the resulting traditions already entrenched.  You can tell some good stories there, but we never get to see the Crazytime before that.  And seriously, there should be some Crazytime.

My two cents.

Beautifully put DeeL, beautifully put. That really helped me crystallize the direction I want the setting to go in, so thank you very much for your input.

I'm thinking in the world of the Occult Underground, the supernatural's always been something that's lurked just beneath the surface, behind the absolute thinnest of veils. The only thing that ever kept it a secret was low population densities, limitations in information technology, and a general refusal of most mortals to accept the bloodsucking elephant in the room. It's only in the past couple of decades that things have begun to change, that the protective masquerade has begun to peel away, with the monsters finally "coming out of the coffin" within the past decade. Even now though, they're still not widely accepted, or even acknowledged at all. They may have a presence in pop culture, but they still have a world of their own that regular humans don't really understand and aren't all that welcome in. It's a bit like the Mafia or the Free Masons: it's not hard to find out who they are or even where they meet, but not a lot of outsiders have any idea what goes on with them.

How's that sound?

I'll post up my reworked list of supernatural categories. Right this instant, they're probably going to be Vampire, Shapeshifter, Faerie, Ghoul, Ghost, and Possessed, but that's subject to change.

I think I neglected to mention it before, Queen of Quiet, so I'll say it now - I really like this setting idea, and your way of expressing it.  It's the kind of thing that makes me want to see more.

Have you ever heard of Nightlife, a PnP RPG that some insist was the inspiration for the World of Darkness?  It's got most of the tropes of the genre - the PCs are monsters, the supernatural is a big secret, underground wars are common - with a massive layer of splatterpunk.  I've always admired the simplicity of it's system, gameplay is all percentile with modifiers based on your character traits and skills.  What system were you thinking of using with this setting?

I'd heard bits and snippets about Nightlife before and always thought it sounded like a cool retro-RPG, but now that I've gone ahead and actually read the book, I've got a whole new appreciation for it. Mind you, it's 90s as fuck, incredibly on-the-nose, and leaves practically nothing up to the imagination, but I dig the heavy emphasis on splatterpunk (something that's definitely going to be a major theme in my setting). I also like their mix-and-match system for supernatural powers. I don't know if I'll necessarily go with that sort of system, a stripped-down version of Storyteller, or something completely different.

Anyway, I've narrowed down the list of supernaturals that will make up the majority of the Occult Underground. They are...

Vampires

AKA: Vampers, fangs, Counts, Orlocks, Draculas.

The perfect pale poster-children for the Occult Underground, the unliving embodiment of what happens when you mix the Victorian's ridiculous sexual repression with an unhealthy obsession with death and a dash of paranoia about mysterious foreigners defiling their virginal women. One part necrophilia, one part cannibalism, one part sexual predation. Mix well and serve over ice.

Power source: Vitae

Magic: Disciplines


Shapeshifters

AKA: Weres, shifters, ferals, 'thropes (from therianthropes).

Aristotle called man a "rational animal". Well, as it turns out, some of us got a little less of the rational and a whole fuck of a lot more of the animal. People like to focus on werewolves because they're a nice balance of sexy and terrifying, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Were-cats. Were-bears. Were-spiders. Were-falcons. Even fucking were-alligators.

Power source: Feral Heart

Magic: Aspects


Faeries

AKA:  Fey, the Fair Folk, Grimms, goblins, Morgan (as a name).

Even next to talking corpses sipping blood martinis and skin-changing beast-men, faeries are a bunch of weird little fuckers. Most of them look like they stepped from the pages of some Black Forest fable that would make the Brothers Grimm's beards curl. Which of course leads to the annoying-ass chicken-egg about whether or not they inspired primitive folktales or just ripped them off, but that's neither here nor fucking there. I'm not even going to begin to try and categorize them: it's a madcap clusterfuck of sprites, elves, pixies, trolls, ogres, goblins, nymphs, both familiar and different enough to get their asses way the fuck down in the Uncanny Valley.

Power source: Glamour

Magic: Contracts


Ghouls

AKA: Zombies, Zeds, wights, Cannibal Corpses.

Ghouls are a lot like vampires, only cranked all the way up to eleven. They died (for realsies) and when they came back, they came back wrong. Really, really fucking wrong. Their emotions are so dull they're basically fucking sociopaths. There's only one passion in existence: the Hunger. It's a constant buzzing, an inescapable ache, and they will do anything, ANYTHING, to try and satisfy it...however brief that satisfaction might be.

Power source: ?

Magic: ?


Ghosts

AKA: Caspers, sheets, haunts, phantoms.

As you may or may not have been able to deduce thus far, everybody dies but not everybody dies quietly or for very long. Ghosts were once mortals who shuffled off this mortal coil but got cold feet when they dipped their toes in the River Styx and came running right the fuck back to the land of the living. But just like your boyfriend after he found out what you pulled over Spring Break, it wouldn't have them back. So they haunt their old stomping-grounds, incorporeal, invisible, untouchable.

Power source: Essence

Magic: Numina


The Ridden

AKA: Linda Blairs, horses, channellers, Voodoo Children.

It must really suck being human and having so many invisible horrors that just want to fuck you over in all sorts of creative ways. As frail as they are, mortal bodies look really, really good to all sorts of insidious little nasties that, if they can find a way in, make themselves real comfortable in some poor fucker's grey matter. In a particularly-horrific team-building exercise, the two minds are smashed together and something loosely-resembling a whole personality sometimes crawls from the wreckage.

Power source: Synthesis

Magic: Mutilations

Quote from: Queen of Quiet

Also coming are Ghosts and Possessed (really need a more evocative name for them), but I wanted to put up what I had so far.

The ridden?

Added bits about Ghosts and The Ridden, fleshed-out Faeries, named the Power Sources and Magics for the different supernaturals.

Right now I'm working on an actual geographical write-up for Kentucky which, in addition to being my native state, never seems to be used as a setting for this (or really any other) type of horror. I'm juggling this with school starting, so it's going pretty slowly, but I hope to have something worth reading soon.

[ooc]This is the first bit of my attempt at re-doing the Occult Underground to be something a little less mainstream urban fantasy and a lot more macabre and splatterpunk-y, which I'm tentatively calling 'The Underworld". Let me know what you think.[/ooc]

Fuck your "Occult Underground". You think a bunch of wannabe Harry Potters with holes in their ears you could stick a dick through tonelessly fingerbanging their daddies' old guitars and underhand-tossing watered-down hexes at each other in some shitty suburban basement is "underground"? Motherfucker, you don't even know the meaning of the world. You people, you infernal fucking hipsters, you bandy around words like "chthonic" and "squamous" and "cyclopean" like they make you sound like any less of a pathetically self-indulgent little nerd now than they did eighty-six years ago, when you haven't even seen the sort of cerebrum-searing shit that first put those words on a madman's tongue and gouged out his eyes as royalties. Nerd culture and undersexed fangirls ate supernatural horror alive, like, two fucking decades ago, but you know it was all bullshit to begin with because it didn't chew its way out of their fucking stomachs like it was one of H.R. Geiger's homoerotic wet dreams. If there was even enough truth in the most ludicrous of the post-bath salts zombie conspiracy theories to bump off a Vegas showgirl's tit, you quicks would be tying anyone who yawned too throatily to lampposts and pouring on the gasoline.

I'm not here to put this nicely, or politely, or in such a way as to ensure you don't take your grandma's .38 and aerate your own brainpan with it, because by all means, go ahead and bite the not-so-proverbial bullet: we'll have a nice welcoming committee, just for you. I'm here to grab you by the hair and drag your ass out of the comforting light of your supposed reality and into the horrid actuality of a world you didn't even know you didn't know existed.

I hope your momma left you some pocket change, because we're going to The Underworld, baby.

You got one thing right, at least: occult really did used to mean "knowledge of the hidden" or some crap like that, which makes it all the more mind-boggling that you people use it to describe the sort of shit you write fucking comic books about. And don't give me that crap about "the meaning of words changing over time": that shit only flies when you're too short-lived to remember what they meant in the first place or too pants-on-head retarded to go look it up yourself. So no, the occult, the real, honest-to-squamous "occult", does not include the likes of vampires, werewolves, witches, and faeires. Am I saying they don't exist? No, but you better believe they stopped being allowed to eat lunch with the cool kids about the time the first picture of Lestat started to get a little bit crusty, and much like your beloved H.P. Lovecraft and literally any ethnicity in the whole fucking world, you wouldn't know one if you saw one but you'd still probably shit all over yourselves anyway.

I stand corrected, two things: Aleister Crowley really was a limey fuck, wasn't he? Great Beast, my wormy, fucking ass.

Actually, the more I look at it, there's a few bullet-points that don't totally suck dick, so I'll let them stay:

Quote from: Queen of QuietIt's Not Business, It's Personal: The Occult Underground might seem like a great big place where you can just slip under the radar, but believe me when I say it isn't. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows everyone else and you better believe you are on one of those someone's shit-lists because this place is too goddamn crowded to not step on a few toes. So when the gloves come off and the knives come out everyone goes at it with so much relish they wouldn't spread it on a Coney Island hot dog.

Quote from: Queen of QuietReal Punks In A –Punk World: All these genres chocking on their own post-modernism and jilling-off to Isambard Kingdom Brunel and William Gibson and you know what crucial element they've forgotten in their obsession with steam and cyber and a million other interchangeable aesthetics? The Punk. The anger and the disdain for any king you didn't vote for and the refusal to obey any laws you didn't write in your own goddamn blood and tears. Not us. The Occult Underground is all about that barely-contained anarchy, DIY attitude, and self-expression so radical Anton LaVey would tell you to back the fuck up and cool it.

Quote from: Queen of QuietThe First Rule Is Looking Cool: Call us a shallow bunch of motherfuckers, but we all knows the importance of weaponized fashion sense. Everyone's got their own personal aesthetic and biting someone else's shit is almost as bad as biting someone else's throat. Bodies tattooed with alchemical formula from Paracelsus and Jabir. One-percenter colors with Solomonic pentacle-patches. Ear lobes pierced with coffin-nails. Denim jackets embroidered with grimoire-text. Go crazy.

There're a few general rules to keep in mind when talking about the denizens of the Underworld. Actually, there's, like, three, so you got no excuse if you can't remember them.

First things first, we don't stick out heads out from beneath the manhole covers during the day. For some of us, sunlight sears like an acetylene torch; for others, it just gives a nice tingling sensation a lot like getting dick-acupuncture inside of a light bulb. But it's more than that. The sun is life and energy, hope and warmth. It's a symbol of inspiration to the quick, and the blazing antithesis of everything we are. You want a good comparison, imagine waking up every morning with a fiery fucking skull staring down at you. Yeah, so you can probably see why we keep in on the subterranean until after dark.

Second thing, we're not fucking sexy. I don't know when vampires suddenly became crazy postmodern sex-symbols, but rest assured that shit doesn't really fly. Would you think someone who wanted to fuck an ice-cold Victorian corpse is any less of a goddamn deviant just because said corpse could talk? Didn't think so. Now, not all of us are monstrously-hideous, but even the ones who seem like they'd be pretty hot on paper have that particular sort of charnel aura that surrounds fresh roadkill: no matter how much you like venison, it's still not some place you'd want to put your tongue.

Last and certainly not least, there is absolutely no Grand Unified Fucking Field Theory of Undeath, no easy answer why we haven't shuffled off this mortal coil like so many other billions. For some, it's because of a curse, or a taint, or a pathogen, a mutation, possession, a parasite, a fungus, or just an inhuman act of will.

Now then, on to the juicy bits! Or the bony bits. Or whatever.

The Undead are your run-of-the-mill (and not-so-run-of-the-mill) walking corpses, bodies possessed of consciousness and animation but severely lacking that essential spark of life that makes the quick so, well, quick.

The Spectral have the opposite problem: they're nothing but spirits, nice and incorporeal. Sure, most can manifest enough to move objects or possess a body that may or may not already be occupied, but that's a lot of work.

The Twisted are what happens when a normal human gets exposed to the eldritch radiation that bubbles up from the bowels of the Hateful Earth. Ever wonder why subhuman mutants always seem to live in caves? It's not just because they've been shunned by the mortal world: living in a cave actually turns you into a subhuman mutant, at least some of the time.

The Outsiders come from realities outside our own, the kind of places the more pretentious of fucks like to call "dark anthropic zones": realms where life exists, but a kind of life that's wholly incompatible and quite often hostile to what we call life. Of course, because of the shape and constraints of our world, they get forced into boring three-dimensional bodies. Or at least, part of them does: like a circle talking to a sphere, only a cross-section of their entire being exists at any one time, the greater whole lurking in a space their new brains can't even comprehend anymore.

The Ancient are the last remnants of the antediluvian races that once ruled the earth in eons before humans even discovered fire, only to have fallen into centuries of degeneration and inbreeding. What few remain may or may not remember their past glories, which would only make the sting of having to cower in the shadows of the upstart apes burn all that much more.

[ooc]I still don't have a system totally nailed down, but my intention is for each of the five groups to have a handful of intrinsic attributes, with the players further selecting their own optional traits and abilities to better define their own breed of Underworlder a la Nightlife.[/ooc]