Wayland’s Smithy – A Hunter Conspiracy

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JezMiller Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:34 AM

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Following on from all the discussion about non-US-based Conspiracies, this is something that I created for an online game...

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History

In the 1860s, a young Englishman named Leighton Woodrow visited India on a mission for the Diplomatic Service. He never spoke of the details of what happened to him there, but in the course of his work, he and several companions encountered a Nosferatu of the Rakshasha bloodline which had been leading a particularly twisted and murderous Thuggee cult, about four decades after the last such cult had supposedly been wiped out. They managed to destroy the creature and put its followers to flight, but the experience taught them that the British Empire had enemies that conventional tactics and conventionally understood science could neither explain nor fight. Aware that they would make themselves a laughing-stock – at best – if they spoke openly of what they had seen, they decided to found their own secret organization to learn about such things and hunt them where necessary. In this, they were very much of their time – Victorian society teemed with secret quasi-mystical orders such as the Theosophical Society or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Woodrow’s group, however, took a rather more practical approach. Since the Rakshasha had shunned the daylight, they decided to name their new group the Mithraeum Club, a name taken from a Persian solar deity worshipped as a god of soldiers in the days of Rome. That was how they saw themselves – as soldiers dragging the creatures of the night into the cleansing light of the sun.

Woodrow himself had all the occult ability of a lump of chalk, and his fellow founders were hardly any more adept. They did, however, have wealth and connections in abundance, and these they used to seek out scholars of the occult. Many charlatans tried to take advantage of them, only to find themselves summarily thrown out onto the street by their prospective marks. After a few years, however, the Mithraeum Club had managed to recruit a large and talented stable of mediums and occultists. There were no true Mages amongst them, but a number of them did have real power – particularly the power to summon and bind ghosts and other spirits.

Woodrow was, more or less, a secret intelligence agent, and it didn’t take him very long – actually, all of about two seconds – to spot the potential uses of an invisible, incorporeal spirit as a spy. It didn’t take very much longer before the Mithraeum Club was interrogating every spirit it could lay its metaphorical hands on about the supernatural world. And because the Kindred, sadly, tend to create a lot of ghosts, the Mithraeum Club quite quickly learned that London was infested with vampires

They were patient, at first. They did their research. They compiled dossiers, cross-checking the knowledge gleaned from spirits with information from more mundane means of investigation. Within two years, they’d built up a shockingly complete profile of London’s Kindred population. And then they started to strike.

The Kindred didn’t notice, at first. The victims were relatively small fry; their disappearances could be attributed to the normal attrition of the Danse Macarbre. The Sheriff investigated, but with an eye to possible Kindred involvement; a group of mortal hunters were able to operate under the radar. Then the casualties started to mount up.

Woodrow had built a remarkably effective Hunter organization, but it had one Achilles heel. Many of its members tended to be wealthy, and usually aristocratic. This had been a deliberate policy of Woodrow’s to ensure that the Club had ready access to money and social influence, but the aristocrats proved poor Hunter material in other respects. They were too used to having things their own way. They were sloppy and undisciplined; often ignoring the rules and procedures that Woodrow had carefully devised to ensure the Club’s security. Worst of all, their carelessness started to infect the mediums and occultists who provided the organization with its secret weapon. Spirits started to escape from the control of their summoners, sometimes going on rampages in which innocent bystanders were injured. Finally, a particularly botched summoning conjured up a dark spirit which fed on the pain and terror of mortal victims, sometimes to the point of death.

Eventually, London's Mage community managed to locate and banish the spirit, but the experience destroyed the Club's morale and its faith in its own purpose. Sir Leighton Woodrow, stricken with guilt, decided that if he wanted to avoid more such incidents, the Mithraeum Club would have to close – permanently.

Perhaps, if the Great War hadn’t taken place, that would have been the end of it. As it was, the horrors of the trenches were enough to drive Mathias Galt, one of the youngest members of the Club at the time of its dissolution, to desperate measures. He conceived the idea of taking the Mithraeum’s researches one stage further. Instead of conjuring incorporeal spirits, he wanted to raise zombies, and send them to face the German machine-guns in place of living troops.

There were enough former members of the Mithraeum in positions of influence that Galt was able to secure support for his scheme, as insane as it sounded. He established himself at a small hospital a few miles from the front lines, ostensibly – and in most cases treated there, genuinely – a psychiatric institution. As before, he recruited followers from wealthy, influential backgrounds, but he learned from Woodrow’s mistakes. This time, there were no wilful dilettantes or arrogant spoiled brats amongst the membership, just serious, dedicated individuals devoted to a cause. In fairness, the horrors of the war produced far more of such people that Woodrow had ever had to work with. Galt named his new organization “Wayland’s Smithy”, for its intended purpose – to forge new, magical weapons for the defence of the British Empire. Galt had always had a somewhat rose-tinted view of the British Empire, seeing it as a civilizing force for peace and stability. His romanticized concept of Britain was heavily influenced by a boyhood fondness for the romances of Sir Thomas Mallory, and in establishing the group, he chose a preponderance of Arthurian imagery for its code names and call signs. As leader of the magical research effort, he took the name “Merlin” for himself.

In 1916, as the Battle of the Somme, Wayland’s Smithy performed the ritual which their researches had devised – a working partially based on ancient Babylonian religious rites. The result was spectacular, but not at all what they were expecting. Instead of raising troops on the battlefield, it was Galt who was dragged across the threshold of death and returned a seemingly undestructible undead creature.

Unable to repeat its success with Merlin, the Smithy tried other approaches, including locating and reviving a torpid Kindred elder. The result, in 1917, was the near-destruction of the organisation in a pitched battle between its remaining loyal members and those who the elder had managed to subvert.

Merlin’s plans were ruined, his hopes dashed, his organization in tatters. Nonetheless, he did his best to salvage the situation and rebuild the Smithy. By the time he’d even got close to success, the war was over and many of his former patrons were retired or dead.

The inter-war years were, to coin a phrase, the best and worst of times for Wayland’s Smithy. On the positive side, Merlin found plenty of occultists and plenty of wealthy patrons, but the organization, though it had money and talent, boasted few official connections, and without the over-riding need to find a solution to trench warfare, it lacked a strategic direction or coherent organization.

World War Two changed everything. Between the desperate need to protect the country from being over-run by Hitler’s war machine, the fact that several of the Smithy’s members had slipped into officer positions in the armed forces, where they could call on the Smithy’s help, and the discovery by certain interested parties on the Allied side that the Nazis had their own programme of occult research, Wayland’s Smithy was suddenly relevant again.

The first Director of the Smithy in its modern incarnation was Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Butler, a highly decorated officer who lost a leg in Africa and was seconded to work in the Cabinet Office. Butler had already had several encounters with the supernatural both before and during the war, and needed little convincing that it represented a resource to be seized by the Allies and denied to the Nazis when Merlin approached him with an offer of membership. He despised the aristocratic amateurism that had hitherto characterised the Smithy, however. He completely revamped the organization, establishing a clear chain of command to a four-man Board with himself at its head. Merlin might have been expected to resent his own de facto demotion, but in fact, he respected Butler and was convinced by his argument that a single, immortal leader for the Smithy would inevitably cause it to stagnate and rob it of the flexibility that it needed to respond to a rapidly changing world. That Butler made this argument is not without irony, for Wayland’s Smithy today remains essentially shaped by the vision he laid out in 1944. The Smithy actually refers to it as the “Butler Doctrine”, a phrase that started as an informal nickname but has, over time, become “officially” adopted.

The Five Key Elements of the Butler Doctrine

One: Wayland’s Smithy must be independent of government

Butler’s first strategic decision was that the Smithy would remain a private organization, not a government department. The primary reason for this was financial – he could easily foresee that a “department of things that go bump in the night”, as he put it, would be the first on the list for spending cuts during the financial lean times, and he also realized that lean times lay ahead for Britain once the war was won. Beyond this, he shuddered at the thought of having to explain to each new group of incoming Ministers, every five years or so, that yes, magic and ghosts and vampires were real and living… er, existing… right here in London and across the United Kingdom. And what would happen if some leak-prone political hack got drunk one night and revealed the existence of the Smithy to a tabloid journalist?

Two: Wayland’s Smithy must be self-financing and adequately resourced

From the first principle of independence naturally flowed the second key principle, that the Smithy should be self-financing. The initial sources of funding came from its upper-class members and backers, but Butler insisted on diversification from patronage to investment. During the post-war reconstruction, Wayland’s Smithy quietly and anonymously bought up shares in hundreds of different companies, along with property and banking ventures. Shrewd investment strategy (a phrase which Butler far preferred to “insider trading”), is far easier when ghosts and spirits are spying for you, and by the time the sixties had started to swing, Wayland’s Smithy had assets worth billions of pounds. The investment programme had other purposes beyond simply making money, though. It’s far easier to build a secret headquarters if you control a construction company, far easier to obtain advanced electronic equipment if you run an R&D department, far easier to treat your injured personnel if you’re the largest shareholder in a private clinic.

Three: Wayland’s Smithy is an organization of patriots

At Butler’s insistence, all these companies were British-owned and, as much as possible, British-based. He saw and feared the danger that it would become self-serving and obsessed with no greater cause than its own profit, and he was determined that it should remain dedicated to what he saw as a higher cause – protecting and advancing the interests of the British Empire. Wayland’s Smithy would be a fellowship of patriots; no others need apply. Although some of the more imperialistic and jingoistic elements of the Butler Doctrine have faded over time, and its investment base has broadened with the march of globalisation, the Smithy definitely retains its Britain-first attitude.

Four: Wayland’s Smithy must be influential

Butler’s position in the Cabinet office had proved invaluable to the Smithy, and he realized that it would be seriously hampered in its role. While he was determined that it should remain independent of government, he was equally clear that government could not remain independent of it. Therefore its recruitment strategy should focus on bringing in (carefully vetted) people of influence – senior civil servants, military officers, police, judges, even the occasional politician – who could bring pressure to bear on the authorities if it proved necessary

Five: The mission of Wayland’s Smithy is to protect Britain by finding means to control and exploit supernatural phenomena

Butler knew that the supernatural could be a serious threat to public safety, one that couldn’t always be countered by conventional means. The Smithy’s own M.O. demonstrated how effective spirits could be for espionage purposes, for example, and with the Cold War hotting up, the possibility of “Reds in the Ether” was a major preoccupation of the organization for the first couple of decades of its existence. (Fortunately unfounded – the intensely materialistic bias of the Soviet dictatorship blinded it to the idea that the supernatural might be real, but Cold War paranoia stopped the Smithy from seeing that). By the same token, if a way could be found to control the supernatural world, it would not only be neutralized as a threat, but would become a potent tool in advancing the country’s interests.

Butler had probably never heard the phrase “mission creep”, but he understood the principle all too well. He was determined that the Smithy should stay focussed on its core mission. It might render aid and assistance to the authorities and others on an ad hoc basis, but it should never establish any programme or working group that was not in some way aimed towards the exploitation of the supernatural.

Organizational Structure

Wayland’s Smithy is run by a four-person Executive Board. Although there is no actual rule to the effect, the Director has thus far always been an Affiliate, whereas the three Deputy Directors have always been specialists.

The Director, code-name “Arthur” – Sir Frederick Dalton, Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Home Office

The Director of Wayland’s Smithy is in overall charge of the entire organization. In practice, the post almost always goes to a senior government bureaucrat, who can exert considerable influence on the Smithy’s behalf, but whose normal duties leave him little leisure to oversee the organization, leaving most of the Smithy’s operations to be overseen by one of his three deputies. The Director has a small personal staff who look after policy and vet the recruitment of senior personnel, but the position is somewhat “hands-off”

The present Director is Sir Frederick Dalton, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office. (In the British Government system, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State (almost always referred to simply as the Permanent Secretary), is the chief executive of a government department, responsible for running it on a day-to-day basis. The Home Office, the department headed by Sir Frederick, is responsible for the maintenance of law and order, including the police, the fire services, and the domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5. It is in the latter portion of the Home Office that Sir Frederick has spent most of his career).

A grammar-school boy from a northern working-class background, Frederick Dalton won a scholarship to read History at Oxford before joining the Civil Service. He has spent his entire career in the Home Office, finally achieving his present position in 2002. A clever, generally self-effacing and wryly witty man, his background and attitudes have won him a reputation as the "simple copper's friend", but the more careerist, politically motivated senior members of the police force are rather less fond of him. Within his own department, he is known to be hostile to the sweeping expansion of surveillance powers overseen by New Labour. His argument is that the backlash created by allowing, say, local Councils to mount covert observation operations for utterly trivial reasons, will ultimately lead to restrictions on the powers which the security services actually need to defeat serious criminal and terrorist threats to public safety.

He joined the Smithy in 1981, after a nasty incident when he spent several weeks possessed by a spirit under the control of a witch. The experience left him with no disbelief left to suspend, making him an ideal target for Merlin’s recruitment pitch. Initially an Affiliate, he became Director in 1998.

Deputy Director of Resources and Personnel, code-name “Galahad” – Lt. Colonel Stewart Ingham, ret’d

The Deputy Director of Resources and Personnel is the most “mundane” member of the board. Rather than finding new ways to exploit the supernatural, his job is to manage the Smithy’s huge array of resources and investments, ensuring that its operations always have the money and equipment they need. It’s a highly complex and diverse job, ranging from managing stock portfolios to blackmailing millionaires into selling parts of their collections of antiquities to the Smithy.

Stewart Ingham, the present Deputy Director, was the leader of a counter-terrorism unit in Northern Ireland before the Smithy recruited him. A career military man, he has a great respect for established protocols and the chain of command – he is, essentially, a conformist. A first-rate administrator, he tends to delegate the more specialized aspects of the Smithy’s financial management to his subordinates.

Deputy Director of Research and Development, code name – “Nimue” – Dr. Katrina Henshaw

Katrina Henshaw was a biochemist working for a major international pharmaceutical company, but she was appalled by the way that her conglomerate denied vital antiretroviral drugs to Africa – except at exorbitant prices – and leaked various formulae to certain African governments so that they could produce their own cheap clones of the medication. The Smithy, impressed by both her principled moral stance and by her formidable scientific abilities, recruited her just ahead of a joint FBI-Europol operation, and gave her a new identity.

Although her bias is towards science rather than mysticism, Dr. Henshaw believes that results are what matters. If a magical procedure can produce consistent, verifiable results, she will do her damndest to figure out how to replicate it and add it to the Smithy’s arsenal. Although not mystically gifted herself, she has a large number of subordinates who are.

Deputy Director of Field Operations and Acquisitions, code name “Merlin” - Dr. Mathias Galt

Field Operations and Acquisitions are normally one and the same. Aside from the occasional elimination of a monster, the Smithy’s field operations are almost all aimed at obtaining new captives and artefacts for study. The Field Operations Directorate is also responsible for identifying and approaching new recruits.

Dr. Mathias Galt was born in 1867, the son of a London solicitor who belonged to the Mithraeum Club. A talented scholar, he excelled in his studies as a doctor, and also proved a remarkable student of the occult. After Sir Leighton Woodrow dismantled the Mithraeum Club, he focussed on medicine, until the outbreak of the First World War. His experiments with raising the dead left him as an indestructible zombie, but after almost a century, he’s learned to make the best of his situation. Without the need for food or sleep, and with the ability to regenerate almost any injury, he frequently volunteers for the most dangerous field assignments himself. Dedicated to the point of fanaticism, he’s the heart and soul of Wayland’s Smithy, the man who conceived it and founded it. Although on the organization chart, Sir Frederick Dalton is his superior – and indeed, Merlin makes a point of deferring to him in publc – in the eyes of many of its members, he is Wayland’s Smithy, its heart, soul and conscience.

Types of Membership

Wayland’s Smithy has two types of member. Affiliates are people with their own jobs and careers – usually prominent and politically powerful ones – whose job is to ensure the the Smithy receives the support of their own organizations, whether those organizations are the Army, the Police, Customs and Excise, or local government. Some Affiliates also run the Smithy’s various business enterprises. With their “real” jobs to attend to, such people almost never participate in field operations. Specialists are full-time employees of the Smithy. Although there are no true Mages amongst their number, their ranks are filled with psychics and hedge magicians, who supply the Smithy’s infamous tools of the trade. Others are highly trained military personnel who give the group its teeth.

Headquarters – Siege Perilous

In the 1950s, the British government embarked upon a classified project called Death Watch; a test of an experimental nerve gas known as VXL-575. The tests were conducted on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, home of a tumbledown castle which the research team renovated and adapted to their own use.

The tests were a failure. Or rather, they were too successful – the gas killed everything on the island, with a horrifying lethality beyond anything its creators had anticipated. The tests were abandoned, and the old castle left to rot.

Wayland’s Smithy had other ideas. The castle setting appealed to Merlin’s ingrained romanticism, but the isolated location and the barren, lifeless island had a far more practical appeal. Many of the needed facilities had already been put in place by Project Death Watch; with a little adaptation, the Smithy would have a secure headquarters with no inconvenient witnesses and no innocent bystanders to et hurt if one of their experiments got out of hand.

The refurbished castle served as living quarters for the Specialists permanently stationed there. Below, the labs and research facilities taken over from Project Death Watch house a variety of secure archives and ongoing research projects.

Endowments

Wayland’s Smithy still specializes in summoning and binding ghosts and other spirits, and the majority of their specialized “equipment” is based on manipulating entities in Twilight They do, however, have an extensive range of high-technology toys to give their agents an extra edge. While their technological base might not be as advanced as that of Task Force: Valkyrie, their more versatile array of supernatural items more than compensates.

Undead Eye: Level One Endowment

Superficially a simple mobile phone with an integral camera, this device actually incorporates image-processing software and in infra-red heat sensor. Using the image-distortion effect usually caused by vampires, in conjunction with their lack of body heat, it allows the user to scan an entire room for undead while appearing to do nothing more than send a text. Although no amount of processing capacity has yet managed to resolve a vampire’s blurred reflection into something clear (the distortion appears to involve some kind of fractal effect which sends image-resolution software into infinite loops when it tries to process it), the device can also make comparisons based on the edges of the distortion zone to estimate the vampire’s approximate height and weight.

Jawbone of an Ass: Level Three Endowment

Churchill once said scathingly of a political opponent that he proved that “the jawbone of an ass is as deadly a weapon today as it was in Biblical times”. This endowment is named after that comment. Despite the name, it’s actually the jawbone of a human, with a spirit – usually the ghost of the jawbone’s owner, but occasionally something stranger – bound into it. The spirit is visible to the holder of the jawbone, who may command it to travel up to several hundred yards from the bone and then return to report back on what it has seen. The spirit cannot manifest or affect the physical world in any way, but it makes a superb spy and scout.

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QualitySteel replied on 30 Jun 2009 9:09 AM

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I don't have a lot of time to type right now, but I'll get back to it later. For now: This is good stuff, how about you write up the Status ranks and their effects, too?

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Friedrich vom Berg replied on 30 Jun 2009 11:20 AM

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Not to poke holes in it, but i think if Galt is somebody who "had always had a somewhat rose-tinted view of the British Empire, seeing it as a civilizing force for peace and stability" the dissolution of said empire should have some impact on him.
The way he is now, he is just some big bad (or good) with superpowers, like all these funny things from Hellboy, but not some intriging figure like the Lucifuge who give depth and also a kind of dilemma to their conspiracy.
What i miss in this is both the fractionous nature and the air of a battle lost before begun of the other conspiracy.
They seem to be some british guys who are willing to get all magical to defend (what exactly? Britain and only Britain? The UK? The Empire? The Commonwealth?) and who have some undying superman.
It is neat as a draft, but not so good as a completed conspiracy.

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JezMiller replied on 30 Jun 2009 3:33 PM

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Friedrich vom Berg:
if Galt is somebody who "had always had a somewhat rose-tinted view of the British Empire, seeing it as a civilizing force for peace and stability" the dissolution of said empire should have some impact on him.

Less than you might think.Galt went into World War One with a comfortable, unquestioning Victorian faith in Science, Reason, Progress, the Whig Interpretation of History, et cetera. By the end of it, the horrors he'd seen and experienced had burned out his romantic fantasies in favour of a coldly pragmatic obsession with saving lives. Which sounds an admirable goal and is in many ways, but with Galt, it's an obsession that makes him willing to cut a lot of other ethical corners.

Friedrich vom Berg:
The way he is now, he is just some big bad (or good) with superpowers

The only superpower he has is his unkillability, really. He doesn't have any greater speed or strength than he did before, and he certainly doesn't have anything in the way of Dread Powers.

Friedrich vom Berg:
They seem to be some British guys who are willing to get all magical to defend (what exactly? Britain and only Britain? The UK? The Empire? The Commonwealth?) and who have some undying superman.

These days, just the UK. The ones who remember the Empire are mostly gone except for Galt himself, and he doesn't run the organization. (And isn't any kind of superman, as I said). Their operatives are either mundane humans with unusual skills and training (think Dogs of War), or minor-template supernaturals (Second Sight)

Basically, think of them as something like a British Department of Homeland Security, only operating as a secret conspiracy, concerned with monsters more than terrorists, and led by a men (and a woman) whose attitudes and willingness to cut ethical corners in pursuit of otherwise admirable goals recall Dick Cheney being interviewed on Southern talk radio.

Friedrich vom Berg:
What i miss in this is both the fractionous nature and the air of a battle lost before begun of the other conspiracy.

Hmmm... I'm not sure the operatives of TF:V would necessarily accept that interpretation, amongst others! I havent portrayed them as unduly fractious, but the Affiliates in particular are in a situation where conflicts of loyalty could easily arise.

Friedrich vom Berg:
It is neat as a draft, but not so good as a completed conspiracy.

Well, if there's anything in there that you like, you can always canibalize it

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Octavian_5 replied on 30 Jun 2009 3:54 PM

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I agree somewhat, in that this needs a little polish. But it's nice to see that the Brits have their own answer to Task Force: Valkyire. The only real issue I have is that, from what I've seen, the two sample Endowments seem a little...schizophrenic. On the one hand, you have an Advanced Armory style sensor, and the other is a human jawbone with a spirit bound to it, which seems a lot like a Relic. The difference is, of course, that I assume that the Smithy made said bound-jawbone, and didn't find it.

That's what I think you should do with the Endowments: lose the tech angle. Keep that "aesthetic" of binding spirits to items. No reason to have two styles of Endowments. The Ascendings ones always have some kind of compound, Cheiron always uses implants, etc.

Other than that, this looks great. Keep it up!

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JezMiller replied on 30 Jun 2009 4:34 PM

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Thanks! This is very much a roughed-out work in progress, but in general terms I'd say the ranks broke down like this:-

Status is handled a little differently for Affiliates and Specialists, except at Rank 5, which indicates membership of the Executive Board in both cases.

Affiliates

A Status 1 Affiliate is someone who has had an encounter with the supernatural, probably in connection with a Smithy operation, and has been made aware that an organization of "like-minded individuals" had formed an informal alliance to combat it. At this point they might know the name of the Smithy but not its history or the extent of its operations. They gain one point of Allies and one point of Contacts from the organization

At Status 2, an Affiliate is made aware of the Smithy's true nature and history. He may request the loan of equipment and endowments rated up to Level 2

At Status 3, the Affiliate becomes a resource that the Smithy is willing to invest time and money protecting; he or she gains a three-dot Mentor and may request the use of Endowments and equipment up to Level 3

At level 4, the Affiliate has reached a level where he able to initiate and control operations himself (subject to Board approval). He gains either three dots of retainers or three dots of Allies, whichever seems more appropriate (player's choice). He may be allowed the permanant loan of Endowments and equipment up to Level 3, and may be given access to Level 4 or even Level 5 Endowments at the Board's discretion.

Specialists

All Specialists are well-paid for their unusual talents. Unlike Affiliates, who receive no income from the Smithy lest their "day jobs" be compromised by their having a mysterious additional source of income, all Specialists are assumed to have a Resources rating equal to their Status, reflecting their generous salaries.

A Status 1 Specialist is someone whose talents the Smithy wishes to cultivate. They may be psychics, minor spell-casters, or talented military personnel who the Smithy wants to recruit on a full-time basis. They are allowed to know of the organization's nature and history, and gain a 2-dot Mentor

Status 2 Specialists have received extensive training in their particular field. To reflect this, minor-template supernaturals gain one dot of their particular path of power. Military specialists gain two free dots of military Skills or a suitable Merit like Danger Sense.

At Status 3, Specialists may be assigned the permanant use of an Endowment up to Level 3. However, many of them are expected to spend long periods away from their homes and loved ones. A number are stationed full-time at Siege Perilous.

Level 4 Specialists are research leaders or field commanders. They gain 3 dots of Allies or Retainers to reflect their teams in the field or research assistants back at base.

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Octavian_5 replied on 30 Jun 2009 4:46 PM

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I like how you've broken down how Status for both "divisions". It really gives it a feel that the Smithy is made of two distinct parts.

And, because every Compact or Conspiracy needs something wrong with it, this also sets it up really well for a "let not the left hand..." situation.

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JezMiller replied on 30 Jun 2009 4:54 PM

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Octavian_5:
The difference is, of course, that I assume that the Smithy made said bound-jawbone, and didn't find it.

Yup. They have Specialists dedicated to doing just that. Of course, if they can find a bone that's already a Fetter (a concept they fully understand), so much the better.

Octavian_5:
That's what I think you should do with the Endowments: lose the tech angle. Keep that "aesthetic" of binding spirits to items. No reason to have two styles of Endowments.

Hmmm... good point. Emphasing their aesthetic as Victorian-descended spiritualists would give them a consistent theme and ambience. I like that idea. OK, the level one Endowment could be a monocle, or perhaps a simple pair of glasses, which "channel" the perceptions of the ghost bound into them, so the wearer gains a type of second sight analagous the the Level 1 Death Arcanum in Mage - can see ghosts (though not spirits), and also mortal auras.

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Octavian_5 replied on 30 Jun 2009 9:13 PM

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A monocle? Jolly good! Might I also reccommend a more...offensive Endowment: a sword cane with some type of violent spirit attached to it. Sword canes (and variants including cane-guns) were very popular during the Victorian Era. Obviously, only men would use canes, so women sometimes carried Derringers in their muffs (those fur-tube things), hence the classification of "muff-pistol", a small, usually single-or-double-shot pistol used by women.

As for the sword cane, perhaps the spirit bound to it does extra damage (or something), but it's like eating Pringles. Once you start killing with this sword, it's just so. Hard. To. Stop.

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DavidT replied on 2 Jul 2009 2:38 AM

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Octavian_5:
And, because every Compact or Conspiracy needs something wrong with it, this also sets it up really well for a "let not the left hand..." situation.

Why must there be some thing wrong with every hunter compact and conspiracy? Sure let some members do wrong. Let there be some weakness. However why does it have to be wrong in some way? Wouldn't the life of a hunter be wrong enough already?

To get back at topic... It sounds all bloody good to me man. Keep it up and forget the naysayers. They only complicate things to the point it only fits their image instead of yours.

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Friedrich vom Berg replied on 2 Jul 2009 10:07 AM

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There is something wrong because they have reached the size where the group of people belonging is to big to be tied together by solidarity or mutual acquitance. Factionism appears, your buddies surely need that stuff more urgently than those other guys you do not even know, right? And anyway, what is the harm if you sell of 50% of these gadget things? There a thousands. Surely nobody would miss them?!
Add "Power corrupts", the xenophobia and the fanatism of the average hunter (he is after all willing to destroy what he does not understand) and the toll the fieldwork takes and there is something wrong with every organisation of hunters. The question is only if there is something uniquely wrong with waylands smithy?!
I just noticed that they also some to have a pretty large bullseye point on their backs in regard to certain factions of the WoD and other hunters. Not everybody is okay with "working with dark powers" and using necromancy (which is cultural taboo in western culture) to fight the good fight.

But to answer the question:
There has to be something wrong with the conspiracies and compacts for the simple reason that this is the world of darkness. This is no happy place. This is not where things might break. This is were they WILL break.
And on an additional note:
There is something wrong with every OTHER conspiracy or compact. From infernal powers to fundamentalist religion to drugdealing to not knowing who you are working for. Dark past, ancient secrets, experiments worthy of nazi doctors, etc.
Would be a little strange if a group which started with a large scale desecration of corpses (for whatever reasons) would be the only one to hold the torch of truest purpose and highest morale.

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DavidT replied on 2 Jul 2009 2:28 PM

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Friedrich vom Berg:
Would be a little strange if a group which started with a large scale desecration of corpses (for whatever reasons) would be the only one to hold the torch of truest purpose and highest morale.

Would that be it? Obviously you are defiling graves so there is your wrong right there.

Friedrich vom Berg:
There has to be something wrong with the conspiracies and compacts for the simple reason that this is the world of darkness.

That is pretty sorry excuse. Not everything is dark and evil. After all the core book did stated that the world is vary much like our own except with supernatural powers and a few more evil people. It is darker than our world for sure, but not that dark as most people like to think it is. Now given I like to have a honest to god evil conspiracy and a vile world too, but if you don't have the good then the world is pretty much flat.

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JezMiller replied on 2 Jul 2009 3:49 PM

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Octavian_5:
A monocle? Jolly good! Might I also reccommend a more...offensive Endowment: a sword cane with some type of violent spirit attached to it. Sword canes (and variants including cane-guns) were very popular during the Victorian Era. Obviously, only men would use canes, so women sometimes carried Derringers in their muffs (those fur-tube things), hence the classification of "muff-pistol", a small, usually single-or-double-shot pistol used by women.

As for the sword cane, perhaps the spirit bound to it does extra damage (or something), but it's like eating Pringles. Once you start killing with this sword, it's just so. Hard. To. Stop.

I like that idea. How about this as another variant?

Dumuzi Blade - Level Five Endowment

The Dumuzi Blade was created using ancient Babylonian magic, a curious variant of the Ishtar cycle discovered by Wayland's Smithy in a forgotten Mesopotamian tomb in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The ritual can be cast on any blade of sufficient size - which in practice is about the length of a man's forearm or longer - although the Smithy's preferred choice for the weapons is a Victorian sword cane.

By spending a willpower point, the wielder can cause the weapon to inflict aggravated, rather than lethal, damage, on supernatural beings, but that is an almost accidental side benefit. The real power of the Dumuzi blade is that anyone it kills automatically becomes a Wraith - and the blade acts as a Fetter for the last three people it has killed (so killing a fourth person releases the first, and so on).

The wielder can use the blade to draw on any mental skills and any knowledge or memories of any of the Wraiths presently bound to it, but only as long as he holds the blade. In some cases, Smithy members have been able to draw on Physical and Social skills as well, but it's rather difficullt to use Empathy or Socialize on someone when you're waving a sword at them, so the Smithy has tended to dismiss those occasions as curious but impractical flukes.

Particularly strong-willed Wraiths (Willpower 8+), get to resist having their consciousness tapped by rolling Willpower against the wielder's Intelligence + Investigation. Otherwise the wielder is assumed to be automatically successful... but at a price. The enchantment demands and takes a piece of the user, and those who use the blades to exploit the trapped wraiths often find themselves convulsed with pain, bringing up blood in wracking coughs or finding themselves rendered helpless by muscle spasms as their skin turns grey and deathy-looking and their hair goes prematurely grey.

In game terms, the wielder may gain up to five points of Mental Skills which the Wraith has at a higher level than he does for a single scene, but he takes a point of bashing damage for each one. He may also choose instead to experience complete scenes from the Wraith's memories of its mortal existence, again at the cost of a point of bashing damage per scene. The Smithy most often uses the blades to interrogate enemies who are too dangerous to let live but too knowledgeable to merely destroy.

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JezMiller replied on 2 Jul 2009 4:07 PM

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Friedrich vom Berg:
Would be a little strange if a group which started with a large scale desecration of corpses (for whatever reasons) would be the only one to hold the torch of truest purpose and highest morale.

No. And they don't. But they aren't unambiguous bad guys, either. If you'd been a WWI soldier facing the prospect of going over the top, wouldn't you rather send an animated corpse to face the German guns in your place? And wouldn't your family prefer that your life be spared in favour of someone who was already dead? (And the same argument applies to conflicts which are happening right now, but I'm not very comfortable with the idea of using the real tragedies of real familes alive today to frame a theoretical argument in an RPG). Wayland's Smithy would no doubt argue that their zombie research was ethically equivalent to a transplant surgeon using a donated heart - exploiting the bodies of the dead to save the living. And you could argue that's a valid point of view, except that they've allowed themselves to apply the same argument to enslaving Wraiths, many of whom are thinking, sentient beings. If you were after a theme for Wayland's Smithy, it would probably be "How far does the end justify the means?"

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JezMiller replied on 2 Jul 2009 4:27 PM

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DavidT:
To get back at topic... It sounds all bloody good to me man. Keep it up and forget the naysayers. They only complicate things to the point it only fits their image instead of yours.

Thanks! I'm glad you like it, but like Grand Admiral Thrawn, I have no problem with using a good idea just because it doesn't happen to be my own. Octavian's point about the Endowments lacking a consistent theme really hit home with me, for instance. Making the Smithy more reliant on Wraiths and Wraith-related artifacts gives them a much clearer, better defined style and tone.

Wayland’s Smithy – A Hunter Conspiracy

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