From: andrew smith
From: Nick Barnes
Has anyone ever given any thought to the working of a cult? Obviously I mean in the theoretical sense, not the those-plans-officer? No-I-never-intended-to-really-become-a- religious-figurehead sort of thoughts. I'm in the middle of a serial killer hunt. My players have worked out that the SK is murdering with a purpose and will now track him to the cult lair (He's killing in a ritualistic fashion and removing only the eyes of his victims to appease the cult leader) but that's where my imagination is running dry. I want my cult to be real and immersive rather than a bunch of 2d psycho's who happen to be hanging around listening to some loon rave on - all thoughts and discussion on the subject are welcome.
Cults of various kinds often turn up in my games. Here is a sample:
PTA is based on a screwed folk-remembering of ancient Egyptian funeral beliefs. Its basic tenet is that you /do/ get to take it with you. This leads to several core behaviours:
- Acquisitiveness. Greed has a point: you accumulate wealth and then bury it with you when you die. Successful PTAers have large, ornate, well-defended mausoleums.
- Good-looking corpses. There's no point living to a ripe old age: you'd be too crotchety to enjoy anything! PTAers try to die peacefully and at as early an age as possible. They then like to have applied cryogenic and chemical preservation techniques to their corpses.
- Servants. Those people you kill in life become your slaves in the afterlife. Of course, you want them to look good too, so you tend to use poison or stilettos rather than power-reapers.
- Hierarchy. Progress in the sect is through, you guessed it, assassination. This has to be done as subtly as possible, because apart from the corpse preservation aspects, too many deaths attracts SLA attention. High Priests who survive twelve months without being done in by their juniors are promoted sideways as 'Emeritus', and deemed to be living in their own afterlives already. Quite often these ones are so paranoid and twisted they even believe it, and are among the most fiendish serial killers around.
PTAers are a shade different from the average serial killer cognate. They prefer poison, they will rob the corpse and its apartment, if possible, and they will both avoid combat if possible but fight with recklessness when cornered, trying to die as quickly as possible with as few wounds as possible.
PTAers also hunt other killers, be they serial killers, contract killers, props or whatever. To be served by such a slave in the afterlife is also to be served by all the souls he/she took as well.
Finally there is a more extreme group within the sect composed of the attractive younger women (and some men), called Nepenthe. These PTAers know that given their looks and without power and riches in this world, they are most likely only going to end up their elders' slaves in the next. Nepenthers typically short-circuit the system by becoming suicide bombers, preferring to end it all quickly and take as many bystanders with them in the off chance they get to enjoy them as slaves. Nepenthers both hope and fear oblivion when their bodies are vaporised in explosions, but some hope that they will be given brand-new bodies by the ever-merciful Lords of the Otherworld.
PTAers regard Life After Death as abomination and take unusual steps to prevent its use by their intended slaves. These include using SAMs on incoming Karma Kilcopters, and administering drugs (DarkNight developed?) to corpses to prevent their resuscitation.
If you want a PC dead, a PTAer will get the job done. ;-]
Sample PTA BPN concepts:
- Silver: a bodyguarding job turns nasty; a spate of poisonings among media starlets, leading to a PTA 'collector'.
- Blue: a Nepenther, being hunted by one of her elder relatives, choses the Ops as good-looking slaves and attempts to explode near them.
- Yellow: retrieval of a McGuffin from a rich PTAer's tomb. Maybe this one had himself preserved as a manchine...
- Grey: a spate of assassinations in a SLA subsidiary is due to most of its middle-senior management being PTAers. They will try to continue the killings around the PC's investigation, but if the PCs get too nosy they will unite to remove the squad before getting back to business.
- White: a DarkNight infiltration team, attempting to recruit a PTA cell as a stalking-horse, end up getting assassinated by their supposed victims. DarkNight send an investigation squad of their own which will interfere with the PCs.
- [Down-time]: this one works especially well for contract killer PCs or squads with high kill-rates acknowledged in the media. A nubile and attractive young groupie of the appropriate sex falls into a PC killer's life. It's nine-and-a-half hours of pleasure and romantic interlude, and then she/he tries her utmost to kill the PC, with as little damage to the corpse as possible, and then she/he will commit suicide.
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