Forbidden Book:

The Elvis Wars

This book is 'forbidden' mostly in the sense that mundanes don't get to look at it. Soldiers on both sides are effectively cleared for the information, although Hell takes the official opinion that the book is the worst sort of angelic agitprop and outright disinformation, not to be trusted and certainly not to be sought out. This, of course, means that Hellsworn open it right up... which was the Game's intent all along. Talking monkeys are quite predictable that way.

The Elvis Wars is a history of a set of connected campaigns made by Heaven against the Media in the latter half of the 20th Century. Strictly speaking, only the second, fifth and seventh campaigns explicitly involved Elvis Presley, but to most celestials those three sub-conflicts were most representative of the whole. Besides, the causes for the third and sixth campaigns were rooted in events from the second and fifth. In human terms, the Elvis Wars were more about Elvis than the War of Jenkin's Ear was about the ear, but less than the British/Chinese Opium War was about opium.

Campaign One: Collapse of Paradigms

Campaign Two: The first Elvis Intervention

Campaign Three: The Fall of Sullivan

Campaign Four: The Spoiler Retreats

Campaign Five: The second Elvis Intervention

Campaign Six: The Disco Atrocities

Campaign Seven: The Graceland Redoubt

Campaign Eight: The ARPAnet Siege

Campaign Nine: The Digital Beachhead

Without going into precise details, the nine campaigns above were either directly or indirectly responsible for the formation of both the SDS and John Birch Society, the rise of talk radio, roughly half the inflation rate between the years 1964 and 1974, the Gulf of Tonklin resolution, the designation of America's first space program as "Mercury," the soft drink Tab, the books To Kill a Mockingbird and Watership Down, the air-traffic controllers strike, the board game Ogre ... and, of course, the creation of the Internet. As such, possession of the book would give a +3 to any roll researching 20th Century American history; of course, nobody in the "mainstream" would be willing to believe the results, but at least the reader will know that The Truth Is In There.

Interestingly, the author of the work was apparently a 46 year old Elvis impersonator from Green Bay, Wisconsin who has shown no knowledge of the War either prior to writing this text, or afterwards. In fact, he is a regular five Force human who blames the entire thing on the combination of a bottle of good scotch and a rainy three day weekend. Further research into the man's life has so far proven unfruitful; the unofficial consensus by both side's researchers is that the Symphony was clearly having its little joke.

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