An adventure seed for Tattered In Nomine

By Neel Krishnaswami

People believe all sorts of patently nonsensical things all the time: UFOs, lucky numbers, phrenology - no one thoughtful is terribly concerned when a human being, or even a cult full of them, decides to believe something dumb on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Thus, ignoring what humans believe is usually sound and rational, and even essential if you are an angel that can't afford to waste resource on the vast floodtide of human stupidity.

As essential as this strategy is, however, occasionally it backfires. A couple of homo sapiens get an idea, and before any celestials or ethereals fully understand what's going on entire societies have gone through wrenching changes. This is the sort of thing that gives Archangels ulcers, and for PCs making sure that your boss is on the ball is often a good way to keep themselves from getting ulcers.

History is being rewritten.

Someone is publishing a series of books, articles, paintings and videos describing a completely fictitious history of the world, and people are starting to adopt it in preference to the real thing. Not many, yet, but the numbers of believers are growing exponentially. If things continue along undisturbed within three years 40% of the human race is going to have accepted the false history in the place of the true one. Can the PCs stop it? Should they?

The PCs can be angels from any side; angels of Mariel, Nybbas, and Demogorgon would be particularly interested in radical perceptual shifts among humanity. Also viable are ethereals, who would be extremely disturbed at the prospect of a shift in human belief disrupting their Essence flow.

Jeanette Demig was a member of a loose collection of unorthodox young authors and artists living on the fringes of artistic culture. They were all rather talented and rather unhappy with the way things were: the existence and pervasiveness of things like racism, existential despair, poverty, and authoritarianism really frightened them.

Concern about these issues is not at all uncommon among artists: in fact it's almost a cliche to see an artist espouse some philosophy - socialism, Christianity, environmentalism - as a cure for the ills of mankind. But Jeanette Demig was very unorthodox; she had a rare gift for seeing the obvious and could see that the actual implementations of those philosophies had not solved the problems that worried her. Even more surprisingly, she was able to communicate her insight to her entire circle of associates.

They knew they had to do something. But how could poetry and music cure nuclear holocaust, or centuries-old ethnic hatreds, or the fact that poor starved? This was their problem, and as it happens the distance between artist and mystic is not that great. Jeanette discovered sorcery, and when she tried it, it worked. In particular, the Rite she tried gained her the attention of the angel Asmodeus and the answers to three questions.

Ecstatic, she asked the spirit the questions her ritual permitted - how to end war, how to end hatred, how to feed the starving. Asmodeus told her: to end war men would have to stop wanting to kill one another, to end hatred they would have to give up their grievances, and that the hungry could eat if they were given food.

At the sight of Jeanette's crestfallen face, the angel took pity on her, and asked a question in return: what were Jeanette and her friends? They were artists, she answered - and then she saw as the angel did. She and her friends would have to help mankind forget the causes of their grievances and give them reasons for living cleanly. If the lessons of history were written in blood, then they would sweep it away, and replace it with a new and better vision of mankind.

So, armed with this insight, Jeanette and her friends began to dream up a new history for mankind. It was a difficult task: they had to create a vision of the past so compelling people would voluntarily choose to believe it in preference to the actual facts, and yet so uplifting that its lessons convinced them to act well and nobly.

They named their artistic collective Orbis Tertius, after the short story by Borges, and went to work. Between their native talent and their access to artifacts to aid in the artistic process, they have created the core of an entire, consistent, belief system to replace all of history. The Orbis Tertius crew wants to take all the physical and linguistic evidence of the last 5000 years and reinterpret it in a way that a) everyone would accept, and b) would inspire people to act better than they do now.

The Orbis Tertius collective consists of several dozen members who devote the whole of their art to transforming the human understanding of self and history. Most fields of art are represented with one or more Orbis Tertius, and the collective eagerly recruits more, since they have an entire history to create.

Here are a few of the more important members of the collective:

Insofar as the Orbis Tertius collective has a guiding vision, it is hers. She had the original insight, and spends much of her time coordinating the dozens of strands that compose the entirety of the project. She's a charming but no-nonsense woman who really doesn't seem like the sort of person who would consider making the rewrite of the human collective unconsciousness her day job.

The son of Indian immigrants and shopowners, he has left the family business to pursue a career as a computer artist. Essentially, he's a high-tech collagist: he re-mixes bits of video, music and computer graphics into something completely new. Most often the first exposure people have to the new history is through his work: much of it is freely available through the Internet.

A tall, handsome Nigerian immigrant, Yusuf is a dancer and choreographer. He plays a central role in the collective - he turns philosophy and painting and stories into dance, and thus ensures that the ideas of Orbis Tertius have a strong kinesthetic component, and can inspire the body as well as the mind. Even the slightest criticism from him is usually enough to send any of the other members back to do revisions.

Maria is a poet and professionally trained linguist who discovered Orbis Tertius by accident, and fell in love with the concept. Her primary task is to come up with alternate versions of languages, so that their texts can be read with the meaning that the artists of Orbis Tertius desire them to have. She also writes epic poetry for the collective.

Butcher looks and acts like a punk who is a little too old for his look, and uncomfortably aware of the fact. However, he is a powerful sorcerer and artificer, and has taken over leadership of the magical component of Orbis Tertius since Jeannette is too busy with the rest of the project. Mostly, the magic is support - the ability to create artistic masterpieces on demand requires a lot of Essence and skill-enhancing artifacts.

Alyssa is a Chinese woman (from Fukien province, if you care) who came to the campaign area to get a graduate degree in anthropology. She is in the process of doing so. She is also in the process of turning into a first-class crank, meeting and exceeding the highest standards of kookery that even 19th century English clergymen set. While she is not marinating her brain in weird conspiracy theories, she connects the more artistic members of the collective to the vast historical and anthropological literature. Orbis Tertius is out to replace history, and to do so it must exceed it in explanatory power.

Depending on how jet-setting a game the GM wishes to run, Orbis Tertius may be run over the Internet in dozens of cities. Or the collective may work primarily in the campaign city.

The Orbis Tertius plan is breathtaking in its scope: its members mean to replace all of history. But focusing on one aspect of it can help make the rest of it seem real. For example:

Part of the Orbis Tertius plan is to replace the ancient archetypes that lurk in the human collective unconscious with new ones that are both wilder and more peaceful. More peaceful, to staunch the blood shed, and wilder, to persuade mankind to let go of its old inhibitions and prejudices.

- The Arbiter of Fashion (elegance and accord)

- The Aristocrat (politics and rules-tweaking)

- The Horrible Old Woman (one who says what she thinks)

- The Brilliant Ingenue (youth seeking fulfillment)

- The Honest Man (antithesis to the others)

[I'm abusing Jung quite badly here. I should throw in some verbiage to prove the Orbis people are doing it on purpose.]

[Fill in more: linguistics, history, and reinterpretation]

• Pakkarthe, Elohite Angel of Perception, is one of Demogorgon's agents of Chaos. She has discovered this recreation of the past and sees an opportunity to for mankind to break free of the shackles of history and recreate itself. She is working with Rona and Erithon.
• Erithon is a Mercurian of Creation, and a specialist in artifact creation. He is sure that the creation of an entirely new history is probably a good thing, and works to create new artifacts and talent scouts for the Orbis Tertius collective. The fact that Chaos is interested worries him, but a) Pakkarthe seems sane, and b) it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, so he figures it's better for Eli to find out after Orbis Tertius succeeds.
• Rona is an Ethereal goddess, and one of the new spirits that are coming into being as a result of the new worldview being born. She is a poetic symbol embodying elegance and accord, the grace born of varied worldviews reinforcing one another. She is determined to see heterotopia born, and will try to protect the artists from harm.
• Cael, one of Dominique's Mistresses, is determined to stop this at once. Forgetting the past means that the guilty will go unpunished, and that's utterly unacceptable.