In the next few weeks, I’m presenting groups devoted to exploring the supernatural. From séance-busters to mind enhancing experiments, each group is described for use in your games. Each group could be an association, an employer, the main villain, or a just a mob of protesters blocking the street during a chase.
Some information (like the Sinister Ideas and Benevolent Ideas) is contradictory and will be dependent on their use in play. The terms Private and Public describe the club’s activates. Public describes activities the club willingly lets the general populace know, and Private describes activates and pursuits known only to initiates and the group’s leadership.
Reputation modifiers (Notoriety and Propriety) are applicable to any member of the groups (NPC or PC).
The Laocoön Club (The Table-Shaker-Shakers)
Students taking courses of Empirical Thaumaturgy listened to their professors lecture on the “low” magical traditions and superstitions competing with Guild Hermetic practices. A few of the student’s decided to do something about it.
Students belonging to the Laocoön club secretly gather to sniff out magical charlatanry in London and expose it. Their targets include: séance parlors, fortune tellers, enchanters, and mystics. An evening’s work could range from heckling a stage magician, researching public records, or breaking into a haunted house.
So far, their interruptive investigations have not been discovered officially and shut down. Their professors may admonish their disruptive and dangerous behavior but they always applaud their cleverness and desire for truth.
While some are genuinely interested in unmasking frauds, most Laocoön club members relish sneaking around London, spying their target, and mercilessly taunting their victim after revealing their fakery.
Public Goal: Discover and publicly denounce magical hoaxes, charlatans, and superstition
Private Goal: To have exiting adventures, catching the eye of Guild magicians
Membership: 10-20; All students (males ages 12-18), along with steady girlfriends, outside school friends, and some trustworthy faculty
Meetings: Planning in dormitories, classrooms and libraries (Private), followed by evenings in theaters, and séance parlors (Public)
Sinister Ideas: Collegiate vigilantism, harassed or injured magical practitioners and entertainers, know-it-all student’s playing with powers they can’t understand, vengeance from the target of an investigation
Benevolent Ideas: Genuine scientific curiosity, unmasking confidence men, boy sleuths solving mysteries
Notoriety: 1 (Hooligans up to who-knows-what is a disgrace to the school’s reputation)
Propriety: 0 (Not very many members, all quite young)
Sample Members:
Walter “Piper” Fyfe (bespeckled dwarf on the fast track to be a magician’s apprentice)
Jack Timber (secretly superstitious halfling athlete, who doesn’t like following orders)
Samuel “Chicken” Hawkins (easily led Eldren schoolboy fascinated by mechanical workings)
Leadership:
Victor Ludorum (human, prize-winning student, ring leader and teacher’s pet)
Professor Allen Denizen (inspiring and opinionated gnome teacher, with very few friends at the Guild)
Plot Hooks
A famous stage magician has offered a sizable reward to anyone able to explain his Twin Brother Death Trap Trick. The boast caught the Laocoön club’s eye, but they may need help or the magician may need extra security.
One of their professors wants to stop the increasingly illegal activities of the Laocoön Club. He doesn’t want to expel sons of the most influential businessmen in London and ruin their potential careers, so he asks for help arranging a Séance the club will never forget.
The Laocoön club has bitten off more than they can chew. Their younger members dream terrifying visions and wake with small bites on their hands. A few have quit the club. Does the curse come from without or within?
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