This is one of a series of posts intended to show what various mage groups believe, how they think, and why they think the Sleepers ought to prefer their vision of reality. It is not intended as a complete picture of each group, or a 'fair' portrait. It's written as propaganda by each group, but honest propaganda. They won't lie, but they won't list their own flaws in detail either :) Naturally, these posts represent my own idiosyncratic views which I believe to be reasonably compatible with canon, but given my memory is at times rather sieve like, I may forget stuff. If you see a contradiction between this or the appropriate Trad/Conv book, it may or may not be deliberate. If you have suggestions for more questions that should be covered, please let me know. Akashic Brotherhood and a bunch o' other stuff is all copyright of White Wolf, of course. You can find the ones done so far at: http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/WW/index.html Enjoy! Ascension 2000 Campaign Pamphlets: Progenitors So, you're the people who wiped out the population of the Earth accidentally in _The Stand_, right? I guess giving pigs wings, cloning sheep, and breeding superplagues must keep you pretty busy. So, do you really clone all your enemies and replace them? While we do sometimes need to breed biological weapons, most of our research is not directed towards killing things or silly behavior like giving pigs wings. We are not the Sons of Ether with an MD. Our goal is to benefit humanity through the study of the life sciences. We are a collection of doctors and biologists of every stripe, from paleontologists to geneticists. We are the ones who ended the great plagues. We are the ones who have pushed the average human lifespan to a higher level than any previous point in history. And we are the ones who will create a healthier, happier humanity in the future. Yes, we do produce clones; indeed, one day that technology will be available to everyone, and no one will ever have to die from an unfortunate accident ever again or suffer because organs needed for a transplant are not available. We'll be able to clone a fresh organ from the remains of your damaged one. But what about what I've heard about you replacing your enemies with clones programmed to obey you? That would be unethical. While I hate to be cynical, Dr. Culp, human beings are quite capable of being unethical. I can quite easily imagine every government on Earth doing it if they had the technology. What makes you better? I have heard rumors of such things taking place in NWO espionage operations, but I assure you that is not the intent of our cloning studies. Our work is intended to help mankind, not to enslave it. There may be some use of cloning of people who have posed especial threats to our operationgs, but full body cloning is normally only carried out on volunteer subjects in order to provide them with backup bodies. But doesn't cloning have vast potential for abuse? Virtually everything has potential for abuse. Folding chairs can be used to beat people to death. So can cars. Yes, I could create a superplague in my laboratory, but that's not what it is intended to be used for, and there is no way to reap the fruits of biological research without risking their abuse. Unless you propose we abandon all biological studies and go back to mixing gold, salt, urine, and saltpeter together as a cure for goiters, I don't see what you expect us to do. But you're not answerable to anyone for what you do. That's what scares me. We are answerable to someone. Both the Inner Circle of the Technocratic Union, and our own Administrators watch over us to make sure we don't get out of line. There have been occassions when Research Directors got out of line and tested things irresponsibily and had to be punished, but all in all, we hold to as high a standard of ethics as the public scientific community. Indeed, most of us are part of that community; we don't build our labs in ruined castles at the edge of the swamp, you know. Many of us hold university positions and conduct public research; it's one of the ways in which we introduce new ideas to the masses. But what if the Inner Circle orders you to make a superplague because they decide they don't like Pakistan or something? What if the United States or the French or the Russian government decides to do it? We can always refuse an order; we're not an army, unlike Iteration X or the NWO. Of course, it would likely wreck the refusee's career, but it's not easy to hold to morals at times. Being from academia yourself, Dr. Warwick, I'm sure you know all about that sort of thing. Far more than I wish. You can't have the benefits of biology without risking the bad side. We must risk the thorns to grasp the rose. What about these attack monsters I've heard about? Something called 'Damage Control'? Yes, we do make use of specially bred life forms for security purposes. And we do have a security branch called Damage Control which often makes use of them. What about them? Let me quote the Verbena. "Thus it is that we frequently come to blows with the Progenitors, for they enjoy conducting horrible life-warping experiments, such as transplanting human brains into animals to use as guardians, or creating cats with frog tongues, or humans who spit acid and have poison for blood." That sounds rather horrible and unethical to me. The Verbena hardly know what they're talking about. Most of those sound rather more like things the Sons of Ether would do than what we do, although I have been involved in a project that involved turning people's blood poisonous to vampires. We're hoping to eventually wipe them out through starvation in that manner, once we perfect the technology. We have created some unusual guardian animals, such as guard dogs that could be controlled by thought (usually involving control technology developed in conjunction with Iteration X), guard dogs and cats with poison sacs, guard animals with heightened intelligence, talking animals, and other creatures with non-standard attributes. We don't simply alter creatures to see how strange they can get. Why would someone WANT to give a cat a frog's tongue? Most of our experiments simply involve increasing desirable traits already present in the species in question, although we have developed some experimental life forms as servitor races. Imagine how much easier it is to ride a horse when you can talk to him and he understands you. Or how much better a pet is who instinctively knows how to use a litterbox. The real problem, I'm sure, is that the Verbena can't see all the perfectly safe and beneficial experiments, mostly because we can't use our disease- resistant wheat, frost-resistant tomatoes, and our cancer cures to fight them when they decide to break into one of our facilities and murder everyone. Perhaps if they thought about what they did themselves, they'd have to answer some hard questions. How many farms suffer a lack of rain when they summon a storm to rain down lightning and hail on one of our facilities? How many animals have they slaughtered in sacrifice to a non-existant goddess? How many completely innocent lab technicians have they slaughtered for just happening to be present when they attacked one of our facilities? How many of them would have died in childhood without the medical technologies we perfected? Compare how many people died as infants when they were in charge to the current rates. These servant animals...I've heard they sometimes revolt and massacre their makers. And I've heard stories about them being used as slave labor on plantations. Humans have always used domesticated animals. These are simply superior ones. There are some research facilities involved in crop experiments which make heavy use of them, and we have had some problems with revolts, but we've largely eliminated the problems. Reading about those incidents, I always wondered why they bred predator animals to do farm work; why not get herbivores, who are going to be more docile and less of a threat if they do revolt? Save the predators for Damage Control. But isn't using intelligent farm animals slavery? They're not human; they have no rights. And humans have always used domesticated animals as servants. What's worse--keeping a bird trapped in a cage when its nature is to fly free the way millions of people do, or making a horse smart enough so that it can do what it's bred for more effectively? We treat our horses much better than most people do who imprison a bird just to hear it sing. Such experiments are not the main focus of our convention, however. So what sort of things do you actually do? We have three major research groups. The FACADE Engineers engage in our cloning research. They chiefly work with human cloning, but also conduct animal and plant research. The Pharmacopoeists do most of our directly medical research; their chief area of expertise is drug development, as you might guess from their name, but they also do work with developing surgical techniques. And finally, the Genegineers are working on the Human Genome Project, mapping out the entire human genetic code. Once that work is complete, we'll be able to make some major breakthroughs. We conduct a wide range of research that doesn't fit quite so neatly into any of these three groups, but they indicate the main directions of our work fairly well. There are several minor research groups. The Agronomists work on improving the crops and breeding stock used in agriculture. The Conservationists work to save species on the verge of extinction; they have a horizon construct which doubles as a sort of wildlife refuge. It's a marvelous place. They're also working on trying to recreate various species from DNA samples found in fossil remains. And finally, Reality Deviant Studies work on trying to understand the biological aspects of vampirism, lycanthropy, and changelingism. This is the group I'm affiliated with. Those three groups tend to be fairly small scale, although they frequently work in union with the major Methodologies. There are several major projects. Firstly, the FACADE Engineers are trying to perfect organ cloning, so that it can be introduced to the masses. They've been held back by continuing problems with getting it to work fast enough to be of use and accurately enough under normal Earth conditions. It works just fine in Horizon laboratories, but back here on Earth, things seem to go wrong, ranging from cloned heart tissue somehow turning into a spleen to people's bodies somehow rejecting the cloned organs. The second major project is the mapping of the human genome. Once that is in place, we'll be able to begin work on greatly improving the human gene pool and finding ways to cure and prevent all the major genetic diseases. Since most other behavior is rooted in genetics as well, we should be able to solve many of the recurrent social problems of humanity also. We estimate success within the next ten to twenty years, at which point we can begin reaping the full benefits. We already have made great strides in genetic surgery and the diagnosis and cure of genetic problems. Still, it will be a while before we can release all of our informations and techniques; there are still a significant number of disasters that have taken place, too many disasters. And finally, we've developed cures for a wide variety of diseases. Unfortunately, some of them have undesirable side effects. Still, we hope to introduce cures for most forms of cancer, Parkinson's Disease, AIDS, and various other plagues on mankind within the next twenty years. Unfortunately, none of them have reached a fully safe form yet, which we greatly regret. After the thallomide disaster, we've greatly tightened our standards and increased our testing periods in order to watch for long term effects. What about these rumors I've heard about you all selling addictive drugs on the street to increase your incomes and to test things out? It is not a standard operating procedure, although I wouldn't be surprised if some abuses did take place. Competition for research funding is tight, and some of us are rather more concerned about conducting their experiments than preserving their morals. Selling drugs on the street is more in the ballpark of the Syndicate, though. We do conduct a large amount of research out in the mundane world, but our test subjects are all volunteers, I assure you. Well, except for the captive Reality Deviants, but that's another story--they're not human beings. Captured Mages aren't human beings??? Let me be more clear. We have virtually nothing to do with 'Mages', unless they come to kill us. There is a small group that works with the NWO to find the sources of their powers, but most of the rest of us find the ethics of their research to be dubious, though necessary. Unlike the NWO, we can't bring ourselves to think of human beings as 'Reality Deviants', per se. We do some work with the victims of changelingism, trying to find if their delusions have a genetic or biochemical component, but they mostly fall under the NWO's sphere of research. I'm speaking of vampires, werewolves, werecats, alien life forms, and other non-human monsters. They're all threats that need to be eliminated. Even if they're not hurting anyone? Vampires feed on human beings and try to dominate human society. Werewolves like to rip people apart for not living in caves. So do the other lycanthropes. And the various alien life forms we've had to deal with are even worse. It often seems to me that nearly every intelligent life form we've encountered is hostile to mankind. In which case, they'll have to be elminated. I put humanity first over other species, intelligent or not. The tendency of many of these species to berserker rages doesn't help us to appreciate them either. They're at war with us, and I feel no guilt in experimenting on them or killing them; they're simply monsters who have preyed on us for thousands of years. We have to eliminate them if humanity is to be safe. Especially the werecreatures. Why the werecreatures? They want to send us back to the Stone Age, for one thing. For another thing, they've killed so many humans that normal humans now have an instinctive fear of them, the same way some animals will hide from the shadow of predator animals without having ever seen one. It's an instinct that one can learn to control, but it means they've been preying on humanity for untold millenia. They're aware of this, and proud of it. Most of them think humanity needs to be cut down to size...a size of a few thousand or so. I can't allow that. A few of our colleagues like to speculate they may have played a role in exterminating the neanderthals, although I find that implausible; if they were that numerous, they would have ruled over humanity with ease. How could we have broken free? And without modern communications, it would have been rather difficult for them to coordinate such a campaign. We've been tempted a few times to reveal their existence to the public in order to bring humanity's full resources to bear on them, but because many of them seem able to cross dimensional boundaries, we're trying to find solutions that will wipe them out without simply panicking them so they flee to another dimension from which they could conduct guerilla operations. Our main hope is to develop ways to render them infertile so they simply die out. We've also been working on a plague that only kills werecreatures, but that would be a more risky measure, as diseases sometimes mutate. Taking out millions of people along with the lycanthropes would be too high a price to pay. I've heard rumors that your Convention is developing drugs that would kill the Avatars of the masses in order to wipe out the other mages. You can't kill something that doesn't exist. All that talk about Avatars is mystic claptrap. We're materialists; we don't believe in silly babbling about spirits and shards of the One and whatnot. We have developed psionic suppressant drugs and gases, but those are largely for self-defense against the lunatics of the 'Traditions'. Trying to use them on the Masses en masse would be too dangerous; we don't know what side effects they might have on normal humans, and it would be difficult to continually dose the entire world all the time with them. So you think the abilities of the Tradition mages are psionic in nature? Lacking a better description, yes. Our current operating theory is that they are mutants, possessing certain incredibly rare recessive genes which give them the ability to produce the effects they conduct. Their powers have proven difficult to duplicate, however, and study continues. So how would you go about curing lung cancer? I'd refer you to one of my colleagues who specializes in medicine. He'd probably either clone your lungs and replace them or use some of our cancer targeting drugs to attack and destroy your cancer, followed by tissue growth stimulation drugs to repair the damage. We'd also suggest getting on the NWO's nine- step program to kick your cigarette habit. So what would your ideal world be like? Like it is now, with the bad parts removed. In our own specific areas of health and biology, we'd institute genetic screening so that people with bad genetics could be identified. Then we'd be able to require them to only reproduce via artificial insemination where the egg and sperm involved could undergo genetic surgery and have all the bad bits repaired. In fact, we'd probably go ahead and have all babies grown in artificial wombs so that women wouldn't have to go around pregnant for nine months, and so that measures could be taken to insure no accidental pregnancies. Within a few generations, we could weed out all of the bad genetics, creating a healthier gene pool. Everyone would be naturally smarter, healthier, and better looking. We'd also have a system of global free health care, implementing all of our medical technology, and people would be able to live virtually forever by transferring to a new body when their current one wore out. Wouldn't that be great? Doesn't genetic screening and the like have the potential to lead to genetic based discrimination? And how would everyone be able to afford this? That's what would make having a global free health care system so important, so that everyone would benefit. And since everyone would be able to have good genes and we could fix bad ones, there would be no need for discrimination. I think you underestimate human capacity for prejudice. And how would this be paid for? That's the Syndicate's job to figure out. We're talking ideal futures, anyway. True. So what do you think of your fellow Conventions? Our closest allies are Iteration X, with whom we have had traditionally close relations, especially as medicine and biological research has become more mechanized and machine-dependent. We work with them on the development of cybernetics, and currently, we have a joint 'bio-computer' project in progress. Like us, they are scientists, rather than simply users of technology. The Void Engineers, on the other hand, epitomize the self-centered users of science and technology, merely engineers at best, thugs like their marines at worst. They would rush forward everything before it has been properly tested, heedless of the potentially disastrous consequences of badly tested technology. We remember the thrashing we took over thallomide; we won't do something like that to the Masses again if we can help it. At the rate they're going, they'll bring back some plague from space that will kill 80% of humanity, then blame us for it. They've deserved the cutbacks they've been given. The NWO does useful work, but I sometimes wonder if they've become too caught up in their spy games, too paranoid and secretive. I understand the need to not expose our existence, but at times, I think the NWO is hiding something from the rest of us. The Syndicate will probably be the next Convention in need of a spanking. They aren't even engineers, just a glorified Amway. There are lower life forms than salesmen, such as slime molds, but... Still, we need someone to round up the money, and spread ideas to the masses, and they're good at it. They just need to send more of it our way. In conclusion, I'll say that we have done more to benefit humanity than any other group. Who has been hurt by better hygiene, the elimination of many major diseases, better medical care, and the improvement of agriculture? So long as we are careful in our testing, we can only help, not harm humanity. Several hundred years ago, most people were lucky to make it to forty. Thanks to us, the average life span has nearly doubled, and infant mortality has plummeted. And all this despite the traditional neglect and underfunding of the life sciences. Most of you reading this would already be dead if not for us. Join us, and together we can build a better future.