DCC Campaign Update: Aw Shit, not a Cowbell!

So as of last session, the PCs were on the eve of the Death Race 3000, when a horde of Sezrekhan Zombies were headed right for their encampment in the night.

Now:

-"OK, so there's like more than 40 of these sezrekhan zombies coming; I say we take them from both sides."
"Well, we are in vehicles, why don't we just drive off?"
"Oh yeah, totally. I was just saying that other shit to the pirates."

-"would ramming them with the truck do non-lethal damage?"
"When you start looking for technicalities to get away with murder, you're just not a pacifist anymore."

-"We have to save the city, though!"
"As far as I'm concerned, fuck those people."

-"We should have tied the sezrekhan zombies to our vehicle as cushioning!"
"That's stupid."
"It's also how you get sezrekAIDS."

-"Do you think this many sezrekhan zombies means that there might be a follower of sezrekhan in the city? Remember how we heard that zombie outbreaks are more likely to happen where there's acolytes of sezrekhan?"
"There are some wizards in the city."
"Maybe the Hippomagus is a follower of Sezrekhan!"
"What? I am not! I'm a member of the council, we hate diabolism!"
"Tell that to Fluffy."
"He was a traitor."
"I bet there's others in the council who were too."
"Yeah, I bet the Hippomagus is a follower of sezrekhan."
"I am not! Stop it!"
"That's just what a follower of sezrekhan would say."

-"We should probably stop treating the Hippomagus like shit. He's mumbling to himself again."
"...going to burn them all one day.."

-"The Hippomagus is like the anti-Bill. It's like if someone shot a ray at bill the elf that sucked all the goodness, innocence, and general wussiness out of him, and put it into a ridiculous-looking wizard, and that's the hippomagus."

-"So the race is tomorrow, right? Is there any side-quest we can get distracted by tonight?"

-"So the pirates have 'comms' that don't actually work and you're just sending them to their deaths?"
"I guess. I just don't want them hanging around."
"Man, you're an even bigger pile of crap than most pacifists!"

-"So, who's going on the Shaft-1 and who's going on the Loser Car?"
"Does the Shaft-1 have a dolphin-launcher?"
"It has a particle beam cannon."
"Ours is still cooler."
"I don't know, the Particle Beam Cannon has particles."
"Yeah, and a beam!"

-"So wait, our entire strategy depended on launching dolphins that explode on impact... and you forgot to get any explosives?"
"What really matters is looking cool!"
"Ok, sure."

-Sami volunteers to go looking for explosives, with her extensive knowledge of the streets.
"You mean street walking?"
"Yes."

-"The cotton-candy vendor has a bandolier full of grenades under his tunic."
"See? That's using your street-smarts!"

-"Sir, I want to buy that bandolier of grenades!"
"No way! This bandolier is a family heirloom! Here, we only sell blue and pink cotton candy, and plastic explosives."
"Aw, ok. I'll take the blue cotton candy and 5kg of C4 please."

-Heidi went out looking for musicians (to play while the gang engages in post-apocalyptic road-warrior battles) but only manages to spot a marching band.
"Ok, anyone here want to make 30 gp?"
"Yeah, man!"
"Can you play pirate music?"
"Um... sure."
"Alright then, get your instrument and come with me."
"Sure, here..."
"Aw shit, not a cowbell!"

-"Ok, 100gp for anyone playing anything better than a cowbell!"
"I could do it for 100gp!"
"What do you play."
"Trombone."
"Can you play trombone pirate music?"
"Yeah, ok."

-"Is that C4?"
"Yeah."
"Go easy on that, you don't want to apply too much per dolphin, we need to make it last."

-"You know you have to stop letting people bullying you, Hippomagus"
"Yeah... people are always taking advantage of me... someday they'll all pay.."
"What?"
"Nothing."

-"So when are we betraying the pirates?"
"We already have, my friend."

-The various racers line up at the starting point, about to start the Death Race. They are a wide variety of races, nationalities, and vehicles.
"Are there anything like skyshield-nazis?"
"No, but you do see some skyshield-soviets."
"How can I tell?"
"They're driving a bland looking box-shaped van with a hammer & sickle on it"

-Heidi goes looking for another human crew to mentally control. He ends up finding a crew of hot babes. He was going to steal their vehicle, but he just kidnaps the hot-babe leader instead.

-"OK, the second the race starts, we shoot fireworks, play the trombone, and launch a dolphin at one of the other cars!"

-Blitzkrieg puts the hovertruck in a drift, spins fast and drives off at full speed to avoid the large number of contestant-vehicles all shooting at each other.  In the first few minutes of the race, close to half the contestants are wiped out.

-"Should I shoot, Blitzkreig?"
"No, man, we don't want to attract attention to ourselves"
"Meanwhile, in the other truck... exploding dolphins!"

-"Hey, the dolphin didn't explode! What the fuck?!"
"Wait a  minute... this isn't C4.. its taffee!"

-The hot-babe leader (named Suzanne) isn't very reasonable when de-controlled. She starts attacking everyone on the Lolipop.

-The PCs' vampire allies are having troubles of their own. Their Vampmobile is attacked by a gang of Senior-Citizen Punks.

-"Are the punks getting inside the vampmobile? Or is it hermetically sealed?"
"No, they're getting in. Ironically, the vampiremobile has a sunroof"

-"Help us! There are too.. too many of them.. ah hah hah hah!"

-Heidi tries to fly over to help, but the aged punks overwhelm the vampires.

-Sami the cleric prays for Divine Aid to transform the Taffee into real C4.  Roman licks it.
"Yeah, its pure."

-The Shaft-1 has gotten far ahead, and finds a side path.

-The Lolipop is gaining ground again, having dumped Suzanne and abandoned the vampires.  Then they run into a kind of EMP mine; luckily for everyone but Heidi, Heidi was flying ahead; his jet pack is fried but he manages to crash on the Lolipop without great danger.

-"I thought we were calling this the Mammoth-1?"
"Nope, it's back to being the lolipop now."

-The Shaft-1 encounters a totally wooden big-rig, that has a Trent-launcher!
"Holy shit!"

-The Trent lands on the Shaft-1 and starts trying to tear open its hull, while the elves who pilot the wooden big-rig are trying to cut off the Shaft-1's escape.
"Are the elves trying to reach around the Shaft?"
"No, but the Trent is trying to penetrate it from behind."

-Vizi and the hippomagus manage to fight off the Trent (mostly Vizi), while Blitzkrieg Sakomano and Space-Bear manage to outmaneuver the elves and blow them up.

-The Lolipop runs into some Redneck Orcs with heavy-duty shotguns on the back of a pickup truck.
"How many are there?"
"There's four in the back of the pickup armed with shotguns, one driver, and one riding shotgun, which means he has two shotguns."

-The Vegan is hit by a shotgun for 7 points of damage.
"I might be dead!"
"Shit, I forgot how few hp you have."
"Mu got hit too, but he has a ton of hp."
"I guess that makes sense, wizards have few hp and non-wizards have tons of hp."
"Yeah..hey!"

-"Can I cast magic missile at a tire?"
"No."
"Tires are made of darkness."

-"The orc redneck truck is fast, it runs on moonshine and nitro."
"I shoot the gas tank."

-The Vegan survives! No one knows how, what with his only having 7 luck. It's the second time, too.

-"Mongo has a slight owie on his head, and the Vegan has 1hp and two gaping shotgun wounds."
"I heal Mongo."

-The PCs run into the Space-romans again, and they propose teaming up.
"What do they have?"
"They said 'we have the courage of the ancients'."
"Dolphin the fuck out of them."
"Wait.. I'll tell them we're coming in friendly. THEN we dolphin them."

-The Shaft-1, meanwhile, enters an area filled with a dark green smoke. They decide to take a chance and ride through it, having forgotten that the Shaft-1 had a hull breach from the trent. The mysterious smoke fills the cabin, but every single character on board makes their saving throw.
"The smoke is irritating, but it doesn't do anything."
"Just like Mu!"

-"We try to heal the trombone player."
"His trombone is destroyed."
"Yeah, I'm a  musician, I'm used to suffering."

-"If the Vegan dies, we'll launch him."
"I don't think I'd do anything."
"You would if we stuffed your corpse full of C4."
"I wouldn't fit in the dolphin launcher though!"
"You would if we cut off your limbs."
"OK, but promise me one thing, Heidi: if I die please keep the sacred dagger"
"What dagger?"
"The one you yourself gave to my people shortly before they all died."
"Ohh, hey yeah, that piece of shit."

-The team runs across various other rival/enemy vehicles, including a Giant Mecha Scorpion. Also obstacles or traps, like a Cow-launching catapult being fired from off-track.

-The Shaft-1 drives by a seemingly broken-down car with four very hot blondes waving for help.
"Hey look, man, those hot ladies need my help."
"Blitzkrieg, no! It's an obvious trap!"
"Rawwwrrr"
"No way you guys, it's not a trap, they're just sexy ladies needing someone like Sakomano."
"I'm firing on them."
"You jive motherfucker!"

-The Blondes dealt with, the Shaft-1 notices fireworks in the distance.
"That's the lolipop!"
"Hail them."
"Hey there, you're still alive! Keep shooting those fireworks and we'll try to reach you."
"These are celebratory fireworks, Sakomano, we only fire them when we kill someone... sorry, Vegan."
"Wait... why not kill the musician instead of me??"
"No way, the musician is an important part of our image."

-The party runs into a Rastan Murder Robot.
"It's one of the deadliest robots in existence. Other than BOLT-0, I mean."

-Escaping the robot, they run into a Klingon-type vessel.
"They're some kind of space-klingons!"
"They're not the bullshit fake-klingons from Discovery, are they?"

-Sami, who still has a functioning jet pack, gets the Sunstaff over to the Hippomagus, who then uses it to make force-manipulation balls, which he proceeds to throw like a girl.

-The pseudo-klingon ship tries to use some kind of a tractor beam to get the hippomagus, but he dodges!
"He's remarkably agile at dodging!"
"Oh sure, at dodging, not at throwing."

-After the battle, they move the Hippomagus to the APV, so that everyone needing the Sunstaff will be in one place. Heidi, meanwhile, moves over to the Shaft-1.

-"The Vegan only needs 3xp to level, so let's stop here for today."
"God damn it!"
"All that means is you won't die until two weeks from now."

That's it for this session. Next time, we continue with the second half of the Death Race 3000!


RPGPundit

Currently smoking: Mastro de Paja Rhodesian + Image Virginia

Classic Rant: Real Magic In RPGs Letter Day

I get some letters from time to time; and I thought there was one here I should respond to on this blog, its from "Sage Nagai":

Dear Pundit,

After all these years, I'm still reading your blog!

After your recent article on further reading on Crowley, you piqued my curiosity, and I ordered one of the Duquette books you recommended which provides an overview of Crowley's rituals. I enjoyed reading the historical and biographical intro chapter of the book very much, but when I got to the parts actually talking about specific ritual procedures and reproducing various texts, I felt confused.

The book did not make it clear to me exactly what a person is supposed to be able to accomplish, or what the exact purpose is, of doing the various ceremonies.

Let me try and put it this way. If someone asked me, "Why would someone want to practice karate, by doing the various training regimens and procedures listed in a karate book," I would be able to give a pretty concise answer. "By practicing karate, a person may enjoy the benefits of athleticism, flexibility, discipline, spatial awareness, confidence, and may enjoy the social aspect of development of combat or combat sports skills with a group of like-minded hobbyists. In the event that you're someday assaulted, expertise in karate may improve your probability of survival, depending on the circumstances, and the intensity of your training level and mindset."

But, when it comes to the question, "Why would someone want to practice Crowley's magick, by doing the various training regimens and procedures listed in Duquette's book," I have absolutely no idea what the answer would be.

I know that in your blog, you stated that if someone performs the rituals enough, they affect major changes in their ego because they realize that the day to day is less all-encompassing than it seems. But it is not immediately apparent to me what the rituals directly have to do with that, or the difference between doing the magical rituals towards that end, and simply having powerful ego-rattling life experiences, such as, for example, having worked in health care long enough to have worked with a number of patients who end up dying in spite of your best efforts, or having had combat experience in a war. I thought that maybe you would be able to help me understand what exactly a person aims to achieve or affect when they perform Crowley's rituals. 

Thanks very much for your kind help and consideration!

-S


First, the series I've been writing on magick is not meant as a practical guide, its meant as a guide for RPG play. That said, it might be important for people in an RPG to have an answer to this question of "why bother with magick"?

You do magical rituals as a way to perform the Great Work. That is, the work of self-transformation.
The "ego-rattling" mind-blowing side of things is one part of that; and to answer one of your questions the point of doing magick to get that rather than just going through life and waiting for those experiences to happen, is that the magician does INTENTIONALLY and in controlled ways what happens to most people just by ACCIDENT. The point is that if rather than waiting for live events to cause shake ups, you invite them, and create them with specific circumstances, then you can create moments of opportunity for transcendence.

But the Great Work only starts with the whole "mind-blowing" experience. After that is the question of where to go from there. The second purpose of magick ritual is to prepare yourself, once sufficiently shifted in perspective, to be able to direct that perspective shift into a permanent communication with your "higher self", the intentionally-silly named "Holy Guardian Angel".
This is not just "you at your best" or something like that, but it is you at a level so beyond the ordinary definitions of yourself that it will seem like an entirely different human being, and hence one can literally end up engaging in conversation with it. Magick allows us regular glimpses of that higher self, but a magician who goes through the somewhat grueling process of breaking down the self and then opening up the self that is require to obtain full and regular knowledge and conversation of one's higher self is called an Adept.
This is a person who, in an RPG occult game, would have access to some serious power and wisdom.
They would be able to control demons (I'll explain more about that in some future blog entry), they would be able to see connections in things that a normal human being is unaware of, they'd have powerful intuitive senses, and would also by then have a significant knowledge of most forms of magick.

There's a further step beyond that in the Great Work, however. Once you have become complete and harmonized within yourself, comes the job of annihilating the self: jumping into the abyss, becoming a Master of the Temple. This is the ultimate challenge of magick, to be able to sacrifice all of yourself, to leap out of the ego completely, and become one with the great dark mother, with emptiness and infinity. It is precisely the same as Buddhist Enlightenment: you cease to exist as an ego.
In game terms, this can be quite a trip, as the process of crossing the Abyss involves passing through this vast expanse of emptiness and dispersion (basically, everything that could possibly be defined as "Wrong" is there), facing the great demon Choronzon (among many other dangers), and then willingly draining every drop of your blood into the Cup of Babalon that you may burn in her embrace, and enter as a pile of ashes into the City of the Pyramids.
This is basically a symbolic journey, often done by pathworking or astral travel (more on that in some future blog post too). After that, a magician continues to exist in the physical world, but has become a Master, far beyond in awareness and comprehension; which unfortunately, means that to many people he may seem batshit nuts, if he's not very good at dissimulation.

Also, many fail to give all their blood into that cup, they hold onto some tiny piece of themselves; they become a Black Brother. Their soul becomes shut up inside the abyss, and while the body continues in the ordinary world that Black Brother is now hopelessly corrupted, desperate to Live, above all else, the ultimate trap of Egotism. He believes himself to be the most important thing in the universe, and convinces himself and others of all kinds of lies. The Black Brother is doomed to slowly be consumed by the anti-energy of the abyss, and desperate to do anything he can to keep saving himself. He makes, in other words, a perfect mastermind villain or cult leader for a modern occult game; a kind of "false immortal".

So yeah, the short answer to your question is: you do magick because you want to create intentional effects to generate change in yourself that would otherwise just be dependent on circumstances; and with the higher purpose of spiritual transcendence, with the same ultimate goal of enlightenment as you'd find in Buddhism; except that in magick you get to face demons and cast spells and shit, while in Buddhism you mostly just sit around (except for Tibetan Buddhism, where you get to face demons and cast spells and shit).

RPGPundit

(Originally posted November 3, 2011)

RPGPundit Presents: The Book of the Art of Hours

You liked our previous RPGPundit Presents product, "Three Medieval-Authentic Magical Grimiores", so very much that this week we're presenting you with yet another grimoire!

Just like the last three, the Book of the Art of Hours is a totally unique training manual in magical techniques for your spellcaster, based on real historical ideas of medieval magic, with a special method of summoning magical spirits to grant impressive and interesting magical powers... but only if your timing is right.

So check out The Book of the Art of Hours on DTRPG or at Precis Intermedia's own webstore, either way for just $1.99!

Also, while you're at it, be sure to check out the earlier issues of RPGPundit Presents:


RPGPundit Presents #1: DungeonChef!

RPGPundit Presents #2: The Goetia

RPGPundit Presents #3: High-Tech Weapons

RPGPundit Presents #4: Hipster Elves

RPGPundit Presents #5: The Child-Eaters

RPGPundit Presents #6: The Distinguished Wizard's Guide to Pipes and Pipeweed 

RPGPundit Presents #7: The Medieval-Authentic Vancian Wizard's Spellbook

RPGPundit Presents #8: Three Medieval-Authentic Grimoires

Stay tuned for more next week!

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti half-volcano + H&H's Chestnut

"Tres Auténticos Grimorios Medievales" Ahora esta disponible en Castellano!

Si, como todas los lunes, el nuevo capitulo de "RPGPundit Presents" esta disponible en castellano.

Esta ves se trata de una version OSR de 3 Grimorios Medievales!

Los grimorios eran textos mágicos fundamentales del ocultismo medieval europeo. No eran libros de conjuros en el sentido del OSR, ni eran manuales mágicos, realmente. Eran obras de técnicas de magia avanzada, recopiladas y divulgadas. Los Grimorios presentados en este número están basados en textos históricos reales, adaptados en cierta forma para resultar útiles en una campaña OSR.

Se puede comprar por solo $2.99, en la tienda de Precis Intermedia, o en DTRPG como siempre.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Poker + Blue Boar 

"Fat Black Lesbian" Was Everyone's Favorite GI JOE Action Figure as a Kid, Right?

I've been very amused at the development of what's now being called "comicsgate", and how the Ctrl-Left takeover of the comic industry (and especially Marvel comics) is now facing a MASSIVE backlash from fans.

And it's pretty clear now that the tide is turning.  Axel Alonso, the Marvel editor-in-chief who presided over the two year slide into Marvel's obsession with Identity Politics and the elimination of all their major heroes to be replaced by minority token characters no one wanted, is out. And in spite of disgustingly fawning eulogies for Alonso's career by all the regular fake-news suspects, it's obvious that the end result of his tenure was that Marvel currently lies in ruins.

The article above pretends that "Ms.Marvel", the teenage Muslim-feminist sociopath with powers who helped the adult man-dyke fascist Captain Marvel to literally round up and imprison people for wrongthink without trial, was one of his greatest triumphs.  It wasn't.  Ms.Marvel was a triumph of HYPE and praised endlessly on leftist media, but it never actually sold well at all (in the past year, it has shipped between 15000 and 24000 units per month, and presumably actually sold less than that; that's a level so low that under normal circumstances the comic would be cancelled, but of course it won't be because it is crucial to the Ctrl-Leftists to pretend that Ms.Marvel is very popular). Nor did the remade Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers, or Carl Manvers as the comicsgate shitlords call her, on account of how each successive SJW artist depicts the once-beautiful character as increasingly mannish, muscular, crew-cutted and generally ugly; a trend that Marvel has taken up with most of its female characters, as if being an attractive female superhero was somehow itself a crime against women, because, you know, western 'male gaze' is exactly the same as Congolese Rape Militias or something).

In spite of Alonso and company insisting that Captain Marvel be retconned into being by far the most popular superhero of the marvel world who all the populace love and who was so trusted and beloved that everyone sided with her even when she imposed a fascist regime that sent youth-gangs to arrest people for pre-crime without any due process or rule of law, somehow the fans just didn't go for this absurd totalitarian man-thing. That more or less sums up all of Marvel's history in the last two years: the writers and editors demanding that we readers like what THEY tell us to like, and then claiming that horrible sales was the fault of all of us being Nazis. You know, like Captain America, who they made a Nazi twice.


Their response was to just FORCE comic stores to buy the comics that no one wanted, by making those pre-requisites to being allowed to buy those few titles that Marvel still had that did generate demand.  This meant that comic store owners were stuck with piles of stock they could never get rid of, and that already-fragile business model became almost untenable. It led to a revolt in the middle of a panel during a recent Comicon, where one comic-store owner after another berated the Marvel people for their practices and demanded change.

I could go on about how they made Thor "unworthy" of being Thor and replaced him with a girl no one wanted, replaced Iron Man with a sassy black teen (that sounds kind of racist, doesn't it? But that's how they made her! SJWs are actually incapable of making characters who aren't ridiculous stereotypes) that no one wanted. Captain America was replaced by Falcon (ruining Falcon, a perfectly good non-white Marvel hero, in the process) and later by "America Chavez", a sassy (again) Lesbian Latina Illegal that no one at all wanted, who got to punch Hitler INSTEAD of Captain America, because after all why would Captain America punch Hitler? He, like all patriotic white American men, is a Nazi himself after all. That's why the US forces in WWII were composed almost entirely of sassy hispanic illegal immigrant teenage lesbian girls.

In brief, all the most important Marvel male heroes were replaced with minorities or female characters in the period between very late 2014 and late 2016. All the previously-existing female heroes were turned into sociopathic feminist fascists (Mockingbird, Hellcat, Female-wolverine, girl-Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, she-hulk, and of course Carl-Manvers the dyke-haircut maoist Captain Marvel) or sociopathic feminist retards (Squirrel Girl), in that same period of time.  Also, as well as a HUGE decline in art quality in general, all the female characters were drawn to be as unattractive as possible, because apparently that's feminism. 

Like, here's PRE-SJW Squirrel girl, circa 2009 or so:

And here's what being on Feminist Ideology does to you (it's worse than Crystal Meth!):

Now, though, the tide is turning. Alonso is gone, and it's not just readers and fans who are fighting back about the decline in the comics industry.  Jim Shooter, one of comic's legends both as a creator and as an editor, recently gave the comics industry (and it was clearly Marvel in particular) some very harsh criticism about their current mismanagement, stating that "Jack Kirby must be rolling in his grave" at their making Captain America a Nazi. 

Of course, it's not just Marvel. IDW, which currently produces GI JOE (which was, besides a toy line, cartoon and movie franchise, an incredibly successful long-standing comic franchise), utterly destroyed that comic by handing over the reins of it to Aubrey Sitterson, an avowed socialist who hates America and who was on record as saying that almost anyone who mentions 9/11 is politically suspect. 

Sitterson decided that the best way to write GI JOE was to have the Joes no longer be American, turning them instead into an international social-justice militia force of some kind, and replacing many of the favorite characters with women & minority characters because social justice.

I mean after all, whose favorite GI JOE action figure as a kid wasn't "Fat Black Lesbian Joe", am I right??

As it turns out, the sales were so utterly atrocious (around 4500 units ordered, for a comic that could once easily get ten times that much, around 2003, a time long after the cartoon had ended and years before the movies first came out) that the newest series was actually cancelled even before issue #1 came out.

Some people somehow suggested this was unfair. It isn't. This isn't some kind of censorship, or blacklisting, or a boycott. This is a product that was intentionally designed to make its original market despise it (because the writer felt that fans of GI JOE as a patriotic American military organization should be punished for their beliefs) failing to attract any alternative audience (because SJWs love to praise the takeover and ruination of comics by replacing characters with SJW tokens, but have no real intention to ever actually buy these new politically-proper comics), and thus ceasing to exist as a result of the gross incompetence and one could even say malevolent intent of its untalented politically-motivated creators. 

I don't quite think the Totalitarian-Left is finished, in comics or in movies or in RPGs or all other aspects of pop culture (which they correctly recognize as a vital battleground in their efforts to tear down the fabric of Western culture), but it's also true that the backlash is only just getting started. 

It's going to be hopeful and interesting times.


RPGPundit 

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti half-volcano + H&H's Chestnut

PHOTOS: A Vicious Catfight In My Own House!

Yes, my home was the scene of a violent and vicious catfight, all for my affections!  And I managed to catch it all on pictures.


Witness:

And then as fast as it began, it ended. They decided they could share the precious real-estate near my desk. 

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Moretti Rhodesian + Sutliff Man's Best Friend 

Classic Rant: "Real Magick" In RPGs, part 666

So, I know that I said when I started this series that it was NOT going to be an instructional series on western Magick; but rather an attempt to help GMs to "fake it" credibly, to be able to imitate the "setting details" of what a modern occult campaign would like in the "real world".

But I've had a few people asking me to please give them some kind of info on where they should start if they wanted to actually get into magick. Which is weird, since you'd think that mainly what I've written thus far would discourage people from getting into it; but I guess there are a few who might read all this and say, "shit, it's worth it". And in a way I have to feel that's awesome, since you'd really have to grok it, to get the point, after the completely stark completely honest fairly brutal assessment of all the downside of western occultism I've been doing on here.

So this entry is to give suggestions for those who are looking to investigate some magick for themselves; mainly in the question of who would I recommend for reading.

I guess the first thing I'd recommend, above all else, would have to be the writings and magical system of Aleister Crowley. Now, the thing is that Crowley can sometimes feel a bit intimidating to the casual reader. So if you have no balls, you might want to start with something a bit more approachable, namely, Lon Milo Duquette.

Duquette is easily the most brilliant writer on the occult since Crowley. His books are incredible, though he rarely treads any new ground; what he's really good at is translating Crowley's work into a slightly folksy, straightforward style of modern American writing that absolutely anyone could understand. Duquette's "The Magick of Aleister Crowley", is probably the best introductory book to the magical system designed by Crowley. Any of Duquette's other books are great too, particularly his "Chicken Qabalah" (written under the pseudonym of "Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford").

So start with those. Then read "Magick in Theory and Practice", by Crowley. Then "Magick Without Tears", also by Crowley. Then buy a Thoth Deck, and read The Book of Thoth, by Crowley, and after that read Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, by Duquette.

At this point you should already be familiar with all of the basics of magick, and you should have by now decided if you think its "for you" or not; you should also have probably decided by now if you plan to be one of the 90% who read a lot of Crowley and Do No Magick, or the 10% who actually get off their asses and do magick. If the latter, by this point you should certainly already be writing in a magical diary, performing solar adorations, meditating daily, doing the banishing ritual of the pentagram, working with the Tarot and/or the I Ching (for the latter, I recommend John Blofeld's translation) experimenting in astral travel, learning all the magical signs and god-forms, "Saying will" before eating, and giving sex magick some serious consideration.

In other words, you'll be well on your way to being batshit obsessed; and if you do the above you'll also very quickly be having some initial experiences that will confirm to you why this shit is worth becoming batshit obsessed about. Your ego will start getting little cracks, and you'll start getting little glimpses beyond the veil that surrounds the tiny little tower you constructed for yourself that you called "reality", into something way beyond what you could have conceived of.

So yeah, there are a few other writers I could recommend (and after getting a good solid grounding in actual magick, you might want to look at some of these crazy chaos magick types like Peter Carroll, or Dave Lee); but I don't see the point; the above will be more than enough to get anyone who actually wants to do something to get started.

RPGPundit

(Originally posted October 14, 2011)

Happy Thanksgiving, Americans!

So, it being Thanksgiving, and having heard (for the first time) a considerable Leftist backlash against Thanksgiving (I guess it was it's turn, since they've been going after Christmas for decades and Halloween for years), I wanted to wish all my American friends a very happy Thanksgiving.

You have so much to be thankful for this year.  For starters, that Hillary is not you president. That there are more and more people every day rising up against the insanity of the Totalitarian Left and willing to stand up against the traitors to our values and Western Civilization and just refuse to keep humoring their absurd demands. And fighting back with intentional outrageousness.

Here's my friend John Cardillo, an American, with a longer list of stuff you can be thankful for:

We should all be thankful for those things, American or not.


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Wild West Campaign Update: Three Killers Legend

The town of East Las Vegas keeps being an absolutely insane violence-ridden nest of criminals. Hoodoo Brown made himself mayor, and then made Doc Thomas into the town Coroner (which would allow the doc to make official papers declaring obvious murders 'accidental' or 'self defense'). The player characters just can't believe the amount of violence and criminality going on here (such that would put Dodge City to shame), and yet they're all making crazy amounts of money from contributing to this criminal enterprise.  They know there's no way something this nuts is going to last, so they're planning on milking it for all it's worth.

So Other Miller and Dirty Dave Rudabaugh were on their regular stagecoach-stick-up run, when they again ran into a large group of Commancheros. They agreed to stay and convey the message Hoodoo Brown wanted to send them, though Dirty Dave ran off at the last second, leaving Other Miller in the lurch. Even so, the leader of the Commancheros was sufficiently curious about the balls on Hoodoo for suggesting a parley that he let Other Miller go with his life.

The parley happened at a place not far from town called Piedras Rojas, where Hoodoo intentionally went with only about a dozen men (including all of the PCs except Doc Thomas), knowing that the Commancheros would outnumber them. He basically decided to psych them out, and get them to consider an alliance, and convinced them of the benefit of having a town where they would be free to come and go without any fear of arrest or harassment, and get all the pleasures of the flesh they would like.

Among the Commancheros, who came back into East Vegas to shoot up the town, get drunk and use all the whores, was a mysterious white man who started asking questions about Crazy Miller, and also Doc Holliday (who had not come with Hoodoo's group, but who was of course at his usual place in the saloon he partly owned).  The stranger had a haunted look, and a killer's gaze, the likes of which Crazy Miller had only ever seen in two other people: John Joshua Webb, and Holliday himself.

The next day, the stranger was gone, along with Dirty Dave and Mysterious Dave Mathers. It turns out that they headed off early and robbed the Santa Fe Railroad. This was a big problem, since the Santa Fe railroad are part of Hoodoo's network of powerful people who help keep him and the town protected from the real lawmen, and perhaps even more importantly because they'd gone and done it without Hoodoo's permission.  Hoodoo had also promised the Railroad men that whoever did it would pay, before realizing that two of the three people who did it were part of his Dodge City Gang.

When they got back to town, rather than hide or deny it, the two Daves went right up to Hoodoo and admitted what they'd done, that it went off without a hitch, and that they'd got a haul of $12000 which was a payroll belonging to the Railroad. And it was all thanks to the mysterious white commanchero. Hoodoo was still going to punish them, but Mysterious Dave explained that they had to do it, and he'd understand, once he knew who the man was. And when he told Hoodoo, Brown agreed.

Meanwhile, Doc Thomas was visited by a scruffy dirty teenager who'd sewn up his own bullet wound on the trail. It was also not the first wound he'd taken in his young life. He was also heavily armed, and looking to meet Doc Holliday. Doc Thomas, perhaps a bit smitten by the lad, decided to take him over to Kate's Saloon.  Turns out the white commanchero was there too.

The boy sat down very brashly at Doc Holliday's table, and started talking him up, admiringly but boastfully about how he'd heard Doc was 'almost as good a shot as he was'. And telling Doc that they should team up.  Doc was just about to shoot the boy, and asked him who the hell he thinks he is to be talking such when he can't even grow a beard yet.
Turns out, he's Billy the Kid.

This did change Doc's perspective, but he still said he had no interest in joining a gang with him. But then the White commanchero jumped in and said that Doc was wrong, that it was Providence that brought them all here, to this place, and that they were beholden to destiny to work together.  When Billy asked how he figured such, the man explained: he's Jesse James.

Now, a little historical context: It is pretty much an historically known fact that Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday did in fact meet, in East Vegas, in 1879. But it is also a long-standing legend that Jesse James met them too.  This is a lot more historically questionable; this wasn't Jesse James' country. But 1879 was a time when James was in places unknown, laying low, trying to rebuild after the end of the James-Younger gang, and in fact many people at the time assumed he'd just died. So it COULD have been that he ended up in East Las Vegas, where he knew he'd have a measure of security and a likely spot to find people to join him in a new criminal enterprise. And a lot of fans of the west will claim that this definitely happened.  And anyways, it was too good to pass up in the campaign.

When Doc asked what the two other deadliest killers in the west were proposing, Kid admitted he didn't rightly know but that he needed a new gang (most of his old gang were dead, scattered or imprisoned). Jesse James (who was in much the same situation) did have an idea, however: He had heard that Crazy Miller had made his fortune because of connections he had to the famous bandit Derek McClue, and that he knew where McClue could be found.  McClue had once double-crossed Jesse James, and Jesse felt he was owed a considerable amount of money McClue had promised him, so his idea was to force Crazy Miller to tell them where he was so they could go get it.


Of course, long-time readers will know that this is not true: the "mormon gambler" who was a PC in Dodge City was a spitting image of McClue and was frequently mistaken for him, and Miller made his fortune through a bit of cattle rustling, then some savvy legitimate business, and also inheriting money from the widow he married (who was later killed by his horse). And the other PCs from Dodge could vouch for the former, while Doc Holliday (whose aunt was the aforementioned widow) could vouch for the latter.

So that plan was out, except that Billy the Kid then casually mentioned that he knew where Derek's brother Robert McClue and most of the McClue gang were hiding out, in a town a couple of days' ride from here named Navajo Springs.

So that was the new plan. Doc, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid, along with Crazy Miller, Other Miller and Doc Thomas would all ride out to Navajo Springs and rob the McClue gang.

While they headed out, Sheriff (kid) Taylor and Deputy Jackson were busy with another job: since Hoodoo Brown had decided not to kill the two Daves (he had to admit that no one would pass up a chance to rob a train with Jesse James; plus they were giving Hoodoo half the money), they needed some patsies to take the fall. He charged the Sheriff to find three bums, kill them in a 'shootout' when they were 'resisting arrest' and plant the payroll bag with a bit of the cash on them. The Railroad would thus get their crooks, and sadly accept that most of the money was already lost, hidden or squandered.

Only, Kid Taylor being who he is, he fucked it all up. Taking Jackson and Smiley the mad scotsman with him, they went out looking for 'bums', and Smiley naturally suggested that the ideal choice would be Irishmen (since no one would doubt their criminal nature, and no one would care if they died). There was a small but significant community of Irish wastrels in East Vegas, so finding three of them, getting them alone and killing them probably wouldn't be hard. 
Except Kid didn't do that. Instead, he tried to arrest three of them right outside a tent-saloon where there were about 20 other Irishmen drinking cheap moonshine. The Irishmen called for help, and their countrymen came out en masse threatening the Sheriff and his men with violent death. Kid Taylor and the others ran for it, and took refuge in the Sheriff's office, now surrounded by a large mob of violent drunken Irishmen.

Naturally, Hoodoo Brown couldn't take this lying down. So he came out to the street with the two Daves, Dutch Henry, and a number of other goons; and when the Irishmen refused to disperse they started massacring them. Several Irishmen died and the rest fled, presumably racing out of town. Hoodoo was understandably upset at the boobery of Kid Taylor's bungled job, but in light of Taylor's talents he decided not to kill him. Instead he fired Taylor, and made Dirty Dave Rudabaugh his new sheriff.  Taylor, meanwhile, would have a chance to redeem himself as one of Hoodoo's strongmen instead.

Hoodoo was also upset at how the Millers hadn't come in answer to his call to deal with the Irishmen. He interrogated Big Nose Kate and she explained how they had gone with Doc, Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Now Hoodoo realized that yet again some of the members of HIS Dodge City Gang had gone off without his leave, and were potentially going to start a gang war with a rival band of outlaws. He decided to raise up a posse and go after them, not sure yet whether he'd be going to help them or to kill them himself (that last bit was probably bravado, as it was already clear from the previous adventure that Doc Holliday was one of the few men that Hoodoo feared).

The other PCs had arrived somewhere outside of Navajo Springs, and they decided to send out Other Miller and Doc Thomas (the only two in the bunch who weren't at risk of being recognized) to go into town, pretending to be passing through on the way to join the Cowboy Gang, and gather some intelligence.
They went into town, and soon learned that the McClue Gang (now led by Derek's brother Robert) were definitely in town. They were laying low and semi-retired, but were apparently planning to make an alliance with the Cowboys, the newest and fastest growing criminal gang in the southwest (led by the infamous outlaw Curly Bill Brocious, and based in an area of Pima County protected by the Clanton family).

Unfortunately, their questions did not go unnoticed. Robert McClue made his way out of his large walled hacienda with a number of his men, and cornered the two in the town's only saloon. Now, he said, he was going to be the one asking the questions, and then he'd decide whether he would invite Doc Thomas and Other Miller to join them, or just kill them.

That's it for this session, this one turned out to be a two-parter.


RPGPundit

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RPGPundit Presents: Three Medieval-Authentic Grimoires!

Yes, issue #8 of RPGPundit Presents is already here! Geez, it feels like this started just yesterday. Anyways, this week we have something really special for you: a 15-page book, featuring three different Grimoires, all three based on REAL historical grimoires of the middle-ages, presenting interesting new abilities and challenges for the magicians who read and study them!

Check out:
The Ghayat-al-Hakim, with its planetary and stellar summonings!

The Clavicula, with its rules for summoning demons and bonding them to magical talismans! Also, rules for creating four powerful magic items.

The Theurgia, with its 36 "Spirits of the Aires", each of which can either reveal a secret, or grant a gift.


If you want some interesting new artifacts to add to your OSR, D&D or fantasy game, pick up RPGPundit Presents #8 for just $2.99 over at DTRPG or the Precis Intermedia Store!





Also, while you're at it, be sure to check out the earlier issues of RPGPundit Presents:


RPGPundit Presents #1: DungeonChef!

RPGPundit Presents #2: The Goetia

RPGPundit Presents #3: High-Tech Weapons

RPGPundit Presents #4: Hipster Elves

RPGPundit Presents #5: The Child-Eaters

RPGPundit Presents #6: The Distinguished Wizard's Guide to Pipes and Pipeweed 

RPGPundit Presents #7: The Medieval-Authentic Vancian Wizard's Spellbook

Stay tuned for more next week!

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti half-volcano + H&H's Chestnut

RPGPundit Presents #7 is Now in Spanish

Hey folks, as always, and right on time, we have RPGPundit Presents #7: A Medieval Authentic Vancian Spellbook, is now available in Spanish!

You can pick up the Spanish edition at DTRPG, or at the Precis Store!


And stay tuned tomorrow for a great medieval-authentic issue #8!


RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Poker + H&H's Chestnut

Classic Rant: Real Magick" in RPGs: Types of Magicians and "Magical Orders"

I'm going to break from talking about actual practices of magick to take a step back into addressing types of people and groups who do magick, to add more information on that subject in the specific context of "serious" practitioners of the western magical tradition. 

These days, there are probably three broad categories of western occultist you could be likely to meet in a "realistic" modern-occult setting.
First, the seriously old-school (or to use a term from modern magick, "Old Aeon"). These are the guys who basically don't like anything that came along in the world of occultism after about 1904. They identify with very traditional western magick, and more specifically with the Victorian interpretations thereof. Most of them have an affinity with the work of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (more about the Golden Dawn found later in this entry), and basically have a serious hate-on for Aleister Crowley. Some of these guys "graduated" into occultism from the new-age (particularly quasi-theosophical beliefs), though some got into it from more specific segments of occultism like astrology or kabbalah. They are, these days, a relative minority among occultists. 
When encountered, they will be very vocal about "tradition", like to use a lot of props in their ritual, don't cut any corners, and will be quite focused on old-school style hermetic work. Lots of Hebrew, and maybe the occasional sanskrit that slips in there, but they're generally not into "mingling" eastern techniques with their western magick. I would say that a lot of these guys are more "theory" than practice, but you could really say that about basically ALL of the types I'm describing; its just that these guy's "theory" will quote a lot from medieval grimoires, pseudo-masonry or Rosicrucian sources, Eliphas Levi, etc. and will carry a general disdain for any novelty. They also generally tend to be prudes, both socially, morally, and magically squeamish.

Second, the new school: Thelema. "Thelema" is a Greek word meaning "will", and is the term referring to the general religious philosophy and school of magick that was created by and will forever be influenced by Aleister Crowley, who was basically about as much of a game-changer in the world of the occult as Einstein was in the world of Physics, Picasso in the world of art, or Elvis in the world of popular music. Note that not all magicians in this category would describe themselves as "Thelemites", that is, a lot of them might not actually be DIRECTLY influenced by Crowley anymore; but if they are practicing your standard "mainstream" (inasmuch as you can call it that) hermetic magick these days, the authors they're reading and the type of magick they're doing is based on Crowley anyways. 

In many ways, the "new school" guys are not so different from the "old school", they don't ultimately reject any of the symbols or basic practices of the 19th century magicians, but they have both modernized it, personalized it, and you could say "updated" it. These guys don't stick to traditional ritual, but rather look at the building blocks of those rituals and make new iterations of it. The Kabbalah for them is still the Kabbalah, but rather than referring to just the traditional lexicon of kabbalistic concepts they want to create their own dictionary of words and images that are meaningful to them. At least, the really serious guys in this category will do that; the rest will just do the rituals that Crowley wrote, the way he wrote them, becoming in a sense the new conservatives. 

Three big differences between the old school and the new are that the new school puts a big influence on the philosophy of self-transformation (defining magick as "the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity to the Will", for that matter, you'll hear "true will" bandied about quite a lot), individualism and respect for but not blind hierarchical obedience to spiritual authority; that they put a much bigger emphasis on personal revelation and personal "astral visions" (or whatever you want to call it), basically suggesting that a big part of the magical work is to experience altered perceptions and other dimensions of your being, and take very seriously the insights that these provide (for many of the new school, this includes incorporating both sex and drugs into their magical practice, something that Crowley was really big on and that the old school tends to seriously dislike); and that they will tend to be much more open to synthesis with all kinds of non-western influences. "New School" magicians and old-school magicians both tend to accept that there is a "Perennial philosophy", that all esoteric practices of every culture are basically different ways of describing the same magical "formula" for self-transformation, but the "new school" people have taken this to mean that there is a benefit to incorporating sources that weren't traditionally part of western-magick into their practices; so you have things like the "Voudoun-Gnostic Workbook" or the "Voodoo Tarot", the borrowing of rituals from tribal shamanic practices, significant interest in sufism, and most especially in the esoteric parts of the big three eastern religions: Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. The parts they like to borrow from these religions tend to be the radical esoteric practices, things like Tantrism or Taoist Alchemy. 
On the other hand, the New School guys are generally less inclined to include Christian symbolism than the old school. Also, the new-school guys are the most likely to interact with the general Wiccan and Pagan subcultures and self-identify as "pagans" (though sometimes with the caveat that they aren't like "normal" neo-pagans, or that they're more serious about it, or whatever).

Like I said above, just as many of the "old school" guys will be more "theory" than "practice", so will most of the new-school guys; only their "theory" will be a lot more talking about received Holy Books, someone else's (usually Crowley's) astral visions of the kabbalistic tree of life or the Enochian Aethyrs, talking about the True Will, or about "sex magick". 
New school guys generally tend to think that "old school" guys are reactionary farts who "have the ritual but don't understand it", and that the "Really New school" guys are "posers" who are "too lazy" to study serious magick and don't know what they're doing.


Thirdly, the REALLY New School, or "Chaos magicians". Sometime around the early 1980s, a new kind of post-modern movement started springing up among the magick subculture of what was quickly termed "chaos magick"; this is a movement that basically rejects the old style of ritual completely (or at most, defines it as an entirely aesthetic personal choice), and have neither respect nor obedience to spiritual authority. They are extreme personalists, who believe that each magician has to not only interpret traditional symbols in an individual way (the way the "new schoolers" do), but have to create their own entirely new, entirely personal set of symbols, or incorporate modern symbols and concepts into their magical practice. Confusingly, many chaos magicians would also identify themselves as Thelemites and express admiration for Aleister Crowley (unsurprisingly, since many of them started as "new school" magicians, and then jumped over to the Chaos Magick current). They just don't believe that you need to use any of the old methods to do magick. 

These guys can be characterized for a love of creating spontaneous rituals, breaking the rules for rules-breaking's sake, using lots of "sigil magick" where they create some new word (sometimes out of the letters of whatever concept they're trying to invoke) or image (again, out of the general imagery of what they're trying to invoke) and then using that as a focus for their will (by varied means, anything from masturbation (over the sigil) to mass-production (of the sigil, making it seen in a whole lot of places or by a whole lot of people)), and going out of their way to try to mingle talk about modern quantum physics, chaos mathematics, or other cutting-edge legitimate sciences with their personal occult theory. 

This is the guy, in other words, who will use lots of quasi-scientific words to try to convince you that the Uncertainty Principle or String Theory "Proves" that magick is real. They see the "new school" guys as "old farts" and the "Old school" guys as utterly hopeless.
The general criticism that more traditional magicians have for fans of "chaos magick" is that they're not basically doing anything, they're just making it up as they go along; I've even literally heard one "new school" Thelemic magician accuse chaos magick of being "barely a step above D&D on the scale of credible occultism".


Critics will point to the absurdity of the fact that Chaos magicians believe that symbols are only powerful due to the personal impact they have for you in your personal history and experience (rather than the more standard occult theory that symbols are powerful because of an objective connection to the collective unconscious, the kabbalistic tree of life, or the divine supersoul). The chaos magicians, feeling that all that matters is one's own personal whims, will argue that it makes more sense to "invoke Superman" in a magical ritual rather than Zeus, evoke the Cthulhu monsters from Lovecraft novels rather than the demons of the goetia, or will use pseudo-latin words from Harry Potter rather than the Ineffable Names or the Enochian Calls. More traditional magicians will take this to mean that not only do most chaos magicians not know what they're doing, they don't even believe in what they're doing, they're just playing at being pop-culture post-modern wizards; an accusation that might be true for a significant number of chaos magicians, but then again, similar accusations of "playing at being Crowley" or "playing at collecting absurd titles" can be levied at the majority of Thelemites and the Golden-dawn old-schoolers.

Like the other two above, the majority of chaos magicians are much more "theory" (or one should say "talk", in their case, since they intentionally don't have a coherent theory) than practice.
I think Alan Moore perhaps put it best in his incredible occult-comic Promethea; "You know, in the 20s, magicians had style; it was turbans, tuxedos, and tarts in tiaras; now its all sigils, stubble and self-abuse". Of course Grant Morrison, a practicing chaos magician and writer of the even-more incredible The Invisibles, responded by calling Moore's treatment of magick in Promethea "elitist". 

Curiously, the thing worth noting is that the really great magicians of any of these three predominant types will all end up looking very similar; its the posers that tend to look different from one another. The hardcore guys who have developed a serious magical practice, regardless of what outer "school of thought" they belong to, will all have engaged in obsessive study of ALL kinds of sources, near-neurotic levels of daily practices, will demonstrate a notable ability to improvise and adapt their magick to the situation at hand, and will all have gone through similar experiences though perhaps via different methods. In other words, they'll all be batshit crazy, AND have something real going on; and so will a real tantrist, or a real shaman, or a real voodoo witch doctor or a real Taoist alchemist. They all end up looking very similar at the high end of the "attainment" spectrum, and if that's not a good argument in favour of the Philosophia Perennia, I don't know what is.



Now, a note about magical orders: there aren't really any truly "vast occult conspiracies" out there. That's because any order that becomes truly big, and there are precious few of these too, will inevitably end up becoming much more social and less "occult". That's not to say they won't have plenty of serious magicians in these groups, but those serious magicians will not be seeing their membership in the group as the central part of their magical work, only as a compliment or a social outlet. The largest "occult order" in the western world is undoubtedly Freemasonry, which at the present time boasts about six million members worldwide. That sounds like a lot but you have to remember that its spread over a shitload of countries, there's no central "worldwide" masonic institution, and the VAST majority of its members would not define themselves as "occultists" at all, much less magicians, even though what they do in their lodges and rituals is entirely a part of the western magical tradition. 

As far as "serious" magical orders go (that is to say, orders that define themselves as "MAGICAL" Orders), they're freaking tiny by comparison. One of the largest of these is one of Crowley's orders, the Ordo Templi Orientis or OTO, and its splintered into about a dozen different rival factions; the largest of these has about 3000 members worldwide, and none of the others get anywhere near that number. The smallest "OTO" claimant group I've run into personally had a whopping TWO members!


The "old school" order par excellence was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which were absolutely revolutionary in their development of ritual magick in the late 19th century; the original Golden Dawn (of which Crowley was a member in his youth, and which included luminaries of multiple backgrounds, people like W.B. Yeats, A.E. Waite of the "Rider Waite Tarot" fame, Bram "Dracula" Stoker, Allan "first western Buddhist Monk" Bennett, and many, many more) broke up due to infighting around 1901; after that there have been dozens of groups claiming to be the "one true" Golden Dawn (in the same way that there are dozens of "one true" OTOs out there). These days none of these groups are very big; and they generally take the form of mail-order correspondence-course groups that send you instructional material and give you a fancy "degree" as you pass written exams; the better ones actually have some type of headquarter where you go for initiations. The entirety of the original Golden Dawn's secret rituals are available in print (and online), and many "old school" magicians practice or study that ritual on their own, rather than in a group.

There are two major and a host of minor "Thelemic" groups, the aforementioned OTO being the biggest; like the Golden Dawn it works with a pseudo-masonic "Lodge" structure and offers initiations. Its membership has been suffering a decline since around the late 1980s, however, and there are far fewer working OTO lodges than there used to be. The quality of these groups vary immensely, from being largely social groups that engage in a lot of magical "conversation", to individual lodges that do very serious magical work alongside the standard ritual. 

The other major Thelemic group is the A.'.A.'., which Crowley founded. It does not follow the "lodge structure", but rather works (in theory) on a "cell" basis, where each member only knows his immediate superior in the order (the guy who's teaching him magick) and those lower-degree members that the person themselves has brought into the order. 

This means that basically, since Crowley's death, there has been no true central structure of the A.'.A.'., and there are shitloads of people who spontaneously claim to have membership in this group; theoretically, the "real" A.'.A.'. is anyone who has an unbroken "lineage" going back to Crowley himself (that is, he was brought into the A.'.A.'. by someone who was brought into the A.'.A.'. by someone who was brought into the A.'.A.'., by someone etc. etc. who was brought into the A.'.A.'. by Crowley); but this is in practice notoriously difficult to accurately confirm. Fortunately in both cases, just like with the Golden Dawn, the entire OTO rituals and A.'.A.'. magical writings are available in print or online if you know where to look, though the legal heirs of Crowley's OTO try to suppress this material whenever they find it.

The "Really New School" guys tend mostly to be solitary or work in small groups, but there's one kind-of "major" group, the Illuminates of Thanateros, who were founded by the guy who first coined the term Chaos Magick (Peter Carroll). This group is, true to chaos magick format, pretty loosey-goosey compared to the other orders I've mentioned.

So magical orders tend to be kind of shit, which tends to put the damper on some of the traditional setting-concepts of occult campaigns; but is more in keeping with the far more "realistic" setting elements of isolation and infighting that I've been trying to emphasize as being part of an accurate portrayal of the occult scene. 

And in any case, this doesn't mean that you can't have "secret groups" being a significant part of an occult campaign; remember that there's probably literally hundreds of very small "orders", often incredibly pretentious in spite of their size, which can run the gamut from con artists to cults of personality, to a group of people who have tapped into some seriously Powerful (and Possibly Fucked Up) Heavy Shit. While the majority of magicians actually work alone, or through small or medium-sized networks of like-minded acquaintances, there's also thousands of "working groups" that don't go so far as to call themselves an "order", who are also often the groups that do some of the most serious magical group work. The PC party can be one of these, for that matter. 

RPGPundit

(Originally Posted October 7, 2011)