AC: GM world notes

I figured it would be neat (if not useful) for players to see this. The vast majority of this was written pre-game, the stuff on law and courts during the game. There was more written on Omegas but I can't make heads or tails of what the hell it was about so it's not part of this post. 

GM AURORA CONSERGENS NOTES

The World

This is earth, only it's been nanny-run by the Illuminati for centuries and other conspiracies have grown and altered and changed it as the centuries went by. Despite their wish to not be a power in the world, the nature of how the Illuminati went about protecting it spawned many other conspiracies and secret organizations, often devoted to fighting it at some point in their existence. Which, given its nature, proved mostly futile.

But the Illuminati remained out of government and outside temporal power, which is where the other conspiracies flourished and moved the world from. The trilateral commission, CFR, and likely aspects of the UN fit into this. They were the powers behind the throne, the secret rulers who shaped and directed the world to a point.

In a lot of ways, world war 1 was a wakeup call to all of them: no one had planned it and though, arguably, they all benefited from it it did shake their faith in systems and their own control of them. The 20s did not help this, and the depression of the 30s was engineered to try and reign in a world slowly spiralling out of control. Alphas became more and more prevalent, and their inventions – as well as their genius pushing ordinary humans to new heights – led to the world changing in ways so great and vast almost no one remarks on them.

It does not help that the Illuminati's deep understanding of Omegas as 'demons' and 'angels' was falling apart slowly but steadily under the realities of DNA and evolution. As such, a faction of them tried to prove that such things were not possibly, by giving humans the abilities of Omegas via genetic tampering. AKA splices. They began their experiments in 1931 and quickly decided to use Germany and Nazis to cover it; a loud noise to hide their whispers, as it were.

But the various covert government agencies and conspiracies were getting better at their jobs and, wishing to keel Splices a shameful secret – and, probably, destroy them all – the Illuminati decided to distract everyone by having Germany invade Poland.  That this went belly-up beyond any expectations is an understatement. To this day, no one is aware the Illuminati caused world war 2. Some suspect, yes, but there is no proof. (There was an X badge, in the concentration camps: this never made history, and those were taken away to become splices. At some point, the Illuminati not only allowed the holocaust to occur -- or at least was complicit with it. No one knows this because they scoured it from their records and their own minds, but this was their Vietnam, the failure from which they never truly recovered.)

The cold war became a cover for Omega experimentation by many parties: Splicing was discovered by r2-45, the idea of Omegas as the new superpower emerged and nations began secretly trading them around, as if they each bad a baseball team. Bu the 70s, the amount of Omegas made this unworkable, and the lack of a Red Scare [echoes of the Red King?] to get people to comply let to many of those programs falling apart or simply failing to function.

Major problems began to arise with the news, with the Illuminati began to concern itself with too late: a telepath could not alter the image on a TV screen, after all. They did learn how to do this, but it took time and in the meantime they worked on brainwashing and controlling the media of the world, which worked until alphas began to rise up in ranks in said organizations. Killing off alphas was crude and, frankly, noticeable; most were bought off, or blackmailed, but there's always one principled idealist who won't be, and the idea of big media conspiracies became a cause célèbre with deep grains of truth buried in it.

Roswell, in 1978, pretty much created the modern conspiracy theory. Or at least the conspiracy theory as deeply flawed: in the end, it made it easy to dismiss people as nutters because it would be impossible to hide things the scale of, say, 9/11 from everyone and people figured that was obvious, since they had no clue about telepaths and the like. A lot of the 'old' (aka world war 1-2 era) conspiracies fell apart during this time, or had to restructure and re brand themselves in in light of the soon-to-end cold war. Most conspiracies were aware of the Illuminati, or at least that an organization that had been given that name did exist, but the actual age and depth and breadth of it was simply too big for them to believe.

In truth, beyond being composed of telepaths (which wasn't unique) and being able – at their height – to literally make everyone in the world forget things via the Eye, the Illuminati worked because they kept out of affairs not part of their limited plan: the hide the war between heaven and hell from the world. That was it. Once alpha began pushing the world into the insanity of the modern life ~100 years ago, they had to devote a lot of resources to keeping up with the world, finagling with it and trying to achieve their goals while working around alphas. Hence the gradual mistakes and eventual 'collapse' of the Illuminati.

Also, anyone who seriously thinks it did collapse should give their heads a shake.

The Event:

Seven years ago, Barry began to get openly pro-Omega rights. There were more of them in the world than ever, and he figured it was high time they got treated both at citizens and as equals to humanity. That Barry was outside the power of the Illuminati and could, in theory, make others the same made a confrontation almost unavoidable. Hence Sally as spy/telepath and the eventual mental assault from the entire Illuminati, the backlash of which killed many and actually hurt Barry.

That a nuber of people have put 2 and 2 together to figure out that the Illuminati's fracturing and Barry's  damage are related doesn't explain how 1 +1 = 2, namely why the Illuminati went after him and to what end. The real truth is, well, hideously simple. Barry hadn't gone off the rails, but he was worried about the possibility; it had been gnawing at him since he started the renaissance and had to watch the outcome of that, to try and balance the benefits of this world with the awful things it has led to. At least, that's what he told them, and they bought it. In truth, Barry was stuck. A person falls into habits over a lifetime, and over millennia he'd fallen into rather deep ones and become very, very predictable as a result of that. It was a chance, however small, to see the world with fresh eyes.

Even Barry had no idea what the backlash would do, but the real movers and shakers in the Illuminati did, or at least took advantage of it. They used that to wipe out a lot of dead wood and cast the weak telepaths aside [as the Choir], left the more morally-minded as the Illuminati [Artie et. al] and have re-branded themselves as Dynamic Solutions Inc., an 'old fashioned think tank' whose offices are old stone buildings with gas lighting and typewriters. Old-fashioned feel, successful hiding from Trevor. Their goal is to offer 'advice' that allows them to shape the entire world from behind the scenes, not the limited stuff the Illuminati did, but hard-core changing of society itself.

To this end, they need the Eye to shut down and put something Other in place while it repairs itself. Their 'genius' in this is to use something that mimics the Red King, and divert suspicion from themselves. Their lack of understanding about the Red King, however, and how he'll feel about it, is the major chink in their current plans.

Now:

The world is run by conspiracies. This has pretty much become fact. Whether it was the unconscious knowledge the Illuminati existed, or simply the realization that one can get more things done from behind the curtains than on the stage, secrecy has become the rule of the game, and real secrets – like the existence of an Illuminati – can he kept by waving them in plain sight.

"See? Area 51 can't be a secret base if everyone knows about it," people say, while above them the real Area 51 floats in the clouds, a giant refitted alien spaceship crammed with alien prisoners and some Omegas unable to convince the government they weren't human. Of course, by government I mean the real movers and shakers, people whose levels of security clearance go far beyond that of the president. Which isn't to say the law, congress and the president don't exist but that, at the real levels of power and influence, they simply don't matter. Omegas are a paradigm-changing event for the world, capable of insane and powerful things, and management and response to them is the real concern of the secret world.

The Law

Laws are odd beasts, often flailing behind the times. That most of the Omega Laws are signed into being without public knowledge doesn't help, but they do exist. They existence of Omegas is, to the government at large (and by government I mean the president, joint chiefs, CIA, FBI and the non-secret branches) only about 5 years old.

Omega Rights: None. Once you are an Omega, who lose the right to attorney and the jails cqan hold you as long as they wish, by any means deemed necessary, should one prove a danger to themselves or the public. The latter is Important, but the extent to which it is used or abused depends largely on situations. This is considered a desperate stop-gap until Omegas police and other services can be made to help keep a lid on things, but has probably made a lot of resentments worse than it should.

Hospitals have underground wards, police stations the same with cells and it's very costly (most of the official blacks ops budget has been sunk into this and keeps a LOT of alphas happily employed devising cells and restraints for Omegas) but frankly the authorities see no other way of stopping Omega crimes. Most SAFE-like groups that have set up have found themselves destroyed quickly by the more organized criminal Omegas who obviously have no desire to be policed.

The fact that the cells and segregation of Omegas is a short step from Camps and the like is NOT lost on a lot of people, which means a fair number really don't like it but are also lost for better solutions for those that need to be locked up. The big problem is conventional prisons are not about reform of Learning A Lesson as much as producing a better class of thug. And trying to set something up that is more relaxed, yet can keep Omegas locked in a location, is pretty much not possible. People are looking for alternatives, but they just aren't finding any barring rewriting personalities and other such charming 'options'.

The police themselves tend to use excessive force, often because they have no clue how much force to use, or how to stop Omegas and they're often shit scared of this freaky weird thing. (Omega police can be the same way, mind.) All of which tends to lead to the healed Omega being brought up, battered and shaken and likely with a deep distrust of The Man, before the courts.

The Courts

The courts are a little further ahead than the jails: being an Omega is not automatically a crime to a judge, desite what the police an authorities tell people, and killing someone with said abilities does not equate a life sentence. A lot of paid psychiatrists are making good money going on about temporary insanity and the 'horror' of becoming an Omega, which does get clients off the book but the end result also stains the image of Omegas in the eyes of judges cleared to hear such cases.

The fact remains that most Omegas who do not kill themselves out of shock and confusion adjust to their new life surprisingly quickly from an outside (human) point of view. The period of WTF? And accidental deaths varies a lot, depending on upbringing, the nature of the change, and the situation the new Omega is in at the time. Presenting this to courts is, however, boring. And given the variety of Omegas, hard to justify as a blanket statement in any event. Overall, the courts tend to look at Omega crimes as acts of opportunity – if you could walk through walls, you'd rob at least one bank – rather than the makings of a career criminal. The police don't see it like that, but they have to arrest said Omegas and deal with inferiority vs. them, lack of weapons and general 'Oh, my god, this 13 year old boy could kill a swat team' levels of fear and distrust that leads to extreme responses at times.

Overall, the system of laws is one of checks and balances, and it's hard to check Omegas and far harder to balance things against them. Official Omega branches of police forces and the like are cropping up, but tend to have the problem of being considered separate from the other branches and contain echoes of segregation and second-class citizenship. That people are aware of this and some want to find a better way is one of the underlying themes to counter the 'ism' aspect.


Omegas

Omegas exist to protect the earth from invasion from other earths and dimensions. Not every world has them, not every world needs them, but they basically exist as the immune system for Life, allowing it to flourish at the cost of their own lives. Other worlds invade, they stop it and so forth. Asteroid falling? Ditto. In this world, few Omegas advance beyond being city-level threats, and most begin at about a block or more, mostly because Omegas never really caught on in this world until cities did. Oh, Barry has been around for ages and there's some old and deep Omegas out and about, but for the most part the rise of civilization led to the need for them. More people means more Omegas, and the skyrocketing population of the last century crossed a threshold in this regard.