So, yesterday I dropped the least interesting of my faction ideas for Kronos. Today, I drop my favorite: the Indigo Brotherhood.
The Indigo Brotherhood is old. It takes to Undercity Noir 1, where a member of the faction helped out one of the Ranathim PCs escape from her Bloodsider pursuers. I didn’t have a strong idea of what they were like that point, other than that I knew:
- They were psychic
- They were a rebel faction
- They were inspired by the Indigo Academy for the Gifted
This Indigo Academy was, of course, a reference to a secretive catspaw cult of the Cult of Revalis White, which dates back to Iteration 6.
What exactly they were like, I had several different conflicting ideas, not all of which made it in.
The earliest inspiration was an idea for Telepathic Blaster Combat that combined the teamwork of the Final Form with the tactical precision of Combat Geometrics. I liked the idea of this being a highly coordinated group of scrappy rebels using their telepathy to outmaneuver the Empire. The problem I had with this idea is that, first of all, the Indigo Brotherhood teaches more than just Telepathy, as it teaches everything, and second, there’s another rebel faction that I think would do far better at this sort of thing (The Warmaidens).
The second inspiration came from my work with cybernetics. I wanted an Ergokinetic Cyber-Mysticism that allowed the psychic to interface with their cybernetics and make them more powerful, a cybernetic equivalent to the Keleni breathing forms. The problem, again, was the Brotherhood teaches more than just Ergokinesis. I could have two different styles, but what about the other psychic disciplines? And how big is this organization going to be?! So this was spun off into its own organization.
The third idea came from Mob Psycho 100, probably one of the best psychic anime I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen quite a few!). The character above used a toy sword as a focus for their psychic power, and it was a great example of these sort of quirky psychic powers that felt like something unique and a hook on which I could base a style, except it had the problem of “how do I even define something like that?” I can just tell you to apply a Gadget limitation to a psychic power and call it a focus, but that doesn’t let you rapidly make a character, and doesn’t tell that much a story about the organization. I still liked the idea.
The final inspiration was the powers-system of To Be Hero X, an excellent Chinese/Japanese super-hero “anime.” While I’m not convinced the power system makes as much sense as the writers think it does, the “trust/fear” system of the setting interfaces neatly with Communion, especially some speculations as to how it could work. An extremely canny individual with a deep understanding of Communion could manipulate events to make certain psychics align with a Communion Path, and then super-charge their connection with it by broadcasting their feats to a sufficiently large population, say, the population of Kronos. They’d need to arrange for dramatic narratives, rivalries and arrange for situations where a hero was needed, but the result, if handled well, could fasttrack a psychic onto some unconscious form of Communion.
If we combined these last two concepts into the idea of a school for psychics, and a secret rebellion, and I think we’ve got something GMs can really use.
“So they’re the X-men?”
No! They’re not the… look…. I’m… okay fine.
So, I wasn’t setting out to make the X-men. I do a lot of deep dives into psychic sci-fi, and one thing I’ve noticed is that it hit its peak around the same time as the X-men were being made, and if you stop and go back and look at the X-men, the parallels are obvious. There is lots of secret conspiracy experiments on rare, advanced people who have unique abilities to manipulate the world around them, and much of the story turns on telepathy and other psychic abilities, and the technologies that augment them. And when you take those psychic powers to their natural extreme, they start looking a lot like super-powers (in fact, there is a nWoD 2.0 game, Deviant, which focuses on, among other things, psychics, and you bet you can make super-heroes with that).
There’s really no way to create an underground school for illegal psychics that doesn’t vibe like the X-men. Rifts had similar vibes because it tried a similar thing. Of course, I didn’t need to then split the group into two factions, but there were other reasons for that. But on the other hand, their focus on experiments, psychic drugs, conspiracy theories, the edge of indoctrination, all pulls the vibe back towards the paranoid paranormal sci-fi of the 60s and the 70s that I was aiming for.
With my innocence established, I would like to pitch that having super-heroes in Psi-Wars might not be such a bad thing. Psi-Wars is, like most space opera settings, is designed to be a trope stew, where a samurai and a cowboy team-up to fight a dragon and rescue a princess. Why not add super-heroes into the mix?
Kronos is also the perfect place to put them. It’s highly urbanized, the ideal haunt for “super-heroes,” and if you take the psion template and its inherent weirdness, mix it with the concepts of a psychic focus, the inherent self-deception of the Indigo Brotherhood, the media manipulation, and the drugs and experimentation in a night city saturated in crime and neon, I think, I hope, we have something Psi-Wars players can mess with. It’s also an organization that brings psychics to the fore as more than just discount sorcerers, which is how I’ve seen people use them.
They’re also a nice contrast to yesterday’s post: from the intolerance of Silver Faction to the idealism of the Indigo Brotherhood.
The Indigo Brotherhood
The Indigo Brotherhood is broken into two pieces: the Organization and the Esoteric Style
With the Organization, I tried to replicate the ideas from the Slaver cartels by including some sample NPCs; between those, some implications of the various powers and the tasks the needed by the organization, and the agendas/storyhooks, I hope this gives people enough to easily drop into the organization and get started.
The Indigo Academy was a struggle, because it could potentially teach anything, but I wanted to capture the thrust of what sort of training they generally do, and give some “worked examples” if powers they might teach.
This is the second, officially detailed rebel organization of the setting (though Mech Mob could use some revisiting)
Mailanka's Musing 