White Wolf's World of Darkness

[MJ12 Commando]

You're really trying to soft peddle this. Normal members of the military are free (as much as anyone is free, cause this is a casual universe) to regard anyone they like as an enemy or a friend. They're induced to act in certain ways because the military is good at that, but their thoughts are their own. Social conditioning implies strongly that they aren't. Control can make you believe X is friend or Y is foe basically just because they want too.

That's not the same as some random western civilian who regularly disagrees with the government on a whole host of issues.

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We can go around and around as to this, but let me make a different point.

Narratively, your interpretation of Conditioning basically absolves the vast majority of the Technocracy, everyone but Control, of the things it did which were wrong. It's the "I was just following orders" defense. I don't like it anymore than I liked M20 going "well, all the Technocratic and Traditions leadership were Sekrit Nephandi" because it basically absolves everyone who isn't a high-level leader of any wrongdoing. It makes them inculpable, because they never really had a choice. You just need to go in, punch out some old wizards and scientists, and then you can create the new, better, Technocracy and Traditions, with all the former good parts and none of the bad. Like, under your interpretation, every Technocrat is legally insane. They could literally commit genocide, and the court would have no choice but to find them not guilty, because they do not know right from wrong. They cannot know right from wrong. It is unsatisfying given how much of Mage's theme relates to personal responsibility.

Why is it that the Technocracy thus gets a 'get out of jail free' card of "I was not literally a member of Control, therefore because Control was actively overriding my sense of right and wrong, I am innocent of everything and have never made any meaningful chose to do bad?" It flies in the face of even the anti-Technocracy bits of the game, because it means the Technocrats you are fighting are not evil, but woefully sick people who need to be pitied. And that's not a good place to be.

Ascension actually points out that Control and Conditioning play this exact role-they exist largely to self-justify, so a Technocrat who does something horrible doesn't have to face it, but just can go 'Control said so, therefore I had to do it/clearly I was right' and avoid having to deal with that problem. And it makes sure to point out that it's a hollow absolution. A Technocrat is still a mage, a god with no masters save those who he chooses to take on.

 

[ChineseDrone]

Hell, speaking of a random idea: some dystopia where the Choristers-alikes replace the TU and every world religion other than Christianity is dying a slow death while the Theocracy of America is crusading in Jerusalem, using the Godly Power of Prayer and Faith, Blessed Steel, and their own Saints to do it.

Edit: Allow me to note that the TU thinks they're being scientific, just like this Chorister One World Religion thinks that theirs is the true faith and that's why they have the powers they do. No purple paradigm needed or whatnot.

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Ehh...

You can definitely replace the Technocracy with a religious organization, but I don't think you can go so far as to say that you can replace it with the American fundamentalist right. The Technocracy isn't fundamentally tied to science, but it is fundamentally tied to a sense of detached, dispassionate, and austere intellectualism the way the High Modernists of real life were. By contrast American evangelicalism is heavily associated with passion and sentimentalism, which means that an Evangelical Technocracy just doesn't really register as the Technocracy.

Now, you can definitely do the Technocracy as a theocracy, but you'd probably want to make it more reminiscent of some combination of the worst excesses of medieval scholasticism, the early modern Catholic Church, and hyper-Calvinism--hierarchical and highly formalistic, with an austere and legalistic vision of religious standards derived from piles of dated dogmas and philosophical theories derived from elsewhere with at best a tenuous connection to their own religion, and giving off a general sense that they're trying to put god in a box and are more concerned with the social order that their religious beliefs impose than genuine religious belief itself (because of this there's also a undercurrent of hypocrisy to what they do). The Theocracy is highly dogmatic and fanatical, but its fanaticism is characterized not by passionate, heartfelt, and pure faith in the love of god from their souls but by a cold and arrogant obsession with their texts. They would rather spend their time theologically quibbling over the translations of a couple of words in their catechisms or proving whether God has hair than letting the love of the Almighty into their hearts.

(Obviously this is a Alt!Traditions critical perspective, and the actual Theocracy is not this bad--and even if these criticisms ring true it kind of downplays the fact that the Theocracy genuinely operates the greatest charities of the world that have saved millions from starvation, have used their organization to sponsor sublime arts and music, have preserved and expanded the philosophy of the classics in their scholastic investigations, etc.)

Evangelicalism (and similar beliefs characterized by a greater degree of spiritualism) is, like, the Sons of Ether of the Theocracy rather than the Theocracy itself--people who reject the Theocracy's formalism and want to return the world to one of genuine, spiritual, passionate faith. Much in the same sense, the Eastern Orthodox beliefs espoused by Fyodor Dostoyevsky are a great thing to base the Theocracy against--Aloysha Karamazov is, like, a perfect SoE character in this universe.

Huh. I actually kind of want to see this shard world now.

 

[Lealope]

EDIT: This a sleep deprived rant so take it with a bucket of salt.

I mean, the problems with Conditioning aren't really in the mind control stuff anyway. It's mostly in how incredibly hypocritical it ends up making the Technocracy when they peddle their message of glorious rational enlightenment while also making them the diametric opposite of the scientific ideals they praise. They aren't discoverers of the unknown, they're conquerors imposing order and structure on the vast darkness. They've already got their conclusions and are trying to find ways to justify them, aside from moments of large scale paradox backlash and internal disagreements.

@The Laurent's got the right of it when they say the Technocracy's paradigm is basically just an aesthetic, as all paradigms are, though it's particularly damning of their message in the first place. The longer I think about the Technocracy, the more I become skeptical of the Order of Reason's message of defending the oppressed Sleepers from big bad Mage overlords.

That's pretty much just a side effect of them being the first couple of paradigms willing to band together and imperialistically impose their beliefs on the rest of the world, spreading their particular form of linear sorcery to strengthen the weight of their beliefs on the Consensus, something necessary to do if they wanted to wage a war of aggression against competing paradigms instead of just keeping to them selves.

I still agree with their message, sure, if only because their paradigm is more conceptually palatable and already established. At the same time, it led me to the awful realisation that maybe Changeling the Dreaming got one thing right. Mocking Changeling for calling "scientists" Banal is either missing or misrepresenting what the Technocracy actually does.

You can definitely replace the Technocracy with a religious organization, but I don't think you can go so far as to say that you can replace it with the American fundamentalist right. The Technocracy isn't fundamentally tied to science, but it is fundamentally tied to a sense of detached, dispassionate, and austere intellectualism the way the High Modernists of real life were. By contrast American evangelicalism is heavily associated with passion and sentimentalism, which means that an Evangelical Technocracy just doesn't really register as the Technocracy.

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Because it's not intended to replicate the Technocracy one to one, it's just pointing out how basically any paradigm could act in the same role as a dominating force because it's mostly just a matter of aesthetics. The Consensus doesn't believe in the mathematics or scientific theories behind what the Technocracy does, it's just about what they'd think looks plausible.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

I still agree with their message, sure, if only because their paradigm is more conceptually palatable and already established. At the same time, it led me to the awful realisation that maybe Changeling the Dreaming got one thing right. Mocking Changeling for calling "scientists" Banal is either missing or misrepresenting what the Technocracy actually does.

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No, it didn't. Because the Technocracy, and Mages, don't need to exist, and in fact if they exist, actively harm the idea that Changelings do something that's important and matters. Like, at this point even ignoring everything else, the Technocracy and Ascension War existing in the context of C:tD, besides for the whole 'this isn't how gamelines work in oWoD' thing just makes Changelings super-chumps. "Okay, you exist to bring wonder and creativity back into the world... except there's already tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are doing just that, except they're all better than you because they don't lose their powers when faced with a math teacher, and can do anything you do better. Oh, and they keep their powers for longer than maybe a decade, so a lot of them are really, really good at their jobs."

It's basically like a crossover between Normal-Man, the person whose powers are to be incredibly average, and Superman. Normal-Man doesn't matter, and neither do Changelings, if you act like the Technocracy exists in C:tD.

Like, if you assume Changeling is adjunct to Mage, this means two things:
1. "Banality" is imposed on reality by a bunch of godlike beings with killer robots and mind control powers, which means you need to take the fight to them to do anything.
2. They hole up in their super-Banal places where you instantly lose your powers and become a particularly deluded mental patient from all the Banality.
3. Because you're a minor, you probably don't have the skills to do even regular ol' mundane terrorism.

At least an angry vampire can kick down the door of a Technocratic construct or a Traditions chantry and stab some people to death.

You might as well call it Hopelessness: The Getting Fucked at this point. Like most of the other lines in the game, Changeling plays very poorly with Mage.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

In fact I'd go so far as to say that in non-Mage lines, WoD mages shouldn't exist.

You might have weird blood magicians in Vampire, and they might do shit like use vampire vitae and paranormal ritual to make guys who are SUPER SWOLE and heal incredibly fast so they can do shit like graft steel plates underneath their skin without worrying about you know, the horrifying death doing so would do on normal humans. They might use human sacrifice to stay young or other shit, but they should be minor players and tied into the curse of Caine somehow. Some sort of conspiracy based on Lilith.

In Werewolf, the Weaver has no desire or need to stay 'secret' like the Technocracy. It should be just straight-up comic book science shit. Everyone knows that JSOC is running tests on its new special forces cyborg unit, METAL-01, and they can fight werewolves mano a mano because of all the Weavertech inside of them. There's a Weaver-worshipping cult in the military-industrial complex building a spider-themed multiped tank as a next generation drone. Tony Stark dreams of crystal spheres and spiders' webs and wakes up with the idea for a new suit of armor.

Only in Mage should there be mages, both of whom control much of the world between each other and the other supernaturals, those unfortunate enough to be never able to Awaken, are fighting for the scraps.

 

[TheLastOne]

EDIT: This a sleep deprived rant so take it with a bucket of salt.

I mean, the problems with Conditioning aren't really in the mind control stuff anyway. It's mostly in how incredibly hypocritical it ends up making the Technocracy when they peddle their message of glorious rational enlightenment while also making them the diametric opposite of the scientific ideals they praise. They aren't discoverers of the unknown, they're conquerors imposing order and structure on the vast darkness. They've already got their conclusions and are trying to find ways to justify them, aside from moments of large scale paradox backlash and internal disagreements.

@The Laurent's got the right of it when they say the Technocracy's paradigm is basically just an aesthetic, as all paradigms are, though it's particularly damning of their message in the first place. The longer I think about the Technocracy, the more I become skeptical of the Order of Reason's message of defending the oppressed Sleepers from big bad Mage overlords.

That's pretty much just a side effect of them being the first couple of paradigms willing to band together and imperialistically impose their beliefs on the rest of the world, spreading their particular form of linear sorcery to strengthen the weight of their beliefs on the Consensus, something necessary to do if they wanted to wage a war of aggression against competing paradigms instead of just keeping to them selves.

I still agree with their message, sure, if only because their paradigm is more conceptually palatable and already established. At the same time, it led me to the awful realisation that maybe Changeling the Dreaming got one thing right. Mocking Changeling for calling "scientists" Banal is either missing or misrepresenting what the Technocracy actually does.



Because it's not intended to replicate the Technocracy one to one, it's just pointing out how basically any paradigm could act in the same role as a dominating force because it's mostly just a matter of aesthetics. The Consensus doesn't believe in the mathematics or scientific theories behind what the Technocracy does, it's just about what they'd think looks plausible.

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It gets lost, both because 'technocrat' is a much less ugly word now then it used to be, and because this board draws from a technocratic (or at least with pretensions of technocracy) audience... but playing the Technocracy is like the Sabbat. You're playing the designated bad guys.

The hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.

 

[Lealope]

You might as well call it Hopelessness: The Getting Fucked at this point. Like most of the other lines in the game, Changeling plays very poorly with Mage.

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I miscommunicated somewhere along the line and I should probably clear this up.

1. I don't care about Changeling: The Dreaming. Actually, I despise it and think it was made of the worst of White Wolf's pretentious, exploitative bullshit in romantising mental illness and promoting unhealthy behaviors in coping with the same. Thus, I don't care about what makes the gameline work better or worse.

2. I was using it as a way of introducing my main point, which was that the Technocracy aren't scientists, being conquerors instead of explorers of the unknown. This was related to how Conditioning seems to act as mental blinders for Technocrats to duct tape together the gaps and patches that inevitably result when trying to get five different evolving paradigms to play nicely together and to make them ignore aforementioned imperialistic conquest of physical law in favour of playing lipservice to scientific ideals.

3. This was related to my third point, supporting The Laurent's argument that pretty much any paradigm could replace the Technocracy's as a global hegemon because the Consensus works mostly as a matter of aesthetics rather than belief in actual mathematical or scientific fact or theory. The Technocracy does this too. A Syndicate Enforcer agent doesn't have to believe in the principles behind an Void Engineer plasma canon, instead putting faith in their fellow Convention. Hell, they'd probably be able to use a Etherite weapon if you retooled the look and slapped an ItX logo on the thing.

And that's fine. It doesn't matter. I'd rather have lipservice to a pretty ideal than honest faith in something horrible.

Sorry it was so convoluted.

It gets lost, both because 'technocrat' is a much less ugly word now then it used to be, and because this board draws from a technocratic (or at least with pretensions of technocracy) audience... but playing the Technocracy is like the Sabbat. You're playing the designated bad guys.

The hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.

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Here's the thing; I still support the Technocracy, fully acknowledging their hypocrisies and failures, knowing that they are the cause of orders of magnitude more human suffering, through action or inaction, than every other faction put together, including the Nephandi. Every sickening act of short sighted corporate greed hurting the people the Syndicate claims to serve is their fault. The suffering of countless alien species they have subjugated, knowing full well that imperialism is horseshit is their fault. The people starving all over the world as first world nations gorge themselves to sickness and throw away the leftovers is their fucking fault.

Sometimes we forgot just how bloody many sins the west has committed and continues to commit today. A million is just a statistic and its real easy to support the Technocracy when you live in their strongholds and heartlands, when you don't have to look or think about the consequences of those sins.

Course, they're the only ones that can fix it so there's not much choice here. I'd rather be able to do something good in a broken system than ineffectually flail away at problems beyond the grasp of even Mage's Greatest Men.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

It gets lost, both because 'technocrat' is a much less ugly word now then it used to be, and because this board draws from a technocratic (or at least with pretensions of technocracy) audience... but playing the Technocracy is like the Sabbat. You're playing the designated bad guys.

The hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.

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Emphasis on 'designated,' given that ever since arguably even 2E, the Technocracy were more antagonists who had a different, mutually exclusive, vision of Ascension than 'bad guys' and the Technocracy only became playable with Revised and GttTech, which writes from the perspective that not everything, or even a lot of the things, the Technocracy does are necessary, but the Technocracy is if not necessary then at least desirable to have and as far as overlords go they're far better than the actual alternatives which might realistically take up power, a perspective which continues through all of Revised.

If you want to look at what the original writers like Brucato thought, you have his actual thoughts in M20, which are "the Technocracy and Traditions are both wrong, you should have been playing orphans fightin' the Nephandi, the REAL bad guys who are responsible for everything bad both sides did."

You are basically trying to force 1E's black-and-black morality on everyone, then carefully bait and switch the much more morally ambiguous (and not horrifyingly psychopathic) Traditions of 2E in, while keeping the Technocracy from 1E, then declaring that your chimera is ~the true Mage~ despite the fact that it really isn't. It's just one interpretation of mage, no more valid than any other, which is quite appropriate for a postmodernist game.

 

[Talkkno]

I still agree with their message, sure, if only because their paradigm is more conceptually palatable and already established.

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Isn't that an issue more so that the issue is that the Traditions can't lean on the real world for reference like the Technocracy without feeling pasted on a messy ad hoc way to actual events, so they are lacking a lot of substance for achievements.

 

[Tasoli]

it's just pointing out how basically any paradigm could act in the same role as a dominating force because it's mostly just a matter of aesthetics.

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It is also a metter of efficency. Technocratic pradigm is efficent enough that normal everyday people can use it a lot more than any Tradition pradigm. Hell just by using a phone to do things like listen music or communicate you are acting as a linear sorcerer.

I mean if Hermetics had won you would get closer than any other but Hermetics wouldn't spread their spells far and wide like technocracy is doing. IT was a mystery cult after all. Which means Hermetic sorceries would advance slower.

IF dream speakers had won you were destined to bow and scrape to any spirit that passes you by.

I can't imagine a world where Eutanatos wins.

etc.

 

[EarthScorpion]

You might have weird blood magicians in Vampire, and they might do shit like use vampire vitae and paranormal ritual to make guys who are SUPER SWOLE and heal incredibly fast so they can do shit like graft steel plates underneath their skin without worrying about you know, the horrifying death doing so would do on normal humans. They might use human sacrifice to stay young or other shit, but they should be minor players and tied into the curse of Caine somehow. Some sort of conspiracy based on Lilith.

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Hell, you might as well as kill two birds with one stone and fix the Tremere at the same time by taking Thaumaturgy away from them and giving them the disciplines of the antitribu Tzimisce, then give Thaumaturgy to these mortal blood magicians using the Rites of Lilith - who can pay with their own blood (but that hurts 1lhl per blood point) or the blood of others (which makes you a bad person).

And hey if you ghoul a blood magician, they can pay with the vitae you give them. Synergy! If only they weren't so weak to people with Celerity running up to them and punching them in the face.

 

[ganonso]

It is also a metter of efficency. Technocratic pradigm is efficent enough that normal everyday people can use it a lot more than any Tradition pradigm. Hell just by using a phone to do things like listen music or communicate you are acting as a linear sorcerer.

I mean if Hermetics had won you would get closer than any other but Hermetics wouldn't spread their spells far and wide like technocracy is doing. IT was a mystery cult after all. Which means Hermetic sorceries would advance slower.

IF dream speakers had won you were destined to bow and scrape to any spirit that passes you by.

I can't imagine a world where Eutanatos wins.

etc.

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Euthanatos want to set up a just world where Fate can reward or punish you.

 

[Vindictus]

I can't imagine a world where Eutanatos wins.

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Euthanatos want to set up a just world where Fate can reward or punish you.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the Euthanatos believe in a sort of dollar-store-buddhist cycle of reincarnation?

So, when they kill someone, they're lightening their karmic debt and giving them a chance to do better in their next life, or something of the sort.

IDK. Been a while since I read up on the Euthanatos.

Anyway, I'd imagine that the world according to Euthanatos consensus would be basically an edgy fantasy story about dudes with swords making the world a better place by killing bad guys.

 

[Renu]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the Euthanatos believe in a sort of dollar-store-buddhist cycle of reincarnation?

So, when they kill someone, they're lightening their karmic debt and giving them a chance to do better in their next life, or something of the sort.

IDK. Been a while since I read up on the Euthanatos.

Anyway, I'd imagine that the world according to Euthanatos consensus would be basically an edgy fantasy story about dudes with swords making the world a better place by killing bad guys.

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Wouldn't it be a world without (permanent) death where every action has an immediate consequence?


It could be nice (though it depends on which moral code we're supposed to follow).

 

[king208]

What was that, @king208 ?

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I mistakenly hit the reply button while scrolling on my phone.

 

[Keres Acheron]

Ehh...

Huh. I actually kind of want to see this shard world now.

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I imagine something like the Magisterium from "Northern Lights"/"The Golden Compass".

 

[Tasoli]

Euthanatos want to set up a just world where Fate can reward or punish you.

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They are the guys whom essentially says "kill them all and let Karma sort them out".

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

We can go around and around as to this, but let me make a different point.

Narratively, your interpretation of Conditioning basically absolves the vast majority of the Technocracy, everyone but Control, of the things it did which were wrong. It's the "I was just following orders" defense. I don't like it anymore than I liked M20 going "well, all the Technocratic and Traditions leadership were Sekrit Nephandi" because it basically absolves everyone who isn't a high-level leader of any wrongdoing. It makes them inculpable, because they never really had a choice. You just need to go in, punch out some old wizards and scientists, and then you can create the new, better, Technocracy and Traditions, with all the former good parts and none of the bad. Like, under your interpretation, every Technocrat is legally insane. They could literally commit genocide, and the court would have no choice but to find them not guilty, because they do not know right from wrong. They cannot know right from wrong. It is unsatisfying given how much of Mage's theme relates to personal responsibility.

Why is it that the Technocracy thus gets a 'get out of jail free' card of "I was not literally a member of Control, therefore because Control was actively overriding my sense of right and wrong, I am innocent of everything and have never made any meaningful chose to do bad?" It flies in the face of even the anti-Technocracy bits of the game, because it means the Technocrats you are fighting are not evil, but woefully sick people who need to be pitied. And that's not a good place to be.

Ascension actually points out that Control and Conditioning play this exact role-they exist largely to self-justify, so a Technocrat who does something horrible doesn't have to face it, but just can go 'Control said so, therefore I had to do it/clearly I was right' and avoid having to deal with that problem. And it makes sure to point out that it's a hollow absolution. A Technocrat is still a mage, a god with no masters save those who he chooses to take on.

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I'm perfectly willing not to have most people in the technocracy be socially conditioned, and frankly I'm actually willing to suggest most technocrats aren't even that misled. Like, they fight magic users every day. They have to know that this stuff is possible.

The issue I see with trying to retroengineer the technocracy as the good guys is that ulitmately whether they're flat evil of the first edition technocracy, the slightly more nuanced evil of the 2nd edition technocracy, or the post punk "actually we're good guys too." liberals of the Rev technocracy, their objective is bad, and they're not actually what you and the rest of their fans on this board want to make them.

Like, the Technocracy's objective isn't a safe world of scientific discovery. It's a Newtonian world of perfect order, in which anything's final state can be determined by its initial state. For all that they have aesthetic trappings you might like, they're ultimately a force of stasis, of order to the point of annihilation of all else. They're about control and order.

The technocracy are almost perfect bad guys for mage. They embody both the overwhelming order which is holding you back in normality and the misguided hubris of mages trying to recreate a malformed reality nobody wants and seeing it slip through their fingers. For all their extreme 1990s trappings, they're a really well constructed antagonist faction.

But they'll never be the heroes. Because at the end of the day, they're a vanguard party for a politics nobody actually wants.

 

[Maugan Ra]

But they'll never be the heroes. Because at the end of the day, they're a vanguard party for a politics nobody actually wants.

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Speak for yourself, Reality Deviant.

 

[BiopunkOtrera]

In fact I'd go so far as to say that in non-Mage lines, WoD mages shouldn't exist.
.

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Add to that Mages are a really annoying in terms of rules. Like, a competently played mage can wreck the shit of even a pretty powerful group of vampire PCs.

WoD's shared world thing is cool in making making opfors but I never thought (and White Wolf admitted that it didn't) it worked very well in terms of fluff or actually trying to create a comic book universe.

 

[The Laurent]

God, for a hyperbolic time chamber to churn out homebrew to drown out this argument.

So, @ChineseDrone , if we were doing that Shard you proposed, what would the Not!Traditions be? If we're doing it, it'd make sense to narrow it down/try to make the Traditions more leaner and etc.

So we have the Evangelicals (who broke off from the Theological Union)...

(Leads to ?: What about Islam? Do they get a faction?)

If we're doing thematics, having someone like the Hermetics via the Silver Ladder could be interesting. A group that believes in the power of man to seize magic for himself, without relying on Godly philosophy and etc, etc, with the ultimate goal of uplifting all men into power and glory and overthrowing the Gods, etc, etc!

So that's two factions. Would we have a technology faction, or should each faction be derived around a religious focus/idea?

 

[linkhyrule5]

I have never, not once, found the entire "precognition and destiny = no free will" argument terrifying, interesting, or even sound. It is incredibly obvious with even a cursory inspection that any self-consistent mechanics for time travel that relies on only a single time dimension and does not invent magical soulstuff for human brains to run on cannot produce such an outcome: your brain is part of the laws of physics, and at every point the decisions you make must make sense to you. I don't suddenly lose my free will because my best friend knows that I will always buy chocolate ice cream, and precognition doesn't change that.

 

[Chehrazad]

Frankly, I too agree with @FBH that the Union are perfect antagonists for Mage; just for entirely different reasons than him. The sheer amount of arguments that the Union and the Traditions create are all I need to convince me that they are perfect for my wonderful game of ideology and shades of grey in a big world everyone thinks their opponents control but no one actually does control. I don't care whether it's the Mage that the books want me to control, in fact I haven't even bothered to check, but it's the Mage I'm playing, and it's one that I find infinitely more interesting than "Ya gotta fight The Man so them damn Technocrat-Nazi-Fascist-Whatever-political-ideology-I-don't-like don't turn us all into vegetable couch potatos!"

And that's speaking as someone who does in fact predominantly run and play Traditions games.

 

[Godwinson]

I've always found it interesting to wonder at what the world would have looked like if the Order of Hermes and the Craftmasons swapped places -- the Craftmasons founding an analogue of the Traditions, the Hermetics founding an analogue of the Order of Reason.

 

[hyzmarca]

Ehh...

You can definitely replace the Technocracy with a religious organization, but I don't think you can go so far as to say that you can replace it with the American fundamentalist right. The Technocracy isn't fundamentally tied to science, but it is fundamentally tied to a sense of detached, dispassionate, and austere intellectualism the way the High Modernists of real life were. By contrast American evangelicalism is heavily associated with passion and sentimentalism, which means that an Evangelical Technocracy just doesn't really register as the Technocracy.

Now, you can definitely do the Technocracy as a theocracy, but you'd probably want to make it more reminiscent of some combination of the worst excesses of medieval scholasticism, the early modern Catholic Church, and hyper-Calvinism--hierarchical and highly formalistic, with an austere and legalistic vision of religious standards derived from piles of dated dogmas and philosophical theories derived from elsewhere with at best a tenuous connection to their own religion, and giving off a general sense that they're trying to put god in a box and are more concerned with the social order that their religious beliefs impose than genuine religious belief itself (because of this there's also a undercurrent of hypocrisy to what they do). The Theocracy is highly dogmatic and fanatical, but its fanaticism is characterized not by passionate, heartfelt, and pure faith in the love of god from their souls but by a cold and arrogant obsession with their texts. They would rather spend their time theologically quibbling over the translations of a couple of words in their catechisms or proving whether God has hair than letting the love of the Almighty into their hearts.

(Obviously this is a Alt!Traditions critical perspective, and the actual Theocracy is not this bad--and even if these criticisms ring true it kind of downplays the fact that the Theocracy genuinely operates the greatest charities of the world that have saved millions from starvation, have used their organization to sponsor sublime arts and music, have preserved and expanded the philosophy of the classics in their scholastic investigations, etc.)

Evangelicalism (and similar beliefs characterized by a greater degree of spiritualism) is, like, the Sons of Ether of the Theocracy rather than the Theocracy itself--people who reject the Theocracy's formalism and want to return the world to one of genuine, spiritual, passionate faith. Much in the same sense, the Eastern Orthodox beliefs espoused by Fyodor Dostoyevsky are a great thing to base the Theocracy against--Aloysha Karamazov is, like, a perfect SoE character in this universe.

Huh. I actually kind of want to see this shard world now.

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In the world ruled by the Theocracy, faith healing is the most effective form of medicine, and is capable of curing all known ailments. Snake venom is also a pretty efficient panacea, if you have sufficient Faith, but you got to let the Spirit move through you and speak in tongues for that. Anyone can repel monsters by brandishing a cross or invoking Jesus, no special True Faith needed. Cars don't exist, but the Theocracy secretly has super-faith chariots that use Ophanim as wheels. They're still Vulgar, though. Prosperity gospel is true, and people can improve both the weather and the economy with sufficient amounts of prayer. Most people are actually incredibly rich because of their belief that Jesus will reward their faith translates to a financial reward in this life.

The Theocracy can genuinely tell people that the traditions want to return to the dark ages in which their faith isn't rewarded with material wealth.