What You Want

[Stacy Stroud]

>I will say that
>I don't have a good handle on what dipsomancy actually lets you do --
>the random magic paragraph is unusually vague.

Same here, though I don't have as much of  a problem with the random magick
paragraph alone, as with the seeming lack of fit between the blast style
(poltergeist effect), the formula spells (based either on
drunkenness/drinking itself or on dealings with the spirit world), and the
random magick domain (the clearly impossible).

If the authors would care to explain how they see dipsomancy, more than one
person (that is, at least two) would be grateful.

>I personally would like an explanation for the continuing secrecy of the
>mystic
>underground that actually works ("the claws of the tiger" is not adequate),
>but it seems very likely that none of the characters or groups mentioned in
>the book know the answer anyway.  Except Saint-Germain, and good
>luck getting an honest answer to *anything* out of M. le Comte.

Hmm.  I've been trying to figure out the secrecy angle myself.  I'm
actually more comfortable with the "Claws of the Tiger" motivation for
everyone to be informally secretive than with the existence of a group like
the Sleepers that actively enforces secrecy.  I like the fact that the
occult underground is not a secret society with rules to enforce its hidden
nature, but a subculture in which everyone's personal reasons for keeping
secrets lead to the whole thing being more-or-less hidden from the populace
at large.

This may be another case of my being influenced unduly by Tim Powers (who
doesn't seem to have *any* evident secrecy-enforcement mechanisms in his
modern-occult setting), but I'd even venture that the underground isn't so
much secret as merely obscure.  Being a clued-in occultist is like being a
really serious gamer, or comics fan, or member of some other weird
subculture.    You have your own celebrities and events that you keep track
of and talk about, and there's not really any active effort to conceal
those things from anyone who's interested.  It's that interest factor
itself that's the barrier.  Most people just don't *care* to know what you
know, and a subcultural celebrity like John Tynes just doesn't get the
media coverage of John Grisham, however talented we may believe him to be.
Of course, gamers and comics fans don't have actual supernatural powers for
the mundanes to covet.  But by the UA rules, anyone with actual powers (an
adept or an avatar) is pretty much required to be sufficiently eccentric as
to be unacceptable in polite society -- and the more obvious the powers,
the tighter the behavioral restrictions.  So either you function in society
by keeping your eccentricities *and* powers well hidden, or you're
sufficiently odd that no one takes you seriously anyway.  Remember, even in
the real world, plenty of people claim to be able to work actual magic, and
even more have had at least an isolated encounter with something they
perceived as "unnatural."  Unless you willingly become part of the
subculture, you're never going to see enough to prove anything beyond doubt.

>From this I would also draw the corollary (which certainly seems true in
Powers' world, though I don't know if Stolze and Tynes intend it to be so
in the UnAverse) that the occult underground is much larger than most of
the secret supernatural groups found in other RPGs.  Of course, the
population drops off steeply as you measure greater and greater levels of
clued-in-ness.  But there are lots of people somewhere in the fringe.  Of
course, that far out, most of them may well fervently deny that they belong
to the same subculture as any of the others, who all have radically
different beliefs and agendas.  There are probably real magickal adepts who
know nothing of the existence of schools other than their own, or who know
of magick but not of the archetypes.  Undoubtedly there are those who are
following (accidentally or on purpose) the path of one archetype, and have
that path sussed out pretty well, but know nothing of the Invisible Clergy
as a group.  There are people know they have powers, but who attribute them
to the wrong source (like the theurgists posted here recently, or Rebecca
DeGhoule).  There are many, many ways to be "clueless" and still dangerous,
even on the magickal front.

So, basically, there are many points on the spectrum between clueless and
clued-in, and there are probably a lot more people somewhere on that
spectrum than would really be recognized by the "real" practitioners at the
high end.  A lot of the people who are considered complete mundanes are in
fact relatively clueless folks who have come up with their own ways of
classifying and dealing with whatever weirdness they might have come across
in their lives, whether than explanation involve an alien abduction
experience or the tenets of some mainstream religion.


Stacy Stroud
sstroud at uky.campuscwix.net