[UA] Outmoded schools

[Peter Hindman]

(Was, improbably and irrelevantly, re: Piromancy and terrorists)

James Palmer writes:

>[...]I'll restrain myself to noting that demourgy, as presented so far,
>strikes me as a very 19th century school (mechanomancy is undoubtedly the
>school of 18th century revolutionaries, thanks to its associations with
>Deism, reason, etc - see RAGGED ARMIES, which I will get around to
>finishing someday when I'm not completely overwhelmed with work) and that
>it might be interesting to present them as rather outmoded.  A modern
>demourgic school, perhaps, would focus on the untapped power of the
>underclass - a magick of trailer parks, single mothers, and the Jerry
>Springer show.

   If it wasn't clear from my own comments on the school and on how I've
elaborated it for my game, I agree.  When the player first presented the
school to me (the version posted to the list is several revisions later),
I had one big problem with it.  Demourgists were, as written, 'good guys',
and I had problems with that.  It's not that I think all institutions and
factions in UA must be essentially corrupt and broken at their core, the
way certain Other Modern Magic Role-Playing-Games are; it's just that
they're used and sustained by people, many or most of whom are in
desperate straits and have to make hard choices.  IMUAC, people are
(sometimes) good guys, schools of magick are (at best) morally ambivalent
tools.
   So I set to work embellishing the backstory.
   IMUAC, the idealistic/European/ leftist school of Demourgy is _dead_,
and has been since 1938, and the surviving American wing is aggressively
white-supremacist and more or less completely powerless to accomplish
anything non-destructive; its polis consists mainly of Ku Klux Klan
members, the racist wing of the militia movement, Nazi skinheads, and like
members of a disenfranchised 'underclass'. Yes, in my game, Lincoln's
assassination was the result of an American Demourgist's spell ('Sic
Semper Tyrannis').  And it accomplished _nothing_ but spite.  The war was
over.  They'd lost.

  Once upon a time, Demourgists proudly looked toward a brighter future.  
That was a long time ago.


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