[UA] Pagan Power

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

--- Winged.Coyote at aol.com wrote:
> Okay, how about this:
> 
> Actual old-style pagans - all dead. Sorry.
> 
> Mainstream new-age faky pagans - powerless.
> Individuals might be OU involved, not the religion
> itself.
Faky?  

Hmmm... what I had in mind was a conscious difference
between "subtle" magic and powerful, in-your-face
stuff.

In other words, let's say that most pagans and Wiccans
and occultists, from Starhawk to Gardner, from the
Circle Sanctuary to Crowley's villa, have subtle magic
at their command.  It works, at best, in invisible
ways and it sometimes doesn't work at all.

In a way, these people form the surface of the Occult
Underground.  Dig a little deeper and you find the
hard-core mojo, guys who can slap your face off with
one blow or who can leap three stories after
chug-a-lugging Night Train from an old spittoon.

Give the majority of modern occultists some credit,
but only where it's due.  Yeah, they got something,
but it isn't as powerful as Infomancy or Bibliomancy -
you can't re-arrange the words someone is reading from
afar to send a message by Drawing Down the Moon or
"sending," all you can do is, well, pray, with that
stuff.

Or maybe that prayer stuff is more potent than anyone
realizes, not magically, but socially and spiritually.
 If pagan rites and wiccan spells and general occult
rituals are really just alternate forms of prayer,
then that's a real, human value there in and of
itself.  It may not stop bullets, but it doesn't ruin
your liver or destroy your life bit-by-bit.  

Thematically, a contrast you may want to draw is to
have a group of silly-looking, earnest Wiccans doing
their Thang and getting no visible power from it. 
When the chips are down, though, the guys you've been
encouraging the group to mock have someone to turn to,
they have friends and emotional bonds.  The powerful
pornomancer or cryptomancer has no one and, obsession
or not, sitting all alone in the aftermath of a hollow
victory is one of the worst things anyone has to face.

Practically speaking: The players are put onto the
trail of some powerful mojo and it leads to a guy a
Wiccan "temple."  One of the members is not well
accepted and turns out to be a powerful
whatever-mancer with a line on some big time artifact
(or maybe just a copy of the Knife that Drinks
ritual.) 
 The guy steps over the line, gets scolded by some
uppity and annoying
more-in-touch-with-nature-than-thou preistess (with
one of those faces you can't hit just once.)  He
breaks off ties with the group and the characters are
releived to be rid of the prancing, clueless Wiccans
(or whatever.)

There's a showdown and some people get really badly
hurt or killed.  Some of them are the Wiccans
(earnestly trying to "make up" because, well, the
preistess gets on their nerves, too.)  Some of them
are family members or bystanders.  The big mojo adept
doesn't get killed, but is maybe hurt badly or
stripped of power or part of his/her mind.  The
Wiccans take the shell of her/his former self off.

That leaves the PCs with the artifact.  Pan back from
the burned-out appartment (or wherever the final
battle went down.)  The PCs staring at the peice of
junk they went through all that for while to Wiccans
settle down in their patchouli-saturated flat,
ministering to the guy who lost and maybe doing some
serious (and very self-righteous) shagging in the back
bedroom.

The wiped-out adept who caused all the trouble gets
some soup, some solace and a really sappy scolding. 
The long runny candles flicker, dim and go out.

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

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