[UA] UA:cults

[Ja Ke]

Nah, what makes a cult's coercive techniques work is by playing on the 
basics of human nature, greed, fear, curiosity, all of which can be 
exploited in a way that only a GM with a character sheet to personalise the 
approach around could, a cult to suit every obsession and to exploit every 
weakness.

though a good cult should look pretty innocuous anyway so that they can 
drawn in gradually without them realising, unless blatant death cult 
antagonists are the intent.

Vanilla scientology therefore isn't that good of a thing to include in games 
because PCs who've heard of scientology have usually also heard of them 
being a brain washing whacko cult, scientology should therefore be heavily 
altered on the surface level, slightly less obviosuly whacko mythos, 
different name and then add some unrelated unnatural events that makes 
perfect sense, if you've just read the Church of Celestial Harmonics' 
pamphlet that is.

The zoobs really are trying to take over our minds! And suddenly the people 
who seem like they know what's going on are very attractive to the PCs, who, 
if they do notice it's a mind destroying cult, presume they'll be able to 
get out of it if it gets too creepy (and then a few of the PC's personal 
details later their family gets soapy suds bubbling between their synapses 
and it's all gone terribly wrong)

In global and cosmic games cults become more like obstacles standing between 
you and awakening the nation to Magick (or slowly killing yourself for 
power, or whatever), unless the street level cult gets clued in by the 
cosmic level PCs and suddenly the cult changes, and becomes very very 
dangerous, would scientologists attempt to brain wash the Compte? will the 
sleepers have to pay more attention to the cult and the PCs who gave them a 
clue? what would a doosmday cult do if they knew of both the statosphere and 
got hold of the doomsday clock from Ascension of the Magdalene? Would they 
try to speed up the process, turning from a mere suicide cult into a 
Universal Suicide Cult or would they just explode quicker than they were 
going to anyway?

>From: Doug Stalker <doug.stalker at gmail.com>
>
>I havn't done a lot with cults in games I've run, mainly because it's
>very hard to play out the effects mind-games used by cults to
>indoctrinate, without resorting to some sort of numbers-based rules.
>Short of having been ina cult and then left, or of having studied cult
>techniques, players aren't going to act in the same way a real person
>would under those circumstances; the "it wont happen to me" mindset
>will prevail.
>
>  - Doug
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