[UA] Homebrew Cabal: Memnon

[David Tormsen]

On 5/4/06, Chris Cooper <insectking at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> This is where my wheels brake. I cannot see magick
> going big time unless there was some heavy
> cause-and-effect right here: Waking Tiger, Sleepers,
> the news media discovering a hostile cult backed by an
> established company is a threat to national security,
> and politicos peeping around for potential terrorist
> cells and glueing Al Qaida links to them.

Yeah I know what you mean. I'm trying to figure out a way of limiting
their clued-in-ness. Thats why I tried to limit it to narco-alchemical
workings. When the mercs are given whack drugs, they're not going to
think "magick" they're going to think "cutting-edge chemistry". Their
experiments with other kinds of magick have had a tendency to end
badly.

The African activities are a bit more prone to meltdown, which I was
hoping I was trying to suggest with the unnatural phenomena.

>
> I can get some of Mnemon's members are street level
> getting some clue, but frankly pouring moneu into
> magick is not the sort of project which would sit well
> with boards of directors. I can imagine some employees
> creating a sluch fund to investigate the OU, but they
> wouldn't know jack from shit and might get despondent,
> run out of money, or both.

They do know jackshit about the American OU at any rate, as they have
barely been involved in it. They have mainly been operating in the
fractious and chaotic equivalents in Latin America, Africa and the
Middle East. And they have no clear picture as to how magick works,
and they don't know anything about the Invisible Clergy, etc. Their
most reliable assets are their narquis and the records of that cult in
Johannesburg, both decidedly dubious in their own ways.

>
> Also note, security mercenary companies are illegal in
> South Africa. If one is found the Scorpions quickly
> dive in and sieze all assets.

One of the reasons the merger worked so well, and they moved much of
their operations to Namibia. I should maybe pull them out of SA
altogether.

>
> Just be careful with playing too heavy with money and
> the OU. You might get 90% fakers and 10% real
> magicians, and not even the magicians know if anything
> is real or not.
>

Thanks, you're right. I had intended this group to be basically just a
homebrew alternative to TNI, dangerous NPC badasses who later turn out
to be rather clueless. I had envisioned a catastrophic collapse for
Memnon as it gets involved in an occult war it can't understand with a
large Voudoun sect, alerting both the Sleepers and the Cecilines as
well as the mundanes to something rotten in the State of Texas. I
didn't mean them as some sort of powergamer unstoppable
uber-military-magick guys.