Sentai Fthagn Cults

This thread is the one in which Grek (and whoever else turns up) writes Sentai Fthagn cult ideas. The goal is to write up cult ideas that real humans would actually voluntarily join, with both plausible and opposable goals. Every cult needs a reason to start, a way to recruit new members, actions which broader society would find objectionable and an ultimate goal which may or may not coincide with the promises made to new members. Cults need not have perfectly accurate information about their own activities (they can be misguided), but if so they need to be both plausibly misguided and propaganda-resistant. Finally, a prospective cult needs to be interesting. Not for setting reasons, but because ultimately this is a role playing game and mundane cults of personality based on extorting money out of the followers just aren't good material for a role playing game setting. Even though those exist in the setting, they don't get a special writeup here.


Purple Cults
The Purple Cults are those which draw upon this intoxicating power in their forbidden rites, or which pray to the Black Goat, Shub Niggurath. She is the Goddess of the Abyss, mother to Yig and grandmother to Cthulhu. Her progeny - the Goat Spawn and the Dark Young - are the originators of all known forms of Purple Arcanotech known to the Union. Her influence is known as 'Black Goat Energy' and fills the body with vigor, making muscles strong and flesh impervious while multiplying the appetites which sustain the body and the species. A person infused with Black Goat Energy becomes virile, powerful and aggressive. They find red meat, rough sex and sudden violence to be deliciously pleasurable and blood relationships to be of newfound, vital importance. Survivors report that Black Goat Energy feels like a sudden chill in the flesh, focused around the heart and rushing through the body with every beat like black lightning in the blood.

The chilling power of the Goat with a Thousand Young is addictive and leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of using Black Goat Energy to obtain offerings to sacrifice in hopes of being granted even more dark power. Ultimately, overdose on Black Goat Energy results in the body being transformed into a conduit to the Abyss through which Dark Young and other servitors of Shub Niggurath may escape into our world. If caught early, the process can be reversed and the soul reclaimed from the Abyss. Such victories are a sadly uncommon occurrence.

Violet Chakra Society [Purple]
The Violet Chakra Society markets itself as a self-help community which teaches low-risk purple sorcery intended to enhance vigor, provide personal protection and enhance beauty. Each follower is recruited into a 'circle' or 'coven' or 'local chapter' and instructed to 'focus their violet chakra essences' (believed to be originate in the head, between the temples) on empowering the coven leader and then to recruit a subsidiary circle of their own from their friends and family. In truth, these 'violet chakra essences' are simply another word for the Black Goat Energy, and the focusing ceremonies do nothing but leak said energy into the body, or transfer it from the body into another vessel.

Unlike most Purple Cults, the Violet Chakra Society makes no reference to Shub Niggurath and does not present itself as a religious organization. Followers are led to believe that they have joined a secular, science-based non-profit organization which uses Purple Arcanotech in order to improve the life of those who buy into the organization. This would even approximate the truth, if not for the organization's claims that their sorceries are safe and legal to use. As with most such organizations, the Society eschews the use of the term "multi-level marketing" in favour of its preferred terminology of "branching social structure" and "elevated spiritual model". The major physical tells for cult membership are the standard signs of Black Goat exposure, the purchase of violet crystals - particularly amethysts - and the occult meditation practices which form the foundation of the cult.


Green Cults
Parallel to our reality is a realm accessible through sleep or sorcery known as the Dreamlands. The Green Cults are those which are in contact with the myriad inhabitants of this realm. Broadly, there are two major coalitions of Dreamlands inhabitants: the Communion of Leng and the Dream of R'lyeh.

The Communion oversees the cold desert plateau of Leng, a region of the Dreamlands adjacent to Earth which is used by numerous extra-planetary species as a travel hub stopover as they pass through our region of space-time. Run chiefly by ghouls, the Communion is a cosmopolitan affair, welcoming all visitors with equanimity save where forced by prudence or outside pressures to deny entry. As an example, both nuclear weapons and Moon Beasts have been banned from entry for several decades now at the request of the Union government. The Union's primary concern relating to the Communion of Leng is the possibility of lunar partisans using the Plateau as a staging ground for attacks on Earth, as they were able to do during the Lunar Wars.

Conversely, the Dream of R'lyeh is an organization dominated by the vast psychic presence of the dreaming Cthulhu. Organized as a sectarian religion with Cthulhu as the figurehead, the Dream's subsidiary orders have become the public face of the Green Cults - deep one priests in dark robes chanting "Cthulhu fhtagn" as they commit public acts of terrorism. They believe that when Cthulhu awakens, he will teach humanity new ways "to shout and kill and revel and enjoy ourselves" while destroying the old world in "a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom" in the process. Preventing this from occurring has been designated a Priority One concern for the Union as a whole, which has in turn lead to a public no-contact order with the Dream of R'lyeh.

The Emerald Tablet [Green]
The Emerald Tablet is an organization in communion with the Dream of R'lyeh and devoted to making permanent records of Cthulhu's rampages, in hopes of gleaning some insight into their god's foretold teachings prior to Cthulhu's ultimate awakening. They accomplish this by posting observers with high tech recording equipment throughout Zones in the Oceania region. Members of the cult are primarily a danger to themselves rather than others - observing Cthulhu's rampages is extremely dangerous to the mental and physical health of onlookers, due to both broad spectrum telepathic assaults and the tidal waves created by Cthulhu's passage through the ocean. As such, Union Agencies in affected areas are encouraged to preemptively identify and monitor members of the Emerald Tablet, but only make arrests only when a Awakening Incident is immanent.

While the Emerald Tablet does not pose a direct risk to the Union per say, their activities has come to be of interest to Union Intelligence after analysts determined that they tend to escalate their activities in the weeks before awakening attempts - thereby offering a potential method to forecast the likelihood of an attempt on R'lyeh in the near future. The Emerald Tablet is currently not believed to have ever been successful in the stated objective of learning Green Arcanotech from observation of Cthulhu's activities. However, embedded assets believe that this may be a matter of poor analytical talent and that by feeding additional data to the Union's intelligence pool, new sorceries could be developed for immediate deployment.


Blue Cults
Blue Arcanotech is among the least likely to directly inspire cult founding. The manipulation of Angular Spacetime lends itself to lone agents and infiltration of existing organizations rather than the establishment of new cults. Yithian mind-agents, as an example, tend to replace vulnerable psychics and using them on missions directly rather than attempting to use their puppets to recruit human followers. Although numerous organizations have been founded in the service or veneration of Yog-Sothoth, these organizations are likewise not considered to be cults - the Lurker at the Threshold does not inspire dangerous behavior or encourage recruitment from Its willing devotees.

The Silver Gate [Blue]
The Silver Gate is one of the great failures of the Union's Time War initiative. Originally designed as a organization devoted to the cultivation of psychic abilities by through the veneration of Yog-Sothoth (with the eventual hope that a method could be discovered to grant non-psychics sufficient telepathic resistance to defend against mental intrusion), the Silver Gate was ultimately compromised from within by Yithian infiltrators posing as Union-aligned double agents from the future. This subversion was not detected for several years, ultimately allowing the inner circle of the Silver Gate conspiracy to consolidate power and build a network of agents (psychic and non-psychic alike) unreported to the central Union registry. Even today, agents of the Silver Gate have been known to pose as Union representatives to commandeer personnel and/or resources in support of their rogue operations. Reliable field identification of Silver Gate operatives via code phrases is not possible, as the organization actively recruits telepaths and trains them in memory-reading techniques in order to maintain their access to Union resources. Only regular telepathic inspection and the use of physical and/or digital authorization ciphers has proven to be a reliable method of securing sites against the Silver Gate's telepaths.

The Tokyo Cipher [Blue]
Although the Tokyo Cipher is technically neither a single organization nor technically capable of using Blue Archanotech on the level of individual Cipher cells, it is classified as a Blue Cult group by virtue of the fact that several criminal cells have been organized by an unknown individual cryptographically encoding prophetic instructions into the graffiti of the city of Old Tokyo. A typical message appears as a series of numbers and letters with no obvious meaning, followed by a request for personally identifying information, eg. "Name of Boss + Home Phone + Home Address". If this information is used as a cryptographic key in a particular widely known decryption algorithm, a message can be read instructing the reader by name to perform a list of particular tasks at particular times in exchange for  valuable information such as winning stocks. Different individuals receive different messages and often no intelligible message at all. The tasks might range from the sending of several coded letters, to thefts, to blocking a particular intersection with a vehicle or, uncommonly, that particular persons be murdered. Obedient decoders are then organized into cells for more complex missions. At present, both the purpose and author of these messages is unknown.


Yellow Cults
The Yellow Cults are those which rely on the mysteries of quantum physics. Poorly understood by the Union, this field of arcane science relies upon the principle that the world is constantly being divided and recombined on an imperceptibly small level, and that these divisions can be manipulated in order to sway the outcome of particular events. Several principles employed by Yellow Arcanotech - including both teleportation and the quantum oracle effect - do not arise from any known law of quantum physics, leading researchers to suspect that extraterrestrial materials or unearthly forces are involved. The tok'l metal mined by the Mi-Go is considered to be a strong possibility, given the Combine's extensive use of Yellow Arcanotech.

Although the Fungi of Yuggoth have been confirmed to primarily use Yellow-class technologies, they do not appear to understand them and seem to have traded for the technology rather than developing it themselves. The entity known as Hastur is suspected of being their supplier, given the extensive cult on Yuggoth and the fact that the Unspeakable is willing to offer similar boons to human cultists in exchange for worship and the sacrifice of intelligent life. Such forms the basis for many of the cults below.

The Exalted Fellowship of the Glories of the Last King [Yellow]
The Fellowship is an organization devoted to the promulgation of the narrative known as the King in Yellow, a play in three acts which details the history of a royal lineage known as the Dynasty of Carcosa, which was blessed with prosperity by Hastur in exchange for an unspecified sacrifice. Although the first act of the King in Yellow is comparatively mundane, readers of the second act are generally overcome with grandiose delusions that they are or will become members of this lineage and that their actions constitute a Grand Narrative which is objectively more important than mere fact. The third act illustrates a ritual in honor of Hastur in which a number of individuals so afflicted are brought together in a masked ball, only to mysteriously perish in the final scene, leaving only one of their number behind as the "Last King" which gives the Fellowship its name. This ritual is thought to rely upon the 'quantum suicide' hypothesis, by which a person who kills themselves upon facing misfortune will eventually channel their probability mass into quantum branches in which such negative events do not occur. Although survivors of the cult's mass suicides have been confirmed to be unusually fortunate, the mental influence and inevitable death toll has made the prevention of the book's spread a Priority One objective for the Union Government. The contents of the book are classified, with only brief excerpts taken from the first act permitted to be disseminated as part of the censorship effort.

The Nithon Cartel [Yellow]
The Nithon Cartel, named for one of the moons of Yuggoth, is a South American tok'l smuggling operation in contact with the Mi-Go Combine. By exchanging this metal for technology from Yuggoth, they have formed an occult power block which claims to have been welcomed into the Combine state cult.


Red Cults
The Red Cults are based around the Music of the Spheres, a world-warping harmonic embedded into the cosmic background radiation of the universe. When manipulated properly, such tones alter the shape of reality, creating divots, bulges and obscure curvatures in space and time. The Cthonians, leading experts in the use of Red Arcanotech, have claimed on multiple occasions that this Music is in truth the Song of Azathoth and that it will unmake the universe if played in full fidelity. Although such claims have not been verified, they remain consistent with information available to Project Zero - the Flutes of Azathoth.

At present, three factions have been identified which make extensive use of Red Arcanotech: Cthonians, the Shan Fleet and K'n-yan Remnant. The Cthonians, famed of the Cthonian Wars, are considered to be a Priority Two threat, but will be upgraded to Priority One in the event of another Cthonian War. The Shan Fleet presently interdicts passage beyond the asteroid belt by human ships and is a Priority Two threat of its own, as their operations severely limit Earth's ability to project force against the Mi-Go combine. Comparatively the K'n-yan Remnant is a non-threat and has been assigned to Priority Four.

The Brotherhood of Argus [Red]
Project Agrus was an initiative sponsored by the now defunct National Aeronautics and Space Administration to monitor the cosmos. Named for the the hundred-eyed giant of Greek myth, the project sought to record transmissions from every direction around Earth and collate them for research purposes. Naturally, the Project recorded the Performance of Ghroth and the Destruction of Shaggai, leading to the initial discovery of Red Arcanotech by Humanity. Today, the Brotherhood is a placation-cult worshiping Ghroth as the destroyer of worlds, hoping to avoid destruction by transmitting a antiphon of his original performance back in the direction of lost Shaggai.

The Red Tongues [Red]
Lead by the severed-but-reanimated head of the undead K'nyanian T’la-yub, the Red Tongues are a street gang operating out of the Asturias Zone of the Iberian Region. Their leader, a lesser member of the aristocracy of K'n-yan, is capable of materialization and dematerialization at will, an ability which she uses to administer each local branch of her organization in person. The name "Red Tongues" comes from the requirement that air be blown into T’la-yub's open neck hole in order for her to speak aloud (rather than telekinetically manipulating a pen) and the initiation rite into the cult/gang which requires such.

Although the individual members of the Red Tongues have little magical affinity, the majority of the high ranking adepts have been trained in flight and in the creation of portals by their undead master, facilitating their numerous drug and person smuggling operations. The devotion of the remainder (along with T’la-yub's willingness to engage in sorcerous hit and run tactics) have left Red Tongues as the dominant criminal force in the Asturias Zone. The physical remains of their leader's body are believed to still reside in K'n-yan, somewhere beneath the Oklahoma Zone and it is unknown whether T’la-yub desires their return.