The Cult of Cults

My group is gathering in New Vendelmark, a kind of New Amsterdam analogue in my Pirates Fight Lovecraftian Evil. They have called a gathering of everyone unhappy with the people they have been fighting, the Conspiracy of the Deeps. I want them to get a feeling of greater conspiracies at work, of a world with a secret history of conspiracies at its core, driving it closer and closer to cataclysm and damnation.

They gathered together, men of business and means in a new world, far from where their ancestors had set down roots. It was an unforgiving wilderness, being tamed by greed and blood but there were fortunes to be made here. They could see past the savages and the death to the bottom line and the bottom line was a profit.

They brought with them a spell to summon a vicious demon lord. In the old world it would have put hell onto their enemies, blood onto their knives and sin into their hearts. They called a council, put the scroll on the table.

But the summoning did not pass council. The scroll, it was said, needed revising.

They did not summon the demon lord of blood and brimstone. Instead they changed the wording, altered the spell and summoned a bureaucrat, an accountant, a creator of rows and columns. They summoned the Devil's Own Book-keeper.

And now the bottom line has never been spelled out in more clear terms. They go into a winter knowing full well how many will have to die of starvation in order for the many to survive. They invest in a venture knowing full well the sins of all involved with coin or deed.

The summoning had proven profitable.

But then the book-keeper looked up for his columns and rows, shut his book, hung his spectacle upon a horned wing and made a request.

They began keeping track of cults, of conspiracies, of other men and women who had made their fortunes on a deal with a beast from beyond. Sometimes they took a piece of what said cults wanted, just to make a profit, sometimes they played one against another. Sometimes they aided a heroic fool who fought against a demon-lord and sometimes they made sure said hero was killed and put in an untamed river in the new world.

They decimated a colony and wrote Croatan, causing a rift between a colonial cult and the savages. They assassinated popes, as the church was just another cult to them, god just another demon in need of blood. They stole a chalice that filled with angel's blood on every hunter's moon in order to stop a cult from gaining too much power in the olde world. And they took notice of a band of pirates in the Archipelago who had been disrupting the trade the Conspiracy of the Deeps was holding with the Leviathan, easing the trades routes between new world and olde.