Programa principal del operador independiente del sistema

The Adamantine Arrow values efficiency, so the order bends its rites into aspects of training and exercising the warrior’s art.

Oaths

An Arrow is rarely without an oath to a person, cabal or ideal. An apprentice’s first oath is to his teacher, and the apprentice’s expected to obey any order, no matter how ludicrous or dangerous. Through this servitude, the mage is forced to strive beyond self-imposed limitations. After that, an Arrow finds his place in Awakened society by swearing to serve a person, organization or cause. Arrow mages’ oaths are loose enough to allow room for interpretation and almost never require them to obey an order to the letter. Instead, the warrior promises to serve, and the recipient of the pledge trusts the warrior’s judgment.

Order of Challenges

Even though the Adamantine Arrow’s mages are known for their dueling prowess, they curtail challenges within their own ranks. Martial wisdom is hard to acquire but easy to lose when one is dead, so the order prefers to avoid pointless duels. Tradition- ally, a challenger must defeat an opponent’s subordinates before being permitted to duel with him. This hierarchy keeps bad luck from destroying a lifetime of accumulated wisdom and discourages assassination under the guise of a duel. This rule does not apply to challengers from outside the order — those, an Arrow must face alone.

TITLESAND DUTIES

The Adamantine Arrow respects two relationships: student and teacher and com- mander and subordinate. Within Arrow cabals, these associations are normally one and the same, but outside, the latter is determined by an Arrow’s oaths, whether he’s liege or vassal. Teachers and students do not have official names, relying instead on whatever terms both are comfortable with.

Banner Warden

The defender of a mixed cabal or the second-most senior member of an Arrow cabal takes this title. A Banner Warden typically represents the cabal in any magical duel and organizes the group’s defenses. This leaves her superiors safe to refine their rule or further develop the mystic arts of war.

Adamant Sage

War leaders and chief tacticians are given the title of Adamant Sage. These days the title is rare, since modern mages rarely fight in large groups, so Adamant Sage is more often the unofficial leader of a Consilium or large cabal. Her title is technically that of a military advisor, but her guidance is the de facto rule of law.

103 Chapter Two: Character

THE FREE COUNCIL

Rote Specialties: Crafts, Persuasion and Science

Magic still exists like an ancient tree bent under the weight of the Abyss. Nations can call fire from the sky against their enemies. Voices float in the air from New York to Jakarta. People will die for a flag or work themselves to death for a brand. This is an age of power and opportunity, and the Awakened can see Supernal shadows over it all, if they look at it the right way. But power doesn’t have an ethos. The tools of power can sit in any man’s hand, good or evil.

The Free Council means to change that. This age of glorious chaos needs Awakened wisdom. The Council seeks to change the trappings of the Sleepers’ Quiescence into its undoing. Atlantis is a worthy dream, but the Free Council believes that other mages make the mistake of cleaving to the past. The Awakened City is a spiritual ideal, but the order doesn’t believe that the original rites are the best way to renew Awakened power. Virtually any method, as long as it captures some meaning, can invoke the Supernal Realms. Humanity found the spark of Awakening in prehistory and never forgot; the Quiescence can only subdue it.

Arcane power is not wisdom — the Free Council discovered that when the order questioned the Atlantean orthodoxy, as even great masters were blind to the new truths of the modern age. It was time to discard the old hierarchies and seek the truth through consensus. Secrets barred from the so-called unworthy replicated the ideals of the Exarchs and their Seers of the Throne. The Free Council insists that humanity should not have to beg for occult training. Magic exists now, and it’s moving as swiftly as a thought. Cling to tradition, and you’ll get left behind.

OVERVIEW

Awakened society has always had its rebels and strange geniuses, mages who couldn’t accept the easy answers of Atlantean tradition. The Silver Ladder cast them out, the Adamantine Arrow turned its back on them and the Mysterium purged their words from history. However, the Awakened have always been sensitive to the human spirit. There have been times when the trickle of malcontent grew to a flood, and those eras coincided with the greatest achievements in human history as well as its wars and disasters. Do mages cause such events to happen, or are mages shaped by them? It’s impossible to tell who bears the burden of history, but arcane knowledge increases during these pivotal periods.

During the early 19th century, cabals across Europe expounded a startling theory: upheaval led to completely new occult praxes, not shadows of the Atlantean praxis. Men and women strained against their prison across the generations. Conflict was inevitable. It spanned the globe from the Boxer Rebellion in China to the American West and London anarchists.

Mysterium historians call it the Nameless War because at the time the other orders refused to give the revolutionaries a common name (because names grant symbolic power). For all the internal strife, the heirs of Atlantis wanted to wipe these apostates from the face of history. The war left the rebels bloody but unbowed. Young members of the traditional orders defected, charmed by the opportunities offered by the rebel factions. Even so, the Nameless rebels were unable to prove their worth until they took

a stand for something instead of against tradition. The Great Refusal provided this.

The rebels presented a great opportunity for the Seers of the Throne. Nameless mages who embraced the Sleeping world’s technologies and fashions could be used to wipe out all memory of Atlantis.

Together, the Seers and the Nameless could create a world where humanity would not even conceive of the occult. The Seers sent emissaries, who of- fered wealth and the power to wed technological and cultural magic to an agenda of control, to Nameless cabals.

The Nameless declined, using guns, bombs and mind-crushing Arts. On New Year’s Eve

in 1899, the Great Refusal concluded with the official formation of the Free Council, an order that had finally discovered a common enemy. The spirit of the modern world would be liberty, not technocracy, and it was time to explore this spirit.

MEMBERS

The elder orders believe that the Free Council is made up of punks and political blowhards who endanger everyone with poorly wrought spells and defile the Supernal World with every ill-considered touch. Sometimes, that’s true. Novice mages might speak up for the Free Council out of contrariness but might also seek to escape the burden of apprenticeship. Many mages treat their pupils as slaves and cannon fodder, and a few even cripple their apprentices’ development because the masters are afraid of being surpassed. Resentment builds, and apprentices leave.

The Free Council offers an environment in which ideas are debated freely, but novices who expect license to act as they wish are often surprised. The Free Council takes democracy seriously but doesn’t take to every notion flung on the table. Just as all mages, Libertines lead dangerous lives fighting rivals and searching for magical power, and so they believe in security and mutual aid. After running a gauntlet of debate and sporadic violence, survivors are tempered into idealistic but practical occultists who have a diverse set of capabilities. Libertines tend to generalize outside of their arcane specialties. Their interest in culture and technology, coupled with their iconoclasm, makes the ideal member part engineer, part anthropologist and part guerilla.

Young mages aren’t the only ones in the Free Council. Veteran sorcerers join the order to reject their former, corrupt allegiances or to explore radical occult theories; experienced defectors add political clout and arcane power to the cause.

Libertines have a common interest in contemporary culture and tend to be skeptical of Atlantean heritage. They believe it’s useless to limit themselves to tradition. If Atlantis existed in any age, it should be the future. Of course, Free Council members rarely agree on the best model for society. Their sanctums ring with the shouts of anarchists, free-market capitalists and partisans of countless other doctrines.

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105 Chapter Two: Character

PHILOSOPHY

Volumes have been written about what Libertines ought to believe, but members hold little in common aside from the charter forged at the dawn of the 20th century.

Democracy seeks the truth; hierarchy fosters the Lie.

The Quiescence does more than blind Sleepers. It causes them to lie to each other by diluting power through ranks and creating hierarchies to control the spread of knowledge. This is a radical claim by itself, but the Free Council goes a step further and states that even mages trap their lore in hierarchies of mutual deception. Every generation loses a bit of lore concealed in the highest levels of initiation and never passed on. Subsequently, the secrets of Atlantis (if it existed) have filtered through so many masters and apprentices that the secrets are nearly useless. Only shared discovery and free debate can overthrow the Lie.

Humanity is magical; human works have arcane secrets.

The Free Council believes humanity never quite forgot the secrets of magic. Human beings instinctively create miracles. These are shadows of their potential if they Awaken, but miracles point to new ways to understand magic. Technology and culture have their own laws and symbols that are drawn from undiscovered Supernal regions. Libertines embrace a modern vision of magic drawn from human accomplishments.

This doesn’t mean that magic comes only from modern technology and mass media, though. Many Libertines believe that pre-industrial societies have been making discoveries throughout history, and it’s a mistake to cleave too closely to modern Western values. Of course, other Free Council cabals believe that the Enlightenment and its heirs are the only human history worth paying attention to. However, both groups see these developments as new and vital in their own right instead of being scrambled memories of Atlantean glory.

Destroy the followers of the Lie.

This is one of the most fractious points among Free Council cabals. While all agree that the Seers of the Throne are the most extreme proponents of the Lie, the Free Council does not have any consensus on how to guide Awakened society away from authoritarian traditions. The most radical cells espouse war against the Silver Ladder and their collaborators, but others believe that peaceful cooperation and Consilium- level reform will persuade mages to abandon their outdated hierarchies.

RITUALSAND OBSERVANCES

The Free Council has existed for little more than a century, so most know that the order’s traditions were invented, not revealed. The spirit of invention persists, so Free Council cabals regularly develop rituals and conventions that suit their needs.

Assembly

Free Council cabals are run democratically either by complete consensus or major- ity vote. Further, cabals often form a regional Assembly as an alternative to the local Consilium. Cabals send syndics, who formulate proposals to be voted on by every mage represented (see p. 106), to the Assembly. Some Assemblies require members to break any association with a Consilium, but most do not. Even so, the collective power of a well-run Assembly can sway a Consilium as a “voting bloc” of mages committed to a particular policy. A variation of the Assembly known as the Column organizes mages in battle. Although any democratically governed cabal is allowed to join, Libertine mages typically make up the majority.

Lorehouses

A mission to renew the arcane arts can only be realized by an exchange of magical discover- ies. The Lorehouse system provides an open storehouse of magical knowledge. This doesn’t mean it’s easy to get access to a Lorehouse; its controlling cabal dictates any requirements for entry. Some Lorehouses are a free market, selling their stock to any mage who can meet the price. Others serve only cabals ideologically acceptable to the Lorehouse’s owners.

Techné

The order calls its style of magic techné, a Greek word meaning a skill or art. Techné is not an application of Atlantean techniques, but a philosophy combining technology and culture to produce magic relevant in a modern context. While other orders cling to ancient tradition, the Free Council forges ahead to new horizons.