As the Age of Reason spread
**of Note**
across the globe, they neatly fit themselves into various interstices of pre-modem society, becoming thieves, artists, actors, musicians, and members of the avant garde. When the Technocracy began to crack down upon Reality Deviants, the mem. bers of the Ghost Wheel learned to hide among the social fringe, using the eccentricities of various bohemian subcultures as a way to disguise their magics. As new technologies developed, the members of the Ghost Wheel society rapidly discovered how to summon and work with their associated spirits. In short order, they were using electricity elementals to help them forge fake telegraph messages, and spirits of entropy and chance to help them win at video poker.
The development of computers and the internet gave the members of the Ghost Wheel Society access to many new spirits. While the Spirit Smiths hand-built magical computers and the Virtual Adepts wrote programs and developed new computer technologies and encryption algorithms, the less ethical members of the Ghost Wheel Society used Pattern Spiders and similar spirits to covertly obtain others’ passwords and commit numerous new varieties of fraud. While not all Ghost Wheel members worked on the wrong side of the law, most were members of traditionally disreputable professions and were watched carefully by law enforcement and the Technocracy.
The coming of the Avatar Storm has been a mixed blessing for this group. This catastrophe killed off and exiled a number the leaders of this faction. Also, the quick jaunts into the Umbra that so many Ghost Wheel members used to escape danger are now fraught with risk. Still, more spirits are now living in the mundane world. Many displaced spirits are interested in making deals with skilled willworkers. The chaos resulting from the Avatar Storms was also part of the reason that the Technocracy scaled back the Pogrom and turned its attention to other matters. As they always have when changes have come, the Ghost Wheel members are now adapting and regrouping.
Training: Members of the Ghost Wheel Society normally seek out like-minded individuals who appear to have potential for Awakening. Instead of any form of traditional apprenticeship, the student finds that an older con artist, musician, entertainer or criminal has taken an interest in her. The actual training generally consists of a mixture of lengthy conversations, often while drunk or high, combined with a series of dares and tricks. This “teaching” can even include the Dreamspeaker actually pulling cons on their student.
On more than one occasion, students of Ghost Wheelers have Awakened in response to a desire to gain revenge on their teacher.
Some Ghost Wheelers prefer less volatile styles of instruction and simply take on an apprentice to their band, stage magic act or con game and mix practical instruction in the profession with increasing amounts of subtle instruction in magical thinking. A number of newly Awakened Ghost Wheelers have met and worked with spirits on several occasions before they realize that these beings are anything other than highly eccentric humans.
Spiritual Path: Today, most Ghost Wheel members surround themselves with the spirits associated with their own lives, spirits of electricity, information, metal, and plastic. While many Dreamspeakers cling to traditional ways, the Wheelers sees no practical difference between spirits of thunder and lighting and the Umbrood that inhabit a modem city’s power grid.
They don’ t worry about whether a spirit is “natural” or not, and instead concern themselves with how the spirit interacts with their lives and what it can do for them. As a result, while they are rarely technological innovators, Wheelers are premier technology users.
Cell phones, PDAs, credit cards, and (when they can afford them) fancy cars are all regularly used in Ghost Wheel magics. They are experts at using their spiritual allies to help them perform wondrous and useful feats with such gadgets.
In addition to being deeply pragmatic about the spirits they choose to deal with, Wheelers generally prefer to negotiate with the spirits they contact. Most will only consider binding or forcibly controlling highly destructive and dangerous spirits -all other spirits are offered various bargains. The vast majority of Wheelers acknowledge that is both more effective and often simply more fun for a mage to bargain with a spirit than to attempt to forcibly compel it to do their bidding.
Since the Avatar Storm prevents most mages from simply traveling into the Umbra to capture useful spirits, their emphasis on bargaining has caused the Wheelers to gain in power and influence. Some Wheelers are open and honest in their bargains, others are silvertongued masters of deception who obtain the services of a powerful spirit and provide little in return. Of course, like the victims of many skilled con artists, the spirits rarely realize that they have been taken and are eager to work with the Wheeler again.
Style of magic: A good portion of Wheeler magic consists of making elaborate deals with spirits. Today, the Wheelers are especially well known for the Fetishes and Charms they create. Acting as brokers, some Wheelers will create a Fetish for any mage simply by working out a deal between the mage and the spirit, creating a potent object for the spirit to inhabit, and CHAPTER T w e THE MAD - ~ A G I C 41 then collecting a fee from both the mage and the spirit.
Since they can convince most spirits to go along with their deals, Wheeler-made Fetishes are considered especially valuable. These Fetishes are usually quite expensive, since many spirits demand large services in return for their cooperation.
In addition to Spirit, Wheelers generally study Entropy, Forces or Correspondence magics, calling upon their mastery of the minor spirits associated with urban life and modern technology to enable them to manipulate the devices around them with great skill. Wheelers are experts at making minor deals with spirits, offering small services in return for numerous forms of minor but useful aid. Most Wheeler rotes consist of making a small offering to some type of minor elemental in return for gaining the elemental's help in some task.
More difficult and potent magics generally involve actually bargaining with a spirit powerful enough to have an individual identity and its own set of peculiar desires and wants. While many of these bargains are one-time affairs, Wheelers often attempt to strike up mutual aid agreements - and even regular payment plans - with willing spirits. Most actual Wheeler rotes consist of either the proper offering to make to a specific type of minor elemental in order to obtain a desired effect, or lasting bargains between an individual Wheeler and a single spirit, where the spirit provides a specific service in return for a previously specified reward.
Organization: Living on the fringes of society, the Wheelers are a particularly disorganized faction. In many cases, their closest connections are with the spirits with which they have allied themselves. Most Wheelers work with some urban or technologically related totem. Wheelers who share the same totem normally keep in contact with each other and regard each other as allies. These totemic associations function as the only real organizing force within this faction.
Members of these totemic associations are sometimes friends, and normally help other members who are in need, work together on mutual projects and generally look out for each other.
Some Wheelers are unwilling to sacrifice their autonomy to have a totem. Most of these willworkers have one or more Spirit Allies (see page 61). A few are hardened grifters who have no friends or allies, and take advantage of anyone who gives them the slightest opportunity to do so.
Despite the Wheelers' lack of overall organization, they do recognize their common heritage. Most maintain loose contact with other members. While there are rarely more than one Wheeler per city, almost every large urban area has some bar, club or cafe that Wheelers frequent. These locations are generally haunted by a spirit with which visiting Wheelers can share gossip and news. The spirit hears about the dealings of the Wheelers and in return shares the news it already has. These spirits are often the ghosts of dead Wheelers, making the Wheelers the only major Dreamspeaker faction that regularly associates with the shades of its deceased members. For more formal or more urgent messages,a different network is used. Every Wheeler knows the name and location of several other Wheelers, so that messages can rapidly be passed throughout the several hundred members of the convention.
Names: Keepers, Recorders, Traditionalists History: As with many other aspects of Dreamspeaker history, pinning down an actual origin for the Keepers of the Sacred Flame isn’t easy. One master of spirit magic starts doing something. Independently, others do the same, and then still others start doing it because they’ ve seen it done and want to join in. Sometimes the shared activity acquires a name and some organization, sometimes not. The history of the label is not the whole story.
The central idea of the Keepers - that the shamans of peoples who’ve lost their struggle against invaders and other outside influences can preserve at least some of their traditions while coping with the fact of the loss - is as old as cross-cultural encounters. Some of the spirits who often speak to Keeper shamans suggest that the practice may in fact predate homo sapiens, though it’s hard to tell just how much and what sorts of magic Neanderthals and other members of the human genus practiced before they were assimilated into the modem species. Certainly the practice was common > among shamans very early in the Stone Age.
The first organized effort to practice this conservation of L traditions rose in the first century AD among spirit magicians in , the Roman Empire. From about 50 AD until the eruption of Mt. ! Vesuvius in 79 AD, oracles in Pompeii and Herculaneum delivered repeated warnings that there would come a moment when the fate of the world hung on “the wisdom of those who fell.”
Pompeii merchant and amateur playwright Flavius Longinus Didacus, a practitioner of spirit rites within the bounds of linear magic, dedicated much of his family fortune to sending out fellow seers to support the shamans of peoples on the fringes of the growing empire. Longinus’s money paid for the bribes necessary to keep r - I border garrisons ti-om harassing tribal elders too much, along with citizenship for particularly important shamans and an archive of transcribed narratives at the Longinus estate.
The archive perished along with Flavius when Vesuvius erupted. Flavius became a guardian spirit for the operation, guiding still-living associates to buried treasure and sometimes passing along blackmail-worthy information. Despite his best postrtem efforts, however, the venture gradually fell apart early in the Second century. Flavius’ spirit passed out of touch with the world 150, leaving behind a set of gloomy prophecies. They survive only in a single medieval copy that most scholars misunderstand as an effort of the 14th century to produce a Nostradamus imitation.
Other comparably short-lived efforts followed over the centuries. s went very differently in the early 16th century, when Franciscan monk and spirit guide Roberto of Aragon joined the by his brothers to chronicle the lives of the tribes they hoped to convert to Christianity. Contrary to the usual image of Christian fanatics bent on destroying every trace of native culture, many monks in various orders felt that Christian faith transcended any one way of life. Salvation did not require the peoples of the Americas to become just like modem Europeans, any more Europeans had to live just like first-century Jews to be faithful adherents of the gospel. There were genocidal crusaders J a-plenty, but they didn’t have things all their own way.
Fra Roberto had always regarded the spirits he 2 talked with as angels, the guardians of the world order. When he found that the priests of some tribes talked with what were clearly the same spirits, he took this as proof of their worthiness to survive. He coordinated the exchange of information among his fellow scholars and scribes, engaging in a two-prong campaign of preservation. They made every effort to set down a faithful record of beliefs and practices, neither whitewashing nor demonizing, and to get this record publicized in Europe so that the people back home could understand the spiritual stakes. Simultaneously, they engaged in deliberate falsification of census, geographical and other data so as to create havens away from conquistador eyes.
Overall, Roberto’s efforts failed. The press of greedy conquerors led to the genocide he’d hoped to avoid, and untold thousands or millions of American natives perished from disease, starvation, violence and other causes. But his work was not altogether a waste. His network of contacts lingered past his own death in 1560, and indeed by the time he died had stretched to include Jesuit and other observers in Asia as well as the Americas. In the 1570s, one of Roberto’s correspondents came across Flavius’ prophecies (in one of the copies since lost) and recognized the common spirit of the ventures. This anonymous monk dubbed the enterprise “the Keepers of the Sacred Flames,” a label which remains in use, and even appears on the current textbook edition of Roberto’s The Identity of Angels Among the Americans and the Presence of True Spirits and No False Gods, Enumerated and Identified With Reference to the Holy Fathers.
Over the next two generations, the informal brotherhood of cultural preservers became increasingly non-Christian in its makeup. The secularizing spirit of the Renaissance affected European spirit mages along with their neighbors, and of course most of the nonEuropean mages joining the effort came from traditions that never had been Christian. The group’s fortunes waxed and waned with the times - a series of escalating personal feuds nearly destroyed it altogether in the 1870s - but it’s managed to endure. In the last twenty years, in fact, it’ s enjoyed a substantial renaissance of its own, drawing on renewed interest in many parts of the world in linguistic and cultural preservation.
Philosophy: Keepers argue passionately and constantly about the merits of two related ideas. Fra Roberto himself believed that there was intrinsic merit in every culture, since every culture had been initially established by God and must therefore have a place in the celestial scheme, even if it has since become debased.
This view prevails among shamans whose traditions teach a direct continuity back to primal creative forces.
Other Keepers point out that all cultures evolve over time, and that whatever primal merits there may have been, they’re gone forever. This approach says that there may be value in any culture, and that cultural preservation is a sort of prudent planning for the future, much like laying up food for lean times. But they do not regard all cultures as equally valuable, and they’ re quite comfortable making value judgments as they go.
Style: Keeper magic is, by definition, deeply formalized. Initiates spend many years learning their craft from masters, mastering a tremendous body of lore about the spirits and their roles. Almost all Keeper effects rely on extended rolls, and can achieve great power. Seekings always revolve around journeys into the Umbra, and any effect that is not primarily an exercise of spirit likely requires Umbral quest preparation as well.
Initiation: In cultures anywhere but the very brink of extinction, initiation is a matter of tribal legacy. The aging master shaman seeks for a disciple, and someone among the community’ s youth begins demonstrating the proper talent. (Fra Roberto speculated that the shaman himself induces this Awakening without realizing it; that’ s another thing Keepers argue about.) Access to the magical tradition is almost always segregated on the basis of sex, and often on the basis of class or caste as well, in addition to personal features - the wrong color of eyes disqualifies some shamans, for instance. When a shaman is dying without a suitable heir in his own tribe, the Keepers jointly mount magical searches for a suitable successor elsewhere in the world, and bring the suitably-souled student together with the master. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.
Organization: The Keepers maintain no formal hierarchy. In practice, the shamans of aregion tend to know who among their ranks is doing well or badly and provide such deference as they think is earned. Keepers unfamiliar with each other negotiate temporary status based on their knowledge of mutual acquaintances and exploits in the spirit world, which is why Keeper gatherings begin with extensive storytelling (and equally enthusiastic efforts to poke holes in doubtful claims). Initiates of known masters usually receive the benefit of the doubt as presumably worthy heirs, but in time they’ 11 have to stand or fall on their own merits. Likewise, more successful initiates of less successful masters do eventually get to distinguish themselves from their unfortunate legacies.
All honor is personal among Keepers.
Names: Red Spears, World Avengers, Spirit Warriors History: The Dreamspeakers aren’t much of a Tradition, in the sense of a unified, organized group.
Insofar as there is a Dreamspeaker Tradition, however, it’s mostly the Red Spear Society.
The Seneca shaman Walking Hawk followed a vision to the convocation that produced the Council of the Traditions. He traveled widely, by both mundane and supernatural means, drawn by his spirit guides to fellow masters of spiritual communication and warfare. Some rejected his message of unity in the face of common enemies. Others accepted it with reservations. Some adopted the new cause eagerly, seeing through his eyes a unified world beneath all the masks of individual and cultural variety. These disciples of Walking Hawk called themselves the Brotherhood of the Unseen Face, their gathering places distinguished by ever-growing collections of all the totems and symbols they observed in multiple societies. They dreamed of gathering the definitive collection of the world’s masks, and thereby creating a shamanic dictionary in which each practitioner of spirit mastery could read the same underlying truths.
The press of circumstances did not permit endless peaceful contemplation, of course. There was a war on, and whether or not any individual shaman felt himself part of any grand cause, there were both would-be rulers and would-be annihilators moving in the world, alike convinced that the collective entity dubbed “the Dreamspeakers” needed something done to it. Many spirit masters responded by drawing back away from any collective identity, into the privacy of their own peoples, The Brotherhood of the Unseen Face’ s members moved forward voluntarily to take up the challenges of leading the group of which they felt themselves a part, and seemed to move forward twice as rapidly since each of their steps forward was paired with others’ steps backward.
The Brotherhood could reach no consensus about how best to respond to the various threats facing its members. Peacefully inclined scholars of the spirit world drifted into individual studies and alliances with other factions within the community of shamans. More confrontational spirit masters set aside the symbols of peace and tranquility to focus on the tools of war. If others insisted on war against those who stand between the spirits and the visible world, well, they would get war.
Those warlike masters became the Red Spear Society and adopted its current name. The iconography of bloody spears was also adopted in the 15th century, uniting several smaller war bands into a single cause.
The Red Spears acted in the name of the Dreamspeaker Tradition, and since they were willing to meet with other magicians, they colored outsiders’ perceptions of the Tradition as a whole.
Philosophy: Michael Townsland, current Grandfather Spear, describes the Red Spear Society to his students as “like Joseph Campbell, except we know what we’re talking about.” The Red Spears believe that there is a single primal source for each element of warfare. They devote themselves to tracing the connections and applying them, surprising their enemies with syntheses of tool and style outside the grasp of any single culture.
Everything is fair game for the Red Spears, including the psychology and tactics of their enemies. Townsland again: “Our enemies are in massive denial, but that doesn’t make them stupid. We take their ideas, then we go talk to the spirits they deny for the insights they won’t get.”
Style: Red Spear masters make a point of telling their students that weaponry isn’t really the society’s major point. Descructionofenemies is the point, and weapons are only tools to that end. The ideal Red Spear warrior should be capable of charging into battle with nothing but her own wits, will and spirit allies and winning the field against all adversaries. In practice this doesn’ t work so well against the newest Technocratic biotech and nanotech constructs, nor against demons, berserk elder shapechangers or other antagonists the Red Spears sometimes confront. It remains the ideal, nonetheless.
Red Spears engage in fewer extended rituals than most Dreamspeakers. They put a lot of effort into preparing suitable wonders and talismans, both offensive and defensive. They also try to boil down complex, difficult workings into separate easy and quick steps.
The Red Spear emphasis on teamwork lets them get away with more of this than than the typical, largely isolated, shaman can. If five warriors each work one simple rote timed to go off simultaneously, they can unleash powerful results through synergy while preserving freedom of movement and short response times.
Initiation: Most Red Spears come from the ranks of Dreamspeakers at large. The Red Spears travel a lot, and keep an eye out for fellow shamans who show interest in taking the war for survival back to the laps of their enemies. Dreamspeakers of other factions or who decline to affiliate themselves at all often complain about this poaching. A few Red Spears come into the society unAwakened, picked up by current warriors who notice someone fighting the battle against magical hegemony even without having Awakened. The Red Spears’ 8 -. ’ C m m T w @ THE Rem - ~ A G I C 45 There’ s a responsibility to th fight. Red Spears maintain safe houses in at least one major city on each continent, as well as temporary residences close to the sites of their upcoming battles; Cousins tend these and keep their secrets.
Promotion to the ranks of the Sons takes place at the annualwinter solstice rites. Red Spearpracticedeemphasim the equinoxes, the times when all things are equal, in favor of attention to the solstices and the moments of extreme tension. (‘I When it’s darkest, we blaze brightest,” the winter chant begins, while the summer chant begins, “As the sun triumphs, so shall we.”) New Sons undergo a second round of training, emerging from the world’ s darkness into the harsh light of battle.
Groups of Sons form and disperse for particular operations. They are always headed by an Eldest Son and include a Youngest Son who must stay out of the battle to observe and record. Operations can range anywhere from two individuals up to (in very rare cases) dozens. The Red Spears prohibit solo operations, and mentors guide these individuals into Awakening and help them put their anger to more effective result.
The Red Spears, unlike most Dreamspeaker facwarriors like Xoca; they’ 11 cooperate with such individuals tions, expel members who show themselves afraid, weak or otherwise unsuitable for a life of war. Very, very occasionally - perhaps once a century - a disgraced ex-member wins the right of reconside particular acts of valor.
Organization: The Red Spears have a three-level hierarchy. The Fathers plan and direct operations. The Sons lead the actual fight. The Cousins, mostly apprentices and initiates, watch and provide support. All three terms refer to standing in the organization rather than age, and it’ s not uncommon for a young Father to direct old Sons and older Cousins on a particular mission. And yes, the same titles apply to women as well as to men. This occasions endless debate, but many mentoring spirits have made it clear that they see all Red Spears as male, for various reasons best known to the spirits.