TWCB THE R@AD - ~
CWER TWCB THE R@AD - ~ G I C Names: Storytellers, Wanderers, Liars (derogatory) History: The origins of the Baruti are lost in the mists of antiquity, but (as with everything else), the Baruti have a story about their origin. They say that many eons ago (or perhaps many millennia in the future) when the world was flat, the Gauntlet did not yet exist and there were wanderers who worked magic and shared tales of the past with any who would listen.
When the world changed, a few of these ancients survived and continued telling stories of their lost age of glory to people who had suddenly forgotten that the world was ever vastly different.
They say that in the millennia since this event, the Baruti have grown in number and expanded over the earth. Everywhere they have gone, they spread stories of other lands and other times. Their initial mission to keep the knowledge of the Age of Sorrows alive was replaced by a more general charge to share and remember all of the tales of lost peoples and vanished places.
The Baruti became the last repository of wisdom and knowledge for many hundreds of tribes, nations and cultures that were destroyed by invasions, internal conflicts, environmental changes or simply the inevitable march of time.
Once the “civilized” world abandoned shamanism, Baruti who lived in the many empires and kingdoms that arose took on the roles of storytellers, troubadours, messengers and wandering holy men. Everywhere they went, they shared stories and legends and learned all they could of the places they visited. As empires grew, many peoples were destroyed or assimilated and the Baruti’ s store of lost stories grew. Most Baruti were solitary, traveling either alone or occasionally with a single companion or apprentice. Whenever they met, they shared knowledge and expanded their range of stories. Every dozen years, most Baruti were expected to travel through the Gauntlet to their enormous umbral library, where these assembled willworkers would share stories and record their knowledge in the minds of the memory spirits built into the structure of this vast and ancient library.
The coming of colonialism and the Age of Reason began an era of cultural devastation, genocide, conquest and assimilation of unparalleled magnitude. Western expansion not only destroyed many indigenous cultures and all of their stories, but these cultures’ beliefs were declared to be both false and unreal. As the Age of Reason spread over the globe, magic and the supernatural began to vanish.
The North and South American genocides and the other horrors that followed resulted in the loss of much history and many stories. In response, the Baruti summoned the spirits of the dead to acquire knowledge that was no longer to be found among the living. By the 19th century, the pace of this destruction had become so great that the Baruti were fearful that they would be unable to gather even a small portion of what was being lost. Also, the Order of Reason had begun to attempt to enforce their paradigm by bowdlerizing stories and occasionally killing traveling storytellers, claiming that they were dissidents, revolutionaries or anarchists. A number of Baruti attempted to directly fight the forces of reason. Joining resistance efforts ranging from the American Ghost Dance to the Chinese Boxer rebellion, these radical Baruti generally saw their efforts end in failure and death.
By the last decade of the 19th century, the remaining Baruti gave up these fruitless efforts at resistance and attempted to find other ways to survive and continue their sacred trust of sharing stories. Some retreated to the remaining traditional cultures. These Baruti lived among isolated peoples, helping them adjust to the coming changes and learning their remaining stories before the culture was destroyed or assimilated. Most of the storytellers, however, spread themselves throughout the world’s civilized cultures, telling their tales where they could.
To gain greater control over the Sleepers, the Technocracy worked to replace individual storytellers with controlled and uniform mass media. They started with radio and attained near-victory with television. In response, many Baruti relegated their traditional oral storytelling to a small sideline and began writing their tales down. Soon there were many dozen Baruti working as anthropologists, novelists, screen writers and authors of pulp magazines. Some even found work writing for comic books, a media that was so successful in the United States that the Syndicate had to arrange for the restrictive comics code to restrain it.
By the last quarter of the 20th century, more than half of all of Baruti were authors of ethnographies, historical romances, fantasy novels, horror stories, American comic books and Japanese manga. Despite the Technocracy’ s best efforts, the old stories were still being told. The internet proved to be a great boon to more technologically inclined Baruti. It allowed them to share and spread urban legends with great ease, as well as helping them to create websites where anyone could read alternative histories, unpublished stories, comics and other forms of alternative media.
The turn of the millennia, however, brought the Avatar Storms. In addition to slaying or exiling the oldest and most powerful of the Baruti, the Avatar Storms cut most Baruti off from direct contact with their greatest resources: their Umbral gathering and, more importantly, their ancient spiritual library. Today, the Baruti are working to recover from this loss while also attempting to still spread their tales.
Training: A formal apprenticeship is the standard form of training among the Baruti. Using writers’ workshops, college classes in anthropology or writing or informal story-swaps, Baruti look for suitable candidates. The mage then offers to help the student hone her skills. This apprenticeship normally takes many years. Over half of thi helping the student perfect her skills at storytelling or writing. Only when the student has demonstrated that she is a skilled and powerful storyteller is she taught the true power of her stories. Using special myths that induce profound spiritual states in those who hear them, the Baruti sends the student’ s spirit into the Umbra to touch and live some of the most ancient and powerful legends. To be declared a full member of the Baruti the student must acquire a new story, either from the depths of the Umbra or from some people who have not yet told all of their tales to outsiders. fact that the Baruti are not inclined to worry about the mutual inconsistency of many of their histories. While most Baruti agree about events that occurred since the beginning of the Age of Reason, further back their stories become increasingly inconsistent. Some tell tales of how the citizens of Atlantis regularly talked with extraterrestrials or about the magical wonders of Mu an Lemuria. Others speak of a strange time in the far past or the distant future, when the world was flat and its edges consisted of endless plains of lava and infinitely tall forests, while a few speak of how primitive pre-human savages first began telling stories more than 200,000 years ago. Unlike many Traditions, the Spiritual Path: The Baruti say that the cataclysm that heralded the end of the Age of Sorrows was only one of many such changes experienced by the world. According to them, there have been other equally great catastrophes before and after. Some happened in an instant, others were more gradual and were heralded by numerous occult warnings. Almost all Baruti believe that destructions caused by the Age of Reason are the harbinger of yet another catastrophe, and that the start of the Avatar Storms means that this next change is imminent. Most Baruti also do not believe in linear time and accept that history moves in a series of repeating cycles.
Some even claim that the far past and the future are identical and that the entire history of the cosmos is a single grand story that is told and retold countless times, without ending or break. In the midst of these great changes, the Baruti see themselves as the sole keepers of a1 of the many tales that make up the vast myth that is the universe. They claim that only by remembering all the knowledge of the past can humanity attain true wisdom.
The most confusing part of Baruti philosophy for many outsiders is the