OK, I have an internet connection through my own computer again, so let's start posting up excerpts.
The Stellar Oracles
“
Your reign of terror ends now!”
The Stellar Oracles view themselves as heroes who guide and protect human civilization from the works of rogue monsters and sorcerers. They keep a substantial amount of lore about the secret histories and collect prophecies about what the future holds. And they are pretty sure that the future holds some things that are
really bad. The Stellar Oracles also feel that it is their responsibility to stop these events, as the fact that they are currently destined is in no small part
their fault.
Teachings of the Oracles
“
The future is more important than the past because it is your fault.”
The Oracles have a simplistic utilitarian moral system in which making the future “better” is considered to be “good”. And while that might seem to be fairly non-contentious, they are actually dealing with inexact and sometimes inarticulate prophecies, meaning that different Oracles will have radically different ideas about what needs to be done in order to avert some terrible fate or another. In the abstract sense, the Oracles teach that the ends justify the means, but in specific most Oracles try to do things that seem generally good at the time with the hope that it will all come out positive in the end somehow.
The Nature of Time
“
Not all roads lead to the same place. But all roads lead somewhere.”
The flow of time has a relentless inertia to it, like the flow of a river. You can push against the current, but the river will find a way to return to its course. At least, it will do this
most of the time. If the river is diverted far enough or in just the right way, it will find a new course and the water will flow somewhere else. And so it is with Time. There are a finite number of distinct possible futures, and different actions in the here and now can determine which of those futures come to pass. Minor differences in current events will have no meaningful impact on the future: people may be born with different names, but the wars and plagues will still happen on schedule with all the parts played by whatever actors are available.
The Stellar Oracles point to how Divination and Prophecy seem to work as evidence that this view of future history is true. Since prophecy is possible at all, reason the Oracles, the future must have impetus to it all out of proportion to what Chaos Theory tells us about accumulating chances and changes over time. Butterfly wings may cause storms, but prophecies are capable of accurately predicting those storms. However, divinations are not always correct, and when one fails it is frequently the case that
many prophecies start failing all at once. And when that happens, new Divination starts giving radically different predictions. And most importantly of all: sometimes things will start showing up in prophecies again after a previous shift made them stop happening. The Stellar Oracles interpret these events as being accumulated action shifting the timeline from one course to another, and further evidence that there are few enough possible timelines that it is possible to count them.
The prophecies of the Oracles are divided into several different future histories based on key events that seem to accompany them. Currently, there are five such categories: The Solar Empire, The Siege, The Crystal Age, The Time of Darkness, and The Unknown. The Oracles believe it is their duty to keep the Time of Darkness from coming to pass, and do everything they can to divert the timestream to another course.
Fate and Free Will
|
In the real world, there is no true divination, and the question of whether the future is mutable by the choices we make today is strictly unanswerable. But in After Sundown it is entirely possible to predict the future and attempt to change it, thereby putting Fate to the test. In After Sundown, events will conspire to make prophecies come true. But this effect has its limits, and with enough effort a prophecy can be made to fail. And when that happens, it is customary for subsequent prophecies to be based on the new (different) future.
For those groups using the upcoming book Long After Sundown, the Stellar Oracle view of Time is essentially correct. After Sundown uses the “Finite Futures” model for its raygun gothic material, and the Oracles are therefore barking up the right tree. But in the context of the modern age that most After Sundown games are set in, there is no way anyone could be sure of that. The data about prophesy shifts that the Oracles have gathered is real, but there are multiple models that fit the data they have available to them just as well. The future could be determined by the winners of present conflicts. The future could be literally unchangeable, with prophecies themselves being wrong sometimes. There could be literal decision points where time moves off into new and radical directions with prophecies before the decision point giving answers essentially at random. There could be many worlds and divinations could be giving you a probabilistic analysis of which world you are presently in. Or of course a nigh infinite number of other possibilities, some more contrived than others.
But if Long After Sundown is being used, it should be noted that more potential futures are presented than the Stellar Oracles are aware of. Divination is not infallible and the information it provides is not complete, and with their limited tools the Oracles simply cannot distinguish between several of the possible futures, and just plain don't know about some of the others. |
The Legend of the Queen
“
Everyone wishes they were important in a previous life. We actually were.”
The secret histories the Stellar Oracles maintain are amongst the most complete, but there are sections that outsiders are not allowed to see. And one of the most closely guarded secrets is the Legend of the Queen. According to this portion of the secret histories, the Stellar Oracles used to be prognosticators and enforcers for Queen Ayesha from around the 3rd century BCE. She was the cruel queen and goddess of a kingdom in Central Africa which bore her name. She achieved immortality by throwing herself into a sacred flame powered by the heat of Limbo and became possibly the first Fallen.
After ruling her kingdom for four hundred years, Queen Ayesha fell in love with the king of an Ethiopian city state, and she bid her Oracles teach him the secrets of sorcery, which they did. It was only later that one of the Oracles predicted that this king would ultimately destroy the kingdom, a prediction that tore the Oracular Council apart. The council broke into factions, one supporting their duty to the queen, and the other wanting to fight against the predicted terrible future. As it happens, the prediction
did come true, the man
did destroy the kingdom, and the Oracles who had favored abandoning duty to fix the future were left saying various variants of “I told you so.” To this night, the Stellar Oracles embrace the maxim “Results before Duty.”
The Prophecy of the King
“
We did our best and it was not good enough.”
While fractiousness within the ranks of the Oracles mad them unable to stop the doom that the King with Three Shadows brought to Ayesha, the remaining Oracles
were able to banish him from the world before he was able to set about the world conquest stuff he had apparently intended. However, a disturbing prophecy the group has access to indicates that the King with Three Shadows
will return to the mortal world, and that when he does so it will be “very bad”.
The Stellar Oracles hold themselves responsible for the King with Three Shadows being a continued threat to the world. They also consider it their duty to stop whatever it is that the King with Three Shadows is going to do to bring the Time of Darkness. And while the Oracles stress “Results before Duty” as a guiding life goal, in this case the duty is
to the results, meaning that it actually takes precedence over most other results one could achieve. So Stellar Oracles are expected to fight the King, then make the future better in any way they can, and then do whatever else it is that they are supposed to do, in that order.
Status in the Oracles
“
Saving the world should get you more respect than it does.”
The Oracles see themselves as being in a war against many opponents. The future is threatened by a malevolent force, and humanity in the present is under threat by man eating monsters. There are ghastly abominations that the Oracles banished long ago that are threatening to return. The Oracles need things that will help them fight that war, and by “things” they mostly mean “troops”. The Stellar Oracles are woefully understaffed for the goals they have set themselves, and they are entirely willing to make alliances with other monsters or human monster hunters, or anything else that might fight against the darker future.
But they also need to understand what they are doing and how they can achieve their goals. And that means collecting relics of the past and prophecies of the future and conquering magical places and such. The Stellar Oracles value Asset and Destiny Resources, and actively pursue the acquisition of both.
Protect the Weak
“
Rice does not fight, but it is still important.”
Being well thought of in the Stellar Oracles requires more than just defeating monsters. Indeed, most of the members of the Oracles are
themselves “monsters”. The goal is to “protect the weak”. There is a specific prophecy that indicated that not enough protecting of the weak was going to happen and that bad things would result. Protecting the weak has become one of the primary missions of the Oracles. However, what exactly that means is open to discussion.
Some Oracles hold that what needs protection is children or perhaps the handicapped, and that the prophesy in question was specifically about some person who is supposed to grow up to be important being threatened by monsters. Others take a more inclusive stance and consider the vast majority of normal humans (or even
all normal humans) to be “the weak”. In any case, recruiting more of the “strong” to help protect the weak is a good way to ingratiate yourself with the organization, and fighting monsters that threaten humans (especially children) gives you substantial cred with the Oracles. It is not unusual for the Stellar Oracles to send their members on essentially diplomatic missions, where the actual goal is to gain Assets by making common cause with others who have the capabilities to fight monsters.
Fight the Future
“
You can not fight what you do not understand.”
The Stellar Oracles have the most extensive collection of true prophecies of any group in After Sundown, and if you do well for the group they will let you see some of them. But they are also aware that their picture of the future is incomplete (although even they don't know
how incomplete), and they obsessively collect more relics and prophecies to try to complete that picture. Using the artifacts they have, the Oracles can locate a great many other Destiny Resources, and regularly send their people to go acquire them.
The goal of all the acquisitions remains to identify the things that lead to the Time of Darkness and stop them from happening. So actually
using Destinies to thwart bad events is the best thing you can do in the eyes of other Oracles. Sometimes the leaders of the Oracles detail members and allies to go fight the future, but they also encourage vigilantism and initiative on the part of their members. So if members go off on their own to save people or fight evil that's considered a good thing – at least so long as they achieve results.
Love & Justice
“
Everyone wants happiness, only the paths differ.”
Ultimately the goal of the Stellar Oracles is to make a better future, and the leaders of the Oracles are essentially romantics. Getting a better
personal future by falling in love and living happily ever after is a goal that the Oracles respect and embrace. While the Oracles take a dim view of those who jeopardize missions in order to take vengeance on enemies or to get a bunch of money, they actively encourage their people to do risky stupid stuff “for love”. That sort of thing is praised when it works, is lamented when it fails, but is in any case not looked down upon at all.