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[Reasor]

It occurs to me that any setting where True Faith threatens to spread like wildfire would see a vampiric counter-inquisition working to stamp it out and cover it up.

[Reasor]

Part of what makes Gehenna-as-cyclical-culling really interesting to me is how it potentially reframes Ur-Shulgi's purge of his clan, which is quite a few years in the rear view mirror now. The Banu Haqim are the canaries in the coal mine, in hindsight.

[Reasor]

Path of Night isn't infernalist, but every write-up that I've seen across the game's previous editions has made it about accepting damnation because the individual vampire's damnation has a role in God's plan....

[Reasor]

So, Path of Night? And Cathari?

[Reasor]

The divide that can't be bridged between Anarchs and Sabbat Loyalists is an interesting one. The Anarchs are technically correct that joining an organized army to fight for an ideal means becoming somebody else's soldier. On the other hand, it wasn't the Anarchs who were knocking over one city after another up and down the United States' eastern coast as the 1990's gave way to the turn of the millennium. For any number of reasons, the decision was made to depict the Sabbat as ascendant in the metaplot at the same time that the Kuei-Jin had the Free State Anarchs' backs to the wall.

[Reasor]

On Anarchs and diablerie: There were books released in 1992 and 1993 that basically were adventures designed with coteries of diablerist Anarchs specifically in mind, complete with dungeon crawl third acts in the lairs of the coteries' low Generation targets.

This game has taken some weird twists and turns over the years. When Beckett's Jyhad Diary first came out, and when that superb read-along thread was going on this forum, I had honestly forgotten that the Sword of Nul and the Book of the Grave-War both date back at least as far as the Diablerie adventure set in England.

[Reasor]

I think that's terrific. Hoover's G-men and the eventual birth of the the FBI having been a potential Inquisition would make a terrific secret for even a modern day setting.

[Reasor]

The fatal 1947 crash of an experimental high altitude balloon carrying a photographer's nest in Roswell, New Mexico was not an attempt to spy on Russian bomb testing, but a Ventrue Prince's scheme to collect intel on the Russian Brujah. After the recovery of bodies from the crash site made it impossible to keep some form of the story out of the press, it was decided to let the first cover story that came to mind go out in order to protect the Masquerade. And that's why the town is famous for flying saucers.

[Reasor]

I've long thought the same about the master of Dominate and Fortitude who founded the Ventrue clan. Every time a Ventrue NPC is depicted in a book mentioning that their founder is dead, I think of Coulson in Season One of Agents S.H.I.E.L.D., reciting his programmed memory that "Tahiti is a magical place." Our monster dad was indestructible as well as able to rewrite others' memories. Gosh, we'll miss him, but we'll carry on in his name even without his leadership. Ignore the monster dad behind the curtain....

[Reasor]

I could see Lasombra having infernalist leanings, with creeps like the Angellis Ater being more like their clan founder than anyone outside the clan suspects, but that only works for me as an option because the Abyss was revealed to be the prison of the Fallen at such a late date in the history of White Wolf's publishing.

[Reasor]

I like the idea of bringing back this feeling of tense escalation toward something. The Y2K panic that Gehenna represented once is in the rear view mirror now, but the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop remains a part of the atmosphere in the real world's modern day.

In a World of Darkness where Enoch was never hit with spirit nukes, whatever other forms of supernatural mayhem you have going on in modern Vampire, Mage, or Werewolf games could be the thing that leads to the first player-level Demons escaping the Abyss.

[Reasor]

I don't have my book collection on hand. If memory serves, the Toreador Antedeluvian passed through Manhattan at one point, which was why the Nosferatu Antedeluvian's geomantic curse on its ancient enemy took the form of a threatened nuclear missile launch targeting New York. Is that right?

I can only speak for myself, but I have an interest in hearing the OP's full theory - which will dwindle if I'm strung along with "stay tuned" posts. Folks have had two decades to chew on these books and think about what they mean. If you've found an interesting new angle, then by...

[Reasor]

I meant at the game table than rather than an official crossover book, which I agree would be unlikely - especially with the issue of contracting the work out still up in the air for Mage.

[Reasor]

That could dovetail neatly with what we've all seen in promotional materials for Werewolf, and the idea expressed earlier in this thread that Mage and Werewolf are uniquely suited for crossover. The triumph of nihilism over scientific consensus at the political level is a democratic expression of the same phenomenon in the minds of the public, but that's because they've been coached for decades by media owned by (in the WoD) Malfean-aligned corporate entities like the Pentex subsidiaries....

[Reasor]

I did not know any of that. Awesome!

[Reasor]

Pentex versus the Syndicate could potentially be a comedy of dueling hostile takeovers.

[Reasor]

If anyone is making a buck off of Golconda by selling New Age Golconda salt lamps that don't do anything, it's definitely the Ministry, but that's primarily because the death of all those Ravnos left a gap in the con artist market.

[Reasor]

I like to keep in mind that we don't really know what Set would do if his clan ever succeeded in resurrecting him. All of the noise about corruption and breaking down the chains of the Aeons could plausibly just be the clan's recruitment pitch.

[Reasor]

Did the topic of ECHELON/"Five Eyes" come up in this thread at some point? That's the five way intelligence sharing arrangement that exists between the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK in the real world. Member countries get around their own laws that protect the privacy of citizens against government surveillance, by spying on one another's citizens and then simply trading information.

Anyhow, the international nature of it makes it seem like something that would have vampire sect or mage convention backing in the WoD.

[Reasor]

Sounds like one of those uniquely American medicine ads, where the narrator explicitly warns you not to take the medicine.