By Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@somme.nada.kth.se) (8 Nov 94)
The Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a group of mages dedicated to the downfall of the Technocracy and modern civilisation. They have realised that it is corrupt to the core, and the only way to save humanity is to purge the disease before it hardens the paradigm forever.
The Horsemen was founded shortly before the turn of the last century. A group of mages, watching how the Technocracy was reshaping the world using the Industrial Revolution, realised that modern civilisation was sick, and would, in the long run only lead mankind into a blind alley, from which escape and eventual Ascension was impossible. People were turned more materialistic, rational and deeply asleep for every day. The only way to stop this, and to return to a more primal state of being, was to destroy civilisation. Through the cleansing fire of this catastrophe, mankind would be given a second chance. A few of the most devoted and knowledgeable mages founded the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to achieve this goal.
The Horsemen soon realised that the only way to defeat the Technocracy was to use their own methods against them. The technomancers had carefully planned against any form of magickal attack, but one using their own paradigm would be much harder to stop, since that would require the technomancers to fight their own paradigm. The mages of the group decided to use the upcoming war as their tool of Armageddon. They carefully extrapolated developments in weapons technology, economics and magick, and came to the conclusion that the World War would quite possibly spell the end of civilisation in Europe, taking the Technocracy down with it. They set to bring it about, manipulating people and nations to make the war as destructive as possible.
Unfortunately they were wrong in their predictions, or they failed somehow. The War to End All Wars bogged down into the trenches, and soon became just a matter of attrition. The Horsemen lost their fire, and while the chaos and changes in the aftermath temporarily gave the Traditions some new chances, the group more or less disbanded.
However, during the Second World War, some of the old members began to realise what was about to happen. They intuited some of the plans of the Technocracy, and realised that It planned to divide the world between the Superpowers. They also realised the awesome potential of nuclear energy long before the sleeper scientists did. The Horsemen reformed, and set to the work of helping the Technocracy with the Cold War. Now they were a much more powerful organisation, their leaders were both experienced and pragmatic and their mundane assets quickly began to grow, using the remains of the intelligence network of the old group.
The Cold War was a masterstroke of the Technocracy. By pitting the superpowers against each other, they forced both sides to develop more and more advanced technology, to usurp more power from lesser nations and impose their own ideas on them. This suited the Technocracy perfectly, who was the puppet master behind the scene. The nuclear weapons were intended as the basis for this structure, and was never intended to be used except as deterrence and as a possible way to scare the Traditions into submission. But the Horsemen sabotaged the plan, and the arms race got out of control. Their agents inside the military and intelligence community spread paranoia and revanchism, and by leaking information between the superpowers they encouraged the development of the arms race. Soon the Technocracy had to adapt to the new situation, and they had to plan for a world with superpowers engaged in an eternal race of destruction. That wasn't so bad, although some technomancers disliked the instability of the situation.
The Horsemen waited for the spark which would ignite the apocalypse. During the Cuba Crisis they were almost sure it would happen, and they didn't use all their forces to finally push the world over the edge to nuclear war because they were so sure it would start by itself. Unfortunately, the Technocracy intervened and the crisis was averted. The next major crisis, the "Jewel Crisis" 1980 (which was never made public), was so close that the Technocracy had to use magickal sabotage to prevent the automatic launching of hundreds of missiles as the American systems went haywire. This time, a few of the agents and members of the Horsemen had to be terminated to prevent discovery.
Unfortunately, the Horsemen failed to cause nuclear holocaust, and as the Syndicate pulled the plug on the Eastern Block, their old plans were similarly thrown into chaos. They could no longer count on direct means, and their goal seemed further away. For a short period the Horsemen aimlessly supported whatever groups and phenomena they thought could start the Third World War, but they lacked unity and coordination. But then they found new strength and direction as their new Central Coordinator, the Euthanatos Georgios Papadimitriou created the Millennium Project.
The Millennium was a radical new idea. Instead of just trying to make the historical developments of the Technocracy to fail catastrophically, the Horsemen will try to cause the Apocalypse themselves by subverting technocratic reality. This goal will be brought about using a complex strategy, involving many mutually enforcing factors. On one hand, the Horsemen have started to develop their already sizeable economical assets into a huge but invisible economic force, with ties into almost every nation and industry. Their network of agents infiltrate both political, military and intelligence agencies, but also education, religious groups and society in general. Some members work inside the Traditions, supporting the Ascension War. Others work as double agents, leaking information to the Technocracy.
The Horsemen are planning to increase social, economical and military tensions slowly, using whatever methods works. At the same time they try to heat up the Ascension War, forcing the Technocracy to turn more and more repressive and direct itself against fighting the Traditions instead of securing their reality. Around the year 2000, when the world should be completely out of the Recession according to Syndicate plans, the Horsemen suddenly will pull the plug. Their financial empires will collapse overnight, taking the international stockmarkets and monetary systems with them. Multinational Corporations and whole nations will be ruined overnight. The chaos on the market will be amplified by their agents and the paranoia and insecurity they have sown.
At the same time, the agents inside youth gangs and criminal organisations will cause even more chaos as the international drug market collapses and a crimewave of titanic proportion causes widespread destruction. Terrorist groups suddenly strike using chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Agents in intelligence and military organisations will initiate conflicts and make leaders make hasty and unwise decisions. Religious cults will proclaim the Apocalypse to the masses. The assassins of the Horsemen will terminate popular leaders, celebrities and important people. The Technocracy will be completely surprised, and their reaction will only worsen things. The world will be plunged into complete chaos and destruction. If this succeeds, the resulting chaos will soon escalate as war, pestilence and famine ravage the world. This will hopefully destroy the Technocracy and modern civilisation.
Today the Horsemen work silently and efficiently on the Millennium Plan. To implement it, they use minimal magick and rely instead on use of the Technocracy paradigm, which is much harder for the enemy to discover. Limited divination in the form of financial forecasting is used to invest their huge wealth, Mind is camouflaged as advertisements and psychology and is used to manipulate people, and experience from the CIA and KGB is used to build the huge networks of the agents the Horsemen use. Of course, this raises the risk that the Horsemen are slowly becoming more and more like their enemies, and such accusations are not entirely unfounded.
Organisation: The Millennium Project is so huge and secret that it requires very careful administration. Each mage in the Horsemen controls a tiny part or runs a special project, often with many subordinates and with no overall knowledge. These are coordinated by local Coordinators, who either runs operations in a geographical area or of a certain type (like fundamentalist Christianity or Left Wing politics). Above these Coordinators are the members of the Coordinator Council, who organise the large scale planning and develop general policies. It is led by the Chief Coordinator, currently the Euthanatos Georgios Papadimitriou.
Resources: The Horsemen have access to huge mundane resources. Most mages can easily build a great base of power and wealth, but the Horsemen has been working on it for decades. However, their magickal resources are not as strong, since they prefer to use mundane methods.
Economically, the Horsemen control several apparently unrelated financial empires, with ties into almost every part of the world and every trade. Their influence is mostly passive, and they only intervene to make sure their assets grow and prosper. However, they have arranged things so that when the Millennium comes, the empires will all collapse in the worst possible way. They have also designed them to fall if the Coordinators vanish, to make sure at least the possibility of apocalypse remains if the Horsemen would be destroyed.
The intelligence networks of the Horsemen are almost unrivalled, except by the Technocracy. Their agents are everywhere, and practically none know their real purpose. Many are simply normal people who think they help out some patriotic organisation or government group. Others are professional agents who think they work for some secret branch of some intelligence agency. A few are defectors from intelligence agencies who know they are working for some kind of conspiracy (they have often been misinformed to get a very erroneous image of what type of conspiracy it is. Many think they serve the Technocracy). And many are simply unwitting victims of deep hypnotic suggestions and mind control. Beside these agents, the Horsemen has lots of contacts and allies in every area, ranging from fundamentalist churches to the military-industrial complex.
The Horsemen has also worked on acquiring as much surplus weapons from the fallen Eastern Bloc they can, and stockpiling them in secret caches around the world. They have nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, lots of firearms and a few heavier weapons. They intend to give them to terrorists, extremists and criminals just before the Millennium, to ensure maximum random destruction. Before that stage, they seek to limit such spread to create maximum effect when the bombings start.
Magickally they are not very strong. They control a few nodes and have a Horizon Realm, but not much more. This is a conscious policy to avoid arousing the suspicion of the Traditions and Technocracy. The realm, mostly known as Command, is a captured small NWO construct. A group of tradition mages captured it during the 60ps, and it got into the hands of the Horsemen. They have not changed it very much. Its central part is the War Room, a meeting room with great screens and maps showing the current world situation, where the Council of Coordinators meet. Around it is a complex of offices, computer rooms, corridors, warehouses and small living units, not unlike the inside of some military installation. The realm is reachable through its elevators; a mage can simply step into an elevator, press a code on a panel and the elevator will rise to any floor in most buildings around the world. This doesn't work the other way, somebody wanting to enter must signal it to the Construct, and they will send an elevator. Everything is clean, efficient and slightly technocratic. Most members find it very oppressive, but its also the only safe place for the Horsemen and the Central Coordinator actually lives here.
Georgios is the Central Coordinator of the Horsemen. He is an ex-member of the Euthanatos, who he voluntarily left to work totally for the Horsemen. Using his Entropy and Mind, he has erased the memory of himself from everybody except his closest associates, and nobody knows anything about his earlier history.
Georgios is a middle aged man with dark hair and eyes. He always dresses impeccably in dark suits, and always seems to sit in a pool of shadow. He is polite, quiet and seems to spend most of his time just studying people with his unsettling gaze. He never seems to get angry or have any other strong emotion except for determination.
He is actually not completely happy with the current situation. While he thrills at the thought of attempting to give the Technocracy and Modern Civilisation the Good Death, he also longs for personal involvement. Manipulating the destiny of mankind is not as rewarding and merciful as actually helping people as individuals, like the rest of his tradition does. He actually longs to join it again, but feels that he is more needed here. However, he sometimes takes a walk through the city, just to feel the presence of normal people, to share a bit of their lives and deaths.
Military Coordinator Laura Peterson
If Georgios is darkness and death, Laura is fire and blood. Shortly after her initiation into the Verbena she witnessed how the Technocracy destroyed her whole coven with a chemical "accident". After that she wowed to destroy the Technocracy and all of the decadent, sick, modern civilisation.
She is a red-haired woman in her late forties, with an impressive build and an iron-will. She is outdoors as much as possible, and always wear practical, rugged clothing. She is currently involved in the survivalist movement, and actually runs a secret survivalist camp with strong ties to the Verbena. Her main area as Coordinator is contacts with the Traditions and Military. She is the secret face of the Horsemen to the traditions, where she is known as a very radical mage, often inciting other mages to strike harder at the Technocracy or modern society. She is the center of a network of similar-minded mages in the Traditions, from whom she sometimes recruits new members to the Horsemen.
Her connections with the military are indirect, through her staff of subordinate Coordinators. They are all highly competent and fairly independent, and her main task is just to coordinate them. She dislikes just developing strategic planning, which she often leaves to Dr Hill. She wants to get personally involved, and thus has taken as her personal responsibility to organise para-military groups around the world.
Economical Coordinator Charles Liddenbrook (Flood-which-sweeps-the-plain)
Despite his name, Charles is a full-blooded Indian. He grew up without acknowledging his heritage, trying to fit in with the white man by turning his considerable intelligence and willpower into a business career. When he was called by the spirits, he refused until they forced his eyes open to see what had been done to his people, the world and to the spirits. Then he swore vengeance, took his new name and joined the fight against the Technocracy. He soon proved his worth to the Horsemen, and became one of the youngest Coordinators ever. He is currently responsible for the financial side of the organisation, pulling the strings to the different financial empires.
Charles appears to have two personalities, one of a cunning and hyper-efficient businessman always clad in conservative suits, one of a raging shaman invoking great spirits of destruction against the oppressing white man. His talent for financial destruction is great, and Georgios is very confident that he will be able to bring the world economy crashing down when the time is right. However, Charles disagrees with the two others about how to deal with the Traditions. He wants to warn at least some mages about the Millennium in order to give them a better chance to survive the cataclysm. The others want to keep it a total secret for security reasons.
Strategic Coordinator Dr. Alexander Hill
Dr. Hill is a small, bespectacled man with sparse grey hair, a hunched posture and a freckled, wrinkled face. He is the oldest of the Coordinators, and has been with the Horsemen since the early Cold War (in fact, he was one of the founders of the modern group). He is the resident expert on all forms of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and especially bioweapons.
He is one of the few Sons of Ether involved in the Horsemen. He started as a military analyst during the 40's, and with his keen mind and ruthless efficiency gained widespread recognition. That he was serving the Technocracy didn't bother him the least. Then one day he made a simple extrapolation of current research and politics, and he was horrified. He suddenly realised how the Technocracy would trap mankind in eternal stasis with no way out, and worse, they had all but succeeded. He joined the Horsemen, and remained inside the defence sphere as a valuable agent until the late 50's, when he left and became Coordinator.
Dr. Hill is the Coordinator responsible for terrorism and intelligence. He runs his intelligence networks with ruthless efficiency through his underlings. While he often falls back into classical Cold War rhetoric against the Technocracy, he is always coldly planning for all eventualities and developing new ways to make the Millennium as devastating as possible. It was his idea to acquire as much Soviet military material as possible, and he has even made some slight improvements in the bioweapons-field. He is genuinely interested in seeing how they will work out.
The characters might be approached by agents from the Horsemen if they appear to fight the Technocracy hard enough. At first the agents may pose as members of a radical cabal, and subtly test the characters to see how far they are prepared to go in the fight. When they have truly proven themselves (and preferable are too deep in the war to back out), they might be offered to join the Horsemen.
The players by chance stumbles upon some old technocracy documents which imply that some external force tried to worsen World War I in many ways. The Horsemen might become worried if somebody starts to dig in their past, and send out their agents to lead the characters astray or remove them, posing as the Technocracy.
If the player characters are members of the Technocracy, they might start to notice that there is some other force influencing things subtly. When they start to dig, they might find disturbing correlations between some old files from the Cold War, current economics and a slow rise in societal tensions.
Everywhere in the World of Darkness there are whispers of an imminent disaster; vampires dream daymares about Gehenna, werewolf shamans see frightful visions they do not dare to tell anybody, the wraiths grow uneasy and mages feel a building tension in the tapestry. The Horsemen are working towards the Millennium, unknowingly serving greater forces which slowly bring the world towards the brink of destruction - or Ascension?