Possible gaming fodder: The Society of the Reflective Goose.

Via @GregStolze comes this:

https://twitter.com/laura_hudson/status/738780136296714240

…which is of course one of the few remaining pictures of the long-defunct Society of the Reflective Goose.  This group got its start during a set of exceptionally dubious cultural exchange events in 1898 and 1899: while organizers claimed that the events were officially sanctioned by the Chinese Empire in order to ‘promote the understanding of the Hidden Wisdom of the Orient,’ this was largely not believed even at the time and certainly the Qing dynasty had no interest in teaching foreign devils anything useful at all. The group still grew fairly rapidly over the next several years, with chapter houses in London, New York, Paris, and Madrid by 1901.  The first and only Western leader of the Society was John Fearn, an amateur New York bibliophile of good family and poor reputation.

It was about 1902 or so that the more unsavory rumors started to circulate.  The Society had always had a certain reputation for its supposedly libertine and certainly lurid ways: but in Fin de siècle upper-class Europe and American circles a rumored taste for sporting with women dressed in fantastical costumes would barely be worth even a raised eyebrow. As for the opium and heroin… sadly unwise, but hardly unique – even among the best families.  But when it was reported that the Society held its wildest revels under the watchful eyes of a curiously deformed set of geese… well. That was enough to get a certain amount of official scrutiny, which led rather rapidly to a set of police raids and at least one suspicious house fire. Fearn himself disappeared in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Occultists are in some disagreement whether the Society ever reached true cult status: the few members that stood firm in the face of social disapproval, tacit persecution, and the odd narcotics raid all perished during World War I.  During the 1950s an apocryphal manuscript circulated through various publishing companies that purported to link the Society, Howard Hughes, and the ‘John Frum’ Melanesian Cargo Cult; needless to say, nobody was willing to put it to print, even before certain federal agencies became involved. If there was ever any genuine metaphysical or supernatural danger emanating from the Society, it has been lost to obscurity.

Of course, thanks to the Internet, what is truly obscure anymore?