Blame this.
Adventure seed: Operation SANDAL KEYWORD
This still-too-classified-to-legally-exist NSA case file dates back to the 1970s, which is a nostalgic time for some Shadow Government operatives and a source of nightmare fuel to others. It all depended on how close you got to getting strapped to the sacrificial altar before the nominal cavalry arrived – and no, that wasn’t any sort of euphemism. The ascension of the never-elected Gerald Ford to the Presidency caused some extremely weird ripples in the cultural Deep Unconscious, occultly speaking. To the point where even the masses were reacting, and that’s typically not great news. For everybody, including the masses.
Digressions aside, SANDAL KEYWORD was a long term dirty tricks operation: the NSA identified a dozen or so ambitious Serpent People who could be conceivably manipulated into starting a civil war between the major factions of that hidden species, and during the years 1973 and 1974 proceeded to do just that (with the usual help from the CIA, DEA, and HUD, of course). The war went perfectly from humanity’s point of view: a bunch of Serpent People got killed on three continents, at least one faction imploded, and the faction that won was heavily seeded with secret NSA assets. And then the NSA tossed all the records of the project into a vault for forty years, specifically to ensure the spread of the charming delusion that the Shadow Government somehow forgot that all of this happened.
And now the SANDAL KEYWORD file is in the players’ hands, complete with fresh annotations as to what happened to all those original Serpent People assets. Turns out that at least three of them thrived – one, in fact, may be the next Serpentine Supreme, or whatever they call themselves. At any rate, one wonders what a bunch of proactive Illuminati agents might do with this opportunity…