Tag: group

Group Seed: Reasonable Metahuman Solutions.

Reasonable Metahuman Solutions – Google Docs

Reasonable Metahuman Solutions

 

Reasonable Metahuman Solutions (RMS) is in the metahuman employment business; which, in a world where superheroes and supervillains exist, is not particularly unusual. What does make RMS unusual is that they almost exclusively hire ex-convicts (both villains and henchmen).  The company will even hire violent ex-convicts, provided that they have served their sentences and have no outstanding warrants.  The employee demographics tend to skew towards older metahumans and henchmen, but RMS gets its fair share of younger ex-cons who had a taste of prison, and who aren’t eager to go back.

Continue reading Group Seed: Reasonable Metahuman Solutions.

Group Seed: Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services (HADeS)

Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services – Google Docs

 

Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services

(HADeS)

 

On the surface, Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services (HADeS) looks like one of your standard SoCal crystal and chakra weirdnesses: they bring animals to Hollywood productions in order to “cleanse the workspace of negative stress energy by cooperatively using primal life forces.” Basically, this means that the company brings in dogs and cats for the cast and crew to pet, play with, and feed (the crew is not supposed to feed the animals, but everybody does anyway, and HADeS never seems to really mind). Sometimes HADeS will provide something more exotic, like a rabbit or a sheep; on one memorable occasion the company brought in an actual cow, and encouraged everyone to touch it.  Oddly enough, that story never made the papers; you’d expect it to, seeing that the movie in question more or less swept the Oscars that year.

Continue reading Group Seed: Hollywood Animal Detoxification Services (HADeS)

Group Seed: Ultimate Sanitation Services.

Ultimate Sanitation Services – Google Docs

Ultimate Sanitation Services

 

Ultimate Sanitation Services (USS) is headquartered in Washington, DC, with a second office in London and a fairly extensive online presence.  They are an exclusive company, but not in the typical ‘you will pay lots of money to use our services’ sort of way.  Instead, they are very selective over the clients that they take on.  As for cost, don’t worry about it: clients simply give USS everything except the clothes on the client’s back and whatever can fit into a standard briefcase. Part of the selection process, in fact, is weeding out the people who don’t need USS’s services that badly.

Continue reading Group Seed: Ultimate Sanitation Services.

Group Seed: Porlock Solutions, Ltd.

Porlock Solutions, Ltd – Google Docs

Porlock Solutions, Ltd.

 

This particular company is difficult to hire, mostly because the services it offers — the removal of irritating people from one’s personal history — are equally difficult to bill for.  Let’s say that somebody employs Porlock Solutions to ensure that a crusading district attorney about to get a conviction against the client’s company is not assigned to try the case.  Porlock Solutions arranges the switch.  How does Porlock actually get paid for that?  After all, from the client’s point of view the case was now always being handled by a fumble-fingered idiot.

Continue reading Group Seed: Porlock Solutions, Ltd.

Group seed: Aglet Solutions.

Pardon the joke.

Aglet Solutions – Google Docs

 

Aglet Solutions

 

A variant of this group can exist at any point of a particular society’s technological or social development.  Provided, of course, that the society has access to resurrection or general necromantic magic.  Aglet Solutions exists to counter such magic, for the noblest of reasons: people will pay them extremely well to do so.

 

The pay is good because this is actually a surprisingly popular service, particularly in worlds where the resurrection process can or does have extremely nasty side effects.  There is a lot that necromancy can do with a person’s corpse, and some of it can be only be prevented or reversed by people who are effectively necromancers themselves, if only theoretical ones. Magicians who discover that they simultaneously have a talent for death-related magic and a basic ethical sense are Aglet Solution’s preferred candidates for employment, as the group gives them an opportunity to practice their art in a non-corrupting manner.

Continue reading Group seed: Aglet Solutions.

Group Seed: Silence Dogood’s Master Practical Jewelers.

Blame it all on this.

silence-dogoods-master-practical-jewelers-google-docs

Silence Dogood’s Master Practical Jewelers

“Lost time is never found again. Guaranteed.”

So you’ve stolen yourself a time machine.  The problem now becomes, how do you get away with it for any length of, well, time?  After all, aside from the usual questions about causality and predestination and whatnot, there’s also the practical problem that the entities that you stole the time machine from probably want that time machine back, and in all likelihood the original owners have some generally efficient way to track down their stolen property.  After all: how many times have you heard about people stealing time machines?

Exactly. Continue reading Group Seed: Silence Dogood’s Master Practical Jewelers.

Group Seed: The Honorable Order of Ley Engineers (HOLE).

the-honorable-order-of-ley-engineers-hole-google-docs

The Honorable Order of Ley Engineers (HOLE)

Yes, they made that joke in the 19th century, too.  At least, that’s what the surviving records (of which, more later) suggest.  With ‘suggest’ being the operative word: people back then would often be more delicate when writing things down.

HOLE was a secret society (started in 1845) that seemed destined for greatness: it was well-organized, reasonably benign, and had access to a highly useful magical gate system that allowed them to reliably transmit small (no more than 20 lb) packages between any two permanent portals.  True, building new portals was a non-trivial exercise, but by 1860 the following network had been set up: Continue reading Group Seed: The Honorable Order of Ley Engineers (HOLE).

Group Seed: The ‘True Living’ cult.

Went a little ‘yikes’ pretty fast, here.  Sorry about that…

The ‘True Living’ Cult

As vaguely apocalyptic cults go, True Living cultists (or ‘True Lifers’) are… well, they’re still pretty weird and mildly dangerous, but you could probably safely get one to change your flat tire (not that he would). You’ll still get the weirdness, but the dangerous part would be dialed back because the average True Lifer is intensely wary of the outside world.  Best to keep out of its way.

The basic principle of the True Living Cult is Eat All The Meat.  It’s partially metaphorical (‘you deserve total selfishness, so be totally selfish’) but very decidedly literal, too. Note, though, that these people aren’t carnivores, in the same way that vegans aren’t vegetarians. To be fair, True Lifers aren’t really comparable to vegans, either: after all, most vegans don’t literally worship animals via elaborate ceremonies involving ritual sacrifices cast into the flames. True Lifers do that, only with plants. Each group picks a species of plant life to venerate, then proceed to do so with the aforementioned immolation of various animals. Preferably while the animal is still alive. And after all the useful flame-vulnerable bits have been, ah, recycled. Yeah, basically imagine something out of a dream flash-image sequence in a horror movie and you’ll get an idea of the average Saturday night at the True Living’s local chapel/butcher’s station.

It’s probably a special miracle that True Lifers haven’t graduated to human sacrifices yet: partially that’s due to lingering morality, and partially because of an institutional awareness of just how dangerous it is to eat human meat.  Or it’s due to the fact that the True Living Cult is not under the control of any occult or supernatural group. They came up with this way of life all on their own. Continue reading Group Seed: The ‘True Living’ cult.

Group Seed: Stavemaster and Sons, Ltd.

Stavemaster and Sons, Ltd.

Stavemaster and Sons can exist in any world that has any sort of organized production of magical artifacts and weapons.  The company does not specialize in actual enchanting; that’s for specialists – and in some universes, the not-quite-sane.  What Stavemaster does is procure raw materials for enchanters; and for a truly esoteric value of ‘raw materials.’

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Group Seed: The Elmerite Order.

This went off the tracks – but in an interesting way, so I’ll allow it.

The Elmerite Order

So, it turns out that the worldview found in first edition Mage: The Ascension is not entirely inaccurate, after all.  Magic works; there are various Traditions that can manipulate it; but one paradigm (scientific rationalism) is so dominant that the others cannot operate freely on our plane of existence.  Fair enough… as far as that goes.

Continue reading Group Seed: The Elmerite Order.