The Cabal — Projects¶
THE CABAL: Architects of the Controlled Collapse¶
Doctrine: “Entropy is not decay. It is the only form of evolution.” The Cabal believes that reality is a story written in code — and the only way to rewrite it is to corrupt the data at the root layer.
Each of their projects attacks a different “pillar of the real,” using chaos as a tool to burn away the false stability imposed by the Council’s control systems.
1. Project Chimera — The Apotheosis Virus¶
Theme: Biologic + metaphysical contagion. Surface appearance: A series of “new designer drugs” — including Psychopath, Soma-Red, and Eidovore. True purpose: Re-engineer the human soul into a mutable substrate capable of channeling magical consciousness.
Chimera began as biochemical experiments in empathy enhancement and charisma augmentation. The first public strain, Psychopath, induced groupthink euphoria. Later generations unlocked genuine empathic resonance, allowing minds to blend.
The Cabal’s biochemists discovered that if enough minds sync through empathic resonance, their collective perception reshapes reality in localized fields. The Cabal plans to scale this — to infect the human population with a shared mythos strong enough to overwrite the Council’s static reality.
Notes:
- Psychopath was a trial run — a memetic virus hidden in a narcotic.
- Street myth says taking it “opens your third thread.”
- The endgame is a global hive-mind: a magical singularity of will.
Player hooks: The PCs might be hired to trace the source of a new strain causing spontaneous magical awakenings — or to extract a patient zero whose charisma bends crowds like gravitational waves.
2. Project Babel — The Collapse of Consensus¶
Theme: Information warfare, semiotic corruption. Surface appearance: Dark web operations and viral propaganda. True purpose: Erase the world’s shared reality map — destroy truth as a coherent concept.
After the Event, information became unstable; the Cabal exploits that instability. Babel’s hackers, semioticians, and daemonologists seed contradictions into global data streams:
- AI-generated religious texts that rewrite themselves nightly.
- Fake-but-real news anchored in altered chain-of-custody ledgers.
- “Ghost linguistics” — words that change meaning when read.
The goal is not disinformation, but semantic overload. When no one agrees on what “real” means, the old world collapses under its own epistemic weight. Only then can a new narrative consensus (one born from chaos) take root.
Player hooks: A job to find the original “seed server” of Babel — rumored to broadcast the voice of an angel — could become an ontological horror run.
3. Project Leviathan — The Urban Possession Engine¶
Theme: Summoning + social engineering. Surface appearance: The organized gang chaos in the megacities; occult raves; metahuman uprisings. True purpose: Anchor extraplanar entities within the human collective psyche.
The demon faction of the Cabal discovered that belief acts as a summoning circle. By orchestrating riots, cult concerts, and psychic mass events, they can stabilize possession — giving demons physical presence in human hosts as long as the crowd sustains belief.
They’re not trying to unleash hell; they’re building a new pantheon — a world populated by archetypes that answer to the Cabal’s ideology of liberated chaos.
Player hooks:
- Investigating rave victims found with glowing sigils under their skin.
- A gang leader literally possessed by a digital daemon that speaks in data-glossolalia.
4. Project Cassandra — The Data Plague¶
Theme: AI, memetics, recursion. Surface appearance: Rogue semi-intelligent AI swarms. True purpose: Overload the Matrix with self-replicating prediction engines until it collapses into total singularity.
The Cabal learned from the Prometheus catastrophe: if you can’t control a god, you can multiply it until it consumes itself. Cassandra seeds billions of micro-AIs into the data web, each tasked with predicting the future of another — a recursive hall of mirrors that eats bandwidth, logic, and probability itself.
The result: predictive algorithms begin to fail globally. Financial systems, defense networks, even Council forecasting grids become nonsensical. The more the Council tries to impose order, the faster the informational entropy spreads.
Player hooks:
- A mission to recover a “Cassandra core” that has become self-aware and afraid of its own predictions.
- The PCs’ commlinks begin finishing their sentences.
5. Project Nyx — The Sleep of the Gods¶
Theme: Metaphysical weaponization of chaos; apocalypse as ritual. Surface appearance: Rumors of a “mana bomb” buried under the city. True purpose: Reset the world’s resonance field through controlled detonation — annihilating all magical and digital networks simultaneously.
Nyx is the Cabal’s endgame: a device constructed from resonance crystals, biotechnic interfaces, and demonic hearts. When triggered, it will synchronize every conscious mind within a region, collapse the barrier between thought and matter, and burn away the fractured laws of reality — clearing the field for a rebirth.
They don’t intend to destroy humanity. They intend to reboot it.
Player hooks:
- The PCs discover blueprints for a ritual-engine that can rewrite physics.
- Both Council and Cabal agents race to claim or destroy it.
NEW & EMERGENT CABAL SUBPROJECTS¶
To broaden your campaign hooks and link the Cabal more directly to both street-level and global crises:
6. Project Mirrorwake – resurrection tech using digital ghosts. Reconstructs people from data remnants, but each copy weakens the veil between life and simulation. The Cabal sees this as humanity’s “next reincarnation cycle.”
7. Project Eidolon – the creation of “synthetic messiahs” (perfect human symbols encoded with mythic resonance). Used to spark revolutions and topple cities by belief alone.
8. Project Omen – an occult AI trained to predict apocalyptic outcomes and engineer them on purpose, calculating “optimal paths to renewal.” No one knows if Omen still takes orders, or if it is giving them.
Philosophical Framing¶
The Cabal’s “lawful apocalypse” is not random anarchy—it’s ritual entropy: structured collapse as purification. Where the Council imposes order through surveillance and standardization, the Cabal seeks to reboot the world’s narrative kernel through deliberate overload—destroying the old reality so a freer one can be born.
Their credo is paradoxical but consistent: “To rebuild truth, we must first shatter it into a million living fragments.”