The Black Comedy: At the Mountains of Madness

[Sonereal]

Link to video.
We shall go our own way.​

-Lucien Dieulafoy in 1913 after leaving the Sunken Council.​

Oh how we have fallen.

The first stirrings of crisis in the Sunken Council became apparent to all when Lucien and a few others withdrew from the council. It was the first sign that the growing tensions in Europe were beginning to affect the Council instead of the Council diffusing the crisis in Europe. The Great War tore the Sunken Council asunder.

For me, it became a world of darkness. Together, we knew everything. As an individual, I realized just how vast the network of proxies and intermediaries had become. The "Entente Council" suffered heavy casualties during the war. My best friend for years was poisoned in London. My lover was gunned down in New York. More than a few times I found myself the target of assassination plots foiled only by my personal skill in hand-to-hand combat.

The Entente Council won, but lost. We didn't cause the Great Depression, but we didn't and couldn't stop it anyway. The fringes of our conspiracy are falling to encroaching powers. Soon, we will be a memory.
***
The year is 1934. The Sunken Council, once the preeminent guardian of the status quo behind the curtains, is no more.

In this game, players will form new conspiracies from the ashes of the Sunken Council. The Black Comedy is played in the shadows. The updates will be a series of disjointed news clippings and rumors while private updates will give a slightly fuller picture of going-ons.

The OP for this game is purposely vague. Sorry about that!
***
Joining the Game
You must post a public sign-up and private sign-up.

The Public Sign-Up
The public sign-up introduces your character to the other players. Everybody is a former member of the Sunken Council who has gone their own way since 1929. At a minimum, this is what your public sign-up should look like.

Name:
Positions: What organization do you head or are part of? Remember, Sunken Council membership was based on having a good amount of influence, whether through wealth, political power, or otherwise.
Description: Describe your character and their recent history! This includes any information that other Sunken Council members would reasonably know, such as what organizations and factions they control behind the scenes.

Private Sign-Up
The private sign-up is where you flesh out your conspiracy. This includes any key individuals that are part of your conspiracy and their role in it.

Example
This is a map mapping all the notable individuals, conspiracies, and organizations in the previous Black Comedy. Note that even this is incomplete as key nodes had fallen off the map. The map also doesn't fully detail just how much every individual actually knew.

PLEASE READ BEFORE JOINING
MOST of the events and updates will be private. The thread is an unfortunately poor guide to understanding what is happening beneath the surface. If you wish to join after the game begins, PM me first.

​

 

[NinjaCow64]

(OOC: Hope this is enough information, if I need to revise then please tell me)

Name: The 181th Olympian (obviously not his birth name, although his birth name has just become one of hundreds of meaningless aliases that you acquire in this sort of business).

Positions: The 181th Olympian was the Olympian representative to the Sunken Council. The Olympians, also known as the Council of 300, were an organisation founded by the British aristocracy with the goal of controlling Europe's nobility. The Olympians were one of the founding members of the Sunken Council, agreeing with its goals and operations.

Description: The 181th Olympian was known for being a major player in both the Sunken Council and the Council of 300. He has shown a keen interest in psychology and has strong connections to the Satanic and occult communities. World War One and the crisis leading up to it tore the Olympians asunder, the group infighting killed most of the members. It was believed that the 181th was dead also, but there have been sightings of him reported in Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union and more recently the United States.

 

[Sonereal]

Both sign-ups are perfect.

 

[Nuka-sama]

Name: The Order of the Blue Rose
Positions: The Catholic Church was represented in the Sunken Council by Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, on track to becoming the next Pope. They were supporters of the goals and operations of the Sunken Council.
Description: The Order of the Blue Rose is a major Catholic organization with connections in European Catholic powers and American Catholics. The failure of the Church and the Sunken Council to prevent the Great War caused a massive crisis of confidence in the Order and the Church. Determining they had been weakened due to the rise of secularism, the Church has sought new avenues in how they might prevent another global war and to reclaim their position as a key broker in the international system.

 

[Sonereal]

Welcome aboard!

To the people still working on their joins, you have time! I would like to start this game Sunday morning. I will be on a bit Friday night and throughout Saturday to help on Discord and through PMs here on CFC.

 

[Omega124]

Name: Giewont
Positions: Giewont is said to have their hands in every trade and labour union in the world. CNT, AFL, IWW, ADGB, TUC, you name it, and Giewont could pull their strings for the Sunken Council's nefarious schemes
Description: Known only by their alias,"Giewont" was always an enigma to the rest of the Sunken Council. A slight accent betrayed their Slavic origins, and the lack of aristocratic grace probably indicated more humble origins than most other members. However, most other information, such as if Giewont was just an effeminate man or a woman pretending to be male, was simply hidden to even the most prying eyes. However, eccentricities aside, Giewont was effective in keeping the underclass aligned with the interests with the SC, and thus was realtivly tolerated by the more conservative members of the Council. In 1919, Giewont went dark, suddenly dissapearing from all Council meetings and not responding to any of their established contacts. Some thought Giewont meant to betray them, others thought they were dead. 15 years later, and rumors about a Slavic puppet master controlling the unions resurfaced, and not just the standard uneducated masses' allegations about Stalin....

 

[Decamper]

Name: Watchman
Positions: The Watchman was the spymaster of the Sunken Council. If anyone wanted to know where something or someone was, they would ask the Watchman. What the Watchman and his confusingly named watchmen wouldn't do though, was take action. They only watched, not act. You could take your dirty work elsewhere.
Description: How the Watchman could find what he found and know what he knew was a secret that only those who knew the Watchman personally knew. Which was no one on the Sunken Council. Many even wondered if the Watchman was actually an organisation itself, with no individual leader actually present on the Sunken Council. A series of dead drops, telegrams, PO boxes, and fleeting radio signals were the only means of contacting the Watchman, and now with the collapse of the Sunken Council, the Watchman is fading deeper into the shadows.

 

[Seon]

Honest Alex
Positions: Deniable assets management and courier service expert within the Sunken Council, Honest Alex was entrusted to deliver secret messages by hand through the criminal underbelly of society and other undesirables to their targets when traditional mailing or transmission services were unavailable.
Description: Unkempt hair under an American hat, with wildly clashing color scheme on his unmatched clothes. His outwardly friendly and neighborly demeanor is always underscored with a cadre of brutish bodyguards who always follow him around. While many of the upperclass individuals in the Sunken Council was wary of dealing with the man, his connection with the criminal elements of society made him invaluable for many operations of the Sunken Council.

 

[Sonereal]

I would like to start the update for the game tomorrow, but I know there are a few of you still working on your sign-ups. If you need more time for your sign-up, let me know today and I'll see what we can do.

 

[Omega124]

I would like to start the update for the game tomorrow, but I know there are a few of you still working on your sign-ups. If you need more time for your sign-up, let me know today and I'll see what we can do.

I will get you the private sign up asap. I don't plan on needing an extention

 

[Sonereal]

Sign-ups locked until update.

 

[Sonereal]

Update on the update

This game is bigger (and better) than the last one, so updates will take longer to get out than the previous one. I'm aiming for sometime this weekend since I can only work on it for about an hour a night after work.

 

[Decamper]

Looking forward to it!

 

[Omega124]

Take as much time as you need. Can't rush perfection c:

 

[Sonereal]

I'm working on the update but I'm going to stop giving ETA because my work schedule the last week was lol and it will be again this week. Since I've made it a rule to stop looking at Excel on Sundays.

 

[Sonereal]

So after scrapping the third update, I've figured I can't run this game.

I knew going into this game there would be some issues. As a matter of fact, the issues that have come up are exactly the issues I had voiced concerns about myself, but I thought I could gloss over them. I had vastly underestimated the size of the problem.

Quick compare and contrast: The previous Black Comedy had 4-5 players focused in the United States in the 1990s. Writing events for this was easy because everybody was always in knife distance of one another. Your organization had to go out of its way in being irrelevant in order for me not to "connect" you to another player's conspiracy.

This Black Comedy, five players, but ten times the play area. Imagine moving Call of Duty deathmatch to an ARMA island and you'll begin to grasp the problem I've been dealing with the last few weeks. Writing events for everybody is easy. Writing events for everybody is not.

May have been an interesting single-player experience, but not for me to run.

 

[Decamper]

Unfortunate, but understandable.