Monday, December 15, 2014

Taking My Crazy Entropy Rote a Bit Farther

So I recently posted some rote Ideas for my mage character and I've been using them in the chronicle  recently joined.  They're working out so far, but the way I wanted to use one of them went well beyond the intention of the initial rote, so I haven't been getting the benefit of "magickal muscle memory".  So I'm writing up a description of the new rote my Mage is trying to develop to tackle the larger scope of what he's attempting.  This is an expanded version of Deconstruct Organization (Entropy 3 Mind 2) from the linked post.  I am posting this both to elicit feedback from the great wired mind, and so I can send it to my ST to see if he'll even let me go down this road.

Societal Deconstruction Entropy 3 Mind 2:  It is possible to impact a discreet organization's activities directly by engaging with various individuals who are part of the larger organization.  Disrupt Organization is a small discreet effect, and is the purview of Mages who are only beginning to think about the big picture.  It is effective for concrete activities such as internal board elections or a specific PR campaign.  This rote is much more about creating ripples that will impact an organization for weeks, months or generations.  As such it can be much more powerful, but is far less predictable.  This power is always an extended action engaged in over a period of time, and is best performed with multiple mages.  It can even be useful to have mages with massively divergent paradigms performing this rote simultaneously as the forms of luck they bring to bear often mix in spectacular ways.  To affect an organization the mage may monitor them via the internet looking for long term trends as they appear and then slowly teasing those trends in different directions, they may slowly work their way into social networks that overlap with the organization's, they may buy stock, or volunteer with an organization for months or years at a time dropping words or ideas in the ears of influential individuals.  (Note much as the Lasombra don't care about titles, only power influential individuals are often a different breed than prominent individuals)  The use of Mind in this rote is partially about increasing the processing power of the Mage's mind temporarily while they are sifting through the mass of data associated with this rote, partially about directly gaining information from individuals they may interact with in pursuit of this effect, and partially about engaging with the emergent properties of the collective societal mind they begin to see over an extended study of such an organization.  (Maybe corporations aren't people, but to technocratic practitioners of this power there is little question that they are perhaps a bit sentient)  (Side on Collective Sentience: This is a touchy subject.  Some STs might be ok with you engaging on this level, some may consider that the purview of oracles.  The general concept of the rote works without your mage becoming fully aware of organizational sentience, but if you do allow your mages to engage with a collective mind through the patterns that emerge here it would certainly allow for more dramatic effects and some interesting narrative)  There are stories of oracles within the NWO and the Syndicate who can leverage this power with the kind of precision that an acolyte might predict a craps throw, but no one can prove that kind of precision has ever actually been achieved.  For most mages they can influence the general fortune of an organization over generations this way, which is incredibly powerful but you can never quite predict how your meddling with manifest.

Example of How My Mage Uses This in His Paradigm: My mage's paradigm is largely Syndicate, with a far sprinkling of Hermetic thrown in to express his attachment to unity.  (I know I know Unity is an Al I Batin thing. Well I'm an orphan and don't know any better.  Unity is also a very strong theme in actually Kabbahlistic writing dealing with the full tree of life reflecting in each sephirot recursively forever.  Everything is after all an emanation, even varied understandings are an emanation and therefore have all the sephirot within them, and the 777 association tables are just an incredibly strong concrete expression of Unity.)  He leverages the correspondence that has worked it's way into the consensus, but does not directly leverage magickal correspondence effects when working this rote.  This is powerful but also limited to what you can imagine really seeing on the internet.  He has a focus that is several monitors setup in a chart of the kabbalah on the wall of my room.  Each monitor fills a sephirot and next to each sphere there is another small monitor that taps into the entropy programs that the Technocracy has automatically drawing associations across the internet. (anyone who's ever seen "suggested articles" on FB knows what I'm talking about here.  There are some amazing Entropy powers that have made it directly into consensus in the last 10 years, and just run for anyone who is willing to type a search into the right search engine).  My mage then picks up the already partially entropied results and starts to apply direct entropic analysis, breaking them down into how they relate to the manifestations of the 4 worlds of the Kabbalah within the sephirot a given piece of information/writing is related to.  This is specifically an expression of the 4 worlds as they relate to the emergence of systems within systems, not the spiritual expression of the 4 worlds.  This allows my mage to do a few things over the long term.  He can see trends that are beginning to show themselves in pieces across many articles, but haven't fully manifested as an idea that can be recognized and then can tease those "possibilities" into more complete focus and bring them down through the worlds, or he can squash them entirely and make sure they don't ever fully manifest into Assiah.  This involves using this interface not only for observation, but also to respond, knowing the perfect letter to the editor to write, the appropriate Facebook response to make, the right online group to join, or podcast to send an unsolicited contribution to.  In a less direct way my mage could share a writing opportunity and know to include a seemingly unrelated journalism hashtag, because the right journalism student will notice and write just the perfect piece on the topic the mage needs to get into the system he's influencing.

No comments: