Traditions & Orders

“Sanity is a mask,” she says. “It keeps your light inside so you don’t wash away the air.”

Witch-House unfurls her long tendril wings, glittering with spots of cobalt iridescence. The cloud of amber fireflies sends a jumble of soft-bright signals flashing across our chests. My bare skin tingles with the prickling light, cast across the contours in a liquid spray. Her antlers crackle with suppressed electricity.

“I used to swim through sanity,” she adds, her voice drifting like worried flames. The fireflies pulse in time with her words. “Until I came to the bridge of glass. Under that bridge, I could hear words falling like leaves from a thousand trees, their stems cut loose by the inevitable blade.” Witch-House tugs at the hem of her shadow, like a shy little girl in front of strangers. “They told me to let my light run free. So I opened my mouth and the fireflies came out.”

Clumped around the edges of my sight, crowds of devoted souls gather, gleaming in our common madness. Around us, the air is melting, curling away from us like oil across water. Somewhere far away, the muffled voices scream like grass beneath a mower’s blade. Witch-House glances through me. The amber lights skitter in the depths of her eyes. Each light, I see, is a galaxy dying in the pulse of an electric sun.

Beneath us all, the earth cries welcomes, praying for the deliverance we bring…

Uncertain Principles

In a mad world, madness becomes sanity. And let’s be honest – our world is crazy.

The dementia of our age is obvious: the removal from our primal roots, the complex interplay of technological consumption, the fear-based marketplace blasting perpetual alarms into every sense we possess. From the kaleidoscope madness of sensory overload to the lockout isolation of self-absorbed withdrawal, our world feels like Humpty Dumpty on a one-way trip with gravity. Naked emperors dictate our self-image, casting out a hall of mirrors that reflect nothing resembling the truth. Like monkeys in a nitro lab, we appear to exist on a constant verge of self-annihilation.

In such a world, the Mad Ones may be the sanest folks of all. Magick itself is a form of madness, too. In order to perform it, a mage must possess – or be possessed by – an understanding of reality that defies the current standard. He or she must believe so strongly in a personal vision that the vision in question becomes reality. The language of pathology has words for conditions like that: Schizophrenia. Delusion. Disconnection. Sociopathy. The human animal fears people whose reality overrules their own… and with good reason, too. Madness can be terrifying, especially when it reaches out to change your world.

And so, the Marauders exist in a Zen state of paradox: enlightened mages embracing sanity through perpetual dementia. Whether they choose that state consciously or have it chosen for them by forces beyond their control is a question for philosophers. The Mad Ones simply ARE: they exist, they are mad, and their madness is both singular (each Marauder is a reality unto himself) and collective (they all share a similar connection through their disconnection from everybody else) all at once.

Confused? Join the club. By definition, Marauders confound definition. Complex antibodies to the disease of rationality, they’re less irrational than counter-rational – uncertain principles hovering in a six-dimensional cat-box suspending life and death and all things in between. The more you try to quantify them, the more you find yourself chasing shaggy-dog tales that in some sense grow from the base of your own spine.

In short, Marauders are the clap of single nonexistent hands whose echoes penetrate all layers of the Real.

Putting aside the puzzles for a moment, each Marauder is essentially a universe of one – a mage so disconnected from Consensus Reality that he functions in a bubble of self-contained cosmos. Sometimes, that cosmos fits so neatly into the Consensus that the Marauder remains inconspicuous until he does something that reveals his true nature; at other times, a Marauder moves so far beyond the Consensus that her mere presence within Consensual Reality melts its borders and makes its colors run. Like mundane mental illness, a Marauder’s madness slips between the cracks of the world around that person, either seeping in and rotting the surroundings through slow disintegration or else settling into the vulnerable areas and then cracking them like a sudden freeze through deep-set currents of ice.

Metaphysically speaking, Marauders appear to be agents of Dynamic chaos. All mages change reality, but the Wyld Ones become change incarnate. If Technocrats personify Stasis, Nephandi embody Entropy, and the Traditions and Disparates follow Paths of Balance, then the Mad ride the winds of Dynamism through the structures that get set up and torn down by the other factions. Flux, not structure, is their essential nature. Although they might nestle in the broken corners of our world, their activities disrupt the Tapestry wherever they appear.

In the Kingdom of the Mad, All Men are Sane

Madness has been with us always, whirling on the edges of intellect and art. The insights of consciousness contain seeds of chaos too. If imagination is the gift of human sentience, then that same imagination can turn back upon itself, burying its fangs and emptying its poison into the very thing that makes it work. Just as magick, faith, and technology allowed the human species to ascend from rough beginnings, so too did insanity undermine those achievements. Maybe that’s a lesson to us all: don’t get too proud, because pride can bring the whole thing down on your head. Or perhaps it’s just a built-in flaw… or, worst of all, the true measure of Enlightenment: the madness waiting on the edge of understanding.

Drifting From the Baseline

What do we mean by “madness”? Essentially, it’s a disconnection so profound that it becomes dangerous. An insane person – Marauder or otherwise – endures a mental state in which consciousness and perception become their own worst enemies. Baseline reality – the shared fiction that most of us agree is real – drifts away from that person; she perceives and reacts to a different reality than the one most people experience. That disconnection could be as drastic as gibbering hallucinatory mania or as subtle as an obsession that devours every other priority. (For details, see Baseline Reality in Chapter Ten, p. 554.)

Madness is part of the human condition. Everyone has a bit of it, and mages have more of it than most folks. Throughout history, people have regarded dementia as a backhanded blessing from powers beyond human comprehension. Sages, seers, and prophets are essentially insane by most standards, if for no reason other than their expanded perceptions and bizarre devotions. As a result, crazy people have often been seen as “touched” – by gods, by faeries, by exposure to some great and secret truth that mortal minds are too fragile to withstand. And though those things might not be true of the average mentally disturbed person, they’re certainly true of the Marauders. The things that brand them as dangerously un-sane also reflect a deeper level of Awakening. It’s been said that the Mad Ones are the most truly Enlightened mages alive… and that observation might even be correct.

Historically, the term maraud comes from a name given to wild tomcats and, by extension, to vagabonds who attack without warning and leave devastation behind. When a pack of 11th-century Chaos Mages attacked the Hermetic Covenant of Fuar Drochit, turning the stones to flowers and setting fire to the wells, one chronicler referred to them as “ravaging marauds like unto the mad”… and both names stuck. Since then, many other upheavals – some featuring coordinated efforts, most based in the actions of one or two high-powered Marauders – have burned the Mad Ones into the collective memory of Awakened society. Even the Nephandi, normally fond of chaos, fear the unpredictable Chaos Mages… perhaps because no other faction, not even the Technocracy, suffers more violence at their hands.

Perception and Actualization

Folks who study Marauders often divide them into two categories: actualized Marauders, who externalize their delusions and reshape the world around them with that madness; and perceptual Marauders, who internalize their delusions and move inconspicuously among the Masses. The first type is more obviously dangerous, the second type more ominous because you never know just who or where they are.

Actualized Marauders warp reality in their vicinity, inspiring the chaos that makes Wyld Mages so fearsome. Such mages tend to pull other people – Sleepers and Awakened alike – into the sanity sinks that well up around them. These often-unwilling allies add to the localized insanity, especially when they start believing more in the Marauder’s vision of reality than in the one they inhabited a few moments earlier. This phenomenon, in turn, often creates more Marauders… madness, in such cases, is indeed contagious.

Perceptual Marauders keep their madness inside, often without knowing that they are, in fact, insane. Such Mad Folk remain under the radar, trickling out their craziness in small but meaningful ways. One might envision herself as a secret agent in enemy territory, playing a role that could cost her life; another believes himself to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist, seeking a reborn Christ; and a third strips off her clothes and introduces herself as the Train Goddess, assuring the rush hour crowd that they’re all in good hands with her. A handful of these Marauders suppress magick with their mere presence, ironically enforcing the Consensus to which they don’t actually belong.

The apparent leaders of Marauder bands – folks who, in recent years, seem to have become more common – tend to follow the perceptual mode; their reality includes other Marauders, but they’re sane enough to function among the Masses and direct their madder cousins through working strategies. The infamous Robert Davenport (again, see below) is one of these midnight rabbits, moving through everyday reality with the insight of a Marauder seer. In the aftermath of the Avatar Storm (assuming that it ever occurred), these silent Marauders make up the majority of the Earthbound crew, and the more overt Marauders remain on the far side of the Gauntlet, bursting through for quick errands and often burning out in the process.

Regardless of their particular insanity, the Marauders as a whole seem to play out a mad masque, whose nature remains hidden even to them… and though their mortal selves remain clouded by that defining madness, their Awakened souls display a form of sanity whose implications leave other mages cold.

Rhymes Without Reason

So is there a Marauder endgame? What, if anything, looks like Ascension for the Mad? That’s one of countless enigmas. You see, there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason behind this loose-knit faction. They have no headquarters, no gospel, no council, protocols, or spokesmen beyond the eerie fellowships they occasionally form with like-minded lunatics. Unlike those other factions, the Mad Ones hold no reliable influence among the Masses. An individual Marauder might be rich or powerful, but she doesn’t dictate strategies for the group as a whole. One Chaos Mage might view Ascension as communion with the Child-Soul of Jupiter, whereas another views himself as damned to a Hell where everyone is dead and he’ll always lose… and yet, he cannot simply surrender to hopelessness because enough faith might just win his salvation after all. There is no apparent uniting goal, perhaps because Marauders – like many questing mystics – regard the journey, not the destination, as the ultimate Enlightenment.

Despite their collective name (a name imposed by others, almost never accepted by the Mad Mages themselves), each Marauder is a faction of one. And this singular perspective might be the purest view of the Cosmic Mystery. The other groups and factions could be seen as filters for a transcendent Truth too vast and terrible for the human mind to conceive without breaking. Marauders, though, have no such filters… or, if they do, then the filters are internally chosen, not externally imposed. These mages have seen something behind the sun, peeked beyond the masks of Divinity, puzzled out the riddle at the end of the universe… and that insight has driven them to a sanity that appears as madness to everybody else.

The Tragedy of Madness

Folks who see only the crazy side of Marauderdom miss a simple, vital fact: underneath the madness, every Marauder is an Enlightened human being who got burned by cosmic Truth. Each one, then, is a person who had dreams, loved ones, aspirations, and a life… and might perhaps, in some strange way, still have them. In most cases, the Mad have children, mates, lovers, friends, comrades. Insanity might have driven wedges between those mages and their companions, but those ties were there once and probably still linger inside the madness.

So when the vortices of reality-warping bugfuckery start sweeping away the Consensus, there’s still a human being wrapped up in that storm. That fact doesn’t excuse the things a Marauder does or make him any more moral or good (human beings, as a rule, are pretty awful), but it renders that force of insane devastation tragic in the classic sense of that term: an example of greatness brought low by disaster, evoking pity and fear in all those who behold his fate. And it’s that sense of tragedy which makes Marauders the cracked mirrors of the Awakened world – fearsome examples of the treacherous Path all mages pursue.

Fusions, Cabals, Confluxes, and Solitary Madness

Unlike the other factions, the Mad have neither rank nor organization within their collective dementia. Although a few Mad Ones might hold titles like the Obsidian Archduke or Resplendent Dragon of the Thousand Tongues, Marauders live in their own mad little worlds.

Even so, certain types of loose confederations exist within the Wyld world. Classified by outsiders, these rough bands of cooperative lunacy collect like-minded crazies into effective (if often temporary) groups:

Cabals

Like other mages, the Mad often gather into small, sympathetic groups geared toward common purposes. In such cases, the Marauders share just enough communal insanity or cause to unite them for short-term collaboration. A Mad cabal (sometimes called a hatch, murder, pack, mosh, knot, or storm) tends to gather around a central focus – perhaps a shared origin, enemy, or concept of reality – mitigating the various Quiets of its individual members long enough for those mages to cooperate with one another. Witch-House, for example, tends to attract allies and followers through her messianic charisma; many of her followers get swept up in her firefly gospel, sometimes Awakening through the revelations she brings. As a result, Witch-House often brings a few allies with her when she appears in public, generating a cult of weirdness that turns many of her prophecies into headlines on the next news report.

Fusions

A shared Quiet – often generated by a single experience – can instigate a fusion: a group of Marauders whose insanities mesh well enough to link them together. A group of kids Awakened by Witch-House, for instance, might share her view of the world… or perhaps a perspective that’s not quite like the one she experiences but exactly like the one shared by that fusion’s individuals. Essentially a Mad collective, each fusion group shares a mental bond between each member, allowing those mages to speak without words, finish each other’s sentences, understand one another’s madness, and act with the barely-conscious instincts of a wolf pack. According to Hermetic theory, fusion Marauders share a common Avatar or perhaps dance on the strings of several collaborating Avatars, united toward a purpose the mages themselves do not understand.

Confluxes

More often, the Mad get drawn into subconscious flash mobs of common purpose. Essentially, strangers come together through forces of probability, subconscious cues, or outside influence from a greater source. Those strangers act in separate yet collaborative fashion and then go their separate ways, often unaware that they’ve just shared an experience with their fellow Marauders. No one’s quite sure exactly what it is that causes a conflux of Marauders to form, but the results can be quite disconcerting. If Witch-House, Pillory, Mother Goose, and the Wyld Ones all collided in the same space – each unaware of the other party’s presence – the inevitable chaos would signify a conflux.

Unlike fusions and cabals, a conflux holds no common perception of reality. Its members might not even realize that the other ones are involved in whatever madness they create. Again, the individual Avatars probably have some covert agenda in place; to the mages involved, however, those actions remain as mysterious to the Marauders as they do to the outsiders they affect.

Ringleaders

A handful of Mad ringleaders seem to understand the weird forces that unite Marauders; Robert Davenport may be the most notorious ringleader, although the unknown parties behind the Bai Dai and the Sitrin appear to share his ability to steer Wyld Mages in collective directions. Those secrets, however, may be the exclusive province of the Mad. Other non-Marauder mages have tried to guide Marauder groups toward a desired purpose… and without exception, those experiments go poorly for everyone concerned.

Solitary Madness

For the most part, though, Marauderdom appears to be a solitary Path. Despite the occasional collectives that form and dissolve among the Mad, the various Quiets that define this condition lead to alienation. An individual Marauder might share the occasional errand or community, but unless she belongs to a fusion, that situation is almost always temporary. This faction is composed largely of individuals whose Paths intertwine just enough to earn an imposed label from outsiders who’ll never understand what goes on at the cracked side of the mirror.

Mad Tactics

When the Mad Ones go to war, their arsenals range beyond physical weapons (guns, bombs, spiked clubs, and so forth) and mere magickal destruction. The tactics that have bedeviled other mages for roughly a thousand years include certain refinements that only the Mad understand. Other mages can observe them, study them, occasionally even mimic them, but can never employ them with the surety of the Mad.

(For the associated game systems, see the sidebar Tactics and Rules.)

Paradox

Rumor has it that Marauders are immune to Paradox, but that’s not quite true. Although their madness shields them from its worst effects (see How to Make Yourself Mad for details), the Wyld Mages do invoke Paradox energies. It’s just that the backlash tends to hit someone else. And that’s how the Mad Ones use Paradox as a weapon.

Marauder Quiet insulates a mage from Paradox backlash; deep Quiet provides thick insulation. Like lightning, the energies and backlash seek a conductive target – and non-Marauder mages make great lightning rods. Thus, truly crazy Marauders invoke wildly vulgar magicks, and then they stand by while some other mage takes the backlash. That trick never gets old… unless, of course, you’re the mage playing Ben Franklin’s Key in a Marauder’s thunderstorm.

Sanity Sinks

Madness is contagious. When a powerful Marauder sets up shop, her madness soon overwhelms the local sense of reality. People begin to see themselves the way that the Marauder sees them, like actors in her personal passion play. Her delusions become their delusions. The cop directing traffic suddenly sees himself as a 1st-century centurion; the kids playing Frisbee become, in their own minds, ragged beggars tossing around a dead cat; the fast-food cashier imagines himself as a naked slave in the kitchen of some demented, giant clown. For the most part, these sanity sinks affect Sleepers more than they affect mages; really potent madness, though, can overwhelm even a mage’s sense of reality.

Such sanity sinks begin with a sense of creeping weirdness; little things favor the Marauder’s perception of them, rather than the normal way they appear to the sane folks in the Marauder’s sink. Soon madness, as the song says, takes its toll. Although a perceptual Marauder – one whose Quiet stays inside of her – doesn’t radiate this reality warp, a strong actualized Marauder can soon turn other people crazy, if only for a little while. In extreme cases, these converts can become long-term allies, cultists, or even – if they Awaken – new Marauders.

Cults, Allies, and Disruption

Lunacy loves company. Especially in a world that’s crazy to begin with, Marauders often find themselves with kindred spirits whose vision of reality fits their own. Actualizing Marauders tend to grow their own cults and networks, whereas perceptual Marauders attract friends, lovers, and would-be saviors.

Although many Wyld Ones fit the lone whacko stereotype, others gather cults and alliances from among the Masses, the Night-Folk, and occasionally even among other mages who might not realize that their friend is one of the Mad.

Silent Marauders often become agents of disruption, joining other factions, earning the trust and affection of their comrades, and then bringing the whole thing down on everybody’s heads. Naturally, this tactic requires an illusion of sanity on the part of a Marauder – obviously demented ones cannot infiltrate such organizations. As the saying says, however, it’s always the quiet ones (or perhaps the ones in Quiet…) that you have to look out for. Perceptual Marauders, or ones whose Quiet allows a fair measure of interaction with the world at large, can infiltrate a group and then blow it up or tear it down from the inside out. (For an example, see the character Hive in Appendix I.)

Zooterrorism

And then there’s the Marauder specialty: zooterrorism, also known as dropping a manticore on your neighbor’s doorstep, ringing the bell, and running away laughing. Granted, the doorstep is probably the local Technocratic Construct, the manticore won’t survive the experience, and the Paradox will drop a metaphysical anvil on somebody’s head from a great height… but really, this sort of thing creates a memorable impression, so it’s got a long and honorable pedigree among the Mad.

Magickally speaking, a zooterrorist Marauder opens up a portal between the Earth and an appropriate Otherworldly Realm, calls a Bygone through the gate, and lets nature take its course. Compassionate Marauders often stick around to even the odds between the rampaging beastie and the local Technocrats, but more callous Mad Folk (like the Bai Dai) simply let chaos rule the day. The near-inevitable Paradox backlashes, meanwhile, pound unlucky mages into the pavement, which just adds to the overall effect of a pissed-off dragon at the local Progenitor lab. Although the Avatar Storm makes this tactic more dangerous than usual, powerful Marauders still resort to zooterrorism when nothing less than a harpy swarm will send the desired message.

Reality Vortices and the Bigfoot Effect

On the flipside, a powerfully actualized Marauder can skew the localized reality in such powerful ways that even technology gets drawn into the dance. Video cameras, cell phones, and other recording devices shut down (a common occurrence), record indistinct blurs of unidentifiable activity, or else transform completely into related but dissimilar objects – say, an iPad into a clay tablet and stylus – before transforming back to their original configuration once the Mad One leaves the scene.

Such reality vortices help conceal a Marauder’s existence and activities as well as subvert reality with the Bigfoot effect: that annoying cryptozoology quirk that blurs images of Nessie, Bigfoot, and UFOs that appeared with perfect clarity when photographers took their pictures. Whether this means that Consensus Reality smoothes out little wrinkles or that Marauders were involved with some of history’s more notorious cryptozoological events (they probably were…) remains open to debate. In any case, certain Wyld Mages do tend to warp reality on a technological scale. Although the Traditions, Disparates, and Technocracy wind up having to conceal Marauder incidents on a fairly regular basis, the Bigfoot effect appears to nullify a multitude of sins.

Magick and the Mad

Marauder madness blows open a person’s sense of possibility. Whereas other mages study practices handed down through mentors and fellowships, the Mad often manifest wild powers through explosions of enlightened potential. Aside from the Awakened mages who go Wyld, Marauders display the sort of power that saner mages work years or even decades to achieve.

Wild Talent

In a spontaneous burst of expanded dementia, a Mad One can rip holes in the Gauntlet or split into half a dozen self-aware selves. How? Through Wild Talent, described in Chapter Ten, (pp. 527-528), as “a sudden burst of controlled (and uncontrollable) magick.” This talent essentially runs wild, dragging the mage along to clean up the mess. For most mages, such displays happen once or twice in a lifetime, if even that often; for certain Marauders, though, they’re a way of life.

In game terms, this sort of magick is the Storyteller’s playground. She can have it do whatever seems most dramatic at the time, leaving the Marauder’s normal magick to the usual rule systems. Again, see that Chapter Ten entry for details.

Insane Focus

For the average mage, belief provides the foundation for the willworker’s focus. Practices and tools help the mage guide that belief toward magickal acts. For the Mad, however, Enlightened insanity provides the focus. A Marauder’s Arts well up from that crazy-pool, and so she might not use instruments or practices at all – just explosions of demented Will.

That said, most Mad Ones do use practices and tools… typically ones that make sense only to each individual Marauder. One might use words, another uses toys, and a third employs chalk drawings that she scribbles onto notebook paper and then chews up before vomiting a spell. As always, the focus depends upon the insanity. A Mad Mage uses things that fit into his personal view of reality.

Mages who go Mad after belonging to other groups typically retain their original beliefs, tools, and practices. Now, however, those instruments and paradigms get warped in bizarre ways. A Virtual Adept Marauder might use broken computer gear or an Etch-a-Sketch; a Hermetic could employ obsessive glyphs and chants of insane complexity and fifth-dimensional math. A Mad Ecstatic could eat bugs, and a Mad Progenitor makes Dr. Frankenstein look like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Those Mad Ones still practice magick, but it’s a bent form of their original practice, reflecting their permanent delusions.

Marauder Resonance

The Mad weave their madness into everything they do. As a result, each Marauder has powerful Resonance, rippling the Tapestry with lunatic phenomena. Actualized Marauders send out mad echoes: weird quirks of the environment, strange weather, bent musical notes that come from no visible instrument, and other twists of Reality’s tail. Perceptual Marauders, in contrast, send out tiny waves of unease and dread; such people feel wrong but don’t distort reality in such obvious ways.

Eventually, though, the Madness becomes too strong for the Tapestry to endure. Low-key Marauders, like Davenport, might keep a low profile on Earth for years or even decades. Few Mad Ones, however, are that sane. More often than not, the truly powerful Marauders retreat into the Otherworlds, get swallowed up by Umbral Realms, or explode in brilliant flares of glorious insanity, projecting echoes of their dementia to the universe at large.

The Dream Lords: Marauder Oracles?

When Marauders reach a pinnacle of madness, their essence leaps from the confines of reality and soars into the Void. No force on Earth can hold them then – every element of flesh or spirit dissolves into the whirling Wyld. Sometimes, however, visitors to the Onerae – lasting Realms among the Dream Zone – report seeing strange gods whose wishes transform those dreamscapes to suit unearthly whims. Could these Dream Lords be Mad Oracles, advanced beyond material reality yet still held in the gravity of the Real? Given that the Dream Realms are the stuff of incarnated consciousness, the concept of Quiet Bodhisattvas within those Realms makes a certain degree of sense.

(For more about the Onerae, see Lasting Realms and Dreaming Gods, Chapter Four, p. 101)

The Mad Masque?

So what, if anything, does Ascension look like to the metaphysically insane? Is there a Path for the Mad that leads to some ultimate transcendence? Might the Marauders have a vision for the world at large? The answers – assuming they exist – remain mysterious to all but the maddest of seers… and because they’re insane as well, their observations should be taken with several barges full of salt.

Still, there do appear to be forms of Ascension for escapees from reality’s confinement. After all, the illusion of sanity can be a sort of prison from which Enlightenment allows release. What other people see as hopeless dementia might instead be transcendence from a Gnostic cosmos in which reality is a torturous delusion – a Mad Masque pretending to be real.

Perhaps, on an individual level, each Marauder gets a glimpse behind the scenes at this cosmic farce. It could be that this insight has driven them insane. It could also be, however, that such insight has made them the SANEST people in the World of Darkness. Paradoxically, both states may be true: sanity is madness, and the greatest Enlightenment burns too bright to be considered sane.

Ascension, then, is an eternal laugh at the cosmic joke, endless applause for the Mad Masque in which each living thing holds a role. Perhaps that one hand clapping at the end of the universe is the transcendent essence of the Great Marauder Soul. And if, after all these centuries of struggle and war, the Marauders really do have the last laugh, their collective punch line could involve ripping down the curtain that masquerades as the Tapestry… and revealing, in the end, that nothing is what it ever appeared to be at all.

Fragments of a Greater God

Clearly, the World of Darkness is a sick joke perpetrated upon its inhabitants. No divinity could be cruel enough to bestow a constant struggle of absurd miseries upon its children. As the theory goes, this cosmos is a sadistic toy crafted by insane gods. Beyond them, however, a vast Creator offers comfort to the prisoners of this Earthly prison… and the Mad Ones are his angels, ministering to the innocent souls caught up in this Gnostic thrill-ride. It’s a weird theory, sure – but like we said, this world is insane, so who’s to say that the Angels of the True God aren’t actually sane folks whose Awakening allows them to see past the illusions of this rotten Earth and embrace a sanity that only looks like madness when you see it through our eyes…?

In a world torn apart by Ascension Warriors, perhaps madness really is the key to Ascension – an ultimate transcendence beyond this World of Darkness.