Golden Cloister
The Golden Cloister is an occult religious organization with ancient origins. Members of the cult worship the Lord of Fire, who has gone by the name of Moloch among many others. The Golden Cloister also functions as a secret society for a select group of elites who practice dark magic rituals to increase their own wealth, standing, and power, with rites featuring burnt offerings (sometimes of the human variety) to their ancient deity.
Structure
While there are no proper sects within the Golden Cloister, the organization is split into a series of cells, wherein each cell within the cult pursue the goals of the organization via various means. The members of each cell are ranked based on their relative ability to wield Arcana, with powerless individuals acting as servants while talented or well-educated casters occupy leadership roles. Some cells devote themselves to research, others to logistics, and still others to manipulation of the greater society in which the cult is embedded. All cells report to a regional Archmage, who serves as the coordinating force for the Golden Cloister's activities. There is no supra-regional organization; the Archmagi confer directly with the Lord of Fire, whether actually communing with the entity or merely promoting their own interests and tricking their followers into thinking that they are the will of the Lord of Fire.
Assets
The public wealth of the Golden Cloister is largely held in real estate, mining claims, and intellectual property such as patents on scientific processes. The cult also hoards magical artifacts from across history, whether by purchase from collectors who didn't know what they had or by swapping archeological finds with believable non-magical facsimiles.
Cult holy sites are typically concealed within the residences of the more wealthy cult members, though other locations can also serve this purpose if residential construction would draw too much attention. Occasionally, cult members who have infiltrated other religious organizations will purchase or construct a building for that organization to use as a front; for example, a Golden Cloister acolyte who was recruited from within the Catholic clergy might erect a "garage" on rectory grounds and conduct cult gatherings there when not performing his public duties for the church.
The most valuable asset the Golden Cloister possesses is information; a series of informants, fences, and connections in government and industry provide the cult with unparalleled situational awareness, making discovering them without their wanting to be discovered nearly impossible. In Kit's Crater, "Zany" Zeke serves as an unwilling vendor for the Golden Cloister's field agents, though anyone who happens to possess a Cloister coin (a form of black market currency) can peruse the pawn shop's "special collection" of minor magical items.
History
The actual origin of the worship of the Lord of Fire is lost to history, though it is known that it predates classical antiquity, arose and faded away several times in disparate regions of the world, and that at least one early major instance of cult activity came out of the Levant (as in the original worshipers of Moloch). The belief system of the cult as it relates to the Lord of Fire is somewhat syncretic, with bits of lore pieced together from various regional religions by the modern cult to create a more complete picture of what the Lord of Fire is and what he represents.
The Golden Cloister's focus on classical antiquity as a visual aesthetic, deep study into the Mediterranean cultures of that time, and replication of the arts and styles of that time period within their ritual spaces, comes from the fact that a particularly strong resurgence of the Lord of Fire's worship came about during the late Roman Empire. The massacre of countless innocents during gladiatorial games and the persecution of the nascent Christian population were potent sources of spiritual energy for the Lord of Fire, with the power of the cultists of that time only being extirpated from the world (for a time) by the rise of Christendom during the Middle Ages. Even then, rare instances of religious execution by fire sustained the Lord of Fire in a dormant form until his reemergence after the events of 1986.
Mythology & Lore
The Lord of Fire has gone by many names throughout the ages, though the Golden Cloister considers the mythology of Moloch to best fit their understanding of the Lord of Fire's lore and tenets; the Lord of Fire, an elemental force of destruction, change, and useful knowledge, hungers for sacrifices to increase his penetration into the realms of the sons of man.
Worship
The Liturgy of the Cleansing Flame, a blood-chilling tome often bound and leafed in asbestos or other inflammable sheets, is the primary source of ritual knowledge for the Golden Cloister. Sacrifices are performed by the burning of offerings in a special furnace shaped like a bull, with seven orifices into which various offerings are placed to be charred into ash, as incantations from the Liturgy are intoned by a master of ceremonies. First-born children, spellcasters, and agents of order who stand against chaos are the Lord of Fire's favorite sacrifices, though crops, livestock, and other valuables may also be sacrificed for small boons. Living sacrifices are removed from the normal cycle of resurrection by this process, their blanks having been corrupted when they are subsumed into the Lord of Fire's immaterial form.
Granted Divine Powers
In return for their burnt offerings, the Lord of Fire gifts his supplicants in the Golden Cloister skill at obtaining material wealth, the power to create undead (via the Summon spell applied to a dead body), and access to Unallocated Space (via the Teleport and Summon spells) for clandestine occult research. The Liturgy of the Cleansing Flame (see the section on Worship for details) contains the true names of various entities from beyond the Instance, allowing the same entities to be summoned directly; these may be used as servants, negotiated with for powers or monstrous features, or dissected to obtain unusual crafting materials. Occasionally, when enough living beings have been burnt during sacrificial rituals, the iron from their blood can be refined from the ashes to create sacred haemoferrite, a crafting material useful in creating Arcana-conducting weapons or absorbing damage from incoming Arcana-based attacks.
Political Influence & Intrigue
Members of the Golden Cloister are typically affluent before ever joining the cult, though some are cultivated from the rare (but growing) population of naturally-talented spellcasters in the world and others are born to current members. As an ancient and wealthy organization, membership in the cult confers useful social, business, and political connections at the highest echelons of society, though the cult's exclusivity has somewhat limited the scope of their influence. Outwardly, many of the most elite cultists strongly promote scientific research; this is done both to profit off of discoveries, expanding their own wealth, and to promote viewpoints which run counter to the truth of magic's existence so that the cult can continue to operate under a veil of plausible deniability.
Within Kit's Crater itself, the cult has been involved with local politics since at least the 19th century, when the only local community was Rawhide and the town of Kit's Crater hadn't even been incorporated yet. In fact, Rawhide's gold mines began to fail because the cult was already involved in mining operations, having built extensive tunnels to extract much of the mineral wealth long before lone prospectors could reach them and filling the mineshafts back in with tailings once the ore veins ran dry to conceal their efforts.
Founding Date
Unknown (predates classical antiquity)
Type
Secret, Occult
Alternative Names
Novus Ordo Ignis
Leader
Deities
Location
Controlled Territories
Comments