Esoteric Order of the Golden Star
“My friends, my fellow travelers, the Golden Path lies ahead of us, and we need but the courage to take the next step! Heron of Alexandria and Saint Constantine walked it before us, to enlightenment in the dark, and by their blood anointed be the faces here before me.”
You want to join the Esoteric Order of the Golden Star because:
You’re unfulfilled in unlife and want something more. You think magic is cool. You’re looking for a community in which you can immerse yourself fully. You want to escape the world. You see where the money’s going, and you want in on the top floor.
The big picture
The Order of the Star is a small player in a big game, and it survives on its security. It’s just one place, one big fenced-off mansion with its ghoul guards and Kindred on campus, and it’s never going to rival one of the big covenants. Maybe some of the students think otherwise, that the magic powers they learn will make them a political force, but they’re wrong. The magic the school teaches is bullshit. It’s all about the money. When it comes down to brass tacks, the Order is a scam. They promise enlightenment, and in exchange sell books and tools and various faux reagents. The tuition’s free, but the education kills your wallet anyway. Some of the students here have sunk tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into useless crap, and some have accepted blood bonds and do favors for the staff because they can’t pay.
The headmistress, Lady Jezebel Eliza Szilard, and her inner circle of 12 teachers have no intention to do this forever. They’re a fearful bunch, afraid of their students and what will happen when the game is up, and they’re more than happy to rely on blood bonds and ghouls for safety, but eventually, they will move on and open a new school elsewhere. They’ve done so before. But times are changing and, eventually, their past will catch up to them. It’s just a matter of time.
Origins
In 1967, a young, idealistic San Francisco hippie named Debbie Meyer died of a heroin overdose. A Gangrel found the corpse while it was still fresh, and Embraced the young woman, who thus entered into her own personal Requiem. In 1979, that same woman had been thoroughly disillusioned. The hippie movement was dead, her peers from back then had either moved on or turned into sad remnants, and the glorious new age in which she’d once believed hadn’t come around. Mortal mysticism had let her down, and among Kindred, she had found little substitute. She had already long abandoned spiritual fulfillment in favor of material comfort, but what money she had scraped up had long since dried out, and she was in debt. It was time for Debbie Meyer to vanish and reinvent herself. So it was that Meyer vanished from the All Night Society, and Lady Jezebel Eliza Szilard showed up in Seattle, selling books on Kindred history to gullible buyers. The scam had begun. By the end of the year, she published her first book on ancient mysticism, and she held her first seminar in the fall of 1980.
Since that point, her schtick has slowly grown more elaborate and refined, and she has picked up co-conspirators along the way — 12 of them, to reach the number 13, though two of them are imperfect fits that are slated for replacement. Szilard considers that an inevitable side effect of trying to impose a mystical image on reality — you have to fudge it a bit to fit.
At present, the Order of the Star has changed locations and run different, nearly identical schools in several cities. After narrowly escaping a student rebellion in Vancouver in 2006, brought on by the victims of the scam realizing what was going on, the inner circle has grown more paranoid and controlling, and has started employing mute ghoul guards for protection. However, in the age of social media, Lady Szilard believes it to be all-but inevitable that eventually ex-students from other locations will share their stories with the current crop. When, and if, that happens, she plans to burn the building down and escape with her cronies, reinventing themselves on the money they have already squirrelled away.
At present, the Order sees the writing on the wall. They must change or perish. While they have always spent a portion of their budget on researching potential avenues to find some actual power, ancient or otherwise, to call their own, they have stepped these activities up drastically. They are currently following up rumors on a long-slain Iroquois Kindred elder only known by her family name, Burning Sky, whose reputation involved some unknown form of blood sorcery. Her distant descendant Joseph Burning, a Lord, is one of the teachers at the school, and he considers any secret knowledge his ancestor might have found beyond the grave rightfully his. The fact that Burning Sky actually has a still-active grandchilde who also has a good claim to being her heir, the Mekhet Acolyte Joshua Taylor, matters little to Burning.
Our Practices
Image is everything. The Esoteric Order of the Golden Star is all about form over substance. They can do anything, justify anything, so long as they do it with style — dark and occult style. Within the Order’s power, everything is structured to keep questions and criticisms to a minimum, because the paint peels around the edges and might just come off if someone picks at it too diligently. Ritual, spiritualism, and secrecy form the heart of Order’s practices. Its campus functions as a boarding school, guarded by a cadre of ghouls whose tongues have been cut out to keep them obedient. Dormitories, laboratories, and lecture halls dominate, each decorated in a sort of Victorianoccult chic, dominated by purples, grays and browns. Colored lights and incense are omnipresent.
An average night on the Order’s campus begins at nightfall, when one of the ghoul guards enters each dormitory ringing a handbell to rouse the students from their sleep. The students have 30 minutes to prepare themselves and must then be in the main auditorium for the night’s opening lecture by Lady Jezebel herself. This lecture usually involves florid oratory and little substance, but the headmistress is an accomplished and charismatic speaker and tends to leave her listeners feeling like everything she said made sense, but they weren’t smart enough to understand. These lectures last about 30 minutes and end with some kind of communal activity to make the students feel like part of something greater than themselves.
After this, the students are finally permitted into the refectory to partake in the institute’s meal plan, which costs a hefty monthly fee and is all but obligatory. Here, they dine on animal blood, which the teachers claim is a sort of fast and spiritual cleansing. Afterward, classes begin, each lasting between 30 minutes and an hour. These can take the form of rituals, meditation, lectures, and bizarre alchemical laboratory classes, along with arts and crafts. Most of these are designed to bamboozle and bore the students, while others are just filler.
A subset of students catches on to the scam, of course. When that happens, and the teachers find out, Lady Jezebel personally tries to lure them into becoming part of the act, offering them money, favors, and other privileges in exchange for helping to reinforce the illusion of a real magic school and keep the other students in line. Those who reject find themselves escorted off campus by ghoul guards, and become subject to smear campaigns orchestrated by the Order of the Star. The ones who accept become teachers’ assistants and make a tidy little profit from their positions, but their main perk is simply elevation above their fellow students. They get nicer rooms, can expect human blood on occasion, and most importantly, they can boss around and abuse the regular students as they please so long as they aren’t too blatant about it.
Most of the teachers were recruited directly into the upper echelons of the Order, but a few — the later ones — came from the ranks of the TAs, and within their numbers is where Lady Szilard is looking for a replacement for her two not-quite-right teachers. If she finds the right candidates, of course, the replaced teachers can’t be permitted to spread the word of the Order’s true purpose, so the headmistress has already made plans for how to quietly dispose of them. A teacher can expect luxury and money, living in fine suites attended by their favorite ghouls who see to their every whim. They can pursue expensive hobbies and afford most things they might want, and all they must do in exchange is make up some bullshit classes and namedrop some historical and occult figures every so often.
The Order’s ghoul guards are mostly either loyal henchmen or enemies of the group, most of whom, regardless of where they came from, have had their tongues removed, both to stop them from sharing Order secrets and because it gives them a mysterious air. Mortals who discover the existence of the Order and draw their attention risk becoming another body in the campus guard, and mortals who try to infiltrate or investigate them are converted as a matter of procedure. When the inner circle decides to abandon the current campus, they also leave behind any surviving ghouls, with only a few favorites following each teacher to their next location. The headmistress herself has never found a ghoul she decided to bring along.
Order ghouls are dressed in purple uniforms reminiscent of the late 19th century, and wear burnished brass helmets that resemble those popularly associated with ancient Greek hoplites. They wear sashes with rank insignia based on alchemical symbolism — bronze, silver, gold — and carry revolvers and cavalry sabers. They have also recently started being issued AK-47s. They communicate with each other by a proprietary set of hand signals invented by one of the teachers.
There is only one headmistress, and there has only ever been one. Lady Jezebel Elia Szilard, also known as Debbie Meyer, is a fallen idealist, and she has fallen hard. She is a bitter and cynical woman who embraces her former mystic beliefs in a darkened mirror of the hippie she used to be. Seeing her peers from back in the 60s turn into just another iteration of the previous generation left her disillusioned and despairing, and the spiritualism in which she used to bury herself just rang hollow. Ironically, in her backlash against her fellow baby boomers, she has mirrored the heartless materialism that embittered her in the first place, only she wraps it in newage trappings instead of Wall Street worship. She still sees the world through the lens of her own generational struggle, and neither generation X nor the millennial generation have really hit home with her — she just sees the peers who betrayed her repeated over and over, all their potential willingly surrendered and stuffed into business suits.
Deep down, she wants to save the world and see a new enlightened age of spiritual fulfillment and restored ancient wisdom arrive, to uplift humankind to ever-greater heights. Only a single mind, strong and unbending before the corruption of the world, can usher in such an era, she believes — a benevolent dictator, to ensure no further generations are allowed to fall. She has a vision of spiritual purity, uncorrupted by politics and money, and she believes only she can keep others pure. The biases in her vision, and the hypocrisy of a con artist seeing herself as the sole reliable guardian of authenticity, are completely lost on her. And hidden behind her sour ideals is a growing hunger for power: If she sees the chance to turn her scam into a full-sized covenant, especially if she finds a source of actual magical power, then she will seize it greedily and govern her new power base with an iron hand.
Nicknames: Orderites (among members), star cultists (neutral), wizards (sarcastic insult). The Order’s profile is low enough that many Kindred would also simply call them, “who?”
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