Ember Point (Latest Update - FIREBIRD - rogue magical espionage agency)

[Commander Titan]

I'm torn between two half-finished concepts for the next post. Are people more interested in seeing the government magical agency gone rogue, or an expose on what "demons" are in the EP-verse?

[Davies]

One vote for the former, please.

[TheStray7]

I'm interested in both, but I have no preference on order.

[Commander Titan]

FIREBIRD

A Brief Introduction to the Frenzy

The Earth of Ember Point had been aware, on some level, of aliens since the appearance of Vega in Chicago in 1984. There were other incidents as well, but they were generally isolated occurrences.

Until 2010.

That was when the Jagged Armada arrived. An interstellar pirate fleet based around the Voyager ship The Runaway Widow, they arrived over Earth and declared a “Frenzy.” That meant it was “open season” on Earth, its treasures, and its people. Raider vessels streaked across the globe, seeking glory and plunder. The entire world fought back – superteams from the Battalion and Paragon Force in the USA, the Stronghold Society in the United Kingdom, MILITIA and the Night Reserve in Canada, and more did battle alongside conventional militaries.

Yet, ultimately, the Frenzy only came to an end when the tattooed martial artist Captain Scorpion IV gave his life to defeat the Jagged Armada’s leader, Juggernaut-Admiral Krim-Zhen, in single combat. The pirates’ will was broken and they fled back to their ship, leaving the system (of course, those on Earth were only dimly aware of the politicking going on behind the scenes).

The day was saved, but the world was forever changed…


From the Ashes

To call the Frenzy traumatic is an understatement. Alien life existed, and it had made sport of Earth. There was death and destruction across the globe. Cities were ravaged by design or by chance. While the would-be slaves were forcibly returned by Earth’s superheroes, its treasures and dignity were not.

They stole the Statue of Liberty, for chrissakes.

In the aftermath, many sought to rebuild, to recover, to heal.

Others decided to ask “How can we prevent this from ever happening again?”

A particular document began to circulate online. First in intelligence and espionage circles, then soon after breaking through to the mainstream news media.

Entitled Trial by Fire, it analyzed the Frenzy and several key battles. It made the case that the invaders’ technological advantage had been overwhelming, and even researching their remains would be insufficient in case a new threat came by. Instead, it made the case that magic would carry the day in the future, as exemplified in the case of Captain Scorpion IV. It ended by calling for a resurrection and rediscovery of the arts of magic, reviving and refining the practices to defend and advance humanity. A total paradigm shift.

This was somewhere between a testament, a manifesto, a white paper, and a call to arms. It might have been written off as the ravings of a madman, but the document was clearly written by someone who knew all the right terms, magecraft and tradecraft, and spoke of classified programs and operations, including references to the US government’s defunct covert ops witches in the SWEEPER program.

It was a minor sensation but just one story of many in the aftermath. Quickly forgotten.

But it surfaced again when a little more than a year later, superheroes smashing a magic item smuggling ring found, rather than a local Murk branch as they expected, that a highly-organized paramilitary-like group had been operating the warehouse. Everyone working it fled into the night, and most of the evidence was “mysteriously” lost by police. Some of what was left included a seal with the image of a flaming feather, and the name FIREBIRD…


Present-Day Activities

In the years since, FIREBIRD has emerged as a dangerous new player on the supernatural and superhuman scene. It has recruited members from conventional intelligence agencies and special forces, “civic-minded” members of the Murk and the Flock, agents of groups like the Conquest of Dawn and Corps Zeta, and even concerned members of ORCA and CAIRN. Many researchers and mages are enticed to join by the group’s access to rare resources and seemingly unlimited funds. All of them leave their prior affiliations aside, united and reborn under the banner of FIREBIRD.

The resources, mystical and mundane, that FIREBIRD has access to are frightening. It speaks to either high-placed and well-financed backers, or an incredible ability to steal or requisition what it needs from conventional governments. Heroes investigating FIREBIRD are liable to find themselves in the crosshairs of federal authorities, while their targets slip through the nets of bureaucracy, free to pursue their mission.

And what is that mission? To make it so that humanity is never alone and afraid in the dark again. The group is anti-alien, anti-AI, and often expresses reservations about (non-FIREBIRD aligned) superhumans as well. Yet despite its “pro-human” rhetoric, it also tends to privilege the First World, and its narrative of “sacrifice for the greater good” isn’t always even-handed in who must make those sacrifices. Ultimately, FIREBIRD pursues power, mundane and mystical, building up arsenals and testing them out.

The group has been identified or implicated in a number of schemes, including, but not nearly limited to:

• Stealing the corpses of superheroes and villains to attempt to resurrect them via necromancy as supersoldier revenants loyal to FIREBIRD. Instead, a super-zombie outbreak was narrowly contained by the actions of a group of heroes.
• Unleashing the monstrous Hollow Horde, extradimensional mindless soldier-constructs. The Horde proceeded to indiscriminately lay waste to the surrounding area until banished by Professor Devil.
• Creating magical artifacts and Named Objects. This has included the development of magical firearms along the vein of Magnum Opus's work -- so far the most reliable being enchanted Thompson submachine guns and AK-47s, perhaps due to the mythic resonance those guns hold. FIREBIRD agents will often equip them alongside more modern, mundane weapons.
• The development of artificial “ley lines” to reroute magic from naturally occurring magical places, to create a manipulable “power grid” so that FIREBIRD could direct immense magical energy across the globe as it needed. While they were unable to link the entire planet together, across several large areas, FIREBIRD effectively monopolized natural magical resonance.
• A ritual to enhance and alter the Sun itself, so that daylight would be deadly to more than just vampires, instead acting as a “selective filter” on the Earth that could have targeted aliens, and even humans and superhumans as designated by FIREBIRD. Stopped in a climactic battle by the Battalion and the Sanguine Sentinels, as the ritual risked scouring all life off the surface of the planet.

Despite their frequently reckless and destructive acts (“necessary evils,” according to their doctrine), FIREBIRD has also interceded to aid in defense against other major threats. They have come into conflict with the Conquest of Dawn, often targeting their operations for test runs of new mystical weapons and tactics. And the handful of alien incursions to Earth since the Frenzy have all met swift and decisive opposition from FIREBIRD. This has increased their public popularity, but also ensured that the Battalion must be circumspect with revealing its own, more peaceful, alien contacts lest the latter become targets…


Organization & Tradecraft

FIREBIRD is a diffused organization structured into a series of cells, each often focusing on a particular field of research or action. It exists within suborned units of the military-industrial complex, mostly throughout the Five Eyes nations, but the group has also slowly developed its own independent operations and personnel, who operate covertly but without using the shield of another agency. They even don uniforms and plaster their logo on the walls.

FIREBIRD operatives have varying clearance levels, authorizing them to access more information and resources from the wider network. These clearances are themed after the colors of fire:

• RED-level operatives are largely passive informants, often not having formal access to a cell but merely reporting to their handlers. They are scattered throughout the intelligence, military, arcane, criminal, and corporate worlds, directing information and resources to the larger organization. Many are barely a step above fellow travelers, and are being manipulated by FIREBIRD more than they realize. Others have received training, whether combat or magic, and can give anyone who uncovers them an unpleasant surprise.
• ORANGE-level operatives are the closest to “rank-and-file.” A group of ORANGE operatives might be a squad of special forces, a unit of assassins, the staff of a fusion center, or a coven of mystical researchers and archivists. They might be undertaking long-term research or rituals, or they might be deployed in-field for force projection or to acquire some important research. ORANGE-level combat operatives tend not to be magical practitioners themselves, instead using pre-crafted artifacts and rituals provided by support staff, alongside cutting edge modern weaponry and tactical gear. FIREBIRD can’t field a force the size of a group like the Conquest of Dawn, but careful recruitment means the quality of individual FIREBIRD soldiers often more than makes up for their lack of quantity.
• YELLOW-level operatives head up individual cells and operations, and the ORANGE-level operatives therein. These might be commanders of task forces or chief researchers or heads of mystical cabals. They tend to have very particular focuses and agendas. Many are mages finally getting to pursue radical theories that FIREBIRD’s higher-ups have determined to be potentially promising. Others are veterans of the Frenzy or similar conflicts who proved willing to go to extremes as a result. Alternatively, YELLOW operatives may be entrusted with operating the various FIREBIRD cover organizations - law firms, pharmaceutical research companies, archaeological NGOs, financial banks, etc.
• WHITE-level are less operatives than administrators, and they oversee networks of cells, and the YELLOW-level agents heading them, usually on a geographic basis. They are akin to a CIA station chief or KGB rezident. They utilize layers of secrecy, their true numbers being unknown. Some are accomplished low or (very rarely) high mages, but most are noncombatants entirely, though they might have one good trick up their sleeve if they are ever caught. FIREBIRD operating procedures, however, call for them to use a custom concoction to self-immolate if they are cornered, to protect the group’s secrets.
• BLUE-level operators lie outside the standard hierarchy. They enjoy an elite status as troubleshooters and are the subject of both awe and envy amongst the rest of the organization. Whether a high mage with a paradigm or not, BLUE operators have an equivalent level of magical firepower. They usually operate independently or commanding smaller groups of ORANGE agents, but task forces of all BLUE-level agents can easily give superhero teams a run for their money.

Sample BLUE-level operator - Agent KETCH

Spoiler

Carlos Mitchell was an SAS operator who acquitted himself with distinction during the Frenzy, taking part in several surgical strikes where outgunned, under-advanced SAS units nonetheless accomplished key victories against the Jagged Armada. He was even being groomed as a potential Commander Crab after the end of the invasion, but he instead chose to work with the nascent FIREBIRD organization, presented to him as “a chance to make a real difference, fight some real battles, kill some real bad guys.”

Mitchell, operating under the codename KETCH, was the most effective field operator FIREBIRD had, quickly adapting to the use of mystical weapons to supplement his brutal military skills.

And then his luck ran out, and he was killed during a mission. But FIREBIRD found him too useful to let go of, and the highest levels approved efforts to resurrect him in some form.

Ultimately, this took the form of the creation of a grim, skull-like death mask from his corpse, into which something variously termed his “ghost,” “soul,” “spirit,” or “essence” was poured. This ghost (for the sake of simplicity) has all of Mitchell’s skills, knowledge, and personality, which is granted to anyone who dons the mask. FIREBIRD has used this to keep KETCH in the field – different ORANGE-level agents are assigned to wear the mask, and Mitchell’s ghost takes command, adding his abilities to their own. When the host dies, the death mask is recovered and given to another agent. If the mask is destroyed (which is difficult, it is surprisingly resilient), it can be recreated.

There are limitations. Mitchell’s ghost can retain some new knowledge between hosts – anything he personally witnessed or was told about, but not any of their prior skills or expertise. And this is all lost if the death mask must be recreated from scratch.

His current host is a former Murk hitman who agreed to join FIREBIRD to escape enemies within his own organization, adding a degree of smoke magic to KETCH’s current arsenal.

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Possible Plot Seeds & Campaign Uses

• KETCH is a ruthless, brutal operator, but he’s merely amoral, as opposed to actively malicious. He’s willing to cross pretty much any line in the course of his work, but only as he deems necessary. If he comes into conflict or competition with the PCs, he can potentially be reasoned with – for example, a civilian unearths a necklace that turns anyone who wears it into a monster. KETCH has been sent to recover the necklace. He’ll initially take the direct route of trying to kill the monster, but if the PCs can demonstrate their ability to neutralize it nonlethally and efficiently, he’ll willingly step aside as long as he gets the artifact afterwards.
• FIREBIRD always looks to further innovate and refine their works. They’ve developed duplicates of KETCH’s death mask – weaker, mere impressions upon balaclavas, like a tactical gear take on the Shroud of Turin. These are issued to low-level staff at a ritual facility that the PCs break into. All of a sudden a bunch of nerdy academics pull the emergency balaclavas from their pockets and don them, and the PCs are facing down a whole horde of SAS-level combatants!

Sample BLUE-level operator - The Illustrated Woman

Spoiler

When she needs a name, she goes by Lydia, and yes, that is a bad joke - she has a surprisingly corny sense of humor. The Illustrated Woman is an athletic woman known and named for the incredibly intricate, sometimes shifting, tattoos that she has across nearly her entire body, with her face usually left uncovered.

The Illustrated Woman is highly competent with all manner of traditional weapons, and she carries plenty of guns and explosives into the field, but her real assets are her tattoos. They are all magically-empowered, hence their shifting nature, and she can draw upon them for a wide variety of effects. She might turn tattoos of daggers into real weapons, letting her get past metal detectors and other precautions. She might unleash monsters like snakes and serpents. Or even more esoteric effects and associations, like rose thorns that put those struck to sleep.

The Illustrated Woman truly believes in FIREBIRD’s mission and has gone to extraordinary lengths to achieve their goals. But she also has something of a hero complex, occasionally going off-mission to ensure civilians are not endangered or even ignoring standard operating procedures and recovering fallen comrades. She says “nobody is left behind” and means it, and has developed quite a following amongst the organization, her presence inspiring the rest.

Lydia is something of a poster child for FIREBIRD, and this was all by design. You see, she is not in fact a natural human woman, but rather a sort of mystical homunculus created by the group’s most potent mages on order of the group’s founder. This was done by taking a “snapshot” of the founder as a young woman, but altering her personal history as if she’d always been a dashing and daring field agent, of the kind that exists more in novels than in real tradecraft. The tattoos and her heroic personality are the result of the founder’s admiration for Captain Scorpion IV, and thus Lydia is essentially her wish fulfillment brought to life.

Lydia is only dimly aware of this, thinking of FIREBIRD’s founder as something vaguely between a commanding officer and a mother. What she would do, were she to learn the full truth, is unknown…

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Possible Plot Seeds & Campaign Uses

• The Illustrated Woman seems to be in the PCs area of operations, or they are directed to hers by an intelligence or law enforcement contact. She's hit a number of important sites, perhaps museums or archaeological digs, and its clear that FIREBIRD is up to something. The PCs have several opportunities to fight or capture her, though she may slip away (before or after capture) with tricks hidden in her tattoos. Eventually, it becomes clear that she is actually racing against a different, unsavory group (the Murk? the Conquest of Dawn?) to prevent an ancient evil from being awakened when the right artifacts come together. The PCs may choose to work with her, but she'll try to claim the artifact for FIREBIRD, confident that "WE can manage to contain it." Will the PCs form a fragile alliance and let her go? Or risk it all to fight or convince her to give it up?
• Lydia is a "noble opponent" who might help PCs interested in taking down FIREBIRD knockdown the entire house of cards. Perhaps she encounters and works alongside a PC undercover, or even when she's just out for a night on the town. Any chance to see what life outside of the organization could look like - particularly a life where she could be a hero in a less complicated way, would provide an opening. But she's "her mother's daughter" in some ways, and she might feel obligated to take the reins of FIREBIRD if the Gray Lady is defeated, unless the PCs can persuade her otherwise.

FIREBIRD Leadership - The Gray Lady

The leadership of FIREBIRD is shrouded in myth. Some outside observers think that a council of WHITE-level administrators run the group with any tales otherwise as just a false front. But most believe there is still a central figure, the same person who wrote and circulated Trial By Fire. Given the Russian mythological connotations of “FIREBIRD,” many have taken to calling this mystery figure “Baba Yaga,” after the old and powerful witch of the woods, and the assumption that anyone who heads such a mystically potent group must be a high mage of the first order themselves.

They are mistaken. First, she prefers to simply be referred to as the Gray Lady, if not simply “Control.” And second, she’s barely mastered more than a handful of hedge magic rituals herself, with great difficulty.

The woman who would become the Gray Lady was the daughter of a well-connected Beltway-insider family. She was a bookish, gawky child who nurtured dreams of heroism, fed by her family’s stories of wartime service and the fantasy novels she inhaled. But her parents crushed her when they told her she was completely unfit to enter politics as a candidate, or a candidate’s wife. The military wouldn’t accept her for combat duty either, given the time. So instead, she took her political science and international relations degrees and facility with languages, and applied to join the United States intelligence community. To her immense initial disappointment, she was not accepted as a field agent but only as an analyst,

Despite daydreams of entering the field and saving the day like an action hero, this environment proved to be a natural fit for the future Gray Lady. Her prodigious intellect, including oft-neglected emotional intelligence, let her read between the lines and collate disparate data, and her active imagination led to outside-the-box-thinking. Her anonymous reports and marginalia were responsible for a number of successful operations, but she received no credit and felt hemmed in by her work, resigned to a disappointing life.

She was taking some much needed vacation to visit family in Ember Point, when the Jagged Armada invaded. She was a face in the crowd when Captain Scorpion IV sacrificed his life to utilize the full power of his mystical tattoos to defeat the alien leader.

She was inspired, and her entire life’s mission became to find a way to save the world like the hero once had, like the hero she’d wanted to be as a child. She finally gave up playing by the rules and even before she’d circulated Trial By Fire, she’d begun to assemble the beginnings of FIREBIRD.

Her codename of “Gray Lady” is multifaceted. It refers to her low-profile and drab sense of style, yes, but also the fact that she is the sole FIREBIRD member with GRAY-level clearance - complete access and command, as she is the “ashes” from which the entire group sprung. She’s living out something between a fantasy and a hero complex, in which she is fully justified and any acts she does are inherently justified. She makes pretenses to the greater good, but her long-suppressed ego is now working in overdrive.

It is to the Gray Lady’s great frustration that she seems to have little magical aptitude, and thus the creation of the Illustrated Woman is in part an attempt to have the vicarious, adventurous life she always dreamed of, mixed with her admiration for Captain Scorpion. Instead, her true superpower is her organizational and analytical ability, and much of FIREBIRD’s recordkeeping and true extent is only known to her, and only kept in her head.

The Gray Lady is based out of a non-descript penthouse atop an office building hosting a consulting firm that serves as a front for several key FIREBIRD operations. Officially, her old secret identity resigned from the three-letter agency she was working for and died in an accident not long after, a very low-key affair that is considered a case closed by her former employers. None of them would quite be able to believe that the mousy analyst they once knew is now one of the most powerful, and ruthless, people alive…

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Possible Plot Seeds & Campaign Uses

• FIREBIRD is meant to be a group that can serve as a more morally gray entity. They may sometimes be the lesser of two evils, and willing to work with PC heroes to stop greater ones. But of course, they may also be the ones who poked the metaphorical magical poodle and caused a problem in the first place.
• In a guest appearance, during a major crossover / Crisis-style event, a team of more conventional superhero PCs might find themselves approached by the Gray Lady and FIREBIRD
  with offers of support. Transportation to the villain's remote base, or a power-up to take on the alien invaders, or key knowledge or access or distractions. Will the heroes accept this aid, even if it makes them owe FIREBIRD or otherwise leaves them vulnerable? What happens when FIREBIRD uses the PCs acceptance (or refusal) in their propaganda?
• "FIREBIRD experiment gone wrong (or even right!)" is a good origin for PCs, as well as NPC heroes and villains. A ritual or alchemical working going wrong, only leaving one confused, empowered survivor, is a comically common occurrence for this group.
• As outright antagonists, taking down FIREBIRD could be a full campaign. They seek to destroy aliens and AIs outright, making them natural enemies for PCs from those backgrounds, and they also are a good thematic opponent for PCs with ties to the military, intelligence, and/or magic communities. Disrupting their operations, turning their agents like the Illustrated Woman, and ultimately tracking down the Gray Lady before she makes an apocalyptic error trying to play hero and control forces outside her reach are all possibilities. Think ORCHIS from the Krakoan Age of Marvel Comics, or CERBERUS from Mass Effect.
• Alternatively, FIREBIRD could be the group the PCs work for in an Iron Age or otherwise more gritty campaign. The group makes a lot of hard calls and Hail Marys, and dealing with those choices and their aftermath gives a lot of material. The PCs could all be BLUE-level operators, with various mystical talents. Fighting worse mystical and mundane menaces, and preparing for an oncoming alien invasion gives a good overall structure, even as the PCs debate the morality of what they do and perhaps find ways to subvert their more distasteful orders. Think Delta Green or XCOM or the BPRD from Hellboy.

[EternalPhoenix]

...you've learned well from the Phoenixverse. Villains with a point is 100% my BS. Well done.

[Commander Titan]

...you've learned well from the Phoenixverse. Villains with a point is 100% my BS. Well done.

Thank you! Though I might add the point of FIREBIRD is to perhaps have it be an open question for the PCs to decide on if FIREBIRD and/or the Gray Lady have a point, or if they are self-aggrandizing fearmongers.

Next up, either the Unspeakables, street level association of mystic heroes, or “demons” - depends which I finish first.

[TheStray7]

Yay villain organizations that make sense!