The Sons of Liberty
A Lawful Evil Qabal
Some men must rule; the great mass of men must be ruled. Some men must own; the great mass of men must work for those who own.—Mark Hanna
he Sons of Liberty have recently become quite an active qabal, but their history extends back to the American Revolution and even to the Defiance itself. The Sons consider themselves the spiritual descendants of the American Founding Fathers. Comprised of a handful of wealthy industrialists, lawyers and politicians, the Sons believe they have obtained their financial and political might through Divine will. They thus believe that any course of action they follow to further their own financial interests carries God's blessing, and consider the attempts of social reformers to break the status quo tantamount to blasphemy. Fortunately, as "His favorite sons" the Sons of Liberty feel it is their moral duty to guide the United States towards its destiny as the greatest nation in the history of the world. Chiefly, this means guarding the nation's economic interests at home and abroad. The Sons reason that since they ensure the nation's prosperity and guide its development, their concerns and those of the nation are one and the same.
The Sons are even more potentially dangerous than their status as an elitist "old boy's club" would imply, due to their keen interest in the supernatural and its potential power. The Sons view the forces of the supernatural as merely another resource, like coal or steel. As with those resources, the Sons seek to control the supernatural as the key to advancing the United States' interests, and to protect it from enemies within and without. The Sons' views on magic and the paranormal on Gothic Earth are somewhat exaggerated, as they believe that the world is literally swarming with unseen, occult forces; the Sons hold that if they do not monopolize this power, someone else will. Their solution to this perceived threat is simple and decidedly American: they send their agents across the globe in search of forbidden lore. Their hope is to uncover ways in which the supernatural can be exploited for their purposes.
Like most of the known qabals, the Sons of Liberty are aware of the Red Death's existence. However, they are largely ignorant of its corrupting influence. Because the Red Death's taint is an intrinsic quality of the supernatural on Gothic Earth, the Sons believe that the Red Death is the primal force responsible for supernatural manifestations. They do not associate it with evil, speaking of it in the same terms they would use to describe an electrical generator. Thus, the Sons unwisely court the Red Death's attention, all the while believing that they are simply exploiting a supernatural phenomenon for their own purposes.
Symbol
Unlike many qabals, the Sons have a disparate membership rather than formal cells. All of the actual members, who number sixty-four in 1890, know one another by reputation, if not by sight. Though they are scattered across the cities of the United States, many of the Sons attended the same schools and belong to the same social clubs. However, in order to prevent impersonation and to facilitate dealings with minions, the Sons have adopted a symbol: a quill surrounded by thirteen stars. This is typically emblazoned on a silver disc about the size of a coin, and kept on the person for presentation in case identity or authority needs to be established.
Members
Traditionally, the qabals of Gothic Earth have organized themselves into a hierarchical structure of isolated cells. The Sons of Liberty, however, have highly focused temporal goals that render such multiple layers of secrecy impractical. Furthermore, they have a small, tightly controlled membership roster. A single group, assembling only rarely but maintaining regular communication, serves their purposes better.
All of the Sons of Liberty are wealthy white men, although not all were born into privilege. Many are self-made men who built a fortune through guile and genius, and even those members who come from wealthy families hold up the Puritan work ethic as an ideal. For all their sinister activities, the Sons see themselves as highly moral men, even as the vanguard of Christian America. The Sons believe that their position of privilege is Divinely ordained, and that those who oppose them are working not just against the qabal and the United States itself, but the very will of God. This also explains (or justifies) their contempt for socialists and anyone who crusades against the wealthy.
The Sons count among their number some of the most prominent names in modern America. The great majority of the Sons are lawyers or businessmen, and many are also politicians. Throughout the nineteenth century, a career in law was the natural precursor to a career in politics, and many of the Sons fit the model of the American lawyer-statesman. The latter part of the century has increasingly seen a rise in industrialists and other businessmen turning to politics to protect their financial interests. Not only do such men have the capital to carry out a political campaign, but it is not generally seen as a conflict of interest for, say, an oil tycoon to serve as a senator that writes oil tariff laws.
History
Though they might seem to have no connection to the Defiance, the Sons of Liberty actually do have some distant ties to that ancient society. Quite ironically, while the Sons are blind to the Red Death's true danger, their earliest predecessors were originally tireless enemies of the Red Death and its minions.
The Sons' legacy begins with the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, and the subsequent diaspora of the qabals. One of the qabals seeded by a Defiance survivor took root in the heart of central Europe among the rugged Teutonic tribes. The same people who had finally brought low the Roman Empire, these pagan barbarians were gradually becoming feudal Christians. The fledgling qabal that emerged as the Dark Ages settled over Europe was known as the Golden Host. Its membership was made up entirely of intelligent and God-fearing nobles who had pledged themselves to the destruction of the Red Death at any cost. Unfortunately, the secrets of magic that the Defiance had labored so hard to preserve were not passed on to the Host. No adepts or mystics were counted among its members, and to the Golden Host magic was a tantalizing secret lost to the mists of time.
While the Stone flourished in the British Isles, the Host struggled to succeed without true magic. Increasingly, the pursuit of occult power began to take precedent over opposing the true enemy. Many in the qabal devoted themselves utterly to the secrets of the ancients, or at least the medieval interpretation of those secrets: alchemy, sacred geometry, numerology, and other "enlightened" magical practices. The Host became preoccupied with understanding the supernatural and manipulating it to expand their influence, ostensibly for the purposes of combating the Red Death. As the centuries passed, however, the truth about the Red Death's unspeakable evil faded from the Golden Host completely. By the time of the Holy Roman Empire, the Host had been reduced to an extremely secretive cadre of Frankish nobles, more interested in debating the meaning of the Hermetic Books than any battle against a cosmic evil.
Though this state of affairs persisted for many centuries, an important change came with the Renaissance. By this time, the Golden Host had spread to nearly all of Western Europe, and though its members were few, there was hardly a court from Denmark to Italy that did not include at least one member. Historically, the Host had limited its membership to European nobles, but the rise of a merchant class beginning in the fifteenth century began to shift the qabal's demographics. Increasingly, new members were merchants and financiers, men who were not landed gentry but fabulously wealthy nonetheless. Knowledge of the supernatural—which by this time was the Golden Host's only legacy—was seen as a valuable tool by this new "middle class." For the first time in centuries, the qabal began to take a more assertive stance. Members were interested in reigning in supernatural forces and using them to protect and advance their financial interests. Gradually, a modern, well-defined philosophy began to emerge at the heart of the Host, best articulated as "mercantile power backed by supernatural power." Long before Adam Smith was even born, the Host dreamed of a world of free enterprise, a world that they saw as ordained by God. They saw governments as obtrusive entities that prevented the men truly destined to rule from achieving their goals.
Unfortunately, before the eighteenth century dawned, the Golden Host began to dissolve. Fragmented among European empires that had grown increasingly competitive and antagonistic, the Host was no longer capable of perpetuating any kind of central authority for the qabal. Cell leaders began to refuse to speak with other leaders, and what little unity the qabal had disintegrated almost overnight in the late seventeenth century. Still, though the local cells eventually crumbled, the Host's secrets lived on among isolated members of the educated middle class. The tenets of the Enlightenment were often in line with the Host's beliefs, and the secrets of the hidden world were passed on among a small cadre of trustworthy men.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the lingering legacy of the Golden Host was fermenting in the minds of a handful of newly independent British colonists. The occult secrets of the Host, though a far cry from the Puritan background of America, were woven subtly through the colonies, mixed in with revolutionary ideas about government and commerce. Underneath the genteel Christian facade of the Founding Fathers, underneath even their pseudo-mystical "secret societies" such as the Freemasons, the Golden Host was preparing to rise again.
In October of 1787, shortly after the final draft of the United States Constitution was completed, a small group of Convention delegates gathered together in secret to draft another document. The men who were party to this clandestine effort all possessed fragmentary knowledge of the supernatural, the last guttering legacy of the Golden Host. Determined to protect the newly reorganized republic from the minions of the Red Death, the delegates swore to present a unified front in the face of the supernatural.
The brief declaration that they quickly drafted and signed, known as the Oath of Philadelphia, affirmed three vital points. First, the United States of America should be nothing less than the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Second, the signers, as the architects of that nation, were obligated to protect it at all costs. Third, supernatural forces should be either turned to the nation's interests or utterly destroyed. The delegates that signed the Oath christened their new qabal the Sons of Liberty. Not even the modern Sons claim to have seen the original document, so the signers are unknown. Nonetheless, speculation regarding their identity is a persistent topic of conversation for the historically inclined Sons.
Little is known about the qabal's fate between its founding and the years of the Civil War. All evidence seems to suggest that while the ideals of the Sons were noble, limitations on communication and travel hindered the qabal's activities. Perhaps the founding members were simply too unassertive, or too bogged down in national growing pains and foreign conflicts to truly guide the development of the nation. By the 1860s, the qabal's activities were negligible, and its membership extraordinarily slim.
The qabal's fortunes and core philosophy began to shift when a prominent railroad baron (whose identity the Sons guard closely) became a member immediately following the Civil War. This captain of industry revitalized the qabal by aggressively pursuing any occult rumors that surfaced. The qabal began to enlist agents across the world to investigate such rumors, and new members were drawn from the most prominent figures of business and law. The Sons' grip on significant American economic and political power tightened considerably.
In the space of just thirty years, the character of the qabal has changed radically. Still patriotic and protectionist, the Sons have nonetheless become more ruthless and arrogant. Its members are cautious, but not skeptical, and doggedly pursue the slightest hint of supernatural creatures, artifacts, or any lore that they could possibly utilize for their ends. Those few qabals that even know of the Sons' existence speculate wildly about which American giants might be counted among its members; names like Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller are whispered. No hard evidence has yet linked any particular individual to the Sons, however.
In a time of crisis, the Sons can gather together just about anywhere to discuss matters that affect the qabal as a whole. For the Sons' annual meeting, termed the Convention, the preferred place of assembly is in Philadelphia, in homage to the Founding Fathers. As American industry has begun to shift towards the Midwest, however, some among the Sons have advocated moving Conventions to Chicago.