presents...

Red Ribbons

The Lorenzo Conspiracy

There is nothing in 7th Sea canon to suggest a Lorenzo/Bianco/Serrano secret society. Several items are suggestive, however, if one feels inclined to look for them.

The Countess

It all started with Odessa Blanchard. Her name was picked pretty much at random, as was her sample dialogue: "I was thinking the party would have a bianco theme... it's Vodacce for 'white,' why do you ask?" It was just a throwaway line, meant to illustrate the countess's debauched tastes. And then one day... something clicked. Blanchard. Blanc is French for white. "Blanching" is when someone turns white. I don't know enough French to know if "Blanchard" means anything or not, or even if what I thought was a root really was or not. But it was suggestive, so I ran with it.

What's a Bianco doing as a Montaigne Portier? Answering that question drew out the conspiracy in ever-wider threads.

Looking for Hooks upon Which to Hang My Tin Foil Hat

Consider the following canon tidbits:

The Lorenzo traced their lineage to the eldest daughter of the first Numan Imperator, Tigranus.
The Lorenzos liked to style themselves "Kings of Vodacce" and were generally accepted as such by the rest of Theah until their destruction.
The Imperators were overthrown by Senator Montanus and his sorcerous companions.
The du Montaigne royal family traces their lineage to Senator Montanus.
The Villanova and Caligari families are descended from one Senator Delaga. (Although it is not clear whether or not Senator Delaga was one of the Bargainers.)
Within the span of a single month, Septimus 1668, the du Montaigne and Caligari families had their political bases destroyed, and the Villanova were under attack by the Mondavi.
The last of the Lorenzos married into the Mondavi line.
The Lorenzos used to have two islands: the southermost, which famously disappeared, and the northermost.
Modernly, the northermost Vodacce Island is/was Caligari Island.
The Bianco were international bankers.
As an interesting side note, the Poor Knights, the Order of the Black Cross, and the Bianco families were all accused of heresy and other crimes and "eradicated" between 1308 and 1411 AV.

I look at that and see... Lorenzo survivors clinging to dreams of Imperial grandeur. Dreams, one might add, which the hated scion of Senator Montanus, Leon of Montaigne, seems closer to achieving than they. Interesting, isn't it, that the Revolution should damage that line so much and absolutely quell its imperial ambitions?

And isn't it interesting that there isn't an Eisen Imperator at the moment?

And someone - someone who's Lorenzo in soul if not in name - is about to make a grab to become King of Vodacce again.

Oh, and the other Lorenzo Island is due to disappear disastrously.

There isn't even an Hierophant, and the burn-happy Inquisition is focused almost entirely on Castillian "traitors" and "heretical" scholars.

It's an opportunity for somebody.

Changing a Canonical Tragic Accident to an Act of Premeditated Destruction

Canonically, the sinking of Caligari Island is an accident. The Heroes involved were just trying to escape with their lives, and they had no idea that what they did would destroy Reinascienza and the surrounding villages. That had to change if the loss of the island was to be coordinated with the Montaigne Revolution on purpose.

The Donati family secret - that they are the renamed last remnants of the royal Lorenzo line - came about to justify an intentional sinking. Caligari Island used to be a Lorenzo Island. It seems likely that the Lorenzos would have known about the island's secrets, too. That knowledge could have died with Vincenzo and Marietta Lorenzo, but it certainly didn't have to. Other family members may have been initiated into the island's secrets - good insurance, given the deadly nature of Vodacce politics.

The Lorenzo on the southern island all disappeared; those on the northern island were massacred by the Caligara. That left the surviving family on the mainland to make a deal with the Mondavi: Lorenzo territory exchanged for Mondavi leadership and protection. The Mondavi agreed, with the understanding that the exchange was permanent: there would be no return of the Lorenzo kings. The Lorenzo reluctantly agreed; the surviving male line took the name "Donati" to disguise their roots and accepted lands around the village of Monfalcone from Mondavi.

Their fortunes rose and fell over the centuries. The Vestini conquered their cadet line, the Serrano, and their bastards, the Bianco, and so were added along with the Caligara to their list of especial enemies. They watched and waited for either house to make a misstep, but neither ever did when the Donati were in a position to take advantage of it.

Antonio Donati's particular stroke of genius was in recognizing the Eisen migration for what it was - troop build-ups - and in offering to spend his family's greatest secret on the behalf of his prince to aid the coming war. The Donati were, it seemed, unlikely to ever be powerful enough to seriously challenge the entrenched Caligari or Vestini. Mondavi, however, was about to try, and the Donati could extract their revenge through him. Caligari Island's destruction was rewritten to be, not a chance event that spurred Mondavi to action, but a strategic decision leveraged for maximum impact on his enemies.

Evil Templars

That all worked fine for Vodacce, but still failed to explain my Portier Bianco.

The Lost Blood presence outside of Vodacce evolved in two parts. The Bianco were simple, really. They had been bankers. They had banks all over Theah - that was how Renaissance banking worked. You made your money on currency transfers as well as interest. There would have surely been branches in the major cities of the era: Charouse, Heilgrundstat, Vaticine City, San Cristobal, Numa, and of course the main branch in Quattro Alle.

Why on Terra would the Bianco tending to the remote locations have returned to Vodacce in 1400 to be conveniently burned in the family palace?

They wouldn't, of course. It's at the GM's option if the Inquisition or local authorities were able to also persecute family members outside of Vodacce. On the one hand (as the Black Cross would learn eleven years later), the Powers That Be were not shy about using charges of heresy to absorb the wealth of others. On the other hand, the bankers were providing a useful service and may have had an assortment of favors to call in. Perhaps some branches were burned and others survived.

I decided that, sometime in the 1300s, the Bianco in Montaigne were actually ennobled with lands in Rachetisse. The crown had borrowed more than it could repay in cash, and offered title and lands as compensation. The Bianco changed their name to Blanc in token of their new allegiance and as a sign of their willingness to become Montaigne lords. After 1400, when their old family was in disgrace, they changed it further to Blanchard. By 1668, they had married so much into the local nobility that they had a few Full-Blooded Portiers among them.

That still didn't solve my Odessa Blanchard problem, upon further reflection. She wasn't a spinster; she was a widow and had married into the Blanchards. So how, again, should I connect her to this Lorenzo scheme?

Nobility intermarry. They do it to seal agreements and policy decisions. It would be unusual for a Lorenzo prince to go to Montaigne to live with a noble wife, but was it impossible? I decided that it made more sense if a Lorenzo princess was married off to a Montaigne duke, but her favorite younger brother voluntarily accompanied her to her new home. His sister pressured her husband to petition the king to grant the princeling some lands, and the king came through with a small parcel, just enough to make a respectable minor lord. This, back around 850 AV or so (shortly after Carleman's death and the formation of both Montaigne and Vodacce), established the St-Laurent family. Eight hundred years of living in Montaigne has rendered the family essentially Montaigne, but they can still trace direct male descent to that Lorenzo prince.

While the Donati had never entirely lost sight of their desire for revenge on the Caligara and Vestini, I don't think the St-Laurents have been nursing imperial designs for almost one thousand years. I think that's a new development, perhaps occuring only in the last 100-200 years, when someone bothered to look into the family history and took away a new, grand ambition. A few generations were spent looking for allies, uncovering other Lorenzo survivors like the Donati and the Blanchards, and then forming alliances with them.

The St-Laurents have, in the past two or three generations, evolved their family mythology to eschew sorcery. Imperator Tigranus didn't have sorcery; the foul usurper Montanus did. And chasing after occult sorcerous power was a losing proposition: look what it did for the Bianco, after all. (The St-Laurents may have hints of Isabella du Montaigne's work or the Agiotage; just more evidence that Legion destroys those who turn to them.) They have begun dabbling extensively in non-sorcerous occult power, trying to learn more about techniques ranging from druidism to alchemy to astrology. Giselle St-Laurent may be the first practioner of a new shamanism of empathy.

Shamanistic powers in 7th Sea, in general, seem to come from a devotion to something larger than oneself. For the St-Laurents, their power stems from their devotion to their family and its cause. Even though they're Villains, they have (so far) balanced their own selfish considerations with the overall goals and aims of their collective family. It remains to be seen if this pattern will persist.

Breg

So, we have a lost bloodline hidden in a France-analogue. It's related to secret rulership and power. An occult manifestation of that bloodline was accused of sorcery and heresy and supposedly burned out by the Powers That Be... yet still it persists, and has gone on to infiltrate positions of power in the world, subtly shaping world affairs.

It's a nice little "Evil Templar" setup, but it lacks the secret Scots-analogue place of retreat. Enter Breg.

Why Breg? First, the Highland Marches already have a pseudo-Templar secret retreat, so they don't get another one. Breg already has an aura that's slightly wild and dark, and it's run by a fairly interesting Villain in 1668. I had a Villain (Odessa Blanchard) who I wanted to have been chaffed out to the Glamour Isles, and Priam was the only canonical NPC who made sense. The St-Laurents wanted Odessa to learn about druidism, so anyone in the court of the Vaticine queen Iron Margaret was right out. Remote, wild Breg was a better choice, and its ambitious earl (and his son Priam) would not have objected to making friends with a Montaigne family with some resources.

Besides... isn't it interesting how Margaret died at exactly midnight on the spring equinox, at probably no more than thirty years old? It's natural for Avalonians to ascribe that kind of timing to Glamour at work, but the more jaded observer might suspect the careful use of Serrano poison, timed "just so" to elicit a certain reaction from the superstitious locals.

The Lorenzos all intermarried long ago or changed their names; those Bianco who aren't hiding in plain sight seem to prefer the eastern mountains of Vodacce as a base. But what about the Serrano, who were never exterminated as a group but who no one trusted enough to marry? They're still hunted by the Vestini, which makes that research job at Dionna University an edgy proposal. So, while I envisioned Breg as a retreat for any of the Lost Blood on the run (any Lost Blood, that is, who were brought into the St-Laurent-driven conspiracy), I see it as an especial haven for Serrano.

Internal Tensions

Even in their heyday, the Lorenzo couldn't keep from killing each other to further their ambitions.

First, it's important to recall that not every single remnant of the Lorenzo, Bianco, and Serrano families have been recruited by the ambitious St-Laurents. They aren't even interested in, say, any raggle-taggle band of Bianco hiding in the mountains. They're looking for allies with something to offer them.

They are certainly not looking for troublemakers or pot-stirrers. In "Rapier's Edge," there's a mention of a note posted to the Lorenzo Palace door (in Agitazione, across the country from the primary Bianco strongholds) making threats on the behalf of the Bianco. This is exactly what they don't want to see. That's the kind of thing that gets people investigating the Bianco, and maybe pulling out some of the old genealogy books and tracing back far enough to find them.

In "Red Ribbons," the Donati, St-Laurent and Blanchard families all worked together for about two generations. Then the St-Laurents helped the Blanchards along to their own destruction (they simply would not cease their meddling in the Black Arts) and the Donati unexpectedly turned on the St-Laurents. And even within families, there were struggles: Antonio and Angelo Donati aren't done with their quarrel, and Adrien St-Laurent would eliminate his aunt Odessa if he thought he could.

In a game focused on the interior of the conspiracy, these breaks were necessary to provide conflict. If the Lorenzo Conspiracy is used as an opponent, then they're opportunities for the Heroes to uncover and exploit.

Expanding the Conspiracy

Creating new branches of these families to suit any campaign can be as easy as a quick trip to the Babelfish. "Bianco" is just Italian for "white," and "serrare" is (I think) an Italian verb meaning "to lock oneself." (In something? It's not in most online dictionaries and clearly isn't the most common verb for "to lock.") "Serrano" is a conjugation of "serrare."

Quick Bianco Ideas

Herr Freidrich Weiss, reclusive Eisen lord and madman, rumored to be obsessively researching a way to return the dead to life. He stands alone as a Victor Frankenstein, but his research could attract the attention of Eisenfurst Heilgrund. The conspiracy might be interested to get an inside scoop on the Eisenfurst's activities.

Father Florinda Blanca, a dark-eyed Vaticine priest and secret member of the Inquisition - who brings warnings of their movements to her cabal of Legion worshippers and fuego mages. The conspiracy would appreciate her knowledge of the Inquisition, but would see her devotion to the old ruling family of Castille to be a problem.

Sir Richard White, a bold knight of Avalon and true. The young man is unaware of his heritage, but his father (living in Breg) is trying to acquire for him an invitation to join the Rose and Cross in an effort to learn the Order's secrets.