Staff Blog: Why the Kinguim Conspiracy Works

Most conspiracy theories piss me off for one simple reason – they assume a uniform following from a selfish multitude. Every single one of them posits a They that work in perfect clockwork unison without risk of betrayal. This may look good on paper but it falls apart in practice. People are simply too varied in their outlook and too different in their ultimate desires to work together for very long. The very real and inescapable threat of death means that loyalty must always be questions. A popular quote runs “Never join any conspiracy that you could betray, because if you can someone else will.”

The only reason for someone to give undying loyalty to a conspiracy is if that conspiracy can provably overcome death; without that certainty all such plans are doomed in the long-term, unable to last more than a generation or two. In the Triune Legacy we present such a conspiracy, a parasite culture that can see the souls of their dead being caught and recycled into more of their kind. They work to preserve their conspiracy not for one another but for themselves, seeking to enjoy the same advantages they do now in the countless ages to come.

But this triumph isn’t enough to make a culture monstrous. It is, however a good start – the defeat of death means a lack of fear regarding that end. There’s no law against murder among those that belong to this culture because murder is just a way to slow a person down. Suicide becomes an strategic move instead of a cowardly retreat, a calculated risk to better one’s position within that conspiracy. Such callous thinking allows for all manner of cruelty, but faith is what allows for the worst kind of excesses.

Humanity as a whole does wonderful and terrible things in the name of gods that they cannot see or experience – how much more potent, then, would be the acts of a culture that not only believed in their gods but could also see them, speak with them, summon them and deal with them? How much more would be wrought by a people who could feel and witness, quite literally, the power of the god they claim descent from in their veins? And what if the gods they worshiped were not kind, were not loving? What if their gods wanted to bring an end to everything that existed, or meant to enslave whole worlds, or told the members of that faith that they were meant to rule the rest of their non-divine brethren?

We give to you the Kinguim. They claim descent from the Sumerian god Kingu, the soul taker, the blood letter, the death of worlds. He who could read the stars and know all that life could offer any soul that lived, who could feed on the living blood of others to make himself more, who murdered entire planets to satisfy his endless fury. A people who worship the peers of such a deity, who speak with creatures that give nightmares to even the worst monsters any other faith has to offer.

And this is not the worst of the Kinguim. The worst part of them is that they are exactly like you and me in every other aspect. They love, dream, hope, and fear. They know ambition, create complex societies and infiltrate ours with a deftness that can only come from lifetimes of remembered experience and a complete lack of fear. They are the perfect villains because they can be no less, a logical extreme that will go to any length, do anything, and do so with an impunity born of knowing – not believing, but knowing – that death has no hold on them and their gods approve of their actions.

There’s something to be said for authenticity, for something that could actually work, and we like to think that the Kinguim do. But we have given you more than the ability to fight them in our game. The Kinguim are still human, after all. So we give you the option to play them, give you the chance to play our game and perhaps have one of their number in your group, or be one yourself. What will you do, the player of such a character, knowing what you know? Further, what will you do if you’re not playing such a character but someone else is? How do you trust someone like that? Can you trust someone like that?

The choice is yours either way.

Aaron is the principle author and creator of the Triune Legacy mythos and the 8Fold Soul System. Find out more about Aaron and the rest of The Triune Legacy Team. This Staff Blog entry was posted on August 25th, 2009.