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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psychotic Jim" data-source="post: 3926359" data-attributes="member: 547">A young daughter of a prominent nobleman or magistrate has begun seeing visions.  Her visions are vivid and inspiring enough that it has got certain family members and staff within the household.  The patriarch of the clan knows, and has to his best knowledge shut up and confined the girl from the rest of society.  Secretly, however, while he is away at work filling his coffers, his daughter continues to gather a secret cult from her locked bedroom.  How she gains converts or followers remains a mystery.  Perhaps she has some extraordinary means of telepathic communication.  More likely it is the work of the superstitious hired help- the lower class maids, butlers, and cleaning staff.  Imagine if the ambitious girl’s nanny acted as some sort of high priestess for the cult? The servants are able to go about invisibly because they are so ubiquitous and socially not thought much of. The cult is soon sizable in number, and numbers a few dozen as her father goes overseas for war or business.  This new, small religion gains converts because it is simultaneously vivid in its graphic depictions of the other-worldly yet subtle in the action it prescribes.  It gives the downtrodden small ways to improve their dull, dreary lives and offers a kind of special, secret and elite redemption.This outbreak of a cult could very well be supernatural in origin, but it might be more fun to give it mundane origins.  Maybe the nobleman’s grain silos were infected by ergot fungus, the same stuff that is in LSD and was thought to have incited the Salem Witch Trials.  If the whole of your society has been experiencing this, the church might be on high alert looking to confine, cure, or exorcize any people who shown evidence of strange behavior.  Instead of going with the malignant, tyrannical church cliché, perhaps their motivation is generally benevolent, and they seek to maintain order while at the same time helping anybody affected by these delusions.  It is individual agents on the ground or within the structure that might deviate from this general ideal.  Dealing with a church involved like this would add another layer of complexity to the proposed adventure.If the patriarch finds out about his daughter’s continued activities, then he might disown her or have her confined to a sanitarium.  However, that would be unlikely to end the young would-be prophet’s mission; instead she would speak to the other inmates confined within the halls of the asylum.  She either manages to sway the guards to her cause by giving them baubles she managed to stow away before her father confined her.  Or she could let them know about certain secrets they could use to blackmail her father.  Either way, she depends upon them to communicate with the outside world.  Certainly, working from within locked up confinement would seem like a perfect alibi against being implicated as being involved in any sort of play for power and influence.</blockquote>

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