The Harbingers of Avalon are a secret faction of the Technocratic Union in Great Britain.
Overview[]
For centuries, this English secret society has struggled to achieve their interpretation of King Arthur's ideals. Ignoring the silly magic, they see Arthur's Britain as a Technocratic dream: a "benevolent" dictatorship dedicated to law and prosperity under one king and an order of knights. Kill the dragons, obey the law, and the kingdom will prosper.
The cabal members call themselves the Harbingers of Avalon, and the Round Table. Many codes refer to the group as "the Sword in the Stone," referring to the legend of the return of the rightful rulers of Britain. Since the reign of Charles II they have worked to prevent another English civil war, and have largely succeeded. Queen Victoria's father and grandfather were of the Harbingers, and she believed it her destiny to draw the figurative Excalibur from the stone. She was wrong, of course, and died before she could make her final move.
The cabal's plans have suffered in the wake of two World Wars, the defections of the Sons of Ether and Virtual Adepts to the Traditions, and their own old-fashioned difficulty adapting to the Atomic, Space, and Information Ages. They still include some of the most influential Technocrats and operatives in England, but they aren't happy with the "ruin" Britannia has become. They intend to rebuild British influence around the globe, by whatever means necessary.
The cabal contains only ten men and two women and few other Technocrats know they exist. They consider themselves mortals, not mages, and conduct themselves like a gentlemen's club, complete with old-school upper-class English formality, drawing-rooms, secret handshakes, code words... and plenty of money. Their field operatives, the small but dangerous Zero Division, are nothing like what the Traditions and other Reality Deviants typically expect from Technocracy agents. Far different from the likes of HIT Marks, Zero Division are classy, refined, subtle, and hard to recognize for what they are.
Zero Division was exposed to international Convention leadership some time in the late 2000's, and summarily disbanded. The former members have not given up on their ambitions for society, but have accepted that the Union as a whole is hostile to the specifics of their vision. As a result, they have been entertaining the notion of splitting off and becoming a Craft affiliated with the Disparate Alliance. Naturally, this has required a conscious effort to suppress the Harbingers' nationalistic and neo-colonial tendencies, with limited success. It remains to be seen if they can overcome their chauvinism and survive among the Disparates, but one thing is certain: their time in the Union is running out.
References[]
- MTAs: Isle of the Mighty, p. 24-25
- MTAs: Guide to the Technocracy, p. 28-29, 61
- M20: The Operative's Dossier, p. 45-46