The Plague Oracles is a group of Malkavian mystics established in Spain.

History[]
A Malkavian saw how the shattering of the Tremere was a crisis to the antique revanchists, but an opportunity to forge synergies between the old sorcerers who thought they knew it all and the one clan of vampires that always listened for something new—that was, indeed, unable to ignore it. A Spanish Tremere chantry needed direction and found it with that first plague oracle, and turned their blood sorcery to the task of hearing the micro-parasites inside the blood and making them listen to the man-sized parasites outside the human body.
Description[]
Mystics use the word egregore to describe a collective consciousness: the spirit of a place or a people when individuals serve it like cells in a brain. Tech-types espouse big data analysis to use people as pixels in a picture of what a community desires. Plague oracles combine these approaches. The premise of the Plague Oracle school of Blood Sorcery is that everyone who hosts a particular illness--herpes, hepatitis, HPV--mystically corresponds with every other sufferer. The rites of the plague oracles bring insight and information from these collectives. Want to know how to navigate Barcelona with 10 percent of the skill of every driver there who has a cold? It's possible. Want to know what everyone in Rio with the yellow fever virus thinks about the president, or the weather, or a new brand of cola? Plague oracles can tell you, though at the price of hosting the disease themselves while examining it. That's without reading the illness itself, seeing where it's going, feeling what it's done, aggregating the sensations of the mortals who hold it. Plague Oracles work on widespread population influence and control by means of contagion, and they stay largely unopposed in their designs because too many Kindred don't understand what they're doing or else dismiss it as "more nonsense from Malkav's distasteful get." They wear bird-faced plague doctor masks for ceremonies.
Off-putting, glittery-eyed, and rather unsettling. Plague oracles tend to busy themselves in the background of the scene, just one more weird little solitarchy with an oddball theory of sorcery—until they burst into the foreground when one of their experiments gets a little contagious. Encountered around the hospital or wherever case counts get a bit too high. They might be digging up an old plague pit--secretively at night, or openly with a suborned permit—or sniffing the walls at the derelict sanitarium.
Plague oracles draw a line between infectious diseases, caused by micro-organisms, and non-infectious diseases such as cancer or scurvy. Prion diseases straddle that boundary: they seem to have environmental causes, but you can also contract them by consuming prions, mis-folded proteins. And wherever there's a boundary, some sorcerer wants to shove on it.
References[]
Sorcerous Affiliations | ||
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Standard Affiliations | Ancient Order of the Aeon Rites · The Arcanum · Balamo'ob · The Children of Osiris · The Cult of Isis · The Cult of Mercury · The Dozen Priests of the Pythian Order · The Fenian · Forn Jafnaðr · Maison Liban · Mogen HaLev · Nebuu-Afef · The Nephite Priesthood · The Newburgh Group · The Seven Thunders · The Silver Portal · The Society of Enlightened Altruistic Ideologies · The Star Council · Thal'hun · US Government: Project Twilight · Uzoma | |
Mage-run Affiliations | Council of Nine Mystic Traditions · Disparate Alliance · Technocratic Union | |
Redworking Affiliations | The Almost Assembly · The Calderone · CRONUS/DOVECOTE · House Carna · House Goratrix · Lui Domien · The Plague Oracles · Sunburners | |
Minor or Defunct Affiliations | Asatru Futhark · Bata'a · Masters of Stonecrop |