Editing Nephandi (section)

==Factions==
[[White Wolf]] games are nothing if not fractal arrangements of [[splat]]s, subsplats, and sub-subsplats, arranged in ever finer detail. The Nephandi are no exception. 

You have:

*The '''Infernalists''', who like to [[kill puppies for satan]]. Well ok, that's hardly fair. The Infernalists are actually some of the more organized and pragmatic Nephandi, bartering shrewdly with demons in ways that the [[Order of Hermes]] find suspiciously similar to their own. Since they generally meet at black-cloak-and-hood secret conferences around blood-soaked altars in isolated basements, they're not terrible at staying hidden and insinuating themselves into other organizations. It helps that they have literal armies of hapless dupes with demon pacts under their control, which they can use to distract or harry rivals at will. These guys are highly ritualized and hidebound, making them embodiments of [[Stasis]]-adjacent [[Entropy]] and thus the [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse|Eater-Of-Souls]].

* The '''Malfeans''' basically exist to facilitate crossovers with [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]. They worship the [[Wyrm]], hang out with Black Spiral Dancers and rub shoulders with Pentex executives. Since they can find stable employment no matter what they do thanks to their friends in Pentex, they can get away with being covered in weird scars and radioactive sewage half the time. They literally worship the distilled concept of [[Entropy]] itself, tying them in with pure  Entropy and the [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse|Defiler Wyrm]].

* The '''K'Lasshaa''' are your Lovecraftian guys. Bearded ax murderers carving the Elder Sign into their victim's foreheads, mad prophets calling down the stars themselves to wreak havoc, etc. You get the idea. They seem to fundamentally reject ''eyerything'', from morality to physics to the concept of truth itself. Many fully admit that their dark alien gods may be the product of their own diseased imagination Most of them are a hair's breadth away from being Marauders and thus are loosely aligned to the [[Dynamicism]]-adjacent aspects of [[Entropy]] and, by extension, the [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse|Beast-Of-War]].

The rest of these factions are supposed to be "secret", for some inane reason:

* The '''Baphometites''' or "Baphies" as they are apparently sometimes called, are evil club kids and hippies who use corrupted tantra and transcendental meditation to control and violate small circles of followers. That is to say that they are essentially cult-forming date rapists, like the Cult of Ecstasy without moral restraints.

* The '''Heralds of Basilisk''' are basically a bunch of trolls [[What|trying to turn the internet into an evil dragon god through memes]]. This could either be incredibly [[awesome]] or [[derp|fucking moronic]], depending on the kind of vibe your game is going for. Think the Virtual Adepts if they had absolutely no inhibitions and spent all their time on [[/b/]].

* The '''Obliviates''', also known as the Ex-Futurians, the Eschatonics, or the "Exies", because all Nephandic factions are apparently named with the conventions of highschool cliques. Most Nephandi are just power-hungry doom wizards hiding their unfettered hedonism behind a thin veneer of cosmic nihilism. In other words, they talk a big game, but actually like being evil and its fruits too much to really bother with the whole "Armageddon" thing. These are the exceptions. They pursue the power to end reality, be it through wrathful gods, robot uprising, or just a superbug. They're extremely petty, however, and constantly foil each other so the world can end on ''their'' terms.

* The '''Ironhands''' (no cutesy nicknames for these guys) are about the intersection of evil and industry, and are what the Traditions ''think'' the Technocracy is all about. They work people to death, build WMD's, and dump radioactive waste everywhere, making them [[Werewolf: The Apocalypse|Pentex]] for Mages. Obviously opposed by heroic, idealistic technomancers, who see them as a perversion of science's potential, but also alarmingly good infiltrators. Reform-minded Technocrats had best sleep with one eye open. Obvious overlap with the Malfeans goes about as well as you'd expect.

* The '''Mammonites''', aka the Cult of the Golden Bull, are exactly what they sound like: [[Orzhov Syndicate|evil money wizards]]. Unlike [[the Syndicate]] (who are already pretty amoral to begin with), these guys have not even the slightest desire to use their wealth for anything other than world domination. Also unlike the Syndics, they aren't necessarily technomancers, blending bleeding-edge gadgetry with old-world secret rites.

* '''Los Sangrientos''' are a pretty obscure faction, focusing on Aztec blood magic twisted through the lens of esoteric Catholicism, keeping the worst traits of both. The adherents style themselves as modern-day Conquistadors. We assume. They only get like one paragraph in one book.

* Similarly, the '''Gatekeepers''' are the inheritors of an ancient Sumerian astrology cult. They want to stage an alien invasion for their dark masters, which puts them directly at odds with the [[Void Engineers]]. Conversely, their similar origins mean that the two organizations often overlap dangerously. Sounds interesting, right? Too bad. M20 ''Book of the Fallen'' is already out and they're not in it.