Noticed while doing the birthday meme...

[gridlore]

Three US Presidents and one Vice President have died on July 4th. With my taste for occult weirdness, might they have been ritual sacrifices to keep the nation strong?

Notably, none of those deaths occurred after the end of the 19th Century... what mystic protection did we acquire? Perhaps that was the real goal of the Spanish-American War, to steal the artifacts that preserved Spain's empire and use them to establish our own! We did go from "amusing provincials" to "world power" very quickly.

This could be a fun game of politics, the occult, and imperialism! If I've got my timing right, the 1890s were a Golden Age of sorts for British mysticism with the Golden Dawn and all that lot running around without adult supervision. (isomeme.. what was Crowley doing in the 1890s?)

Start the game just before the destruction of the USS Maine (it wasn't the magazine that exploded.. something wanted out and a swabbie accidentally broke the circle holding it in...

Bring in Nicola Tesla and we can add Weird Science and Zeppelins to the mix! Hell, 1897 was the year of the Aurora UFO crash! Tesla and the PCs must race to Texas to recover the crash artifacts before perfidious Spanish agents can do the same!

Now we have a war of Old World mysticism vs. New World steam punk! With the US trying to amass WMD (Weapons of Magical Destruction)

This bears some more research...

Of course, the climax would be aimed to take place in San Francisco around mid-April, 1906

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

Crowley was having a high old time in the 1890s. He hadn't received the Book of the Law yet, though.

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

Yep, he was born in 1875, so the 1890s span his leaving home to attend Cambridge, his interesting adventures there, and later his entry into the Golden Dawn. The Book of the Law is dictated to him in April 1904 (the first chapter arrived 102 years ago today, in fact; I just got back from our celebration of this holiday). Might be fun to mix that into your plot arc...

If I recall correctly

[capplor.livejournal.com]

two of those presidential deaths were Jefferson and Adams (the elder), and were on the same day, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I've never attributed it to anything stranger than a demonstrated ability to hang on until or die after significant dates, in the same way my father hung on to life until his 50th wedding anniversary.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Bravo! Applause!