Editing Supernatural Law: New Orleans (section)

==Cults==
The official story is that OCD and Arclight focus on cult-related crimes, and it is not just a cover story. They often do. And actual cult cases tend to be amongst the worst.

Cult situations tend to turn ugly even when the cult is entirely mundane. Brainwashing, physical and mental abuse, and in the worst cases violent crimes performed by crazed zealots. And things often get even worse when mages and supernatural beings get involved. That is when ritual murders, human sacrifice, and the summoning of monstrosities from distant realms enter the picture.

Gathering cults around them is a time-honored method for villainous mages and supernatural entities. If even a moderately charismatic mundane person can convince other people that he is some sort of messiah, someone who can demonstrate actual supernatural powers has it even easier.
Cults centered on vampires tend to be the most decent ones. Nearly always, the vampire’s motivation for gathering a cult is to use cult members as a larder. These cults normally just follow some mystical mumbo jumbo that involves ritual bloodletting. But blood rites can easily get out of hand, especially if some unhinged members start trying to figure out how they could become like the master.

Conversely, demonic cults are among the worst ones. Demons steal souls and subsist on suffering. Ritual torture and mutilation is nearly always involved. Cult members are desperate, duped, or both, and work to obtain new souls and playthings for their master. These cults tend to be short lived, for their activities not only draw attention, demons have little interest in maintaining them for long. Sooner or later the demon gets tired of playing and liquidates its gains, moving on to start again somewhere else. But if demonic cults are not stopped before that, the end tends to come in a blaze of violence and death.

Angels and Devils love cults and put them to various uses to further their agendas. Propaganda outlets, political pressure groups, spy rings or terrorist cells. They like to have a degree of deniability in their involvement and usually prefer to manipulate the cult leadership rather than having direct control.

Mages have a huge variety of motivations for forming cults, including perfectly mundane ones. Maybe they just like the power and adoration. Maybe they have a philosophy they wish to spread. But even in those cases the mages tend to stage elaborate and very real rituals to maintain the awe of their minions. And these tend to count as unlawful demonstrations of magic in violation of the Edinburgh Treaties that call for the suppression of knowledge about magic.

Then there are the various magic-related motivations. Mages could use their cults as a resource pool, ranging from conning money out of rich dupes to having a cadre of willing sacrifices for proscriped rituals. Or the mage could be fulfilling his pact with some Other Side entity, or trying to contact one. And that can be more or less dangerous depending on the entity. Demonic cults tend to be especially bad when there are actual mages involved in the cult. Cults in contact with Fey tend towards strange and sensual, in fashions ranging from relatively benign to anything but. And then there are always the bogeyman stories about mages trying to contact cosmic horrors long since sealed away, who cause even Angels and Devils to suffer fright and for whom humanity is just a tasty buffet.