Two Blasphemous Guilds in Infinigrad

Michael Raston from The Lizard Man Diaries has a new book out, meant to generate guilds and guild-jobs for his Infinigrad setting. After my previous post generating a couple of Infinigrad neighborhoods, I was already thinking of generating a couple random guilds, and Michael sent me a free PDF of the book. It's based on the guild generator and the guild-job generator he previously posted to his blog, although a close reading might reveal differences. Luke Gearing from ANT-LERRR did the art and the layout, giving the whole thing a kind of punk-collage aesthetic that fits well with the content, and really elevates the visual experience of the book beyond the simple text of the original blog entries. A close reading of the text might reveal differences, but I think the blog and the book are basically the same. If you like the blog, your reasons for buying the book would be because you want to support Michael's writing, or you enjoy Luke's art, or your want to own the polished final product instead of the earlier draft.
  
Infinigrad, as its name implies, is an almost-infinite city, a city-plane like Ravnica ... and like Ravnica, it's full of powerful guilds that control basically every possible form of commerce. Although the guilds would like to war on each other endlessly, some powerful / magical law prevents any guild from acting directly against any other. Which is where the player characters come in. Players don't control guild members, they control unemployed vagrants that the guilds can use as patsies and cutouts and catspaws to attack one another indirectly. So the "guild jobs" that the generator creates aren't jobs for guild members, they're jobs the guilds want someone else to do for them. They aren't jobs that have anything to do with the guild's expertise - that's something they're perfectly capable of doing by themselves. These jobs are the only thing the guilds can't do, the only thing they need to hire someone else to do ... that is, they're cold war black ops.
  
I'm going to generate two random guilds and two random guild jobs. Since all the guilds are embroiled in a war of each-versus-all, I'm going to go ahead and assume that each of the two guilds' jobs are targeting one another. So that means that I'll learn more about each guild from the job its enemy wants done to it than I will from the job it wants done to its enemy.
  
  
First Guild - The Cackling Embrace
  
expertise 10/2/3, forename 10/2/1, modus 7/3/2, aftname 7/3/6
   
expertise: god killers
modus operandi: work is intended to be used in a netlike fashion
   
target 3/2, action 3/5, location 2/4, danger 1/10, reward 2/1
   
target: a device that moves the world around it, a person who causes reactions in others with silence and stealth
action: clean, erase, or otherwise erode target
location: wizardly places, magical laboratories, golem factories, portal mazes, and the like
danger: entire location is an obscene death trap, a torturer's wet dream
reward: a guild-specific blessing
  
The guild: The Cackling Embrace weave giant nets that look like spidersilk webs strung with dew. They use these nets to catch gods, plucking them from the sky and imprisoning them in glass display cases. Some they keep alive in a zoological garden, others they taxidermy and kill, others are never seen again. Once a god is caught in one of the Cackling Embrace's nets, it's cut off from its followers, unable anymore to empower relics or answer prayers. So far, the largest god they've ever caught was an enraged tree spirit the size of a train car, but at the moment they're weaving a new net to catch their largest god ever - an astral leviathan, a god whale.
  
The origin of the Cackling Embrace's nets are a closely guarded secret, but their enemies have recently learned that the "dew-drops" that bedeck each strand are mothers' tears of joy. When a mother learns that her sick baby will live, that it will remain here on earth with her rather than passing on to the afterlife, she laughs and cries, and her tears help bind gods to the world, cutting off their connection to the Spirit Realm, even as the nets bind them physically. The aquarium tanks where the Embrace display their most prized gods aren't filled with ordinary water, but with the same mothers' joyful tears.
  
The job: The Cackling Embrace aim to strike a decisive deathblow against Ambulator Vicis by using glistening net-silk ropes to bind and stifle their central mechanism, the Infinite Orrery. The existence of the Orrery and even its location are no secret - they're in the central chamber of Ambulator Vicis' guild stronghold. But reaching the chamber through any direct route would mean fighting off an army of Vicis guards, battering down doors meant to withstand the crumbling of the world itself.
  
Better to sneak in along the maintenance shafts and utility conduits that connect the Orrery to the bedrock of Infinigrad. Of course, navigating that route means winding a path through a maze of circle-shaped rooms with only one door, that rotate to connect with their four tangent neighbors. Innumerable of these rooms are death-traps, and only one safe route through the maze exists. The Embrace has learned that Vicis calls this route "the knight's tour" but beyond that little more is known. What information they can give you comes from a handful of survivors who only escaped by accident, finding their way by chance to one of the exits rather than the center of the maze. These scarred souls tell of friends crushed beneath rolling wheels, ground up in mills, broken on torturer's wheels, drowned in water wheels, cursed by wheels of fortune.
  
The Embrace will supply the rope to trap the Orrery. Fed into the mechanism as it spins, the rope will wind around and around it, creating a tangle that can never be untied, made from a material that can never be cut. Despite the dangers, they've had no dearth of volunteers, for the prize is a god of the victor's choice, any god from among the Cackling Embrace's collections.
  
  
Second Guild - Ambulator Vicis
  
expertise 7/3/3, forename 7/3/3, modus 6/4/4, aftname 6/4/2
  
expertise: wheeled transportation
modus operandi: work achieves the opposite effect of what is normally expected from expertise
  
target 2/3, action 2/10, location 1/6, danger 3/1, reward 1/1
  
target: someone or something taken for granted but vital and important, most see right through target
action: desanctify or otherwise corrupt target
location: heaving and overpopulated tenements, teeming with conflict
danger: an abundance of light, nowhere to hide
reward: thanks in the form of basic guild-specific service
  
The guild: Ambulator Vicis controls the Infinite Orrery, and with it, the very layout of Infinigrad. Underpinning every neighborhood in the city are gears and wheels, axles, shafts, and pistons - and they all connect back to the Infinite Orrery. Ambulator Vicis doesn't transport goods or people (although supply may be connected to demand through their aid), Vicis moves entire neighborhoods, reshuffling the streets of Infinigrad to push and pull, weave and shift.
  
Sometimes they simply relocate a single neighborhood, shoving its new neighbors aside to make room. Sometimes they do transpositions, switching two neighborhoods' places with a minimum of disruption to anyone intervening. Sometimes their work is more arcane, reshaping whole swaths of the city by reordering the residents according to some unknown or occult streetmap - maybe working for a wealthy client, maybe obeying the demands of the stars in their infinite gyre. Most commonly two neighborhoods in the same region of the city are made direct neighbors, or a divorce is finalized by relocating the sectarians deeper in their new home territory, far from the disputed border.
  
Either at the behest of a hidden client, or perhaps out of civic pride, Vicis has been making moves recently to relocate and contain a disaster site within the city limits, a foundry that exploded like a volcano, trapped in a bubble of slow-time, a problem that seems beyond the scope of any power in the city to address. Never directly, but always as part of some other job, Vicis has begun moving the disaster site, begun reshuffling which neighborhoods border it. They must be planning to contain or control the explosion, mustn't they? Or to contain it by surrounding the site with other derelicts and wrecks? Surely they can't be arranging their enemies to be repositioned en masse? Surely they can't be preparing to surround the site with their foes before releasing the explosion back to real time?
  
The job: How did the war between Ambulator Vicis and the Cackling Embrace begin? Does the Vicis take on gods as clients or retain them as counselors? Is the Embrace's hidden net-works facility somehow sensitive to the movement of the city? However the war started, Ambulator Vicis wants to end it. By studying the net-strands brought into their facilities by would-be saboteurs, Vicis has learned the secret of the mothers' thankful tears. By means unknown, they have discovered the Embrace's greatest collector, a human doctor known as the Angel of Infantile Mercy, who visits the slums and tenements whenever plague wracks them or illness runs floor to floor. The Angel of Infantile Mercy! Whom all the poor mothers pray to! Whom all the poor places beg to appear! Whenever the sickness comes, they beg her to arrive in time, before the dying starts. The Angel of Infantile Mercy saves them all, or most anyway, and collects no payment, only tears of joy and relief, only mothers' grateful tears.
  
The Angel of Infantile Mercy does as much work as dozens of other collectors. Without the Angel, the Embrace could not string their nets, could not fill their tanks. Ambulator Vicis wants the Angel gone. They want the Angel discredited, defamed. They have already planned the blasphemy, that the Angel only goes where the Angel has already been, that the Angel always travels to first to spread sickness, then returns to treat it, that all the children the Angel "saves" were only endangered because of her in the first place. Is it a lie? No one will want to believe it. Charges so serious, if credibly made, will mobilize the Fourth Estate to evaluate and judge. Any frame-up will have to be iron-clad to survive such scrutiny. Every witness will have to be paid, every track and trace swept away. The public would prefer to believe that the accuser tells lies, so any accuser must be prepared to weather the withering gaze of every investigating eye in Infinigrad. But if the charges stick, if the Angel can be blasphemed, then the Cackling Embrace may not survive the revelation of their association with someone so scorned.
  
In return, Ambulator Vicis will move the victor's home neighborhood anywhere they please, will let them choose their immediate neighbors, and agree to forego any job that would upset this arrangement.