Addressing Dark Archon's complaints.

merits.rb

@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ class Merit
       :dot_ratings   => (1..5),
       :prerequisites => "Guardians of the Veil Status #{1.to_dots} to #{5.to_dots}",
       :adjectives    => "Order",
-      :rules_text    => "The Guardians no longer just protect the Veil from Sleepers, but they now also protect Sleepers from the Exarchs and other such malignant supernatural entities. This has become one of their core Exoteric properties, and this in no small part is what makes them worth keeping around to the other Pentacle Orders.\nOnce per Chapter, the willworker who has this Merit may bestow the Occultation Merit at a dot rating equal to this Merit's onto another willworker for an amount of time based on his Gnosis.\nOne Gnosis offers the Merit for one day. Two Gnosis offers the Merit for one week. Three Gnosis offers it for a month. Four Gnosis offers it for a full year. Five Gnosis and above offers the Merit for an entire decade.\nIf they already have the Occultation Merit, add the dot rating of Ward of the Forbidden to it instead. Normally, one can only have an Occultation Merit rating at up to three, but this one allows the beneficiary of this to it to go above that.",
+      :rules_text    => "The Guardians always protected Pentacle Mages from the Seers of the Throne, but after their being duped so thoroughly in the 2020's, this has become more of a focus than perhaps is reasonable. This has become one of their core Exoteric properties, and this new focus in no small part is what makes them worth keeping around to the other Pentacle Orders.\nOnce per Chapter, the willworker who has this Merit may bestow the Occultation Merit at a dot rating equal to this Merit's onto another willworker for an amount of time based on his Gnosis.\nOne Gnosis offers the Merit for one day. Two Gnosis offers the Merit for one week. Three Gnosis offers it for a month. Four Gnosis offers it for a full year. Five Gnosis and above offers the Merit for an entire decade.\nIf they already have the Occultation Merit, add the dot rating of Ward of the Forbidden to it instead. Normally, one can only have an Occultation Merit rating at up to three, but this one allows the beneficiary of this to it to go above that.",
       :pdf           => pdf
     )
 

writeup.rb

@@ -131,7 +131,7 @@ class Awakened2069
 
 			start_section "Changing Times"
 
-			pdf.text "The Guardians of the Veil played right into the plans of the Exarchs. As they distracted the Sleeping world with the banning of Holocaust denial videos and the termination of everybody with a wacky conspiracy theory from any form of conventional employment, they were frantically deleting videos of vampires coercing children to give them their blood, posts describing exactly how to eliminate Uratha who predated the wives and daughters of the citizenry, and, most importantly, any content betraying or, heaven forbid, detailing the way Supernal magic functioned. Too many were appearing too quickly; it was almost as though supernatural entities became more brazen about exposing their true natures as people's personal recording technology and communication skills increased.\nThe views of the people who knew they were being shut up for political reasons mixed with the realities that politically unaligned people were uploading. The two groups intermingled creating bizarre supernatural conspiracy theories that got many details right, but never quite got the whole picture. There was always something off, something missing or incorrect. The pace of this mixture increased as Guardian and Exarch alike lost control of the conversation. Everybody knew that <i>something fucking huge</i> was up, but very few people knew exactly what. Those holding taboo political views banded together with those openly discussing the supernatural, and began retaliating against this suppression. As the world entered 2020's, the United States fell into civil war from all of this, descending into a Weimerica scenario borne directly of the nightmarish rants of every no-name YouTuber with thirty to fifty subscribers.\n\n", :inline_format => true, :indent_paragraphs => INDENT_SIZE
+			pdf.text "The Guardians of the Veil played right into the plans of the Exarchs. They tried to distract the Sleeping world with two approaches. One, they did the standard controlled opposition stunts, where they created immense Labyrinths of nonsensical conspiracy theories that ultimately meant nothing. However, they also tried to distract the Sleeping world with the banning of Holocaust denial videos and the termination of everybody with a wacky conspiracy theory from any form of conventional employment (which is a departure from their historical <i>modus operandi</i>), since they were also frantically deleting videos of vampires coercing children to give them their blood, posts describing exactly how to eliminate Uratha who predated the wives and daughters of the citizenry, and, most importantly, any content betraying or, heaven forbid, detailing the way Supernal magic functioned. Too many were appearing too quickly; it was almost as though supernatural entities became more brazen about exposing their true natures as people's personal recording technology and communication skills increased.\nThe views of the people who knew they were being shut up for political reasons mixed with the realities that politically unaligned people were uploading. The two groups intermingled creating bizarre supernatural conspiracy theories that got many details right, but never quite got the whole picture. There was always something off, something missing or incorrect. The pace of this mixture increased as Guardian and Exarch alike lost control of the conversation. Everybody knew that <i>something fucking huge</i> was up, but very few people knew exactly what. Those holding taboo political views banded together with those openly discussing the supernatural, and began retaliating against this suppression. As the world entered 2020's, the United States fell into civil war from all of this, descending into a Weimerica scenario borne directly of the nightmarish rants of every no-name YouTuber with thirty to fifty subscribers.\n\n", :inline_format => true, :indent_paragraphs => INDENT_SIZE
 
 				start_section "The Hammer Comes Down"
 
@@ -139,7 +139,7 @@ class Awakened2069
 
 				start_section "A Dark Age In The Computing Era"
 
-				pdf.text "The 2040's and 2050's are now a blur. Nobody knows what really happened. Every week, the news, the university professors, the government, insists something different happened in those two decades. Yet everybody just plays along. It's hard to tell for the Awakened if these people are fully brainwashed or if they are merely pretending so as to avoid getting into some sort of trouble. Possession of books is forbidden, since they are less mutable than websites.\nIt took until the late 2060's for Awakened society to even partially recover. That recovery is ongoing. The old Pentacle Orders have re-emerged, in part due to forbidden records of their existence and histories being uncovered. However, it also seems as though these Orders exist naturally. Maybe they were re-seeded by the Oracles. Maybe it's just the way of the world. People were on the brink of a global Awakening in 2020, but as with all things, the more things change, they more they stay the same. Awakened society in 2069 is easily the most underground of the noteworthy supernatural entities. Demons and Beasts appear to be largely defeated, while Vampires and Werewolves appear to be given a deliberate <i>carte blanche</i>. Whenever an Awakened individual gets too arrogant and betrays what they're <i>actually</i> about, they seem to disappear. It's uncanny the efficiency with which this happens.\nWhat is known, however, is that no Awakened soul today appears to be born before 2030. The young scholars that have emerged seem to have formed a consensus that they were all disappeared much in the way their new friends will be if they get too Hubristic, but nobody seems to have concrete proof of this. It's one of those things that \"everybody knows\" in the Awakened community, yet nobody can prove. This may be because it's total hogwash, but it seems plausible enough that nobody questions it.", :inline_format => true, :indent_paragraphs => INDENT_SIZE
+				pdf.text "The 2040's and 2050's are now a blur. Nobody knows what really happened. Every week, the news, the university professors, the government, insists something different happened in those two decades. Yet everybody just plays along. It's hard to tell for the Awakened if these people are fully brainwashed or if they are merely pretending so as to avoid getting into some sort of trouble. Possession of books is forbidden, since they are less mutable than websites.\nOne thing is understood, however, is that Pentacle society more or less collapsed in this period. Some people think that the civil war and its consequences were responsible. However, the lack of any known Pentacle Mages born in the 2020's or earlier is an indication that the ones existing in the 2030's through the 2050's either jumped ships to the Seers or were disappeared. Blaming the Seers of the Throne directly for this phenomena is common, but unconfirmed. It's also speculated that Exarchs, Oracles, and other Archmages essentially destroyed the world during this period, and the one that people live in for 2069 is a cheap facsimile of what once was, hence the gap and the nonsensical \"history\" everybody gets fed.\nIt took until the late 2060's for Awakened society to even partially recover. That recovery is ongoing. The old Pentacle Orders have re-emerged, in part due to forbidden records of their existence and histories being uncovered. However, it also seems as though these Orders exist naturally. Maybe they were re-seeded by the Oracles. Maybe it's just the way of the world. People were on the brink of a global Awakening in 2020, but as with all things, the more things change, they more they stay the same. Awakened society in 2069 is easily the most underground of the noteworthy supernatural entities. Demons and Beasts appear to be largely defeated, while Vampires and Werewolves appear to be given a deliberate <i>carte blanche</i>. Whenever an Awakened individual gets too arrogant and betrays what they're <i>actually</i> about, they seem to disappear. It's uncanny the efficiency with which this happens.\nWhat is known, however, is that no Awakened soul today appears to be born before 2030. The young scholars that have emerged seem to have formed a consensus that they were all disappeared much in the way their new friends will be if they get too Hubristic, but nobody seems to have concrete proof of this. It's one of those things that \"everybody knows\" in the Awakened community, yet nobody can prove. This may be because it's total hogwash, but it seems plausible enough that nobody questions it.", :inline_format => true, :indent_paragraphs => INDENT_SIZE
 		end
 
 		start_chapter "Orders"
@@ -148,7 +148,7 @@ class Awakened2069
 
 			start_section "The Free Council"
 
-			pdf.text "The Free Council is easily the largest Order that has re-emerged. While they were the young bucks, the punks before 2020, they borderline on the norm outright in 2069. Technomages through the 2000's, but pro-LGBT activists in the 2010's, their resurgence has restored them to their more dignified pre-2010 roots. The Free Council are the foremost authorities on cybernetics, artificial intelligence, brain computer interfaces among the Awakened community. Their claim to this domain carries Supernal weight. As such, all such Supernal Cybernetics that are permanent must be acquired through a member of the Free Council of appropriate status. This is no orthopractic issue; it carries such weight that losing one's stature in the Free Council seems to remove one's ability to create permanent Supernal Cybernetics. One simply cannot cast their way into cybernetic technology. Period.\n<b>Sample Character Concepts:</b> transhumanist ideologue, corporate saboteur, cryptocurrency thief, digital grimoire seeder, cryptographic cracker", :inline_format => true, :indent_paragraphs => INDENT_SIZE
+			pdf.text "The Free Council is easily the largest Order that has re-emerged. While they were the young bucks, the punks before 2020, they borderline on the norm outright in 2069. Technomages through the 2000's, but pro-LGBT activists in the 2010's, their resurgence has restored them to their more dignified pre-2010 roots. The Free Council are the foremost authorities on cybernetics, artificial intelligence, brain computer interfaces among the Awakened community. Their claim to this domain carries Supernal weight. As such, all such Supernal Cybernetics that are permanent must be acquired through a member of the Free Council of appropriate status. This is no orthopractic issue; it carries such weight that losing one's stature in the Free Council seems to remove one's ability to create permanent Supernal Cybernetics. One simply cannot cast their way into Lasting cybernetic technology. Period.\n<b>Sample Character Concepts:</b> transhumanist ideologue, corporate saboteur, cryptocurrency thief, digital grimoire seeder, cryptographic cracker", :inline_format => true, :indent_paragraphs => INDENT_SIZE
 
 			start_section "The Guardians of the Veil"