Eric Hughes wrote:
What is interesting about "Confraternity of Solidarity across Empires (CSE)" is, as I understand it, it is a collection of PCs that belive that the greater good can be achieved by overlooking national, church, and societal goals. As a player created society, I don't know how 'secret' it is or if it is just a heroic philosophy any player can subscribe to.
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Personally I see it as a philosophy without an adjenda not a Secret Society. So I don't think that "membership" is strictly prohibited.
This society, the CSE, is focused more around a philosophy than an agenda. Still, it was originally created by a Sarishan PC who was deep into the secrecy aspects of Sarish [that is OOC knowledge, and few, if any, people know IC who created it], and as such it was definitely founded as a secret society rather than an adventurer's club or other informal group. We have secret passwords, levels of membership, secret messages, etc. We organized at LARPs and BIs and accomplished more together than we could have individually. Our planning ahead is what led to our encouraging Milandir and Coryan to work together at the Battle of Five Armies when our plans enabled a Milandisian knight to talk with General Menesis. We were the behind-the-scenes group that shared some information publicly about common enemies at some BIs. In Living Arcanis, some of the secrecy was done by players and we had a mailing list, though we're now treating it like the other official societies. That said, we're *not* an official group, and as such it is within the campaign rules to belong to our group and another secret society as long as you are sincere about both groups and don't abuse either one to help the other (the later being our rule).
The above info is all out-of-character and much of it's secret in-character. Most people in-game don't have a clue that it exists.