In brief, the New Inquisition is an occult action-thriller. It posits a very modern-day approach to classical occult ideas, and depicts an occult underground caught in the throes of the transition from old-school mysticism to new-wave sorcery. There's a war on of sorts, but no one is on the side of the angels--everyone is out for themselves, trying to make sense of what's happening and to grab as much power as they can. The main characters are all neck-deep in the intrigues of the occult underground, callously familiar with even the most shocking of horrors. There are a handful of major characters and groups at play in this setting, but there is a dizzying variety of minor characters, factions, and concepts that will be briefly encountered at lightning speed by the protagonists. The goal of this aspect of the property will be to give the viewer scattershot glimpses of a much larger world, a world that is very strange to most of us but is the bread and butter of the main characters. There will be no novice character whose introduction to the world mirrors the reader; the reader will be plunged head-long into a rich and dangerous world and will be taken for a hell of a ride.

The New Inquisition is set firmly in the modern day. The main characters all live in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, but the stories will occur in other places as well. Generous helpings of hideous violence, furious gunplay, and cynical manipulations set the tone. The insecurities of modern life and the dangers facing us all serve as the macrocosm in which the stories are set; the occult elements are the microcosm, taking our big fears and scaling them down to something you can shoot, fuck, or share a cigarette with.

Used to be you'd hang out with creepy old ex-rabbis and talk about golems and that sort of thing, trading them smack in exchange for old scrolls you couldn't translate anyway. Used to be the worst you'd face might be some tricked-out incantrix who could make you forget that she'd cut off your dick and eaten it for dinner, but that only happened to rank amateurs. Used to be that when you wanted information, you'd have to go shake down some moldy old professor and threaten to pull out a ouija board right then and there and graft an astral parasite onto his ass.

But those days are over, man. The invisible clergy sent all that old school shit packing, by and large, and cranked the volume on what was left to eleven. Big-money guys like Abel got into the scene and bought up those long-lost tomes of forbidden lore, only to find out they were just written by a bunch of crackpots and the info was way stale. Once the naked goddess ascended right in front of the video cameras and the bootlegs began getting around the underground, heavy hitters started coming out of the woodwork and making life tough for the rest of us.

I used to make a good living at this stuff, man. I'd track down old legends, stake vampires, drive off poltergeists, collect rare occult texts, that whole Kolchak trip. Now, there's young turks who've come outta nowhere. Who needs the secrets of the Kabbala when you've got chaos magick? These guys are hungry and lean, and they smell the power that's been waiting for someone to grab this whole time. Me, I knew better--play with fire and you get burnt. But jerks like Alex Abel are funding their own private armies of occultists and duking it out on the astral plane and in the streets of every city. Who needs it?

Sad to say, I do. A man's gotta pay the bills, you know what I'm saying? And if that means I'm shaking down wiccan priests and waxing Crowley-Grant-Lovecraft nuts and doing divinations with a Barbie doll, so-be-freaking-it. The times change and so does the occult underground, but one thing doesn't change: when people are this hungry for power, you better be the one with the fork.

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