So, for those of you that aren't aware, I'm the player of Iytha, the current Archprelate of the Illuminati. I have a problem:

I am caught between the fact that the Illuminati RP is to keep all of our guild lore secret and the fact that, as long as we keep our RP activities secret, we have to suffer from not being able to write, do or talk about anything interesting with people outside the Illuminati or people of lower ranks. Up until now, we've been using a schizophrenic approach where some things are arbitrarily "secret" and don't get talked, while other things get to ignore the secrecy RP and just get talked about openly. This is unsatisfying, for various reasons.

Any advice?

From what I understand, the classic Illuminati and other secret societies had layers of secrets. I think you need to setup that level of structure and have a public Illumination system where you can talk about the basics of the lore, perhaps peppering some falsehoods into the truths, but at least giving you a general overview of the philosophies of the Illuminati. Maybe you can setup some clans with dues so "outsiders" might learn so secrets for a price. (Or just start a racket).

After all, in Lusternia the Illuminati were known and an "open secret", unlike the so-called true Illuminati. And real secret societies have things that are known or theorized about.

True secrecy isn't really possible in lusty anyways. I'd go for the secrecy angle with some "hidden truth" that only rigorous adherence to your weirdness teaches you.

Yeah, people will make an alt in the Illuminati, work their way up to learn all the secrets, then promptly expose them. If they haven't already.

People have been suprisingly good about not doing that. The worst we ever get is people reading about our skills/pathways off the wiki and then asking ingame about them despite their character having no IC way of knowing about that stuff.

Well, I used to think about this a lot, because SD's are very secretive, very regal and mysterious whatnot shadowy skirts of Night blahblah. And before that, when I was in the Nekotai, they had the same thing, sort of. Very secretive. So in considering how to deal with this, I decided to just basically do whatever, write whatever I want, however I want. Now obviously I can't go writing that Sun is better than Night and should be worshiped, that would get me in trouble, but I've written things about Glomdoring being tainted, and when I was a Nekotai, I had a very pro-Scorpion slant, both of which things could be called radical by some. But in the end, it basically works out like this. Anything can be disavowed as being propaganda. All the tainted stuff I write about Glom could easily just be said to be me trying to get Serenwilders to sympathize with the remnants of Fair Gloriana. I write what I want, I get prestige or whatever, I get to express myself, and it doesn't hinder or let out any secrets, as I tend to mix true stuff in with really wonky ideas from time to time. This method has tended to work out for me so far.

I just lied about everything I said in the above post. I don't spread propaganda and chaos through contradicting myself at all.

I know I've been a little bad about that--I guess I've assumed the Wiki wouldn't ever print stuff that was meant to be secret IC, so I sort of summed it up as something that you learn in the Lusternian equivalent of high school--otherwise they really shouldn't publish that stuff IMO. Of course, not all Illuminati stuff is secret anyway--the Butterflies for instance is the core of many of your attacks and lore (Project Paradox, combat, the Hallifax attack).

Rather than focusing on trying to get secret the "what" part of your powers, the "how" and "why" should be more secretive. Though I think you might want to think of what parts of your lore should be secret and what should be public propaganda.

Xiel and the other wiki editors put up whatever's in the AB files. Which is generally a good policy, since the early days of "don't show anyone what our skills look like, or help them make triggers" were completely inane. But, unfortunately for us, AB file for Transmology Pathways spells out stuff that would actually be more fun if it were hidden. If it weren't for that, we could make up some lies for outsiders to hear about. Currently we can't do that, since everyone already knows the real truth about the pathways from reading it on the wiki, so people outside the guild would call us on it if we made up something false.

As it stands, the Illuminati basically ignore the whole pathways RP, both because it isn't secret and because it isn't mechanically supported, ie. Gnosis is the best path for combat, Whispers is better for politics, Psychedelia has a power that's useless unless you get attacked, etc. Instead people just pick whatever path they want and get in a big huff about not talking to nonmembers at all about it.

You could perhaps take the route the Sentinels did with some of their archives and 'declassify' some things? Aloysha took some of our reports, edited them slightly to remove the most sensitive information and put it together for the city library.

Your reasons for releasing the information could be part of some larger plan to sway whatever it is the Illuminati want swayed, which then becomes your new 'super' secret.

Do highly conspicuous and significant things in public, then don't talk about them or offer any explanation.

Write up some obscure things that may or may not mean anything. Perhaps do some personal journaling and create your own secret society inside the guild that only you know about and that you only invite people too, make it secret so nobody knows who else is part of the society except for you, or some pawn that you have hold the clan for you. Spread false secrets even to the guild leadership and the higherups themselves so they don't get the real juicy stuff, spread the lies just to the people who are doing the guild tasks and nothing else, then if they prove themselves beyond that maybe reveal more if you like them and they are trustworthy, etc. Spread so many lies, that the truth might just look more ridiculous, so that most people don't know the right from the wrong, and have to make up their own minds about what is really the secret and what's not. Perhaps quietly publish a series of books in your personal guild library that contradict each other, and allow others of the lower ranks to go through and pick out what they believe is right and wrong if they want to put in the time and work.

For Night they had the liturgies laid out, maybe some generic thing they tell everyone, like secrets yo, and hey get out of those plain grey clothes they are so drab, get your beauty on. They have the liturgies which are a start. They have some cool things in the guild library that people don't really ever go look at. For the Shadowdancers you can't really know all of Night's Secrets, but you can live in the image of knowing them, and you learn them that way. Close scrutiny of the Liturgies, and living by the ideals. Night's ideals aren't really the same for everyone, there is room for ambiguity so everyone tends to have their own slightly skewed version from everyone else. I know for sure Daem has different ideas on most every issue from lets say Druken, Astraea, probably Siam.. ok I'm just listing active Shadowdancers now. I don't know if Illuminati are the same in that regard but that's how the Shadowdancers seem to role.

I've been a secretist RPer for all of my IRE career, and the best way to play with the "We are secret" angle is to just make it up to a certain extent.

First and foremost, as a player, you have to realise the meta of the game is that no information can be secret. Be it your skills, or your guild's "secret" rituals, or the words you say to your guildhall door to get in, where your guildhall is, what you ate for breakfast and when you last went to the loo etc etc.

You can't stop people from making an alt specifically to learn about these and spread them around. You can't stop your best friend in the guild who suddenly had a change of mind and switches org, and thus takes that secret away with him. You can't prevent people sharing what they know to their friends OOCly just for flavour's sake.

Once you realise you cannot keep any real information secret, you are now free to make up any fake information you want to keep as secret as you want. In other words, you're a conman. Whenever someone challenges your secrecy, and says, "I know everything about the guild", you emote your eyes glowing green, twirling an unknown object in your hands so fast its form is blurred and a deep mysterious voice saying, "Ah, but that's only the tip of the iceberg." and you never reveal what the rest of the iceberg is because there's really no iceberg, but really, all that matters is that you have a secret to keep, even if it's a fake one.

When you introduce new members to the guild to the advancement path, you can emote blurring your form then teleporting behind them, tapping them on the shoulder and saying, "This secret teleportation spell will be one of the many secrets you will learn with us... if you have the willpower to stay on, bahahaha." There really is no teleportation spell in your skillset that lets you teleport within the room, but who cares. It's your secret.

And so on and so forth.

This sir, is Genius.

This is pretty much what the Sentinel's have been doing, or at least what I have been doing when Sentinel stuff has come up, just make it seem like I know more than I actually do. Just keeping stuff really vague and never giving straight answers seem to work pretty well.

Making Stuff Up™

That's only one step down from godmoding with emotes, though. I'd be strongly inclined to emote doing the same thing as you if I wouldn't hate myself for it. Breaks the hell out of suspense of disbelief too.

Claiming to have secrets that don't actually exist isn't interesting to me. The whole point of having secrets is so that you have things that you reveal to your favourite proteges and hide from your hated rivals. Having real secrets that have a specific content forces you to behave in character as someone trying to protect those specific secrets and forces anyone that wants to find out your secrets legitimately to roleplay in the sort of way that would actually result in that secret being uncovered.

Similarly, Ushaara's suggestion that we release our action secrets in a declassified form as part of a larger plan seems fishy to me if there isn't actually a larger plan behind it that people could, in principle, figure out by examining what sort of things we're putting out. Again, if we don't actually have a plan or some other reason to release them, it makes no sense for us to actually do it. Sidharta's suggestion is marginally more useful, in that I can see doing public rituals and then refusing to discuss them. But only if there was an actual point to the ritual, and not just something that we're doing so that people will get curious about it and then get turned away when they inquire further.

Astraea's recomendation of revealing a bunch of lies to the general public seems like a good way to counter people illegitimately trying to find out your secrets, since you can just point at the fake knowledge and say it is the truth, effectively disarming (or diluting?) the OOC knowledge. And it has the benefit of being something that makes sense to do from an IC perspective of someone trying to obscure the truth.

I don't think that adopting shishi's approach of having every person come up with their own interpretation is a good idea. Ideally, there should be an independant, canonical truth of what secrets are real and which ones are made up. If there isn't, everyone behaves as if they believed the lies that they themselves made up and the results are indistinguishable from the entire guild being full of incompetents that (ICly) don't actually know how our spells work.

This may or may not be helpful, but you could actually just start making the stuff up and ask your patron to create a book for you, containing all of the made up stuff. The book could be authored by some old Illuminati and be rediscovered in under a fake floorboard in the library. When creating the actual stuff, you could have some public ways that it could be expressed with the larger part, or more important facet, of the idea remaining secret. Not sure how you would work out what's okay to be public and what's secret. Then you could just restrict the book (or books, if you're ambitious), in the library and give out privs to people who are high ranked/achieved something/are your favorite protege. Then have a separate book with the afformentioned "public" secrets in the library available to all guild members. The public book could hint about the existance of the secret book(s) and the ideas in them.

Hope that was a coherent idea.

You can also do what I did--write a book claiming you translated it from another book.

That doesn't always turn out well. Once I did that back in the first few months of the game (not on this character) and it really didn't work out at all.