Arel:

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.

We did that in the Geomancers a while back.

I always thought it was rather a success.

Hi, by the way.

Greleag:

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.

This was a big problem for us when founding the guild, actually. But that's part of what the fun is. As Archprelate, you have a lot of artistic license to create secrets, which could potentially be even more fun. Keep in mind that virtually everything you may consider 'lore' at this point outside of the AB files themselves, was originally pulled out of somebody's ass.

As for the book writing thing, maybe guild mysticism is kept secret and within the walls of the pyramid, but proselytizing doesn't have to be.

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.

Isn't this basically idea of Paradigmatics in the first place, though? That everybody's reality, and their powers, are based on their own conceptions/delusions made manifest, and it also allows the practitioner to believe anything they need to, no matter how contradictory.

So play with that, experiment finding out which truths are 'real' and which are not. A big part of the Illuminati during my time there was experimentation (and those experiments can be rather easily kept secret). If you play around with things like that, you'll often find new concepts to test. If they're generally accepted by the guild as a whole, presto! Instant lore. If that holds for any length of time, voila! Canon!

Or, go into some of the 'lore' you already have, obliterate it, paving the way for newer, deeper secrets.

Just do something, really, which is all you need to do, and then there's avenues to work with it. You actually have a lot more liberty with these sorts of things than some other guilds. Almost nothing is concrete, and therefore the truth is what you say it is! (which could be the Biggest Secret of AllTM, too) At which point you're totally free to spread lies and misinformation, perhaps some of which is even previous 'truths' now made false, either confusing non-Illuminati even more, or making them believe they do in fact know your secrets.

Note: This thread is over a year old and I'm no longer part of the Illuminati. It should probably be locked to keep people from necroing it like this.

*facepalm* Was reading the OP as five days ago, and as something I missed at the time. My, how time flies.