The year is 1973. CIA Director Richard Helms has just destroyed the files of Project MK-ULTRA as the Nixon White House convulses under each new Watergate revelation. Within the shadows of the American and British intelligence communities, Project SANDMAN retreats into a shell of its former self, riddled with moles seduced by the power promised by the other side. SANDMAN’s operations have nearly been fully exposed by the disinfecting sunlight unleashed by American fellow travelers of Soviet intelligence. But all these forces, domestic and foreign, are ultimately the dupes of hidden kulullû masters who seek to restore their own lords and masters (the Anunnakku) and shift their reality (History B) into ours, superseding and cancelling out our world and our history.

It’s not just crusading journalists, burglarizing peace activists, and erstwhile domestic terrorists that are Soviet-aligned dupes of the Irruptors in the West. The kulullû also have their flippers into the various new religious and human potential movements that arose as a result of the cultural revolutions of the late 1960s. Project SANDMAN had been interested in developing these assets—organizations varying in size and scope from tiny hippie commune-cults to huge multinational research institutes showing a sudden interest in Weird phenomena—for themselves. But now, weakened by politics and roiled by internal treachery, SANDMAN is losing its grip on these exploitable assets. Only a dedicated corps of veteran SANDMAN agents has the knowledge and wherewithal to fight off Irruptor influence and harvest what’s worthwhile from the cults, new religions, and neo-esotericists multiplying across the landscape of the American Lemuria: California.

You are members of a special Project SANDMAN team based out of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, conveniently located near both San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Your team’s remit? Surveilling, studying, infiltrating, and, when necessary, neutralizing esoteric groups and individuals involved in the growing human potential movement who might become compromised by the Red Kings from History B. You are:

• fringe historians looking for correlations between 1970s new religions, the nascent ancient astronaut overmyth, and Sumerian cults

• engineers combining cutting-edge research in silicon transistors, cybernetics, and neurobiology, protecting humanity by dreaming of a new world-system of neuro-bio-social control

• veterans of Madison Avenue’s wild and woolly 1960s subliminal ad wars, now using your powers to sway the minds of the younger generation for SANDMAN

• British MI6-aligned cunning folk, recruited in the aftermath of the subversion of the UK’s SANDMAN by tighearnamach traitors and their kulullû masters

• structuralist anthropologists specializing in infiltrating the UFO religions, political cults, and affinity groups multiplying like cockroaches in the libertine ‘70s

• ESP investigators (or debunkers) looking to seduce all the publicity-hungry spoonbenders infesting the halls of both the academy and defense research institutes

• deprogrammers seeking to return the lost lambs of the peace-and-love generation to their families (and, in the process, learn all they can about the methods and practices of the cults who enslaved them)

• veterans of the Indochina War who chanced upon ancient mind-shattering shards of History B during their tour of duty; “enlightened” by the experience, they retreated to the hot tubs of the Bay Area human potential movement

• grifters with a talent for neurolinguistic programming, using their powers to run “training seminars” drawing from the rich American tradition of self-help gurus promoting “positive thinking”

• visionary authors (or disgraced scientists) receiving mysterious mental signals with religious and messianic overtones from vast, alien, gnostic artificial intelligences

• preternaturally precocious Aquarian children born in the final three years of the 1960s, gifted with strangely-tinted auras and prophetic powers; members of an “X generation,” to coin a phrase

Collectively, you are specialists seeking to sow—and to reap—in the fecund gardens of the Age of Aquarius. Within Project SANDMAN, you are… Operation URIEL.

—

Set in the early 1970s in Northern California (with occasional side-treks to the UK and wherever the esoteric might be on the rise across the globe), this game uses the GURPS Madness Dossier campaign setting and frame but focuses on a specific team with a narrower scope: dedicated solely to investigating cults, religious movements, Weird research institutes, psychonauts, cryptids, UFOs, and other elements of the classically Weird 1970s. The characters would mostly be drawn from civilian backgrounds that make them especially knowledgeable about the Irruptors, History B, and Anunnaki infiltration of said esoteric movements.

◎ ABEILLE, GENEVIEVE

◎ HELIX, CHARLEY

◎ HORT, MITCHELL JEFFERSON

◎ MARTIN, ROGER

○ SUB-ROUTINE 01: "PAPA LEGBA"

○ SUB-ROUTINE 02: "MAITRE CARREFOUR"

○ SUB-ROUTINE 03: "AGENT 00"

◎ MENOS, JOCASTA

◎ RANSOM, ARCHIBALD

◎ REDGRAVE, MARSHALL