... A secretive clan performs rites on people seeking 'the good life.'
The rituals are unsuccessful -- their results ranging from death to
minor side-effects. It is enormously controversial but there is little
one can do to stop it... Aetolians -- does this sound familiar?

Well, it should, because this all happened in the Ankyrean age. As
Qeddwyn has told us, the overly ambitious Conclave of Magic of the
ancient past performed rituals very similar to those of the Blackhand
and ending up creating the 'curse' of vampirism some are now so
fancifully trying to purge. People died horrific deaths, or were forever
left mutated or disturbed. And yet, the rituals continued. Disaster
ensued. Sapient war followed, then the Grand Artifice.

The rituals of the old Conclave of Magic polarized the world into two
factions and was only stopped with the devastating measures I have
already stated. As I see it, we are on the cusp of similar disaster,
where people can wantonly flit between death, undeath, life, and unlife;
a world in which one's identity is shattered by depraved and barbaric
science. This is not the dawn of a new age, much less a triumph of
Light. This exact same scenario wreaked a very real and very irrevocable
havoc on the world.

Consider this a call, growing less audible as time marches on, from the
dusty tomes of History...

Penned by my hand on the 23rd of Arios, in the year 132 MA.