Hellfire Club

This page is about the Phase 2 incarnation of the NPCs. For other uses, see Hellfire Club (disambiguation).

PHASE 2

Hellfire Club
Portrayed by various
Known Aliases:	Emma Frost (White Queen), Sebastian Shaw (Black King)
Affiliations:	Independent
Socked By:	various
Introduction:	Paradise Lost

Following M-Day, the Hellfire Club had to reimage itself in order to protect its mutant members and an uneasy truce was struck between Black and White Courts.

Roster

White Court

Inner Court: White Queen - Emma Frost	Leader of the White Court, Emma is cunning, manipulative and intensely protective of her people. PB: Charlize Theron
Inner Court: White Rook - TBD	PB: TBD
Inner Court: White Knight - Doug Ramsey	Ever loyal to Emma, Doug maintains his role as her Knight. PB: Ryan Phillipe.
Inner Court: White Bishop - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Outer Court: White Squire - TBD	PB: TBD
Outer Court: White Herald - Hope Abbott	After being mentored for a year by Doug, the current White Knight, Hope met with White Queen Emma Frost for an interview and on recommendations of Doug and Julian, the current White Squire, became the White Herald. PB: Shelley Hennig.
Outer Court: White Sentry - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Junior Court: White Page - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Junior Court: White Witness - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Junior Court: White Chatelaine - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.

Black Court

Inner Court: Black King - Sebastian Shaw	A powerful industrialist, Sebastian Shaw is a dangerous and cunning opponent. His mutant status is a tightly-kept secret and while he has often been pitched against the X-Men, he has on occasion used them as a means to an end. Since M-Day and the death of his Rook in jail, he has grudgingly admitted things have to change, and in the area of mutant welfare, at least, has agreed to a truce with Emma. PB: Jason Isaacs, socked by Cai
Inner Court: Black Rook - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Inner Court: Black Knight - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Inner Court: Black Bishop - Harry Leland	An esteemed Manhattan businessman, Harry Leland is also a member of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle, serving as their Black Bishop. Leland has been assisting his friend in the rebuilding of his company; although now as a full partner with a controlling interest in Shaw Industries. A heart attack in 2007 has significantly weakened his position, but he remains as Bishop, a modifying influence on the excesses of his King. PB: Sydney Greenstreet, socked by Sam
Outer Court: Black Squire - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Outer Court: Black Herald - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Outer Court: Black Sentry - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Junior Court: Black Page - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Junior Court: Black Witness - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.
Junior Court: Black Chatelaine - TBD	(description here) PB: To be determined.

Former Members

• Friedrich Von Roehm - Black Rook: a mutant, killed in a police cell when his image inducer failed and his position within the HFC was unable to prevent his arrest.

Details

The Hellfire Club is a social club catering to members of the social and financial elite. Secretly founded by members of a secret cabal, the club is an offshoot of John Dee's Invisible College, established sometime in the sixteenth century. Similar to the Royal Society, but with an interest in the arcane and demonic spheres, the club gained a strong cabal of influential members, to the point that it was forced to hide behind the disgraced guise of other clubs to avoid being targeted by political or religious enemies. In the 18th century, the club used pawns like Phillip, Duke of Wharton and Sir Francis Dashwood to distract those who had heard whispers of their studies, instead sending them to drunken orgies and satirical farces of religious ceremonies. However, as the true club began to recruit the best from their fake counterparts, some of the attitudes began to seep in, changing the mores and focus slowly.

Over the years, secret chapters were begun, mostly following the trade routes of the empire, although occasionally making in-roads into the traditional grounds of other societies in Europe. By the mid-19th century, the Hellfire Club was able to shed part of its cloak of secrecy, transforming itself into the public eye as more of an exclusive social club. Wealthy men and women would maneuver for an invitation to one of their elaborate parties, and membership was considered to be a significant honour. The various chapters undertook a period of re-organization, eliminating small and mismanaged chapters, and laying out the court structure which survived up until September 2015.

Today, the Hellfire Club is seen as an anachronistic institution from an imperial past; barely noticed or known about by the public, only as visible as a thousand other private clubs and societies which occasionally provide quiet charitable support or fundraisers. Its private nature allowed very little access to the media, and as a result, it enjoyed the status of being functionally invisible.

Phase 2

Following M-Day, it became obvious that things had changed for the Hellfire Club with the death of the Black Rook in police custody. Where formerly just citing his position with the Club would have seen him on his way, the fact he was a visible mutant in post-M-Day New York meant his position meant nothing. Faced with this new threat, White Queen Emma Frost and Black King Sebastian Shaw came to a reluctant agreement and restructured the NY HFC according to old lines. Part of the agreement was there would be no Black Queen and no White King - the existing 'royalty' would rule alone, in order to provide balance.

The Black and White Courts were still, in most things, in a certain state of opposition. There were only certain things, primarily to do with mutant affairs that they joined together to work on. Part of the reason that they chose to do this, was that the world had changed since M-Day; despite the fact that they had quite a lot of influence in business and politics, all of the members of the HFC had to be considerably more careful about being outed as mutants. The Black Court, particularly as they had neither telepaths nor magic users to cover their tracks, were much less inclined to any overt use of powers in public or in front of non-HFC people they had to leave alive. They also couldn't just throw money and influence at problems they wished to mutually solve; anti-mutant sentiment was so strong that they couldn't simply make things go away or change. For example, they might have been able to convince politicians to go a certain way to softening anti-mutant laws etc but they were unlikely to have sufficient influence to overcome the political liability that would come from a politician being seen as a strong mutant sympathiser.

So, as part of that lessening of influence, they had fewer senators in their pockets - a few influential ones, who were very loyal to the HFC for a number of different reasons, but the Courts couldn't simply let those Senators know what they wanted and expect it to happen. They had to do a lot more work to get the results they wanted, so they expended the need for favours more carefully. In terms of business, they still had a LOT of money and a LOT of influence - but this was also the area where Black and White Courts were primarily in opposition. Frost and Shaw also remained business rivals, so they didn't tend to work together much in terms of undertaking Court activities through the business sphere.

In 2020 that rivalry came to the fore at the annual Hellfire Gala, hosted in this instance by the Black Court. A former Club member had willed some valuable books to the Black Court, one of which contained pages from the highly rare Book of Cagliostro. Warned by Nicholas Harkness that X-Force would attempt to steal the book as a way of currying favour and being allowed to join the Inner Court, the Black Court called up Emma Frost and Doug Ramsey to accuse them of the theft, only for the tables to be turned with the book in the vaults being shown to be a forgery and the "real" book found in Harkness' hotel room. With the Black Court hastily backtracking their accusations, the White Court came out ascendent once again.

Plots/Events

Paradise Lost

Operation: Dewey Deceptional System

Meta

Socked by: Various