Dear Readers,

Top Secret Illuminati is based on a d20 Modern game that Michele and I played. It was run by a friend of ours, Ken, who created the concept of what was basically a modern day Faerun. Elves were on reservations, dwarves were greedy mine barons, halflings and gnomes were circus midgets, and the orcs had just been emancipated 50 years prior and were currently living the thug life.

He explained the concept of the world to me, Michele, and Pat Crapps, the third player. Ken then proceeded to tell us that we would be playing agents of the Illuminati. There was silence for a good long while, and each one of us privately decided that this game was either going to be the greatest thing ever, or it was going to suck harder than anything that had ever sucked before. It wound up being one of the more memorable gaming experiences I’ve had recently, and I mean that in a good way.

I played the role of Rizzen(now Kazin), Michele played Dazil, and Pat played Rizzo, who later changed his name to Squibby to avoid confusion between my character and his (which was just making the entire thing sound like a bad 70s cop drama). Unfortunately, we never finished our first adventure because Ken got cold feet about the whole thing, but Michele and I both felt that there were some great moments there…great enough to be worthy of translation into a web comic. So here we are.

The name Top Secret Illuminati was created while we were making our characters. We kept cracking jokes about how ridiculous the whole premise sounded (which probably contributed to Ken’s cold feet), and we kept asking Ken if we would get a secret underground lair, password, handshake, etc. He went on to dash our hopes about the secret volcano stronghold, but he did tell us that we had an encrypted computer network that we could use to communicate with other cells. To which we naturally replied, “Oh! Fantastic, we need help, just go to ubertopsecretilluminatimembersonly.com and go to the chat room. It’s top secret, you know.” Whenever we needed to use our email in game, we would then make a big show of announcing that we were using our top secret computer network used exclusively for the Illuminati. We made up an intro page that said “Welcome to the top secret Illuminati web page! If you are an Illuminati member, click here to enter. If you are not an Illuminati member, click here to be erased.” Thus, when we created our own web site devoted to adapting the game into comic strip format, we only felt that an appropriate title and domain name was in order.

This is hardly a major project of ours. I personally consider my writing sloppy and half-baked, and Michele thinks her drawing is terrible. We do this in our free time, so who knows if anything will ever come of it. But we sure hope you get a laugh or two out of it.

-Ryan Cape

Writer, Top Secret Illuminati