Pentex

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In White Wolf Game Studio's setting the old World of Darkness, specifically the role-playing game Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Pentex Corporation is a vast fictional conglomerate dedicated to promoting the agenda of the Wyrm. Though primarily staffed by mundane humans unaware of the corporation's sinister mission, its upper management is a group of corrupt humans and outright supernatural beings fully aware of the existence of the Triat and werewolves.

The public face of the Pentex corporation itself appears to the public to possibly be a corporate consulting firm or administrative assistance firm. Its true method, however, is to own other businesses. As such, "Pentex" not only refers to the central corporation, but also to hundreds of other companies and businesses, openly owned or secretly controlled by the Pentex upper management. This allows Pentex to achieve vertical integration, allowing them to secure powerful but clandestine monopolies.

[edit] The Corporate Hierarchy

The central body of Pentex (and thus, indirectly, the entire conglomerate) is controlled by the office of the Executive Director (EXD). Under the EXD are four main branches, each with its own sub-branches:

  • Project Coordination Division (PCD): The largest branch of Pentex, responsible for coordinating the various Pentex subsidiaries to make sure they act in a unified manner without being detected doing so. Its sub-branches include Public Relations (PR), responsible for maintaining a good public image, and Finance (FIN), responsible for controlling the expenditures of Pentex subsidiaries (which, when they buy or sell to one another, essentially simply acts as moving money around without changing its true owner).
  • Acquisitions Division (AQD): Responsible for tracking down new companies to add to the Pentex family, as well as acting as the company's emissaries to other supernatural forces alied with the Wyrm, such as the Black Spiral Dancers. Its most important sub-branch is the Information Collection Systems division (ICS), responsible for industrial and individual espionage.
  • Operations Division (OPD): Responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of Pentex, including its paperwork, shipping, and tech support. Its most important division is Human Resources Development (HRD), which hires and fires (or kills) employees and identifies those employees who have "potential," either as possibly corruptible executives or as scientific guinea pigs.
  • Special Projects Division (SPD): Responsible for the research and development for Pentex that is too clearly Wyrm-tainted to be public. Its branches include Project Iliad (IL), responsible for creating fomori, Project Odyssey (OD), responsible for creating powerful psychics, and the small but growing hybrid division of Project Aeneid, responsible for creating psychic fomori. As a note, this group is not to be confused with the Special Projects Division of the Syndicate, a Convention of the Technocracy. Though the two Special Projects Division are allied, they remain separate entities.

[edit] The Top 21

While certainly not the only companies owned and controlled by Pentex, these are its most important. It includes some of Pentex's oldest subsidiaries, as well as some of its fastest-growing acquisitions. In principle, Pentex is an international corporation, but many of its largest "product" companies (Magadon and Young & Smith in particular) have had difficulty spreading past North America. The European market has been especially tough to enter for these companies, as farmer's unions, government oversight, and health & safety regulations are more stringent. As the "consumption capital" of the world, the U.S. remains the most common retail zone for Pentex. Its effect worldwide has grown most easily among its "resource" companies (Endron, Good House, Harold & Harold Mining, Rainbow, etc.)

  • Ardus Enterprises: A company that (in principle) does environmental cleanup work. In fact, it is just as responsible for pollution and "waste relocation," using industrial wastes to corrupt areas dominated by the Weaver and Wyld.
  • Autumn Health Management Systems: A chain of private hospitals and retirement homes throughout North America. While in treatment, patients often become reliant on the drugs they are prescribed, and sometimes become the hosts for Wyrm spirits (or "Banes"). Often a testing-ground for Magadon, Inc. and Young and Smith, Inc. (see below).
  • Avalon Incorporated: Manufacturers of toys. Avalon toys range from merely unsafe to almost openly corruptive. The most successful line of toys are the "Action Bill" action figures. "Action Bill" is a gun-toting superhero who fights evil shapeshifters; the toys help subconsciously turn young people into gun-toting werewolf-haters.
  • Black Dog Games: A small but influential publishing company that writes and markets role-playing games. Front-to-back, Black Dog is a parody of its authors, White Wolf Game Studio. The various World of Darkness game lines are further parodied, with titles such as "Zombie: The Putrescence," "Lycanthrope: The Rapture," "Warlock: The Pretension," "Pixie: The Delusion," and "Spectre: The Annihilation." A further irony is that White Wolf publishes its "adult-only" role-playing sourcebooks (so-designated because of graphically violent and/or sexual content) under the name "Black Dog."
  • Circinus Brands: A tobacco company. In many ways, cancer is a wonderful vehicle for the Wyrm's agenda, and Circinus is the top causer of cancer among Pentex subsidiaries.
  • Consolidex Worldwide: This investment firm manipulates stock and securities markets worldwide. While its broad objective is to make money, it also is highly effective at bringing controlling shares of new acquisition into Pentex hands and causing stock crashes for Pentex competitors.
  • Endron International: The oldest, most international, and most profitable of the Pentex subsidiaries, Endron sells petroleum products and natural gas, as well as training and hiring out nuclear energy engineers and experts. Part of Endron's success has come from its impossibly complex money-laundering schemes. While the name is very similar to Enron, it was most likely originally intended as a play on Exxon.
  • Good House International: Makers of paper products. Needless to say, this subsidiary's real objective is deforestation, particularly of areas as-of-yet untouched by development.
  • Hallahan Fishing Corporation: This high-yield fishing company not only seeks to fish in as destructive a way as possible, it also engages in blatantly illegal whale, shark, and dolphin fishing for covert sale on the black market.
  • Harold and Harold Mining, Incorporated: This mining company not only provides many of the raw materials Pentex uses in its manufacturing, but also uses cost-effective methods such as strip mining to do as much harm to nature as it can in the process.
  • Herculean Firearms Incorporated: Makers of guns of all kinds. Though it makes cheap, effective guns, the real corruptive power of HF, Inc. is its lobbying power, ensuring that firearms in general (whoever manufactures them) can get on the streets.
  • Herrick's: A grocery and retail chain. Herrick's itself does little to corrupt the masses (though it does engage in practices designed to squash small businesses), but its preference for selling the products of other Pentex subsidiaries at rock-bottom prices makes it the single most effective branch of Pentex's product distribution strategy.
  • King Breweries and Distilleries: Makes of cheap beer and liquor. King uses special formulas and ad campaigns designed to accelerated alcoholism. It is among the older Pentex subsidiaries, and produces the spirits for many brands people think are different. It also distributes its products through a network of "microbreweries" that are, in truth, simply fronts. A parody of Anheuser-Busch, whose premier product, Budweiser, is marketed as "The King of Beers" and which due to its primarily negative reputation markets many specialty products through labels that have little connection to the primary Anheuser-Busch corporate name (a common tactic among large breweries).
  • Magadon, Incorporated: Pentex's #2 company, Magadon sells pharmaceuticals, "health" products, and cosmetics. If Endron is Pentex's most profitable company, Magadon is its largest, sprawling its influence across its own network of sub-subsidiaries.
  • Nastrum Enterprises: Manufacturers of cheap military technology. While Nastrum is, in principle, a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, it also produces military-grade goods for other countries, including dictatorships and totalitarian regimes.
  • Omni Television: This network TV station specializes in vapid television aimed at encouraging baser instincts. It also acts as a platform from which Pentex can advertise its many other products.
  • O'Tolley's: The O'Tolley's fast food chain sells dirt cheap fast food full of empty calories. Of all of Pentex's many tainted products, OTolley's foods are among the fastest acting, causing massive weight gain, diabetes, and emotional instability.
  • Rainbow Incorporated: Where Good House produces paper products, Rainbow Inc. produces plastics. Rainbow has made of point of developing cheap plastics that are difficult to recycle, and provides plastics to many other Pentex subsidiaries.
  • Tellus Enterprises: A video game design and hardware manufacture company. Originally aimed at corrupting the youth while they were young, Tellus' recent expansion into hardware has allowed it to continue this process of corruption well into adulthood, as the average age of game-players rise and their medium of choice is the PC.
  • Vesuvius Incorporated: Publishers of print matter, including novels, comic books, and magazines. Though rarely directly damaging, Vesuvius spreads the philosophy of the Wyrm among its readership by de-emphasizing the environment and gun control and encouraging materialism and trust in corporations.
  • Young and Smith, Incorporated: Pentex's #3 company. Young and Smith manufactures food products and some health products. While not as profitable outright as Magadon, Young & Smith, Inc. have achieved greater product ubiquity. Most households in North America have at least a few Young & Smith products on their shelves.
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