Dragons Rouge et Noir (Night's Black Agents, Bookhounds of London)

 From the Dracula Dossier main book:

Le Dragon Noir

appearance: This crumbling folio (approximately 33 cm × 27 cm) is bound in dark, wrinkled leather with a long grayish stain in a narrow band around its middle (A 1-point spend of Chemistry confirms it as the residue of badly tarnished silver, perhaps from a chain once used to keep it closed). Its 211 parchment pages give off unsettling, varied odors: one handler might smell sulfur, while another smells nothing but grave rot ...

supposed history: Agents with Occult Studies know that Le Dragon Noir (The Black Dragon) is reputed to be the more dangerous and powerful companion to Le Dragon Rouge (The Red Dragon). Both come from the “Solomonic grimoire” tradition of the late Middle Ages ...

So what is this mysterious real-world grimoire, The Red Dragon?

Its progenitor is the notorious Grand Grimoire, which Owen Davies, author of Grimoires, describes as 'the first explicitly diabolic mass-market grimoire.' First printed in 1702 (there is some doubt as to the exact date) its desirability lay in Lucifer's alleged powers over all the riches and treasures of the world. If you were the sort who desired riches, or wanted to find a specific treasure, then you wanted a chat with Lucifer. The Grand Grimoire could make that happen.

For those of you getting M.R. James flashbacks, you're not wrong. Whenever James or other Edwardian ghost story spinners talk about wicked clergy using magic to find or keep wealth (as in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas among others) he's talking about the mystic rites found in the Grand Grimoire. 

"The Grand Grimoire was not only a manual for diabolic communication," says Davies. "The mere possession of it came to be seen as an act of pact-making. In 1804, the same year that Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, a trial in Amiens deliberated on the case of a man found with a grimoire, most likely the Grand Grimoire, with which he said he could call up the Devil by merely touching it." 

The Dragon Rouge is a 19th-century redraft of the Grand Grimoire. It benefited from much better access to printing presses, and soon became a popular item. Previous books of occult lore had entranced due to their rarity and therefore their supposed secret mysteries, but the Dragon Rouge sold by the hundreds for a few sous - a sou being 1/20 of a franc. A British pound of the period would be worth about 25 francs. 

A similar spin-off from the same period, La Poule Noire, did much the same as the rest. It promised to help its owner find treasure, this time by sacrificing a black hen under specific conditions at a specific location. The Devil would appear and offer the ritualist a black hen, one that laid gold and silver eggs.

Pretty much everyone who wanted money bought one of these books, which means copies of the Dragon Rouge should not be difficult to come by. In that sense they're not dissimilar from the Kung Fu Manuals and Charles Atlas supplements so popular in the 1970s. Promises of power and strength are just as popular as promises of money, and the lure in each case is that you don't really need to work hard to get what you want. You just have to practice the ritual.

However it was punishable by law to own a devilish grimoire, so their owners kept them secret. If found, the authorities might burn them. In any case they were mass-produced, not elaborate, well-made medieval missals. Time would crumble them quickly enough. Collectors can still find 19th century copies if they look for them, but there aren't many survivors from the thousands upon thousands that came off the presses.

Again, not unlike comic books. There's a reason why those old comics are worth millions, and it's not their intrinsic value as an art form or their genre-breaking storylines. They were made to be read, by kids, and then thrown away. They were cheaply printed, not made to last. Even the ones that were kept weren't stored properly. They just fell to bits, over time. The surviving copies are worth money because there are so few of them.

The big difference is while there are many out there who want near mint copies of Batman #1 there are very few interested in mint copies of The Dragon Rouge.

The Dracula Dossier makes a point of distinguishing the Dragon Noir from its better-known progenitor the Dragon Rouge by saying the Noir wasn't printed but hand-crafted, its illustrations not woodcuts but hand-drawn images. This preserves its rarity value; if it's scarce, it must be powerful, neh?

That sounds awfully like marketing talk to me. "This? Oh, it's very rare. Very valuable. Not like its mass-market cousin, oh no. See the hand stitching? The delicate penmanship? I'll have to charge you extra, friend - it's only fair." Meanwhile there's stacks of Dragon Rouge out back on a pallet waiting for the shipper. 

Which fits the timeline. Remember, Dragon Rouge is an iteration of the Grand Grimoire. Rouge doesn't really become a thing until the 1820s, and is very popular in the mid-to-late-19th century. If Noir is an iteration of Rouge, then it probably didn't exist until the 19th century. So why is it trying to look like a much older book? Simples! Rarity = value, and the more old-timey it looks the easier it is to make the customer think it's rare. Again, comic books - all those 1990s variant covers, published specifically for collectors to go nuts over.

Why own one of these? Nobody summons Satan for his garlic dip recipe. It's all about the money, specifically gold and lost treasures. If someone goes trotting out to Dracula's castle at midnight with a gibbous moon overhead and an occult book in their hand, it's because they think they'll find sweet, sweet loot. Not a long-dead Wallachian with a blood fixation.

The obvious comedy value of a magic chicken is easily ignored if there are golden eggs at the end of the trail. Any other lure - it might be sex, it might be political power - pales in comparison to gold. There are other devils you can summon up if you want victory in war. Lucifer is all about the Benjamins. 

So all that said what to do with the Dragon Rouge?

Let's gamify this by putting it into a joint Bookhounds-Dossier mini-campaign. The first session is 1930s, the next 1970s during the mole hunt, the last modern day.

The 1930s section will take place in a bookshop. I'm not going to go into great detail about the shop, as that's something best dealt with between you and your players. For purposes of this example I'm going to call it du Bourg's. 

du Bourg's learns of the Dragon Noire through its usual means, and discovers that a friend of the store desires it. Obtaining the book may be a Windfall. As luck would have it a copy is allegedly for sale, but the vendor is a disreputable German recently arrived in London who claims to have obtained it from the estate of a nobleman who died in the Great War and whose family has fallen on hard times. Rumor has it the book is stolen property.

The German, Jan Lachs, says he will offer the book up for private auction to be held at an East End pub. A local Rough Lad, Oscar 'Mutton' Burley, will host it. Several people on the occult fringes have expressed an interest, and one or two of them have deep pockets. 

The pub, The Grapes, is in one of the rougher parts of Limehouse so those attending need to be careful how they get there. Cursory inspection notices several Rough Lads hanging around the public bar being very circumspect about how much they drink - clearly security, probably hired by Mutton. They're not organized but they will check everyone going upstairs to the meet for weapons.

The ones actually on the door seem dazed, confused - perhaps drugged. The reason for this becomes clear when the Hounds go inside and find Mutton dead, exsanguinated, along with any early bidders who arrived before the Hounds did. Jan Lachs is nowhere to be seen, and neither is the book.

A quick questioning (Interrogation, Intimidation, Flattery, core clue) of the people downstairs discovers that someone matching Lachs' description was last seen vanishing down a dark alley 'like Hell was on his heels.' He did have something in a parcel - the book, perhaps?

A Hound with sharp eyes notices that one of the people in the bar (it might be a Rough Lad, it might be one of the drinkers, it might be one of the occultists interested in the book) has a peculiar mark on their right wrist, a weal that is, as they notice it, bleeding. Occult knows that those deep in the mysteries might have a Satanic patron, or belong to some kind of cult, and this is one of their marks. [In fact, this is either a fully-paid-up member of the Satanic Cult of Dracula or one of their many servants.]

The Hounds now have three goals:

• Find out who killed Mutton.
• Find Jan Lachs, and hopefully the book.
• Find out why this book is important enough to kill for.

Complicating factor: one of the people who wants the book is convinced it will help him discover a cache of lost loot, buried somewhere in London by Dracula when he was here last. While not strictly an antagonist, this character will go out of his way to make life difficult for the Hounds. If the Director hasn't got someone in mind for this role, use Clarence Inkpen.

Moving on from the 1930s we go to the 1970s, and the mole hunt. 

The nature of this section will change depending on whether the agents are with Edom or are freelancers. If freelancers, then they are hired by one of the Dossier's 1970s people, or the latest Legacy. Naturally the 1970s person is their younger self, not the version seen in the Dossier. 

The agents' employer discovers that an obscure unsolved murder which happened in Limehouse back in the 1930s may have had something to do with a missing copy of the Dragon Noir, and the agents are tasked with following up.

The Grapes, which I'll reimagine as a Mods bar complete with frippery and scooters, hasn't much to offer at first glance. However there are two potential leads:

• a moldering old codger who always drops in for his pint of mild the same time every day was there on the night in question. [It might even be Clarence, if he survived the original scenario.]
• The rooms on the upper floor are rumored to be haunted, and for once those rumors have some truth to them.
• The exact nature of the haunting will depend on the nature of the vampires in your campaign, so I shan't detail it here. It might be bleeding walls, it might be Mutton clanking chains and moaning, it might be time dilations or creatures hiding behind every mirrored surface.
• Bonus: Ian McKellen, at this point a jobbing actor with headline roles at Stratford and soon to make his Broadway debut, might appear in a Grapes scene. 

Further research (library archives, old police reports, possibly auction records, core clue) discovers that the antiquarian booksellers du Bourg's were somehow involved, and as luck would have it the bookshop still exists. One or two of the Hounds may still be alive, doddering old wrecks in the back room who enjoy a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.

Things get unexpectedly messy when one of the people the agents have questioned (the codger, the landlord/barman/customer at the Grapes, one of the booksellers at du Bourg's) turns up murdered in a back alley shortly after the agents talk to them. The killer's easily found, a heavily tattooed and leather-jacketed Rocker who says they got in an argument. In fact the Rocker was currying favor with the Satanic Brotherhood and was told to do it. The lawyer who ensures the Rocker gets away with the minimal penalty is also a minion of the Brotherhood, distinguishable by his fancy signet ring.

The agents now have three goals:

• find out what happened to the Dragon Noir back in the 1930s, and if it's available, recover it.
• find out why someone apparently so obscure had to be brutally murdered.
• find out what really happened to Jan Lachs back in the 1930s. The Hounds may have their version, but even if Lachs ended up dead did he stay buried? Where did Lachs get the book from, anyway?

Complicating factor: the Mole also wants to get his hands on the Dragon Noir, presumably to hand it off to his Conspiracy backers - or perhaps its some complicated double-bluff designed to throw off the mole hunt.

Additional complicating factor: the events of the 1930s spawned feral vampires, and some of them are still hanging around, trying not to get staked.

In the modern version Sir Ian McKellen now owns the Grapes, and his wizard's staff from Lord of the Rings hangs over the bar. du Bourg's may or may not exist - probably not, or at least not in its original location which in London's heated property market is worth more than the store and all its contents. du Bourg's may have become an exclusively online presence, with warehouses out in North London.

Whatever happened to the Dragon Noir back in the 1970s, it's lost again. Perhaps it's misfiled on a dusty shelf in the Ring's library, or in some collector's den. It's a very mobile McGuffin.

The action begins when a suspected foreign agent working for [insert agency here, preferably one of the other vampire programs] turns up dead after a meal and a pint at the Grapes. It's supposedly a straightforward heart attack but forensic investigation discovers the incident was drug-induced. 

As an added complication, the foreign agent was last seen talking to [Important Person - a Legacy, or one of Edom's Dukes]. The [Important Person] claims that the agent wanted to know the current whereabouts of the Dragon Noir, and as [Important Person] didn't know that was the end of the conversation. Or so they say.

Further investigation of the dead agent's fancy phone (core clue) discovers a cache of documents concerning Jan Lachs, which confirms everything the 1970s agents may have found out about Lachs and further claims that Lachs was a catspaw for Germany's Unternehmen Braun and was intimately involved with Projekt Mandragora - whatever that is. Lachs went off-script and fled for reasons unknown, and the Germans were very keen to get hold of him back in the 1930s. If the German program still exists then they're just as keen now as they were then. 

For that matter Alraune may also be interested in Lachs, assuming Alraune is part of your campaign narrative.

The agents are put on the case either by Edom or by a Mysterious Employer, and if the latter then that Employer is probably that same 1970s character as before, only older.

The agents have three tasks:

• Find out who this foreign agent really was, and who they were really working for.
• Explore the agent's connection with [Important Person] and find out whether [Important Person] was behind the agent's death.
• If [Important Person] didn't kill the agent, who did?
• Since everyone seems interested in the Dragon Noir, best to recover it from wherever-it-is ... for safekeeping, of course. This may mean breaking-and-entry; it certainly will mean researching the 1970s incident, and by extension the 1930s incident.

Complicating factors: all the complicating factors from the 1970s reappear, if they weren't dealt with before. The feral vampires, the haunting at the Grapes, all of them resurface.

Complicating factor: remember that treasure Clarence Inkpen was after back in the 1930s? Someone else is just as keen to get it now, and thinks they need the Dragon Noir to find it. This person might be a great-grand niece or nephew of Inkpen, or might be a suitable 1970s person (the psychic, say). 

Complicating factor (modern): the dead agent's agency wants to know how their agent ended up on a mortuary slab in London.

Potential Time Dilation: this game is spread over several decades but has several locations in common: the Grapes, du Bourg's (even if it's an office conversion in the modern day, the building still exists), possibly other locations like a morgue, Ring, and so on depending on the events of your campaign. One capstone would be to have the 1930s, 1970s and modern day characters all interact with the same location at the same time of day on the same date, thus crossing over each other. They, and one or more of the complicating factors, could all jostle for position in, say, the Grapes, crossing paths and timelines both. 

At the heart of it all is the Dragon Noir, that mysterious McGuffin that everyone's been after for so long. Is it real? A fake? Does it have special significance for the Conspiracy or is it merely a red herring? Now is the time to find out.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

It's a Living - Super Yachts (Night's Black Agents)

I've mentioned super yachts before, and they're covered in the Resource Guide as a potential Location. Bloomberg recently released one of its puff pieces, Wild Superyacht Secrets I Learned When I Became a Deckhand. 

Bloomberg is a pay-to-play site so you may not have access, but there's limited free access and for all I know you're already subscribed to Bloomberg, so here's the article. I'm going to quote from it but shan't post the entire thing. It's fluffy light reading. Brandon Presser is the author.

The Resource Guide has this to say about super yachts:

A “typical” superyacht is 50 meters or more in length, but bigger, more impressive examples can be three or four times bigger. These are the playthings and status symbols of the wealthy, and are outfitted with all sorts of luxuries and opulent facilities. Money is rarely an object here – the yachts are made to reflect the personality of the owner, so one might have a swimming pool and a cocktail bar, another a state-of-the-art satellite communications center and secure offices, and another might have a secret temple to the blood god Zalmoxis and a moon pool for dumping bodies to the sharks ...

The bits in the Bloomberg article that caught my eye are:

Privacy doesn’t exist

A good yachtie isn’t seen or heard—but they see and hear everything. Earpieces, radios, and cameras help keep a constant eye on guests, all feeding back to a control room.

When guests are seen leaving for breakfast, the stewards (or stews, for short) are immediately deployed to the guest rooms to clean. When someone picks mushrooms out of an omelet, the chef makes a note to tweak the dish the next morning ...

Sometimes you need a second boat for prostitutes

Prostitutes are a different story. “We see day-use girlfriends on other boats all the time,” says Christopher Sawyer, the Bella’s chef, “especially in the Med.” He’s even witnessed big spenders fill a secondary superyacht with women to trail the lead vessel, swapping them on and off—10 at a time—throughout the course of several days.

Often a yacht will be rented for two weeks: the first for the family, the second for bachelor party-esque antics. I’ll tell you about the crazy land-bound shopping sprees in a bit—they’re often the wives’ revenge ...

It's all about the tips

When a boat is being chartered, the unspoken rule is for the renter—called the “primary”—to tip each crew member 1% of the total weekly rental cost. For the Bella, which costs $220,000 for seven days (not including food, fuel, and dockage), staff can plan on pocketing at least $2,200 each. The number can be far higher if a group leaves behind what’s left of their food and fuel deposit—30% of the total trip cost—and it’s dispersed to staff. A great summer in the Med could bring in $50,000 worth of tips per person, and then there are those elusive one-off charters where yachties hit it big with a $10,000 bonus.

Incidentally for those out there thinking that renting a super yacht must be easier than buying one, technically you're correct, but take a look at these per-week prices. At the cheap end something like 150,000 Euro, for a 50-m boat. At the more expensive end, half a million per week for an 82-m boat. 

So if your agents get a hankerin' for something different, they'd better have Excessive Funds or a compliant sugar daddy. Even the CIA would blink at half a million a week for a fancy show boat.

James Bond picks up just such a sugar daddy in the short story collection For Your Eyes Only. In The Hildebrand Rarity, parts of which show up in the film License To Kill, insanely wealthy sadist Milton Krest invites Bond aboard his swanky yacht on an expedition to find a near-extinct fish, which Krest intends to poison and preserve for his collection. It's one of the rare Bonds without a spy story; Krest is just a rich man, not a megalomaniac in search of world domination. The ship scenes are well-thought-out but infrequent. 

The film is stagey, but probably more effective from a spy thriller POV.

Let's go back to the Bloomberg article. Picture the world it paints. Everybody knows everybody's business. Not just the captain and chief officers; the least stew knows your every move. Everybody's on the make. You don't earn those tips by being slow. Faces change all the time. Here one week, gone the next. It's a job for the young, particularly if you're a woman since the industry is extremely gendered and you can age out as a yachtie at much the same rate Hollywood actresses do. 

If you're wondering what you might expect on board, let me borrow from Wikipedia:

Yachts above 60 metres (200 ft) are typically built to individual specifications, cost tens of millions of dollars, and typically have four decks above the waterline and one or two below. There is likely to be a helicopter landing platform. Apart from additional guest cabins, which are likely to include one or more "VIP suites" besides the owner's suite, such a yacht will have some or all of the following amenities: indoor hot tubs, sauna and steam rooms, a beauty salon, massage and other treatment rooms, a medical centre, a disco (usually the same space as the sky lounge or saloon, transformed into a dance area when furnishings are moved aside and special lighting activated), a cinema, plunge pool (possibly with a wave-maker), a playroom, and additional living areas such as a separate bar, secondary dining room, private sitting rooms or a library.

Superyachts may be accompanied by a support (or shadow) vessel that carries such items as watercraft, helicopters or other large items that the yacht, itself, cannot readily accommodate. Such vessels range in length from 20 to 100 metres (66 to 328 ft) ... 

So that extremely intimate floating world has plenty of quiet corners to get lost in, but all of those corners have cameras and there are attentive staff hovering on your heels wherever you go. 

Double Tap divvies up Establishing Shots like these into Extras and Cameos, Clues, Rules Effects, In A Fight and In A Chase. So:

Extras and Cameos: Gym Rat (eye candy), bodyguard, civilian (plaything), civilian (stew/crew), civilian (billionaire), charismatic politician or celebrity, far less charismatic celebrity on a coke binge, talented C-list celeb chef/dancer/singer on hire for the week.

Clues.  That pretty young stew Tiffany isn't around any more; is she on the support boat? Somewhere else? Erratic, sinister mumbling from the coke binge celeb. Gym Rat's looking awfully pale and lethargic. A snippet of security camera footage shows something unpleasant. The stews complain that no matter what they try the stains in the disco will not go away. That portrait really is a [insert artist here], allegedly stolen from [museum] - how did it get here?

Rules Effects. Spending a point of Flattery buys the short-term loyalty of any stew. Also, you can find almost anything aboard this boat, so Preparedness test Difficulty drops by 1. However, it's not easy to sneak around when everyone's watching and there are more security cameras than the average prison, so Infiltration Difficulty increases by 1.

In A Fight: Almost every room has something you can use as an improvised weapon, and some of them have actual weapons; antique swords hung on the wall, say, or guns in so-called hidden compartments. That's before you consider the undeniable attraction of braining someone with a Picasso. Hiding the body is more of a problem, if you're going for a stealth run. There's plenty of places to hide the body, but you've got to avoid being spotted by those pesky cameras to get the job done.

In A Chase: Ranges from Normal to Cramped, depending on which room you're in. Obstacles include everything from naked wealthy passengers to fancy tables and chairs in the dining room and an unexpected dip in the plunge pool. Plus, what's really in that playroom? Enquiring minds want to know. 

Rounding it off, let's have a Thrilling Interrogation.

From the Resource Guide, a Thrilling Interrogation models the interrogation of a subject where they’re trying to hold out for as long as possible. They might be concealing some vital (but not core) clue.

Now, that assumes one subject. Let's play with multiple subjects: those all-seeing Stews.

Assume the agents want to know what happened aboard the Kismet [whenever it may have been]. The agents have reason to believe something significant happened, but don't know precisely what. They'll need to piece it together from multiple eyewitness accounts, but for that to happen they'll need to track down all those eyewitnesses - wherever they may be. Stews migrate. One might be in Monaco, another in the Bahamas, a third in Florida and so on. Track down enough Stews and successfully interrogate them to win the Thrilling Interrogation.

So where the standard interrogation is one target in one room, this interrogation is multiple targets in different locations, all of them Open for interrogation purposes. Assume a base pool of 12 for the Stews as a whole, and starting Lead of 5 or 7 depending on how difficult you want this to be. Allow the agents the option of bumping their Chase ability with Investigative spends, particularly Flattery and High Society since most of these interrogations will take place in high-end locales.

For a Swerve, assume Conspiracy mooks have caught up with the Stew and will silence them unless the agent intervenes. If the agent successfully defends the target they cut the Lead.

If the agents reduce Lead to 0 then they find out what happened aboard the Kismet. If Lead increases to 10 then they'll never be sure what happened, but maybe they picked up a couple tantalizing hints.

As a potential extra, if Lead = 0 then the players unlock a bonus scene where they play out the events aboard the Kismet on the night in question. The players take on the role of those Stews and other passengers, and the Director gets to cut loose safe in the knowledge that if it's a bloodbath nobody of any consequence ends up dead.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Source Material: American Decades

I spend a lot of time talking about RPG materials, and not nearly as much time talking about inspiration. Today I'm recommending a book series: American Decades, published by Gale Research. Various authors and editors, but the copy I have in my hands is 1930-39 edited by Victor Bondi. I also have the 1920-29 and the 1980-89.

I first discovered these back when I was working on the Prohibition supplement for Call of Cthulhu. I was working on that in the happy carefree pre-Wikipedia era, and you might think that the internet has supplanted books like these. Well, you're right - to a degree. So long as you don't mind floundering in a sea of links and seemingly unrelated tangents, or relying on what might turn out to be a poorly researched YouTube rant.

Price tag varies. Amazon alleges you can get these new for stupid money, but you don't need new. You need second-hand, ex-library copies. Mine comes courtesy of the Johnson County Library, wherever that is. Ex-library can be had for less than $10 plus shipping. 

Why recommend this series? There must be other, better sources, right? Again, yes - to a degree.

I'm recommending these as a solid first stop for any project set in the US. It's not a deep-dive. It covers everything from world events, politics and the economy to fashion, lifestyle, media and sports. It's the whole package, 600-700 pages long.

So if you're thinking about a scenario idea that involves, say, sports, and you know very little about what sports were popular in the 1930s, American Decades can give you the basics, and also short biographies of important people active in that field at that time. It's not exhaustive, but it doesn't have to be. All it has to do is give you a starting point. You can conduct any follow-up research yourself.  

From the Sports section: 

America's Queen of Bowling

Never too late. America's greatest woman bowler in the 1930s was thirty-five before she even bowled her first game in 1923 - but Colorado's Floretta Doty McCutcheon kept getting better and better at it. By 1927 she was beginning to secure her reputation with a series of high-scoring games and exhibitions, and on 18 December she defeated world champion Jimmy Smith in a challenge match, making sports headlines across the country. When she went on tour for the Brunswick Corporation a year later, she was already something of a legend. She told women they could begin bowling at almost any age and in any physical shape.

Role model. Throughout the 1930s she continued to bowl professionally; she also gave free lessons at bowling alleys around the country and through the Mrs. McCutcheon School of Bowling, sponsored by local newspapers. She toured from 1930 to her retirement in 1938, organizing leagues and teaching classes for high school and college students. She saw bowling as one sport in which men and women could compete equally ...

OK, hands up if you'd ever heard of Floretta McCutcheon before now. Put those hands down, you fibbers. 

That's where this book comes in handy. No matter how much of a polymath you believe yourself to be there's always something you don't know. Like Helene Mayer, the Jewish German fencer who fled Germany for the US to avoid persecution, and fenced for Germany in the 1936 Olympics. Or the Rhens, a black basketball team from Harlem, New York, the best team in the sport between 1932 to 1936. Or Hold That Co-Ed, a 1938 film in which a girl dresses up as a boy to win a football game.

But OK, you cry, Wikipedia exists. Why get this when I have that for free?

Well, why do you buy Investigators' Handbooks? Players Guides? Keeper's Kits? You buy those things to have all those period details together in one place so you don't vanish down a clickhole of entwined links when all you want to know is what speakeasies were like. That's why you need these books.

Probably the best thing about American Decades - incredibly cheap on the secondhand market, I reiterate, maybe $6-7 per plus shipping - from a Cthulhuhounds' perspective is the series divides itself up into decades. Playing Fall of Delta Green? Get 1960-69 for maybe $9. Trail of Cthulhu? 1930-39 is maybe $5 on the second hand market. 

Will it cover every possible topic in exhaustive detail? God no. But in 600-700 pages it will cover most topics in some detail, and give you leads that you might not have found otherwise.

It doesn't do Victoriana, which is a shame. Its earliest volume is 1900, which by its nature must cover some 1890s material but not in any kind of detail. The latest volume goes to 2009, but TBH I doubt most of you will need that. 

Put it to you this way. If you're coming to Call, Trail, Fall, or any of the other Cthulhu variants for the first time and you want to run games, or write them, then you want something like this in your research library. It won't be the last book you buy. God no. But it will be one you turn to time and again when you want to remind yourself what the politics were like then, or the technology, or what was in the news, or who was important in, say, the film business.

It's a solid first step. It's cheap. Plus, it's big enough to use as a doorstop. 

Bonus!

Snatching Auntie (Night's Black Agents)

 Last week I talked about how to start a campaign and this week I want to expand on that, drawing on Auntie's War by Edward Stourton.

I'm going to talk more about that book for YSDC, but the short version is Stourton has put together an exemplary history of the BBC during WWII. Highly recommended, but I'm not going to talk about the War here. Instead I want to dwell a little on an experience he recounts in the Introduction.

Auntie periodically insists that those of us who travel a lot attend what is called a HEFAT course - Hostile Environment and First Aid Training - at which you learn the sort of skills you hope you will never have to use; if you suffer a sucking chest wound from shrapnel, I'm your man. The courses are usually held in some hideous Home Counties mansion with dark shrubberies - rather the sort of place one can imagine being sent for special ops training during the Second World War in fact ... One of the tricks in the HEFAT team repertoire involves a post-prandial stroll across the lawn. You can admire the pretty countryside, and chat with your colleagues and tutors as you walk, but the Home Counties peace is suddenly interrupted by a burst of automatic gunfire, and you are expected to dive under the nearest rhododendron bush. Once the game is over you very often find that, when seeking cover, you have rushed towards the source of the fire rather than away from it; it is surprisingly difficult to identify where bullets are coming from when you are taken by surprise ... 

Imagine being a journalist on that course. Drawing further from information supplied by the International Women's Media Foundation, HEFAT courses look a little like this:

Now, let's go one step further and gamify this.

There will be some changes depending on whether the agents are with, or against, EDOM, but the short version is that the agents are tasked with infiltrating a HEFAT course, snatching a specific journalist and conducting a interrogation on-site. The objective is to find out what the journalist knows about [whatever it may be - presumably a McGuffin or a Node], and a secondary objective is to discover whether the journalist has been co-opted by the Conspiracy. Perhaps the journalist is infected; perhaps they're a Renfield.

So the snatch has very specific parameters. It needs to happen in a particular place. It needs to look as if it's all part of the course. The interrogation needs to happen very quickly, since the idea is to return the journalist to the course as if nothing has happened. In the best case scenario the snatch and interrogation take place and yet nobody - not even the target - knows it's happened. The target assumes the whole business was part of the course, and the people running the course think the journalist was out of pocket for, maybe, half an hour, perhaps because they wandered off somewhere unexpected. If the agents are particularly cunning one of their own might impersonate the journalist for the necessary half-hour, meaning that the HEFAT course operators don't even notice the journalist is missing.

All this is taking place at Stourton's hideous Home Counties mansion with dark shrubberies, which in this narrative may or may not be an EDOM asset. Lord knows EDOM's probably collected quite a few hideous Home Counties mansions over the years. It might even be Ring, depending on your campaign. Whether or not it is Ring is up to you as Director, but even if it isn't it probably shares some characteristics with the former Holmwood estate.

The Dossier has this to say about one version of Ring:

The house is two stories tall, built in a rough J or hook shape; the north wing is mostly disused and remotely monitored. The upper floor of the south wing has 14 rooms; the ground floor somewhat fewer ... Power comes from a generator in the old coach house. Ring incorporates 100 acres of parkland, no longer maintained and therefore gone somewhat to seed ... 

That sounds about right for the HEFAT facility. Impressive looking, but a fair-sized chunk of the property is essentially unmonitored except by remote viewing, and it's likely nobody's tasked with watching those cameras full-time. Someone might hack those cameras, or pick a route that avoids them altogether, so the journalist can be brought to the interrogation chamber. Perhaps that's a basement, perhaps it's some forgotten bedroom. Whatever or wherever it may be, the furniture (if there is any) is covered in dropcloths and there's a strong stink of rat.

Again drawing on the Dossier, the Journalist:

Paula Teague, mid-40s, chain-smoking cigarettes, rumpled clothes. 

As the Runner, the Journalist would use Stability as a chase ability. NPCs generally don't have Stability pools, so I'd assume a base pool of 8 for the encounter - tough but not impossible. 

The interrogation is Open, so I'd add 2 to the Journalist's Lead. The Runner is trained to resist interrogation (that's what the HEFAT course is for, after all), so the Runner gets +1 Maneuver. This might increase by +2 if the Journalist is under vampiric control (total +3).

The Agents start with +2 Maneuver and are using Shrink as their chase ability. 

Whoever has the higher Maneuver adds the difference to their roll. Assuming +2 Agents, +1 Journalist, then the Agents add +1 to their roll. If there's vampiric influence, increasing the runner's total to +3, the Journalist might add +1 to their roll.

Either the runner gets to Lead 10 and escapes - which in context means they outlast the agents and have to be let go - or the pursuers get to Lead 0 and get the information they want. I'd either start at Lead 5 or 7 depending on how challenging I want to be to the agents. This is an opening scenario after all; presumably it's better for the game long-term if they get the information, but at the same time it might be better to make the agents sweat.

In broad terms, it goes like this:

Snatching Auntie

Start with: the agents are already at the HEFAT facility and are about the snatch the Journalist.  

Next moment: the agents have snatched the journalist and are taking them to the interrogation room.

Next moment: the Thrilling Interrogation begins.

At the same time: whatever cover the agents have dreamed up is beginning to unravel. Maybe the HEFAT organizers notice the Journalist is missing, or someone else on the course unexpectedly wanders a little too close to the interrogation room. The agents have to deal with this problem or the Journalist will get a free Swerve Lead bump.

Possible Swerve: Flashback In which the characters play through a significant event in the Journalist's life, as if it was actually happening now. That nightmarish moment in Fallujah, the strange conversation in a bar in Bonn, whatever it may be. Successful resolution of the scene (definition of success being in the hands of the Director) gets the Pursuers a bump, or the runner a Lead bump.

Next moment: the Thrilling Interrogation concludes.

Final moment: the agents return the Journalist and make their escape, hopefully without being spotted.

Throughout the whole process the agents are in no immediate danger. They might not even see a hint of a vampire, or anything to do with the Conspiracy. Still, if ever there was a time to make them sweat a little ...

Enjoy!

GEN CON, Vampires! So Many Vampires!

 Just a quick note to let you folks know I'm going to run three Pelgrane games for GenCon Online this year. One per day for three days straight, and it'll be over Discord.

I'll post more details here closer to the time. Just wanted to let you know it's upcoming and will be a blast! Each game will be Night's Black Agents, and since I don't want this post to be tooo short ...

Movie Recommendation: Blood Red Sky (German, subtitled, Netflix). Terrorists hijack a plane bound for New York, only to discover that one of the passengers objects. Violently objects. 

Brilliant, fast-paced, not a moment wasted on bullshit. If it's plot-relevant, it's in. Characters are well-thought-out and even the assholes aren't wasted.

Plus, that ending. O MY SWEET JEBUS.

Enjoy, and I hope to see you (virtually) at GenCon!

 

Where To Begin ... (GUMSHOE All)

In Medias Res: A narrative work beginning in medias res (Classical Latin: [ɪn ˈmɛdɪ.aːs ˈreːs], lit. "into the middle of things") opens in the midst of the plot. Often, exposition is bypassed and filled in gradually, through dialogue, flashbacks or description of past events. For example, Hamlet begins after the death of Hamlet's father. Characters make reference to the King's death without the plot's first establishment of said fact. [Wikipedia]

RPG scenarios tend to start with a prologue. Delta Green, Esoterrorists and similar often begin with the agents' handler - Ms. Green, let's say - explaining the basic plot, location and suspected opposition forces in a briefing. That briefing might take place in some nondescript government offices, a cheap motel room, an airport conference room - bland, inoffensive, non-threatening. 

In fantasy settings the trope is 'we all meet at a tavern.' There is a brief moment when the group is not a Group. They meet. In a tavern. Awkwardness ensues, introductions are made, then off to fight the whatever-it-may-be. 

This made a certain amount of sense before session zero became standard. Players often created their characters on their own and brought them to the table. The tavern was the first moment the other players got to meet Humphrey Gobbletoes, Halfling Rogue and fetishist. However, if everyone made their characters together in session zero then most of the players should have an idea who their fellow characters are.

When possible, I prefer starting with action.

Touch of Evil, Orson Welles

Starting with action in a TTRPG context has special challenges. In a film, there's usually only one or two main characters so the focus can be on them from the moment the film starts. In a TTRPG setting there can be six or more main characters, so the focus has to be split six ways. 

Consider Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949), a crime thriller set in post-war Tokyo (or, as Kurosawa would have put it, modern day). It tells the story of green recruit Homicide Detective Murakami, whose police-issue Colt has been stolen by a pickpocket while Murakami was on a crowded bus. The plot opens with shamed and fearful Murakami admitting to his boss that his gun has been stolen, and he has no excuse for what happened. 

You couldn't do the same thing with a group of six. Either five characters stand off to one side while one of them admits the deed, or all six have their Colts stolen - which might work in Toon, but not elsewhere.

No, whatever the situation is all the players have to be in it up to their necks. That means they share the scene, whatever it is, and it has equal weight for all of them.

Equal weight is key. If there is a physical threat, it hurts all of them. If there is a problem, it affects all of them. Otherwise some players begin the plot less invested than others, and if they start that way they will probably stay that way.

They don't have to have the same goals. A zombie scenario can start with a bunch of cops chasing a bunch of bad guys into the cemetery, abandoned warehouse or what-have-you. The cops and bad guys start with diametrically opposed goals and might end the scenario trying to meet those same goals. But the problem is the zombies, and it affects all of them equally. 

Let's talk about some possibilities and map them to GUMSHOE titles.

Night's Black Agents (Vanilla). Opening Location: Airport. Task: Snatch Job. The agents are tasked with bringing in, alive, a person of interest to their employer. Opening Moment: the Snatch went ahead as planned and they have the person of interest. Unfortunately whatever means they had in mind to subdue or render the target unconscious didn't work (let the players say why that happened) so the target is very much alive and kicking. Starting Heat: 4, increasing to 6 if the target gets a chance to yell.

Night's Black Agents (Dracula Dossier) Opening Location: Abandoned Castle, possibly even Castle Dracula. Task: Recovery. The agents are tasked with obtaining an item of importance to Edom and returning it to their employer, whoever that may be. Opening Moment: the agents are precisely one room away from their prize when they realize heavily armed OPFOR got to the castle first and are searching the place. The OPFOR may be a rival agency (Edom, Israel's Sayeret Aluka, the US' Find Forever team, similar) or may be a vampiric Node, but either way a head-to-head is inadvisable. First because it's dangerous, and second because even if it works the armed forces of whichever nation the Castle is in will descend on the place guns blazing if large portions of the Castle go up like a C4-inspired volcano.

In both instances the key thing is to give the agents a job to do and an immediate threat to deal with. Sure, there's an employer. We don't need to know who that is in the opening scene. It may already have been covered in session zero; the agents are all working for, say, the Mysterious Monseigneur. Or it may be left undefined, to be determined later in a flashback. The point of this scene isn't to dump a few tons of exposition. The point is to get them into the action by getting them into the core activity of the game. Since the core activity is thrilling spy stuff, hit them with thrilling spy stuff. 

Bookhounds of London. Opening Location: small village outside London. This allows a fish-out-of-water comedy element. Task: looking for rarities at a house sale. Opening Moment: The Hounds are out of their element in a village on market day and have just spotted a rarity - Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician, unauthorized edition 1642 with additions not sponsored by the author) using scientific imagery to illustrate religious truths. The village doctor had a copy, somewhat foxed but well worth repairing. Apparently the old fellow recently keeled over and his replacement is clearing out his belongings. Some seedy looking oik also eyes the manuscript, for unknown reasons. How to get the book from the new doctor without running foul of the oik? There's the rub.

Again, giving the characters something to do but this time there's no potential combat (unless someone punches the oik). There is a prize on offer and if they're successful they take away the prize - though they may earn themselves an enemy. The oik could be a nobody, a necromancer, or anything in between. It pays the Hounds to be a little cautious, but too cautious and they'll lose the prize.

Mutant City Blues (PI) Opening Location: the local precinct. Task: bailing the client out of the drunk tank. Opening Moment: when the PIs realize they have to get their client out of the precinct with as little fuss as possible. It's not often you have to bail your client out of the drunk tank but so far this case is a real winner, all right. You endure the cops' jeers and throw a few back of your own, as you lead the Long Journey's bassist out the back to avoid the press. Turns out that wasn't such a smart call, as the girlfriend's lying in wait with her new toy on hand to film the whole thing. What's a struggling PI to do?

The characters have something to do, and it's not immediately about Mutant Powers - but depending on the skill set the girl friend, her new toy, or any of the media out front might have superpowered ways and means of making this even more complicated than it already is. We haven't discussed why the PI is working for the bassist because we don't need to - not yet, anyway.

One last pitch.

Esoterrorists.  Six people on a subway train. A house husband. A teenager. A retiree. A cop. A cheating girlfriend. A thug. The train stops ten minutes out from the next station. The Train Operator's announcement is a garble of static. The lights go off.

Short, simple and to-the-point. Some of these six are going to end up recruited into the Ordo Veritatis. Some may end up dead. The next few hours will be make or break - and unforgettable.

Enjoy!