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.
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?
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 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!
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