Nights Black Agents - Hauntings

It's that ghostly time of year, when the subconscious dwells uneasily in shadowy corners and obsesses over things which should not be.

I've discussed Hauntings before in connection with Bookhounds, and I've mentioned them in connection with NBA too. At that time I said:

I gave these guidelines for Bookhounds ghosts, or spirits of place:

• The truth of the haunting will probably never be known for certain, since most of the facts are unavailable.
• It cannot be dealt with in the same way as, say, an ordinary antagonist encounter. Ghouls, for example, can be shot, or bargained with. There is no way to communicate with a haunting of place, and probably no way to kill it.
• It has a great deal of power behind it, possibly magical power. That means other people besides the protagonists are going to be interested in it. That also means it could be very dangerous.

I'd modify them for Night's Black Agents, as follows:

• The truth of the haunting must be linked to the Vampire background. If vampires in your game are mutant creations of science, then ghosts should have a scientific background as well. A Satanic vampire game has Satanic ghosts, and so on.
• It cannot be dealt with in the same way as an ordinary antagonist encounter. Ghouls can be shot or bargained with, but ghosts don't have the same weaknesses. Bargaining may be possible, but difficult.
• It has power behind it, but that power is going to depend on the method of its creation. It ought never to be as powerful as, say, a Renfield, let alone a vampire. This isn't a major player; it's a mood piece, possibly even a booby trap.
• These ghosts can be defeated but probably not destroyed, in the same sense that vampires can be defeated, but can come back from the grave. 

In NBA vampires come in four delicious favors: mutant, supernatural, damned, alien. What kind of ghost stories can be told with the same premise?

So with all that in mind, let's talk about some concrete examples.

Before I do, I just want to briefly talk about a phenomenon that first appears in the 1900s: the techno ghost.

A techno ghost is something that mirrors or borrows technology but is not necessarily defined by it. A ghost that only exists when heard over the wireless or telephone. The ghost of a car, or plane, or train. A ghost that appears on television, or a film screen. 

When technology is first introduced and is unfamiliar to the general reading public, authors tend to borrow them for spooky background. So, for instance, when the telephone is first introduced but there isn't a telephone in every home, you'll find a few period authors sneaking in phone calls from beyond the grave. Even Stephen King uses a party line in one of his short stories, because he's old enough to remember the last surviving party line telephone systems way wayyy out in the piney woods. 

Similarly when moving pictures were new and most cinemas were basically large tents or village halls repurposed for the night, you'll find short story writers using cinemas as settings. These share the same advantage as that spooky little antique store where you bought that monkey's paw; you'll never find that mobile cinema again, no matter how hard you look. 

A similar mechanic plays out in Japanese horror The Ring.

Sourced from MotelX

I've often wondered just how common VCR tapes were in Japan in the late 1990s. I'm guessing not very; DVD must have taken over by then. It was a very clever move on someone's part. The ghost in that story is fairly traditional, but the method of delivery gives it that special edge. 

The key point being that, like the mobile cinema, you have to have the tape to make the thing work, and tapes are mobile things. You never know where they'll crop up next ...

Anyway, after that brief diversion, the meat of the matter:

Damned: Their markers are holy symbols and spiritualism, their emphasis is seduction.

Roadside Shrine. You probably drive past a few of these on any long car journey. Someone's last moment on earth before the smash, memorialized in fading flowers and drifting plastic. Whoever they are, someone loved them. Still, it's impossible to tell from that blurred photograph who they were or what they were like.

Aberrance 7, Health 8. Alertness +2. Stealth +3 in shadows, +1 in bright light. Free Powers: Unearthly Tread (+2 difficulty to evade), Reflection Only (can only be seen in a reflective surface, like a rear view mirror). Other Powers: Mesmerism (only works if makes eye contact), Drain Heat.

The Shrine spirit is a twisted remnant of a roadside fatality. It might only exist as some faded police tape and chalk marks, or it might be a collection of dying flowers and heartfelt remembrances. The vampires have taken the essence of this death and made it their own, creating a kind of spiritual IED that attaches itself either to the next person to see the shrine, or a specified target (say, via blood and fingernail parings). The spirit attaches itself to its victim at the earliest opportunity and tries to force them, through Mesmerism, into a fatal accident, preferably a road accident. The spirit appears to its victim in a reflective surface, perhaps a mirror or shop window, to make the eye connection. It has no intelligence and very little memory left, but can be persuaded to return to its shrine if fresh blood is spilt at that location.

Alien: Their markers are various uncanny effects; their emphasis is invasion.

Floating Lights. What's that up in the sky? Probably a satellite passing overhead - but those lights are remarkably bright for a satellite. A plane, maybe? Pretty quiet, if it is. A drone, that's it - has to be. 

Aberrance 10, Firearms (light ray) 8, Health 8. Alertness +1. Stealth +4. Free Powers: Infravision, Regeneration (2 points per round). Other Powers: Cloud Men's Minds, Vampiric Speed, Tracking.

Though these can be mistaken for UFOs in fact they are unexpected byproducts of alien infestation. They only appear in places where the vampires have been, and then only for a brief time - perhaps a week, never longer than a month and then only in cases where the vampires have lingered for some time or gathered in great numbers. The jury's out as to whether they're intelligent, parasites or some kind of mobile portal to other dimensions. One thing's for certain: Renfields hate and fear these things. Only Renfields know why, and they're not talking.

Supernatural: Their markers are strange superstitions, their emphasis hunger. 

Mr. Smiles. Doomscroll through your social media feed, and you'll find him. Those peculiar private messages and videos from someone you don't know or recognize. Funny how they only seem to come after an encounter with ... those things. Don't look at the images. Don't listen to the messages. That's how Mr. Smiles gets in.

Aberrance 7, Hand to Hand 10, Health 10. Alertness +3, Stealth +2. Free Powers: Strength, Unfeeling, Spider Climb. Other Powers: Heat Drain, Vampiric Speed.

Mr. Smiles is something the vampires cooked up. It takes a death to summon it, preferably the death of a friend or Network contact. Then those peculiar messages and images start showing up in the target's social media feed. Threatening messages, unpleasant pictures, and even if you scrub your feed obsessively somehow Mr. Smiles, all teeth and gore like a modern-day Raw Head and Bloody Bones, follows you, tracks you down. If he finds you, he'll crawl out from whichever device he's tracked you down on and kill you - dragging whatever's left back into the device. Then Mr. Smiles will make you just like him, and set you after your friends.

Mutant: Their markers are medical symptoms; their emphasis is infection.

Green Oil. Be careful what you step in. Don't let it get on you. If even the slightest drop gets on you it sticks there, propagates, eating away at your shoes, your clothes, turning whatever it can into more of itself. It doesn't like fire, but it's preternaturally clever; it might let you think it's burnt away, and then it slips into your bed at night. 

Aberrance 7, Hand to Hand 10, Health 4. Alertness +2, Stealth +4. Free Powers: Regeneration (2/round), Track by Smell (+2 difficulty evade). Other Powers: Heat Drain (gains points drained as health, effectively creating more of it from whatever it eats)

The oil is a byproduct of vampire kills. A little of it is left behind wherever a vampire feeds, and usually it dies off within a day or two. However if someone picks it up, even the tiniest speck on the sole of someone's shoe, it can use the heat from whatever it's attached to as a food source. That lets it create more of itself, and more, and more. It can grow too large; if it manages to eat a person it generally can't keep its form together and dissipates, but not before infecting the room it dissipates in. This doesn't create more oil, but does create a very unpleasant atmosphere - effectively a 3-point Stability loss for anyone who spends time (longer than 10 minutes) in that area.

That's it for me. Enjoy!

Montague James and the Hounds (Bookhounds of London)

I did say we'd be back to normal this week.

I expect most of you have heard of M.R. James, academic, antiquarian and author of some of the finest ghost stories ever published. For those who haven't, there's plenty of chances to rectify that deficiency; you can even get the books for free on Gutenberg, and there are any number of people doing readings of his work on podcasts and YouTube. OutsideXbox's Luke Westaway is quite good at it, if you have an hour or so to spare. Christopher Lee is even better, but his stuff can be difficult to find.

M.R. James originally created these stories as live performances for his friends at Christmas, a tradition that goes back a long, long way but is probably best remembered through Dickens' Christmas Carol. James then published them to great acclaim, and enjoys the best distinction a writer could hope for; his work is still in print almost a century after his death.

This time out I want to focus on two of his stories and talk about their Bookhounds implications. I shan't spoil. If you haven't read these stories please seek them out.

The first is Martin's Close, first published in 1911's More Ghost Stories.

Some few years back I was staying with the rector of a parish in the West, where the society to which I belong owns property. I was to go over some of this land: and, on the first morning of my visit, soon after breakfast, the estate carpenter and general handyman, John Hill, was announced as in readiness to accompany us. The rector asked which part of the parish we were to visit that morning. The estate map was produced, and when we had showed him our round, he put his finger on a particular spot. 'Don't forget,' he said, 'to ask John Hill about Martin's Close when you get there. I should like to hear what he tells you.' 'What ought he to tell us?' I said. 'I haven't the slightest idea,' said the rector, 'or, if that is not exactly true, it will do till lunch-time.' And here he was called away ...

It transpires there's not just a story, there's a criminal trial.

I made search in the more obvious places. The trial seemed to be nowhere reported. A newspaper of the time, and one or more news-letters, however, had some short notices, from which I learnt that, on the ground of local prejudice against the prisoner (he was described as a young gentleman of a good estate), the venue had been moved from Exeter to London; that Jeffreys had been the judge, and death the sentence, and that there had been some 'singular passages' in the evidence. Nothing further transpired till September of this year. A friend who knew me to be interested in Jeffreys then sent me a leaf torn out of a second-hand bookseller's catalogue with the entry: JEFFREYS, JUDGE: Interesting old MS. trial for murder, and so forth, from which I gathered, to my delight, that I could become possessed, for a very few shillings, of what seemed to be a verbatim report, in shorthand, of the Martin trial.

OK, let's talk about this.

Bookhounds - and horror games in general - sometimes treat manuscripts as though every single one of them's a Necronomicon, bound in human skin and dripping with evil. That's far from being so. People publish anything and everything. Most of it is rubbish. That's why the Hounds are always on the lookout for some unmemorable 18th century tat that they can rip apart and use the binding and papers for something more valuable. However, one man's rubbish is another man's gold. 

Here we have someone who's looking for the transcript of a trial. They can't find a copy anywhere, and it seems there may not be one. Yet by chance a transcript turns up in a second-hand bookseller's shop. It might have been that simple, but James adds an extra hurdle: the text is in the court reporter's shorthand, and not only that but a 17th century version of shorthand. The narrator has to find someone who can translate it so the narrator can have a copy typed out. It's a very neat touch that lends authenticity to the story, and doesn't take more than a sentence to describe.

The second piece is from Two Doctors, which first appears in A Thin Ghost And Others (1920).

It is a very common thing, in my experience, to find papers shut up in old books; but one of the rarest things to come across any such that are at all interesting. Still it does happen, and one should never destroy them unlooked at. Now it was a practice of mine before the war occasionally to buy old ledgers of which the paper was good, and which possessed a good many blank leaves, and to extract these and use them for my own notes and writings. One such I purchased for a small sum in 1911. It was tightly clasped, and its boards were warped by having for years been obliged to embrace a number of extraneous sheets. Three-quarters of this inserted matter had lost all vestige of importance for any living human being: one bundle had not. That it belonged to a lawyer is certain, for it is endorsed: The strangest case I have yet met, and bears initials, and an address in Gray's Inn. It is only materials for a case, and consists of statements by possible witnesses. The man who would have been the defendant or prisoner seems never to have appeared. The dossier is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what you can make of it.

Again, legal papers are the focus of the narrative, but look at how they're introduced. Not even as a manuscript; they're shoved into a ledger and forgotten about, until the narrator picks the ledger up for next to nothing. Three quarters of the inserted matter is useless, which is what's going to happen to the Hounds more often than not; all those bits and bobs they pick up in estate sales and so on, and most of it rubbish. Yet every so often there is something interesting 'and one should never destroy them unlooked at.'

So what can we extract from this?

1) Occult and by extension Mythos lore can appear anywhere.

2) Since Occult and Mythos lore is inextricably interwound with human history, it will appear everywhere, and that includes the most mundane of places. 

3) People publish all sorts of things, and while most of it is uninteresting rubbish you never know where you might find that next scrap of useful material.

4) In the 1930s and previous, people saved damn near everything. I couldn't tell you the last time I saw, never mind bought, a second-hand writing ledger in an antiquarian shop. Most of them barely had space for the books, never mind the not-quite-books. I doubt I'd find one at the Spreadeagle, and frankly if you can't find one there you can't find one anywhere.

With all that in mind:

A Peculiar Gazette

Back issues of old newspapers are often of interest to collectors; you never know when you'll find someone potty on the subject of , say, Huddersfield and desperate for new material. 

The Hounds find a bound collection of early 1800s publication The Star Gazette, best remembered for its series on the London Poor; they had a discount Mayhew on staff who liked writing social commentary but lacked academic rigor. The paper's been defunct since 1868, and the collection's a potential squiz.

There's a section towards the beginning of the collection that has some extra papers interspersed, and it becomes clear to anyone who examines the papers that they're about a scandal that was big in the 1830s: the Thevenot Abduction. 

A fortune-hunting 30-year-old bankrupt, Eustace Thevenot, wanted to marry into money, and did so by abducting 15-year-old textile heiress Devony Walker. He managed to spirit her away from her boarding school and then got her alone at the Thevenot family castle in Scotland, where he persuaded her that her father had consented to the marriage. The pair went from Scotland to Calais, but her outraged family tracked them down and prosecuted. Thevenot went to prison and died there. Devony, released from her marriage, had a short and unhappy life. She married again, and died in childbirth in her early 20s. 

Oral History, Occult or similar, 1 point spend: Devony's story has a peculiar postscript. She was never buried. There is no body in the family crypt; someone stole it. This was hushed up at the time, but became part of local ghost lore after her death. Nobody knows where Eustace Thevenot is buried. Presumably in an unmarked prison grave.

[Loosely based on the real-world Shrigley abduction.]

The Star Gazette has the bare-bones account of the abduction and trial. 

The interspersed papers are an unpublished statement from Devony Walker about her experiences at Thevenot Castle, on a tidal islet up in the Highlands. The statement was collected as part of trial prep, but never introduced at the actual trial. 

In game terms the Walker Papers have the following stats:

1 pool point Occult (skim) or +1 Occult (pore over), no Mythos, no spells. Effectively a short treatise on Geomancy, as understood by Walker who was the subject of various Geomantic rituals that Thevenot tried to cast on her while the two of them were alone at the Castle. 

To anyone without a Mythos pool these rituals seem nonsensical. Thevenot was trying to gain the attention of a water horse or kelpie, and get the creature to bless the marriage.

To anyone with a Mythos pool Thevenot was clearly trying to evoke the spirit of (or essence, or gain the approval of - it's not clear from the text) a sacred dragon, or Lloligor, that in times past had guided the Thevenot family.  

Whether the reader has a Mythos pool or not, it's clear from the papers that Thevenot had a library of occult texts at the Castle, some of which were scarce and valuable even at the time and will be much more valuable in the 1930s. 

Moreover a quick study of History, Library Use or similar (no point spend needed) soon realizes that Thevenot Castle's last occupant, Dacre Thevenot, died in 1916 at the Battle of Ginchy. There's no mention of an estate sale. Those books could be sitting all alone up there in Scotland, waiting to be pinched ...

So long as the Hounds are willing to risk the wrath of the kelpie, of course. But who believes in kelpies?

That's it for me this week. Enjoy!

God Save The What Now? (Politics - Barbados)

This week's post is partly inspired by recent events in Barbados, as encapsulated in this TL/DR video:

Now, this isn't the only bit of media I've seen bewailing the fate of the Monarchy and wondering what will happen when the Queen finally goes to her well-deserved rest. However as someone born in a colony and who's lived in the Commonwealth nearly all of his life, I thought it might be time to lay some myths to rest.

1) Never forget, she is who she is. Nobody swears allegiance to the Monarchy in the abstract. Yes, Queen Elizabeth II is popular but that's because she takes service to the nation seriously and people respect her for it. If she'd been a different kind of monarch we wouldn't be having this discussion and probably there'd be no Commonwealth. There's a reason why PM Owen Arthur (c. 7.54) said he'd struggle to swear allegiance to Harry; this is it.

2) She came here, and we remember. Early in her reign she travelled the Commonwealth and there are plenty of plaques all over the place to mark the spots she's visited, which is another mark in her favor for those who remember the visits. Problem being, the ones who do are in their eighties, so the public memory's fading. The rest of the family don't seem to travel as much; Charles does, but he's no spring chicken. See also: the Pope. There's a reason why His Holiness gets on a plane and jets off to wherever-it-may-be, and it's not because he's racking up frequent flier miles for that dream holiday to Aruba. The personal touch matters. It keeps people engaged.

3) We don't read the Sun. The British have a very different view of the Monarchy than the Commonwealth does, and that's because the average Englishman's concept of the Crown's been shaped by God alone knows how many newspaper articles, paparazzi shots, TV shorts and a thousand other things besides - most of which we never saw. The big change in the Crown's popularity in the UK came in the 1980s and 1990s, when the media became far less deferential and Spitting Image clowned around. As far as the Commonwealth's concerned, none of that ever happened; it wasn't on our TV or in our papers. We don't even get the BBC, for crying out loud, and that seems a missed opportunity. We'd probably pay a license fee for it, if asked. [possible exceptions: Canada and Australia, which both seem to get more UK media than the rest of us.] In fact until the Internet became everyone's media source of choice we only ever got the Crown's highlight reel, and that rarely. Now we get YouTube vids every time Meghan Markle farts. That changes things, but it still means the Commonwealth doesn't share the same perspective the British do.

4) We need a loud voice. The Commonwealth is made up of small nations, for the most part. When small nations try to strike a bargain with larger powers - and everyone's a larger power - we get squeezed. So there's a very useful benefit to being part of a larger Commonwealth of Nations with the Crown at its head, one worth preserving. However, see also Brexit; the less relevant the UK becomes, the less useful our relationship with the Crown. See also see also CARICOM. If the Crown isn't our voice of choice, we'll invent our own. Bermuda's an associate member, and frankly that's only because we're still a dependent territory of the UK which means all our foreign policy is controlled by London. If we ever vote for independence I expect our full membership of CARICOM will follow five minutes after we formally go independent.

5) The prosperous middle classes. Stop me if you've heard these acronyms before: RICS. ICSA (now the CGI). CIOB. CIPD. CIAT. RIBA. RIN (remember, we're surrounded by lots and lots of ocean). And so on ad infinitum. If you're a lawyer, accountant, administrator, architect, engineer and so forth, and you live and work in the Commonwealth, odds are you belong to one of the many Royal or Chartered Institutes, not least because our legal systems are based on the UK's. That means you probably spent several years in the UK or at the very least went there for a crammer course to pass your exams. Your Chartered Body's HQ is almost certainly in London. If you have legal training, odds are good you've eaten at least one dinner at the Inns of Court. The Institutes have done more to keep the Commonwealth a Commonwealth than anything the Queen could manage if she lives to be two hundred, because they provide shared experiences, shared standards, and most importantly drive tens of thousands of students to that sodden, pestilent isle every year.  Even if a Commonwealth nation decides to throw off the yoke and completely reshape the government, the people who do the reshaping will have been trained in the UK to a UK standard - there's no escaping that influence.

And finally:

6) Brexit and Racists. There are plenty of reasons why a Commonwealth made up largely of non-white citizens might not be madly in love with the UK right now, and they have nothing to do with the Queen. Remember earlier when I mentioned the Internet as a news source? Yeah, turns out we know all about Bojo's racism. We notice when former English Defense League head honcho Tommy Robinson gets BBC coverage. When I was a kid having an English passport meant a gateway to a world of possibilities; post-Brexit, an English passport means a narrow lane to a grey failed state where frothing fisherman and mountains of slaughtered pigs are the new symbols of sovereignty. The Queen's death might provide a convenient excuse to cut formal ties, but let's not kid ourselves; those ties have been fraying for a long, long time and most of the reasons why have nothing to do with the Monarchy. 

Anyway, that's it for me. Normal service will resume next week!