Thank Heaven For That (RPG All)

I've been thinking about the unintended consequences of the absence of God.

There was a time when we took God, or Gods, for Granted. That mountain? God did it. The burning bush over there? God - it's a sign of things to come. A magical King who can cure scrofula just by touching you? God's holy power manifest in His human servant.

We don't do that any more, and one of the unintended consequences of this is that we don't think too much about how having an actual God that does actual Things upon this actual Earth affects plot, in any RPG setting.

For purposes of this post I'm going to assume a Pantheon of fantasy Gods each with their own area of expertise, but your campaign may do things differently.

Point The First: Divine Right of Kings 

It's never entirely clear, in any fantasy setting, how the King got to be first in line at the shiny, pointy hat giveaway. It's just assumed the King is the King, and therefore. 

However, there was a point when in order to be King you had to prove your worth, and more often than not this meant proving your lineage. Perhaps you were a demi-god, the offspring of Zeus or Poseidon. Perhaps you were the son of a demi-god. Perhaps you got the nearest religious authority to crown you, thus showing that God approves of your ascension to the throne. Perhaps you have to perform a miracle, such as curing someone of disease by the touch of your divinely inspired hand.

Whatever your proofs may be, you needed proof of some kind to show that you weren't just a Johnny-come-lately with a sharp knife and a winning smile. Otherwise some Johnny-come-even-more-lately might take your place some day.

The flip side to this is that, if you defy the Gods and take the crown anyway through nefarious means, your Kingdom might be punished for your misdeeds. That's essentially the story of Oedipus Rex.

Overly Sarcastic Productions, Red

How does this affect gameplay? Let me count the ways:

• If your King is the Daughter of Zeus, then another offspring of Zeus might contest them for the Throne by showing off their divine qualifications. The bigger thunderbolt wins.
• Before you can take the Throne you need to visit the Oracle and get its blessing, and that means Side Quest! Plus Festival! Plus possible shenanigans if all is not well at the Oracle ...
• In order to become King you had to create a Divine Something - a well, let's say, that cures all who drink its water. This becomes a pilgrimage site. Then the well stops working, or falls into the hands of some hideous evil. Does this mean you have to stop being King?

Whether or not your adventuring band of misfits are Kings-in-Waiting or just the hired help, they can easily become embroiled in these shenanigans. That Divine Well, for instance, could become a quest site. Do the adventurers want to go there in order to cure, or even resurrect, a companion? Are they hired to go find out why the well ran dry?

In a modern(ish) setting there are far fewer Kings and therefore far fewer reasons to explore this trope, but even then there are ways into the mystery.

Let's say this is Night's Black Agents, with a Damned or Supernatural backstory. For there to be Damnation, there must also be Heaven. It might be a Heaven Denied situation where Lucifer's armies are constantly besieging the Pearly Gates and on the brink of victory, but nevertheless there's a Heaven. Often agents try to brew up Holy Water, if that's a bane, or acquire some divine relic like Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi. 

However, that assumes that the agents are worthy of God's favor. Suppose they have to prove their worth before they can wield the powers of Kings? What does that look like?

Fright Night

Point the Second: Pilgrimage and Relics

Kings aren't the only ones touched by God. There are many places, many people, which once were ordinary but now are lumined with Divine favor. Or Satanic, for that matter - Dungeons and Dragons' Ravenloft setting, for instance, is based around the concept of a land irredeemably tainted by evil powers.

It might be an abbey where a Holy Avatar once rested, and left behind a relic. It might be a sinister crossroads where Strahd once committed some hideous act of depravity. Whatever may have happened, it left behind physical evidence and as a consequence became a place where pilgrims gather to pay tribute, or gain unholy powers. 

In history, people went to great lengths to steal relics.  Bishop Hugh of Lincoln once went to France to pay homage to a holy relic of Mary Magdalene, and bit off her fingers in front of the entire congregation so he could carry them back to Lincoln. He would have snapped off her arm, but lacked the strength. 

Some relic vendors made their career, and fortune, out of selling, say, nails from the Holy Cross, or the finger-bones of saints. The wood and nails of the True Cross seem to act on Ship of Theseus principles and there are enough bits of saint scattered about to put together an undead Ziegfeld Follies, but the fact remains that if your church has a bit of saint or scrap of cross then your church is a very very very fine church.

A vendor gets their cash up front but pilgrimage sites made their money after they obtained the relic. Once you have, say, the skull of St. Foy, you can demand golden tribute from every citizen in the locality, and use that gold to make elaborate artefacts for your abbey. It's essentially the same trick the Mafia uses, but with less leg-breaking and property damage. Nice soul you have there. Shame if something were to ... happen to it.

Again, how does this affect gameplay?

• The land is decimated, but not by plague or war; the clerics at the temple have scooped up every available gold piece, leaving nothing behind. They say their relic needs to be properly honored - but is their relic a true relic? Or is Mammon up to its usual trickery?
• The relic dealer says they have a genuine holy item of glorious memory, and if true then your knightly patron wants it - but is it genuine? That's what you have to find out. Potential added moral dilemma: the item is genuine, but the relic dealer stole it from its resting place. 
• In order to cleanse the land of some hideous curse you have to find the artefact that's at the root of it all and carry it to a holy site for cleansing. The skull of the vampire king, say, must be drowned in the Well of St. Dunstan, or the vampire may rise again. Alternatively, the cursed item you just picked up might demand to be taken to an Unholy ritual site, where it can finally fulfil its purpose.

If this is a modern(ish) setting like, say, Trail of Cthulhu, there are all kinds of artefacts you can pick up, but they're usually cursed. The whole point behind Horror on the Orient Express, to name but one, is that you have to go to various unholy sites and pick up dangerous artefacts so you can dispose of them. 

Point the Third: Animals Are Evil

First, thanks to YouTuber Ginny Di whose video about pets inspired this bit, and therefore the entire post. When I heard the age-old cry, 'The DM hates your pets!' my response was 'well, you could always accuse them of murder like in them there olden days - that sounds like an inciting incident if ever I heard one.' The rest of this post followed.

Incidentally if you're keen I highly recommend Hour of the Pig, also known as the Advocate, if you want to see this plotline in action. Also, young Colin Firth. Nudity, and so forth. Fun times.

There was a time when it was considered quite lawful, normal even, to accuse animals of crimes and punish or even execute them. Perhaps your rooster laid an egg, thus proving it was the spawn of Satan. Perhaps your pig committed murder. Perhaps that monkey really is a French spy - better hang him just to be certain.

In some instances the animal trial was a kind of trial-by-proxy. Say a nobleman commits sexual assault, or some other heinous crime. You might not be in a position to accuse, let alone convict, that nobleman. His horse, on the other hand, can be accused - even castrated. By such means are people theoretically above the law punished by the law.

These days we don't believe animals have moral agency and so cannot be held criminally responsible for whatever they may do. However, most RPG settings allow animals elevated rights of one kind or another, or human-level intelligence. Which begs the question, if your horse is so clever it can talk, is it capable of committing crimes - and can it be put on trial?

The anonymous author of Malefactio Animalium argued for two types of animals: those that were beneficial to man, and those that were not. Those which were beneficial had been designated as such by God, and that meant that Satan could work his wicked way on them, much as Satan could do to man. So those animals designated by God to be beneficial could be tempted, could commit evil acts, and thus be punished by law much as humans who committed evil acts were punished. The divine hand of God had effectively intervened, marking some creatures out as capable of doing wrong and therefore capable of being punished for their actions.

Which is an argument that we might consider nonsensical today, but then we don't have an actual God overtly intervening in mortal affairs on a daily basis. Whereas in Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy settings there are any number of Gods wandering around intervening in mortal affairs on a daily basis. If not an hourly basis.

It's not unreasonable to think that some of those Gods may have designated certain animals as beneficial to their followers. Elhonna, for example, might have sent a flock of geese to aid her worshippers, perhaps to act as some kind of honking Oracle. Erythnul might have sent some other creature to kill those geese, or corrupted the geese themselves somehow.

Whichever way it goes, it follows that as a God has marked these geese out as being distinct from other animals, the geese can do things other animals can't and shouldn't be treated the same way a so-called ordinary animal is treated. If one of them commits theft or destroys property, should they be put on trial? If a cat kills one, should the cat be accused of murder?

Having considered all that, now let's go further: in cases where the animal has an explicit bond with a person - a spellcaster and their familiar - it's very reasonable to assume that anything the familiar does is explicitly sanctioned by its spellcaster, if not actually an order from the spellcaster. In turn this suggests the spellcaster ought to be held accountable for their familiar's actions. 

Depending on the setting there may be explicit rules for this within the society the spellcaster operates. 

For example, within the Catholic church there's a concept called the ecclesiastical court. For much of the medieval period it was basically impossible to hold any priest accountable for anything, and 'priest' in context often meant 'I speak Latin.' The accused immediately claimed that an ordinary court, even a Royal Justice, had no authority over them; only a priest could judge a priest. 

Within a magical society, where there are actual schools dedicated to teaching magic, I can picture a system in which wizards, say, demand the right to judge other wizards. No ordinary court of justice for them; only their peers have authority. Which in turn would mean that if a wizard's familiar committed a crime and someone tried to punish them for it, the wizard could claim that the court had no authority to act; the familiar would have to be tried by a conclave of wizards. 

So how does this affect gameplay?

• The characters are drafted in to act as legal counsel. A horse trampled a farmer to death, and is put on trial for murder. The local lord is the prosecution. The characters are the horse's defenders. If the characters play their cards right they could walk away from this with a lot of local fame, possibly a boon or two; but if they anger the local lord they could find themselves in very hot water.
• The wizard's familiar is accused of theft, and embarrassingly the jewelry in question is found in the wizard's possession. The familiar swears blind they didn't do it. In fact, the crime was committed by someone else who faked it - perhaps a shapeshifter or druid who was able to make it look as if the familiar did it.
• A holy shrine, well or similar location is polluted and it looks as if animals are to blame; a herd of swine did what swine usually do. The question is, did the pigs act of their own accord or did some supernatural entity push the pigs into action?

As for modern(ish), there tends to be fewer legal consequences for evil animals, but on the other hand there are often more evil animals. Packs of Satanically inspired rats, for instance, or a strange tree with peculiar creatures living in it. Quite often they're used as scouts or intelligence gatherers, occasionally as killers. It can be very useful to give the characters an advance warning of things to come by showing them animals behaving strangely, or flocking where they shouldn't.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Little Drummers (Night's Black Agents)

It was the Bad Godesburg incident that gave the proof, though the German authorities had no earthly means of knowing this. Before Bad Godesburg, there had been growing suspicion; a lot of it. But the high quality of the planning, as against the poor quality of the bomb, turned the suspicion into certainty. Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name. The vexation lies in the waiting.

John Le Carré, Little Drummer Girl 

BBC version, dir. Park Chan-wook

The central premise is this: there is a bombmaker, a Palestinian, who uses naïve young women recruited by his younger brother to deliver the bombs. The Israelis want to stop him, so they fabricate their own naïve young woman and make it look as if the younger brother recruited her. That way, they think, the mastermind will take her on as a courier, which in turn will lead them to the bombmaker.

Not to worry, this isn't a spoiler. The whole thing's laid out in the first two chapters.

Le Carré expands on this in his short collection The Pigeon Tunnel, and in one piece (Theatre of the Real: the Villa Brigitte) describes one of his inspirations, Brigitte, a young German captured by the Israelis during a mission against Palestinian terrorists.

The door is unlocked from the other side, and a tall, beautiful woman in a prison tunic, enhanced by a tightly drawn belt, strides in with a diminutive wardress either side of her, each lightly holding an arm. Her long blonde hair is combed freely down her back. Even her prison tunic becomes her. As her wardresses withdraw, she steps forward, drops an ironic bob and, like a well-brought-up daughter of the house, extends her hand to me. "With whom do I have the honor?" she enquires in courtly German ...

  

There are two ideas I want to draw on here and use in Night's Black Agents: Heat as a pool, and an NPC: the Recruiter.

Heat is traditionally thought of as a kind of penalty. You accumulate Heat by doing criminal or near-criminal things, like hacking or stealing or shooting up the place. It can affect the Difficulty of tests, and it can draw extra official attention onto their poor defenseless heads. 

Generally you have to do something to gain heat. Armed robbery, stealing a car, gambling with high rollers, whatever it may be, but the essence is you do a thing, you get a point, or two, or more. 

What if you could voluntarily gain Heat in exchange for an improved chance of success in a General test?

Before Bad Godesburg, there had been growing suspicion; a lot of it. But the high quality of the planning, as against the poor quality of the bomb, turned the suspicion into certainty. Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name.

Here there was a test, probably of Explosive Devices, and something went wrong. That drew suspicion, which eventually became a certainty. The bombmaker gave himself away.

Let's say that was your Bang-and-Burner who flubbed the Devices check. Let's also say that you really, really need a success here, and that you failed the Difficulty by, oh, 2 points, why not. 

What if you could buy 2 points Explosive Devices in exchange for 2 points Heat? A 1 for 1 spend.

In game terms, this is you 'signing your name.' In poker, this would be a tell. You have habits, they become known, and the authorities pick up on the clues you left behind. It's up to you what those clues are. Maybe you always use a Nokia as a detonator. Maybe you always strike at sundown, or smoke a particular brand of cigarettes whose stubbed-out remains are at the crime scene. Maybe you can't help but leave behind riddles at the scene of the crime, or the Ace of Spades, or what-have-you. Maybe, like the Pink Panthers, you always drive an Audi. 

It doesn't matter what it is. The point is, you can't help but do it. By doing so you get a successful Explosive Devices check - but at what cost?

At the beginning of the session you might think it's an acceptable exchange. What's another couple points of Heat? You can buy that off - until you can't. Until Heat's at 5 or more, and making your Difficulty tests that much more difficult. Maybe it starts to feel like using your credit card to pay off your debts, until the card's maxed out and the debts aren't any smaller ... 

Let's not forget that Heat is a group problem. For your 2 points, you've just burnt everyone in your general vicinity. What your fellow agents may do about that is up to them.

As Director, you may only want to allow this once per session, and follow it immediately with a Heat test if Heat has risen to 6 or more. 

Now let's talk about the Recruiter.

In Little Drummer Girl the little brother, Salim, is stalking horse for his more dangerous sibling. His charm and good looks lure the couriers in, and by the time his brother gets hold of them the girls are indoctrinated.

Now, Night's Black Agents kinda handwaves the whole process by which humans are suckered into working for bloodsuckers. It's generally assumed that, if a human's involved, they're doing it for money, immortality, or both. Renfields might be in it for the blood, or addicted to blood. The mooks are in it for cash. The vampires are assumed to be charming enough to lure in their own victims.

Suppose they're not? Suppose they need someone to make the first move for them?

There isn't a Charm general pool. That role is taken by Flattery and Flirting, both of which are Investigative and therefore off-limits for NPCs. It's a good rule of thumb to apply MICE in any given interaction between Conspiracy-linked NPC and potential target - Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. One of those, possibly more than one, is the unwatched door that will let the Recruiter in.

Cameo: Recruiter (aka the Roper)

Conceal 4, Disguise 4, Surveillance 6

Martin could be a movie star; in fact, according to him, for a little while he was. Then he got bored with the superficiality of it all. Why spend all your time in an artificial bubble when you could be out there, in the world, living? He brushes off inquiries about his past, or his present. He's an investor, a white knight, and talks knowledgably about import and export, but exactly what he imports or exports changes depending on which week it is, and he's never investing right now; he's on a kind of sabbatical, recharging his batteries. In the meantime there's so much to do and see! This week Venice, next week Delhi; his passport is the only thing he truly values. Everything else, from his luxury apartments to his stylish clothes, is so much garbage, to be used and thrown away.

In fact Martin is someone whose sole occupation in life is to seek out people who can be used. Martin may have no idea who he's working for, or he may be a willing collaborator. Either way he could care less, so long as his bills get paid at the end of the month. He lines up the mark, male or female, for his employer, feeding them whatever line they need to hear. Maybe they need cash, or need to know they're sticking it to the Man, or need a little bit of flattery to grease the wheels. Martin supplies what they need, then leads them to the people who can give them even more of what they want. 

By the time that meeting happens, Martin's long gone. This week Venice, next week Delhi ...

As Asset. Able to hook the agent up with all kinds of interesting people. Martin doesn't have direct access to [whatever it may be] but he knows someone who does. His whole lifestyle depends on knowing someone who does.

As Clue. Martin knows where the bodies are buried; he helped plant some of them. For the right price, he'll turn over his little black book, full of useful contacts. Martin knows what happened to [fill in the blank] - and why.

In Play. Martin's a practiced gaslighter, and knows how to make you doubt yourself and isolate you from your friends without you ever noticing what he's up to. Always smile, always nod, and bring the conversation back to where Martin needs it to be. Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego - one of those will be the weapon he'll drive into your back, and you'll help you do it.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Musty Money (Night's Black Agents)

I've been reading a lot about money laundering (yes, I have a day job, shocker, I know) and this little gem from The Bermuda Monetary Authority's Financial Intelligence Agency report Q3 2018 leapt out at me:

Three Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) were filed on the suspect activity of two Bermudians, who were on financial assistance at the time. Over a period of two weeks, the two Subjects attended the agency with a stack of “very bad and musty smelling BMD $20 bank notes”. The teller described that the notes had the appearance of being stored in a humid area. The stack of notes amounted to BMD$2,500.00 each visit. During the first visit, the Subject completed a Customer Detail Form, and provided a driver’s license as proof of identification. The agency accepted the notes and advised the first Subject that a cheque would be ready in five business days.

Five business days later, the first Subject returned to the agency where again a stack of musty smelling BMD$20 notes was produced in the same condition, which amounted to BMD$950.00. The first Subject received two cheques from the agency for the value of the damaged notes submitted. The notes tendered by the first Subject were then destroyed by the agency. This incident was closely followed by a second Bermudian, who also produced damaged BMD$100 notes of the same description for exchange.

The reasons for suspicion that were identified were as follows:

• It is known that gangs in Bermuda keep their proceeds of crime in cash and typically bury them until they are needed to fund further criminal conduct.
• The timing of these transactions along with the similarity in nominal value and description of the notes suggests that these transactions deal with cash from the same source, which is likely criminal.

Breaking Bad, Sony

When money laundering rears its ugly head in fiction, it's usually somewhere in the millions or squillions and some minor character speaks knowledgeably about placement, layering and so on. Sometimes shell companies and elaborate corporate structures are invoked, and people whisper about exotic, sun-soaked money laundering havens like Delaware, South Dakota and Alaska. 

However, as the FIA article points out, money laundering can happen on the micro as well as macro level. Never mind the squillions; what about the hundreds, the thousands? How do you prove that the wodge of cash you want to deposit is yours?

It's all the more important as banks and financial institutions, whether it's Bank of America or PayPal, conduct most if not all of their business electronically, and vendors accommodate them by introducing new practices that all but eliminate cash from the system. Tap your card against the terminal, and thank you for your patronage. 

Imagine trying to buy a car, even second-hand, with cash alone. It'd have to be a junker with more miles on it than God before anyone even considered taking cash-only. 

Imagine how many red flags you'd set off if you tried.

Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock

Time was stacks of musty cash meant someone found treasure, and quite often  worthless Confederate loot. Scooby Doo pulled off that old chestnut back in the 1970s, Chester Himes tried it, and there've been plenty of pulp writers who did the same. Dirt-smeared stacks of cash hidden in someone's basement often have an unusual history, or - as happened in the Bermuda example - are too damaged to be used as cash, which presents its own problems.

OK, let's start talking about gamification. 

Here we have a situation where a low-power Node, street-level most likely, has accumulated a chunk of cash it can't easily spend. Maybe it's ordinary currency, maybe it's out-of-date, maybe it's antique. I'm not sure what you'd do with a stack of French Francs, for instance, now the Euro's a thing; I think I'm right in saying the last date of exchange was a while ago. Presumably, if you found a suitcase full of granny's retirement fund in the attic and wanted to spend it, you can still hand over old Francs for new Euro, but I've no idea how you'd do that. Nor, I suspect, does your average street-level Node.

But it wants to spend that cash, so it tries to exchange it at a bank or credit union.

Red Flag

The agents, trawling for information that might lead to the next link in the chain, discover a suspicious activity report in the data they harvested from [insert financial institution here]. Seems that someone's been trying to bank odd-smelling notes in unusual amounts, and this someone's hit the official radar before, for a slightly different crime: robbing a blood bank. What's going on here?

Option One: the man with the money stole the cash from a Level One Node. This hopeless wretch - someone roughly on a par with the Dracula Dossier's Madman - has been shadowing the Node for some time, as they know it's linked to the Conspiracy and there's nothing this poor deluded soul likes better than vampires. Tracking him down will get the agents some useful intel about the Node.

Option Two: the woman exchanging the cash is one of several mules this Level One Node uses to launder its cash. It isn't a perfect system; in fact it's a bloody awful system, as proven by the fact that they have to use a petty criminal to launder their loot. However their only other option is to stash the money in their mattress, and that won't work forever. 

Option Three: the person exchanging the cash is a vampire hunter/Dracula Dossier Legacy or similar, who found it while following up other leads. They're possibly a little naïve when it comes to money matters but they aren't vampire-friendly; quite the reverse. However, the Node knows the cash is missing and has a pretty good idea who has it, so unless the agents intervene this potential friendly could find themselves in deep trouble.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!    

What Odd Fellows (RPG All)

Recently someone discovered desiccated human remains in a garage in Ohio, but you'll be pleased to hear that, just this once, it wasn't a gruesome murder.

The tip-off came when a neighbor heard what's been described as 'youthful voices' coming from a detached garage in Mt. Healthy, Ohio. Further investigation uncovered no suspicious youths (I firmly believe it was four meddling kids and a dog) but did find the bones of what proved to be a very long dead gent.

Turns out the garage was formerly a different building altogether, and was used by the Odd Fellows as a lodge. The bones were kept there for ritual purposes. Time passes, lodge changes hands, lodge is torn down to be turned into a garage, and lo and behold here's our pal Bonesy. 

What do you do when you find a corpse in your new garage? Why, you keep it, of course. The new owner didn't seem inclined to, I don't know, bury the dead, but he wasn't going to turf the poor thing out with the trash. He boxed it and forgot it. Then someone else found it.

The Odd Fellows is a very old masonic organization. The first lodges date back to the 18th century, and nobody really knows what they got up to; its traditions are shrouded in antiquity and, as any historian will tell you, the absolute best way to make everything clear as mud is to shroud the historical record in antiquity. Broadly speaking it's a charitable, philanthropic organization with a penchant for fraternalism and benevolence. Sounds very nice, I'm sure. 

Hot Fuzz, second in the Cornetto Trilogy

The Catholics didn't like 'em much, but then the Catholic Church in its day has condemned everything that isn't Catholic and some things that are, so it's not that difficult to see why the Church might have had a downer on the Odd Fellows.

If you want to know more about the Odd Fellows there is an interesting book over on Gutenberg, first published 1901, about the American branch of the Odd Fellows. 

On Jericho Road is about as gnomic and mystical as you could possibly hope for.  It poses the obvious question: "If," it is demanded, "the aims and purposes of the order be legitimate and praiseworthy, why shroud them in mystery rather than give them the broad sunlight of publicity." only to answer it with the most banal retort possible. "But if the preference of Odd-Fellowship be for quieter and less obtrusive methods, pray who shall fairly contest its right of choice?"

If it specifically mentions bones and peculiar rituals, I didn't notice. That said, I couldn't read it cover to cover and I shall be surprised if you manage it. If you wanted some bland yet useful text to make a mystic, or even Mythos, tome out of, you certainly couldn't do any worse. 

We travel from star to star, from system to system, until we reach yon lonely star that appears to be performing the Guardian's task, upon the verge of unmeasured and immeasurable space. We may descry and describe the form and outlines of those heavenly bodies, detect their movements and approximately determine their distances and dimensions. But what more? Little that is satisfying ...

OK, let's talk gamification. This could be a purist Trail of Cthulhu scenario. In that event the Lodge gets knocked down, say, in the 1890s and replaced with [insert building here - something modern and industrial]. There's a fair amount of junk left over from the old Lodge and the building's new owner can't be bothered to throw it out, so it ends up in the spare room. You know the type. Every office has one. Nobody remembers what its original use was; now it's a place you put things you don't want to have to think about. 

It could also be Fear Itself, or Esoterrorists, or any one of a dozen different modernist settings. Given the Youthful Voices, it could also make a fun BubbleGumshoe scenario. It might be a little tricky to turn it into Night's Black Agents since, in that setting, finding human remains in an unexpected place is just another Tuesday, and not a very exiting one at that. However if you replace the human remains with, say, any of the relics from Dracula Dossier, or some similar McGuffin, you're off to the races. 

Let's round out with a few story seeds. 

The premise: someone finds human remains in a [mundane setting] and it turns out that these bones are older than expected and came from the building that used to be on this spot, but which was torn down forty years ago to make room for this one. What happened, and what will happen next?

• What happened: the old building used to be an occult lodge, and the bones were kept for ritual purposes. 
• What will happen next: The new lodge, located somewhere else in town, is startled to discover its old ritual artefacts hidden away in some forgotten spot, and will do its best to get them back - using magic, if they have to.
• What happened: the old building used to be a funeral home, and was put out of business because it was breaking all sorts of laws regarding the disposal of human remains. The new owner found these bones, decided they didn't need the negative publicity, and put them somewhere forgettable.
• What will happen next: The former owner of those bones wants to be buried properly, and will haunt the finders until they do that.
• What happened:  the old building was someone's home, back in the 1840s or thereabouts, and they wanted to be buried on the old homestead. So they were. The bones were excavated as part of the new build and the developer didn't want the headaches that come with admitting you've found human remains on the property. So they hid the bones.
• What will happen next: The bones become the focal point for a peculiar kind of time dilation. The psychic powers of the dead person were such time doesn't really exist for them: it's always 1840, where they are. Now they've been disturbed the bones will start rebuilding reality to fit its internal vision: first the bedroom where they spent their final hours, then the rest of the house, hall by hall. Soon people in the new building will find themselves walking into the old, by accident, and there's no telling when or how they'll get out again ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!