Wilde's Gavel (Bookhounds)

As I type this I'm doing last-minute bag management for tonight's flight so this will be a quick one.

From Night's Black Angels: The Many Faces of Victorian Cruelty (1975, David McKay NY, by Ronald Pearsall) one of the New York haul courtesy of the Argosy if I remember right:

[Oscar] Wilde's creditors considered that they were behaving in a thoroughly moral and patriotic way by pressing, and his house in Tite Street was sold up. The auction was conducted under scandalous conditions, and valuable paintings and furniture and rare first editions were knocked down for trifles. Many of the spectators thought it would be acceptable to steal what they could, and a good deal of small stuff, plus Wilde manuscripts, were whisked away ...

This would have been after Wilde's attempt to sue the Marquis of Queensbury for libel, an action which did not come off and left Wilde liable for the Maquis' legal expenses. Wilde was able to recover some of his property before the fall; journalist Robert Ross and Wilde's butler broke into Wilde's Tite Street house and spirited away some of Wilde's belongings. 

Shortly afterward Wilde ended up in Reading Gaol, and on release from prison sunk into destitution. He died in exile, in France.

Which brings me to:

Image borrowed from Christie's

Wilde's Gavel

Also borrowed from Christies, this quote from Blackwell's Magazine: Blackwood's magazine recorded that: 'the last lot catalogued was a rabbit hutch, which went for a couple of shillings. The sale was carried on amidst a scene of the greatest disorder, the police eventually being called in to eject the disturbers. Most of the lots were knocked down at comparatively small sums; but several of the owner's personal belongings were secured by sympathising friends and eventually restored to him.'

Strictly speaking this auctioneer's gavel never belonged to Wilde but to the auctioneer who presided at his Tite Street house auction. Mr. Bullock, it is said, had a peculiar horror of that gavel after the auction and gave it to one of his colleagues who used it once, and once only, before passing it on to someone else. After that its provenance, such as it was, became murky.

Megapolisamancers claim that the gavel took on some peculiar aspects after that fateful 24th April auction. What those aspects are vary depending on who's telling the tale, but general consensus is that they do not bode well for the seller as the price of the item being sold drops like a rock. The gavel also exercises some peculiar influence over the auctioneer, who invariably tries to get rid of the gavel after the auction.

Wilde's Gavel: Unremarkable to look at yet unmistakable to hold, this plain wooden gavel gives 4 Auction points to the Auctioneer, who can then transfer those points to anyone of the Auctioneer's choosing. This allows the person with the extra pool points to compete in the auction and, if they win, they obtain the item at a bargain price, effectively renewing their pool by 2 points. So, they get at least 4 points, and can gain a 2-point refresh if they win the auction. However, this is costly to the auctioneer, who effectively loses 2 points Sanity and, if not permanently disabled, has to spend several months recovering their equilibrium. If the Auctioneer is a PC then rather than inflict an automatic 2-point penalty the Keeper should treat it as if it were a brush with Mordiggan, with the appropriate Stability and Sanity risk.

Option 1: Ghoul's Rot. An auctioneer, David Rackham, dropped out of sight a few months back and has resurfaced, complaining of a very peculiar ailment. His right hand has developed symptoms that resemble leprosy. Rackham says this happened after an auction he presided over and he wants to give the gavel away to, well, anyone, but if the PCs are willing ...

Option 2: Skullduggery. A rival bookseller has obtained the gavel and wants to switch it for the auctioneer's gavel in an upcoming auction. The bookseller, Sam Northcote, hasn't told the auctioneer what he intends to do. Northcote hopes to get the winning advantage and doesn't care what happens to the auctioneer - but the PCs might, particularly if a PC is the auctioneer.

Option 3: Wilde's Revenge. What happens when Wilde's Gavel is used at an auction where items from that original knock-down at Tite Street are up for sale? Probably nothing good. Who is that peculiar buyer at the back of the room, and what is that awful, charnel stench?

That's it for this week! See you folks in a bit.

Flying Dead Man (Bookhounds of London)

First, some housekeeping. 

I'm going to be in the UK for two weeks as of Mon 24 July. Among other things this means I shall be as quiet as a mouse for those two weeks (squeek) so don't get alarmed if I go silent.

Lots of train travel in my future, so let's have a train piece. 

The 1930s are Britain's Golden Age of trains. Cars exist and are clearly the way of the future, but there aren't yet the roads to accommodate them. If you're going anywhere for any kind of distance, odds are you're doing it by train. Or alternatively, if you're being murdered in a picturesque way, you're doing it by train. 

Agatha Christie's a premier exponent of death by choo choo. You've got the Mystery of the Blue Train, originally set aboard the Plymouth Express; the 4:50 From Paddington; and, of course, the Orient Express. 

Why so train-happy? Well, it's an interesting way of setting the same old locked door problem outside the country estate, or the library.  The plot might be exactly the same, but the location is exotic, interesting, and just familiar enough to be relatable without being so familiar as to be overdone. 

Plus, trains have the same attraction as cruise liners: they have that element of luxury, cheek-by-jowl with the third-class passengers. The Flying Scotsman is probably the most famous steam train in the world and in its heyday was without peer. Luxury? Its first-class accommodation is as good as anything you'd find on the Orient Express. Plus, you can't beat the views all the way up to Edinburgh, non-stop from London. Eight and a half hours. That's about how long I'll spend flying to London, but I'm sure the accommodations on the Scotsman would be more comfortable.

All that said:

Flying Dead Man

Rumors circulate that a very special auction is to be held aboard the Flying Scotsman on the return leg from Edinburgh to London. The prize is [insert useful Mythos text here] but the catch is that the auctioneer is a dead man.

The deceased is Alan Laughty, a well-known bookseller from Edinburgh who, it's said, was on his way to London to negotiate the sale of his prize when he died of a heart attack while having a shave in the luxurious barbershop aboard the Scotsman. Nobody was able to find the text among his possessions, and many looked. 

According to the story the auction is to be held precisely one year to the day from the date of Laughty's demise, aboard the Scotsman, in the barbershop, which will be closed off to the public for the duration of the exercise. A prominent member of [Mythos Cult] is making the arrangements and paying the bribes to make this happen. All moneys go to the widow and orphans, naturally. Presumably, if this works as intended, the book will appear at the barbershop.

First, the investigators have to score an invitation to this ghoulish little auction. Then they have to beat out the competition ...

Option One:    Dead Man's Prize. Hounds who do a little digging find out that Laughty was, when he                             was alive, a prominent member of [Mythos Cult]. However, he was in bad odor with the                         Cult's hierarchy; they felt he was holding out on them, keeping some of the best items -                             including [Mythos text] - for himself. The prominent member of [Cult] arranged for                                 Laughty's death but didn't realize he'd have the last laugh from beyond the grave.

Option Two:    House Cleaning. [Cult] has a problem. It knows that one of its own killed Laughty. It                                 doesn't know who, and there are three prime suspects. [Cult] arranged this little charade                         to flush out the killer. What [Cult] doesn't realize is the actual killer has hired the Hounds                         to act as their go-between. After all, reasons the killer, why risk your neck when you can                         risk someone else's?

Option Three:    Tell No Tales. Laughty was poisoned by one of the train's staff, who wanted him dead                             for unrelated reasons. Now, it seems, Laughty is about to return. What to do? Good job                             there's still plenty of poison ... after all, the best witnesses are dead witnesses.

The Three Impostors (Machen)

The three passed out, leaving the hall door, cracked and riven with frost and wet, half open, and they stood silent for a moment under the ruinous shelter of the porch.

"Well," said the girl, "it is done at last. I shall hurry no more on the track of the young man with spectacles."

"We owe a great deal to you," said Mr. Davies politely; "the doctor said so before he left. But have we not all three some farewells to make? I, for my part, propose to say good-by, here, before this picturesque but mouldy residence …

I mentioned Arthur Machen last week and time has come to tell the tale.

Machen’s Three Impostors – which you can get on Gutenberg if you like free stuff – is something I’d recommend to any lover of the grotesque and Gothic, but I particularly recommend it to GUMSHOE directors and players for this reason: it is an episodic sandbox campaign in literary form.

If you read any synopsis, you might be forgiven for thinking this novel has a plot. It does not. What it has is a central premise: a group of casual acquaintances, thrust together by circumstance, are involved in a series of peculiar adventures. The McGuffin is a gold coin allegedly minted by the Emperor Tiberius which is worth several fortunes, but in practice it’s all about that mysterious young man with the spectacles. This unnamed gent is the central figure around whom all plot revolves. He is the villain, the scoundrel, the bandit, the occult mastermind. Or perhaps he’s just a mysterious figure. 

The gold Tiberius gets a fairly detailed description, in the style of the Maltese Falcon. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hammett had this in mind when he was writing the Falcon. It goes like this:

It is one of the comparatively few historical objects in existence; it is all storied like those jewels we have read of. A whole cycle of legend has gathered round the thing; the tale goes that it formed part of an issue struck by Tiberius to commemorate an infamous excess. You see the legend on the reverse: 'Victoria.' It is said that by an extraordinary accident the whole issue was thrown into the melting pot, and that only this one coin escaped. It glints through history and legend, appearing and disappearing, with intervals of a hundred years in time and continents in place. It was discovered by an Italian humanist, and lost and rediscovered. It has not been heard of since 1727, when Sir Joshua Byrde, a Turkey merchant, brought it home from Aleppo, and vanished with it a month after he had shown it to the virtuosi, no man knew or knows where. And here it is!

Everyone’s after this coin and will commit any atrocity to get it. It’s introduced to the narrative when it’s flung aside by some unfortunate who’s fleeing one step ahead of a knife-wielding assassin. The fellow with the spectacles is first in the queue and it’s because he’s after the Tiberius that the three Impostors get dragged into the plot. 

However, that’s not why I want to talk about this novel. I want to talk about it because it does something I don’t think I’ve ever seen a novel do: it starts at the end and goes on from there.

I’m sure you can think of half-a-dozen examples where the narrator (usually unreliable) starts at the end, but that isn’t what’s happening here. This is one where the group, such as it is, starts by saying goodbye on the steps of the peculiar house where they have their last adventure. It’s one of a series of improbable tales – you can tell how improbable by the list of chapter titles – which the book then unfolds, event by event. 

Titles:

Prologue

Adventure of the Gold Tiberius

The Encounter of the Pavement

Novel of the Dark Valley

Adventure of the Missing Brother

Novel of the Black Seal

Incident of the Private Bar

The Decorative Imagination

Novel of the Iron Maid

The Recluse of Bayswater

Novel of the White Powder

Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell

History of the Young Man with Spectacles

Adventure of the Deserted Residence

It begins at the end by dropping a number of names and situations, most of which make absolutely no sense to the reader because they haven’t read the rest of the novel yet. You don’t know what happened to the man with the spectacles. You have a feeling it can’t be anything good, not in that dank and evil house, but you don’t know. You haven’t the least clue what a gold Tiberius is, never mind what significance it has to the plot, but it must be significant because it’s all anyone wants to talk about.

Finally, two other people enter the scene, after everyone else has departed. They are struck by the singular, sinister appearance of the house. 

I look at that deep glow on the panes, and the house lies all enchanted; that very room, I tell you, is within all blood and fire ...

With that line, the novel begins in earnest, and will end when those two newcomers explore the deserted residence, with its room within all blood and fire. Everything that came before, led to that picturesque (but mouldy) residence and the thing those two newcomers discover inside.

A lot is said by gamers about session zero. About how it sets expectations, house rules, table etiquette. Much is said about consent. All these are useful topics.

But here is a session zero where the players, in advance of any plot, lay out specific guidelines for what is to happen next. They name their adversary. They name their McGuffin. They lay out some basic outlines for the kind of adventures they had (intend to have) and an abbreviated checklist of where they are to happen. Nothing too specific. Nobody says ‘ah, Ms. Lally, what about that time in the flooded cellar with the deadly serpent?’ 

But there’s enough detail there for the Director/Keeper – assuming one is in the wings – to pick up on and run with it. To know that, whatever else may happen, the chief adversary is that sinister young man in spectacles. That the McGuffin is the gold Tiberius. At this point you don’t even know that the Tiberius is a coin. It might be anything, so long as it’s gold. But you know it exists and has plot significance. 

That kind of information is incredibly useful to the Keeper. It can be easily accommodated no matter what the Keeper intends to run. It wouldn’t be at all difficult, say, to run the Horror on the Orient Express with a sinister fellow in spectacles leading the enemy’s charge. Very little would need to change. Nor would it be difficult to insert such a character into the Armitage Files, or the Dracula Dossier. 

It’s basically a blue book in miniature, a brief in-character dialogue whose purpose isn’t to describe what is happening but to tell the Keeper what happened, so they can incorporate that information into future scenarios.

This could be incredibly useful for open world games in particular. Say this was Armitage Files, where you as Keeper know that there are any number of options, but the players have to pick which they like best. With this kind of session zero blue book at the very start, the Keeper already has a reasonable idea where to go, or at least what kind of villain the players will find when they get there. 

That could be vital. 

So next time you’re planning something sinister, give some thought to this idea: start at the end. Let the players narrate themselves the kind of ending they want to get to.

Then spend the next however many sessions finding out how they get there.

That’s it for this week. Enjoy!

Books! Glorious Books.

 I arrived home poorer financially, but not poor in spirit. I brought home a cargo of books, as you can see. But what, you ask, was the result?

Well!

David Wellington, 99 Coffins and Vampire Zero. If you remember Wellington, that’s because you read his Monster Island series of zombie apocalypse novels. I think I may have mentioned him in a Bookshelf, lo, these many moons past. In Monster Island, followed by Monster Nation and Monster Planet, he started off with a great idea: dude from UN shanghaied during zombie apocalypse is sent to NYC to pick up meds for a Somali warlord afflicted by AIDs, since the UN building is the only place anyone can think of where someone can reliably get said meds. Sold. Job done. Problem being, that plot didn’t quite sustain the novel, never mind the following two books. Here we have a situation where reluctant modern-day vampire hunter is, first, sent off to deal with Civil-War era shenanigans, and then, in the next novel, has to deal with her former mentor who’s gone rogue and joined the fang gang. I admit, this was a gamble purchase. I'll have to see whether it was worth the $7 or so the Strand charged me for them. [spoiler alert: ehhhhhh ... *shrug*]

Christianna Brand, Green For Danger. Classic crime from the British Library. I’ve already seen the film so I kinda know whodunit, but that shan’t stop me enjoying this one. World War Two drama in which a mysterious person is unceremoniously offed on the operating table. The person who says she knows what happened is stabbed to death moments later …

Agatha Christie Mallowan, Come, Show Me How You Lived. Period archaeology, and yes, it is that Agatha Christie. If nothing else this will be excellent research material, but Dame Agatha is always readable so I’m expecting great things.

Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors. I’m going to delve deeper into this in a separate post. Briefly, excellent horror fiction that GUMSHOE Directors should be poaching ideas from left, right and center. A group of disparate acquaintances discover that they’ve all had close encounters with mysterious forces, apparently led, coordinated or otherwise involved by the young man with spectacles – whoever or whatever he may be …Even if you've never read the novel you have almost certainly read The Novel of the Black Seal and The Novel of the White Powder, both of which are part of the Three Impostors and both of which have been anthologized in many publications since.

William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland. Often called a classic of the genre, this is one I actually wouldn’t recommend to most people. It has a strong premise but no follow-through: two friends on a fishing expedition discover a mysterious house, and a diary written by the man who lived there. Expect much luminous and hallucinogenic imagery and almost no plot whatsoever. Worth picking up if you enjoy delving into the history of horror.

Bartholomew Gill, The Death of an Ardent Bibliophile. A policeman pays what amounts to a welfare check on a notorious bibliophile only to find him dead and naked. Or naked and dead, whichever way you’d prefer to read that sentence.

C. Daly King, Obelists at Sea. Another classic crime novel, with the added bonus that this is set on a classic cruise liner. Neatly involving two of my personal obsessions in one package. Job done.

Paul Halter, The Mask of the Vampire. A locked room mystery master tackles supernatural murder. This is a translation of the French original. Vampires and a Frenchman’s interpretation of the English countryside murder mystery? Oho!

Seishi Yokomizo, The Village of Eight Graves. I’ve mentioned his work before. Yokomizo-san struggled to find a market before the War and very nearly starved to death during it, but post-War found fame with his series of historical mystery novels. Once upon a time greedy villagers murdered eight samurai for the stolen gold the samurai were supposedly guarding. Nobody ever found the money; many died from the samurai curse. Now, it seems, the bloody work of vengeance is to begin anew as unlucky heir BLANK comes back to his birthplace, a village he has never seen in his life.

Ken Weber, Maximum Entertainment 2.0. Bought at Tannen’s Magic Shop, a place I thoroughly recommend to all visitors to NYC with even a passing interest in stage magic. I bought this for research purposes; I couldn’t card trick my way out of a rabbit’s hat. However, if you’re going to write about something – say, if you intend to write a novel with a magician as a main or major character – you need to know the business of performance. You need to know what it is to put on a show. That’s what Weber does, and he does it very well.

Lafcadio Hearn, Chita. I admit without shame that I'd buy/read anything Hearn ever wrote and I await the day when someone gathers all his newspaper columns in one anthology. This is his account of the hurricane of 1856 and, speaking as someone who lived through hurricanes: 110%, no error. Horror writers ought to at least read the first chapter, if you read nothing else. 

Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop If you want to understand how the US became what it is today, you need to read books like these. Balko charts the militarization of America's police, from its earliest days to the no-knock present. The downfall of the Castle Doctrine, one coffin nail at a time.