Opening Scenes (Bookhounds of London, RPG All)

Having previously discussed the Hook and Where To Begin before, this time I want to put those principles into practice and design an opening scene, using Bookhounds of London as an example. This is going to be part of a series in which I discuss scenario design from soup to nuts - and this is the soup course.

In Where To Begin I outlined a Bookhounds scenario, which I'm going to call Buyer's Remorse. In that scenario I said:

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

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

Let's fill in some of the blanks.

When designing any scenario, I prefer starting with action, but the type of action is going to depend on the type of game you run. You wouldn't start a combat-heavy Cyberpunk game with a four-hour ceremonial tea party, not unless the teapot immediately gets kicked over by a samurai robot. 

However, Bookhounds is a more peaceful setting. Its main activity is illicit commerce, the buying and selling of books that probably ought to get burnt to ash, if everyone was being reasonable. It makes sense for action, in that instance, meaning a book sale.

What do you know, as Keeper, going in?

Well, you know the characters' strengths and weaknesses. You know their ability pools. You know what Rome is, and where all this plot is finally headed. You know, thanks to session zero, whether this is Technicolor, Sordid or Arabesque. Finally, you know, because you wrote this thing, exactly what this particular copy of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici is, and what's in those mysterious additions not sponsored by the author.

For the purpose of this series Rome shall be Cthugha:

Cthugha

“For this shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea, and the Children of the Fire Mist came to Earth to teach the Elder Lore to man.”

Through the Gates of the Silver Key

From the Trail main text: Cthugha is a neutral force, a repository of energetic information. The race known as “fire vampires” established their own caches of Cthugha on many worlds, including Earth. Under the guise of the Magi, the ancient fire-priests of the Aryan Persians, they created the Elder Lore of fire-magic, the infrastructure to access Cthugha on our world.

Additional Stability +3 Additional Sanity +1

Keywords: energetic information; Magi, the ancient fire-priests; Elder Lore of fire-magic.

Knowing all those things, what does that mean for the opening scene?

It means, first, that there's no point assigning clues or actions that do not match the players' pools. You need to give them something to do, and the fewer impossible challenges in the opening scene, the better. Challenge them, by all means. Don't put them in a conflict where they're beaten before they start, because none of them have pools in Astronomy.

If this is a scenario that you bought rather than designed yourself, then you need to go through the text and see where the potential pitfalls are. If the text relies heavily on Astronomy and none of the players have that skill, you need to come up with a solution to that problem. Perhaps there's a knowledgeable contact that they can bring in - not ideal, since it assigns the fun stuff to an NPC, but it works in a pinch. Or perhaps the annotations in Religio Medici shed some light. Perhaps there's a means by which one of the players can pick up temporary Astronomy pools. Whichever best works for you.

It means, second, that this opening scene needs to mesh with the Technicolor, Sordid or Arabesque nature of the setting, and it needs to reference Rome in some small way. Always bear in mind, a CORE CONCEPT tree bears CORE CONCEPT fruit.

Finally, it means that this opening scene will introduce Religio Medici, give the characters a clear idea of its importance going forward, and potentially decide into whose hands it falls - at least for now. If it ends up in the oik's hands at the end of the opening sequence, the characters should have means by which they can snatch it for themselves.

What do you, as Keeper, need to know about the immediate setting and surrounding area?

Well, you already know that this is a small village outside London proper. You need to name that village and give some means by which it connects to London. Let's say it's part of Metroland, some hideous mix of mock-Tudor new build surrounding an older core. There's a train station with a connection to London Bridge, so the Bookhounds can slip back to London any time they like. It's vaguely rural but most of the people who live here are London clerks and white-collar managerial. You could design some local landmarks, the pub, name a few NPCs, but this is all frill on the cake; you could just as easily do that in play, not beforehand. 

But you do need at least one or two elements that mesh with the Core Concept, which in this case means Rome - Cthugha. Nothing dangerous; but you need to remind the players at all times what the Core Concept is. Perhaps the telephone lines crackle with mysterious life, or the old men in the pub mutter in peculiar tongues.  

Finally, you need to have an idea of where this scene will lead. At least one option is obvious: there will be one Core scene, which describes what happens if the Hounds get the book (and if they don't). You probably want at least two Optional scenes, to cover what might happen if the Hounds go for options X or Y. You may want a floating scene, not part of the Spine proper, in the event that the Hounds do something completely off-the-wall, though that seems unlikely this early in the scenario. Still, unlikely isn't the same thing as impossible. 

OK, all that said, my notes would look like:

Buyer's Remorse

Small village outside London; looking for rarities at a house sale; the Hounds are out of their element in a village on market day and have just spotted a rarity - Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician, unauthorized edition 1642 with additions not sponsored by the author) using scientific imagery to illustrate religious truths.

Names: Doctor Hargrove (elderly dead physician); Doctor Blunt (the new face on the block); Kingshill (the village); Blue Dog (pub); Railwayman (pub, has rooms for rent); Miss Twistleton's (tea parlor); Collier & Sons (combined bakery, restaurant, dance hall, rooms for rent); Constable Wainwright (policeman);  Samson, Wallis, Beresford, Poole, Fairbrother, Gallant, Norbert, Miller (names to be used for NPCs)

Locations: Doctor Hargrove's practice, based in a timber-frame thatched roof building that clearly has been here for many years; the plaque on the door still has his name on it, though workmen are busy dealing with that and other issues. Clues: Architecture (0 point is genuine 15th century build, 1 point shares a roof void with the building next door and if you want an easy access point that would be the way to go; Occult: (0 point Doctor Hargrove's name is familiar, 1 point was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was good friends with Aleister Crowley. Might be worth checking out what the new man is throwing in the skip; the old boy's magical equipment had to end up somewhere.) 

The Blue Dog: rather horrible mock Tudor, aka Stockbroker's Tudor, but the underlying structure (buried under modern tat) is an older building, probably late 1700s or early 1800s. Clues: The Knowledge (0 point: when this was a coaching inn, back in the 1790s, this was a highwayman's haunt, and the blue dog on the pub sign was supposed to have been a highwayman's faithful hound. 1 point: the last highwayman to hang from the gallows here, Fast Tom Nolan, swore, with his last breath, that 'the hound will take you all!' It's said his corpse mysteriously disappeared from the gallows.) Oral History (0 point, the workers have stories to tell about the peculiar artefacts they took from the doctor's house as they stripped it bare; 1 point: Mickey MacFarlane, a Rough Lad working on the house clearance job, has the good stuff) Architecture (0 point: it's odd how the pub uses none of the rooms on the upper storey. Most pubs like this would turn that empty space to good use.) Special:  The upper rooms are unusable due to a peculiar aura that infects everyone who goes up there, energetic information potential 2 point Stability, prolonged exposure grants 1 Mythos)

The Market Not many farmers here; it's all clerks & stockbrokers playing at being common. There's been a market here since the 1600s but the tradition seems to be dying out. Held in the main square, round the statue of Queen Victoria. The old girl looks bored to tears. Clues: The Knowledge (0 point: before the sad statue of Queen Victoria there was a permanent gallows here, from about the 1600s to the early 1800s. Many a rogue danced the hempen jig for passers-by to see. 1 point: after highwayman Fast Tom Nolan swung here the gallows mysteriously burnt down and was never rebuilt. There's some who swear Nolan's ghost dog roams here on moonless nights.) Cop Talk (0 point: that seedy looking oik who's interested in the Religio Medici has the pale skin and shifty eyes of someone who's spent a long time in prison; 1 point: the oik is book scout Samuel Penman, recently released from HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs. Legend has it he's already died three times. That mark round his neck? Hanging. It didn't take.)

The Graveyard Next to an unimpressive Gothic Revival church that had all of its best bits of architectural frippery stripped away in the 1850s, this cemetery has tombs that go back to the Elizabethan period. The most interesting tomb by far is a mausoleum with peculiar statues and marking, almost Orientalist. According to locals (0 point) this belongs to an antiquarian named Hargrove - related to the Doctor, perhaps? Clues: Occult (0 point: now that you see those markings, you remember noticing similar marks all over Kingshill. Casual graffiti and architectural add-ons, scattered about town, all much like these symbols. 1 point: there was a badge with an identical mark attached to the cover of the Religio Medici). Mythos (0 point: marks like these indicate the creator had some knowledge of the Plateau of Leng and the things that dwell there) Clue which can only be found if the Hounds go into the locked mausoleum: four mummified corpses from different eras. One is clearly the antiquarian Hargrove, another a highwayman who could be Fast Tom Nolan, the third unknown, and the fourth Doctor Hargrove, who's supposed to have been buried elsewhere. One of the corpses clutches an amulet whose markings are almost identical to the symbols carved on the mausoleum and elsewhere. Occult 0 point: the slight differences between the other symbols and this amulet remind you of religious traditions where the faithful consider it blasphemy to accurately copy out the works of God. Those other marks are meant to remind onlookers of the Powers, but this amulet is the original on which they were based.

OK, that's as far as I'm going to go with this post. Were these notes I was taking for a game I intended to play at table I would lay them out differently, but otherwise this is all I'd need to run a game at table. I'd want notes on the OPFOR - the book scout Penman, the Hound-Lich at the heart of the scenario - and I'd want notes on the Religio Medici, but for the purpose of this example you can consider them written.

Notice the terms I'm using: Gothic Revival, Mock Tudor, Orientalist. I don't claim to be an architectural expert; that's what Wikipedia's for. But if I want to give a taste of what this place is like when I'm describing it at the table, I need to have a rough idea of what I'm describing. It takes maybe a second or two to wiki architectural styles and it pays dividends. If you're trying to engage the players you need to engage all the senses, and that includes sight. Smell too, for that matter - the vague, crumbling moldiness of the graveyard, the iron and pitch of a railway yard, the rich dungy stink of horse manure - or taste, or feel. These are things you don't have to write down, but you do have to know, if only a little bit.

I've written all the reminders I need to run a game at table and establish the opening scene. I've got a reasonable idea of some optional scenes I can run, and I know where the next Core link is.

Next week: the Midpoint.

Enjoy! 

Not Quite Book Review Corner: Regency Cthulhu

Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen's England, Chaosium 2022, Andrew Peregrine, Lynne Hardy & Friends

This is a fun one!

I'm always happy to see Cthulhu taken to new and interesting historical periods. Setting an entire campaign in the English Regency (late 1700s early 1800s) has a lot of charm. If you're a fan of the old Gothics (Sheridan LeFanu, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley and the like) this is meat and drink to you. Ghosties, ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties! What could be better?

Peregrine does the Keeper an incredible favor by including the setting of Tarryford, a quaint little town in Wiltshire, partway between Bath and Salisbury. Lots of valleys, high downland, and remnants of ancient forest to get lost in, plus the occasional barrow mound, dolmen and stone circle to marvel at. Even if, as Keeper, you never use either of the scenarios in the book you still have plenty of material to draw on for your campaign. Peregrine also updates it for 1913, which means if you want to have a century-spanning game with dark secrets from the past looming over the 'present day', you can have that and welcome!

All told, you're looking at a little shy of 80 pages worth of history and setting, with two substantial scenarios and a further 35 pages of Appendices - equipment tables, pregens, maps, handouts and the like.

I'm going to start with the things I didn't love and then pass on to the things I did.

Personally, I'd have liked to see a little more history outside England proper, for two reasons: first, this is when England fights a lot of the wars that will define it, and the Empire. Second, this is the period of the Grand Tour, when well-to-do Englishmen went abroad for their education. The English are going damn near everywhere, establishing colonies where they please, and it seems a pity not to explore that.  

It might also have been interesting to go into a little more depth about what it means to be a town in England. As opposed to a Cathedral town, or a village. It feels at times as if the book assumes you already know a lot of things that aren't really common knowledge outside England. The history of Catholicism in England, for instance, is something that people outside England might not understand, and it could have been interesting to explore that.

The scenarios are both solid, with lots for the characters to do, but I didn't really fall in love with the opposition. I dunno; I'm sure it's me, but it felt a little as if the core concept went ahead of its skis. The second scenario, The Emptiness, seems stronger than the first.

It’s difficult to get into this without spoilers, but to misquote Stephen King a little bit: these concepts do not come up to you, grab you by the lapels and say: ‘I have this story. I want to tell it to you.’ They stand at a respectful distance and whisper ‘if it’s not too much trouble, I would like to menace you now.’

The art is solid and serviceable. No real standouts. It does what it was supposed to. There are a few moments where the artist clearly draws on art ideas from the period, which is an excellent way to go. I would have liked a little more creepiness; the cover art for Green and Pleasant Land is more inspiring, for instance.

OK, having said all that … 

I think the historical information that is on the page is great. I wish there were more of it, but if wishes were horses, then writers would ride. I especially liked the section on Race and Ethnicity and appreciated the reference to Mary Prince, since her day is coming up (2nd August) – she’s an important part of our history.  

I think the extra Regency rules are interesting, and the section on Reputation could be very valuable if played out. It’s ideas like this that sell a setting. If you’re going to have a campaign set in a particular period, you need to be able to say what makes this time different from any other and having the option to make Reputation a kind of extra Sanity pool (slowly it drains away …) is clever. It implies penalties for character missteps, but unlike Health or Sanity if the Reputation pool drains the character is still alive and (theoretically) capable of taking action. It’s more of a roleplay tool than anything and encouraging roleplay can only be a good thing. 

The idea of a fictional town that isn’t Arkham, Kingsport or any of the usual suspects as a setting for an extended Cthulhu campaign is stellar! There’s a lot of information here for the Keeper to use as they see fit. This could have been twice the length and I’d have enjoyed every bit, but as with the historical info I shall take what I can get. 

Would I recommend this? Yes, to people looking for something a little different. If it has one besetting sin, it's that it doesn't feel all that different from Cthulhu by Gaslight, though there's a new edition of that coming soon so it's possible my opinion may change when I see Gaslight. The Reputation rules are its main standout, the thing that makes it different from other eras. What might have made it a little more interesting is using those rules in one of the scenarios; a touch of Wicked Little Letters, for instance.

It's not a must-have in anyone's collection, but it's a useful add-on. 

Factional Differences (RPG All, Bookhounds)

Recently I talked about Jonah and Tristen Fishel’s Proactive Roleplaying book, which goes into great detail about factions and their impact on the game. I wanted to discuss this in more detail, using Bookhounds of London as an example.

In broad terms, the Fishels use factions as what amounts to a sounding board for PC actions. If the PCs want to do X, the various factions in the game universe will be interested in that action and may react as a response to that action. Similarly, the factions have their own goals with their own timetables and, if the players don’t interfere with those goals, then the faction may succeed.

If this were Night's Black Agents, these are essentially Nodes. The difference being, in NBA Nodes are enemy assets, while here any group, enemy or not, can be a Faction.

What a Faction's success looks like will depend on the nature of the goal and the faction. A band of orcs who want to sack the town will succeed if they sack the town, burning and pillaging. A turncoat in the palace who wants to usurp a political rival may succeed if the rival is kicked out of power. Those two end results look very different, in-universe, but the effect of kicking the rival out of power may end up being far more destructive than an orc raid.

In Pelgrane, this is sometimes referred to as the Icon system. Each Icon represents a power – a faction – within the in-game universe. Each faction has an interest in what the characters are up to. A Heroic Icon, Ambiguous Icon or Villainous Icon will each have its own goals, ambitions, and effect on the in-game universe but, mechanically speaking, they all operate in the same way. Spend points, get stuff. What stuff looks like will depend on whether your character’s relationship with the Icon is positive, conflicted or negative.

OK, so far so familiar. However, most systems like these talk in high fantasy or major conflict terms. Even in Night’s Black Agents, where there is an optional Icon system, it’s talking about the higher echelons of state, or criminal enterprises that could topple governments. The Archmage in 13th Age isn’t interested in helping you improve your chess game, any more than Edom cares whether or not your character wakes up on time to make it to a job interview. They have more important fish to fry.

What changes when the factions are less significant?

Bookhounds of London is a game in which a small group of entrepreneurs stave off financial ruin by selling secrets man was not meant to know. They avoid disaster in the here-and-now by sowing the seeds of future destruction. But while the things they deal in may end up causing death on a grand scale, the forces the Bookhounds contend with are more mundane. The Hounds don’t clash with the Metropolitan Police; they clash with the constable on the beat. They don’t fight off shadowy cabals; they fight off debt collectors. The contests they wage are never recorded in the annals of history. They’d be lucky if they were recorded on the wall of the nearest public toilet.

Ultimately a faction is a group sufficiently powerful enough, and interested enough, to have an effect on your characters. Or, to re-use an old idea, it has:

• Power, appropriate to its function within the narrative.
• Goals.
• Assets, to be used to achieve its goals.

Some factions are going to be obvious, some not. It’s reasonable to say, for example, that every campaign has some kind of authority that handles governmental tasks. Whether this is set in some distant future dystopia or a brooding, unhappy 1930s London, someone is taking out the trash. Or, possibly, failing to take out the trash. Whichever.

In a Bookhounds setting, then, a potential governmental faction could be:

The Local Council: faceless bureaucrats who are doing their best and yet, somehow, not.

For which there are the following Goals:

• Make sure all records are current and up-to-date.
• Levy fines for non-compliance.
• Enforce parking laws.

Add to these minor day-to-day annoyances one major Goal:

• Slum Clearance. The Council has been given grants to clear out slum housing and build new. This includes the street the Hounds’ shop is on.

That one will cause some angst.

Some factions will arise as a consequence of the setting. Bookhounds is a little unique in that its core function is retail: the characters are engaged in the sale of books. Which means the characters have to deal with the unwashed masses.

That wants a special faction:

The Book Club: self-satisfied enthusiasts who have never run a business and yet know how to run a business. Specifically, your business.

For which there are the following Goals:

• Make sure there’s enough tea & biscuits.
• Make sure there’s enough of what we want on the shelves.
• Engage speakers on interesting topics to come and lecture on those topics.

Again, sounds perfectly reasonable. Except it’s not going to be the Club paying for the tea & biscuits, is it? That will be coming out of the shop’s limited petty cash. Just because the Book Club wants it doesn’t mean they’ll buy it all, so if the shop stocks the shelves with titles the Club wants it'll be draining the shop’s limited income as this dross rots upon the shelf. As for those speakers, picture the snorefest as some dusty academic puts off paying customers with his blow-by-blow account of something only the Book Club cares about.

Add to these the major Goal:

• Hold a Séance. One of the Club members fancies themselves a Madame Blavatsky and wants to hold a spiritualist session. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Each group is sufficiently powerful enough, and interested enough, to have an effect on the characters. The effect doesn’t have to be some world-shattering contest or a fight atop the Reichenbach Falls. The effect has to be in keeping with the theme of the campaign. That’s it.

Among other things this means the end Goal doesn't have to be a campaign-ending event. It can be a major annoyance. It can create a scenario all on its own. But it doesn't have to be the capstone unless you want it to be. 

Slum Clearance, for example, seems like an obvious capstone. It can be one, if you like. Or it can be a catalyst, forcing the Hounds to relocate the shop but not ending their careers. It could also involve some clever scheming to make sure that their street isn't included in the slum clearance scheme. That warrants a scenario, perhaps two, as they reestablish elsewhere. Not a Game Over.

There’s one other thing I want to talk about.

The Fishels mention a mechanic they swiped from Blades in the Dark: the pie chart. It’s simple, visual and works well. Divide the Goal up into a pie chart with four, six, eight segments – as many as necessary. Each time a section of that chart is filled in, the faction is one step closer to its Goal. Fill in all the sections, and the Goal is complete.

Hmmm.

I don’t mind swiping ideas from other systems but that seems like a lot of faff.

Was it me, this is how I’d handle it. Have four markers, one Reaction, as follows:

• Marker One
• Marker Two
• Reaction
• Marker Three
• Marker Four: Goal Reached.

The Faction is working towards a Goal. If it achieves three of its objectives, its Markers, then number four is the Goal, which in this case is Hold a Séance. The Reaction is there as a floating response to anything the characters might do.

Exactly what these markers are will depend on the faction, but if we were talking about the Book Club, eg, then the markers would be:

• Make sure there’s enough tea & biscuits.
• Make sure there’s enough of what we want on the shelves.
• Engage speakers on interesting topics to come and lecture on those topics.

As time goes by the Book Club works towards its ultimate Goal, and the more successes it has along the way the more likely it is that the ultimate Goal will be achieved. The Reaction is there for when the Book Club feels slighted or threatened by something the characters do.

Are these markers a threat to the characters? No, not necessarily. Getting tea and biscuits is hardly the same thing as a note written in blood. But it is often the case that even people who seem harmless end up doing a lot of damage, whether they mean to or not.

The tea and biscuits are fine. The séance, not so much. But you don’t get to a point where the séance is possible before granting the Book Club a great deal of leeway, which is what will happen if the Club gets what it wants all the time. Like, eg, tea and biscuits on demand.

As for the Reaction, the Club might, if slighted, withdraw its support. For a while. They might go to a rival store, set up shop there. Take their business somewhere else, perhaps even persuade other customers to follow their lead. This, if not prevented, leads to a financial Reversal for the shop, affecting its credit rating and its ability to buy new stock.

Note the ‘if not prevented’ bit. The characters may decide to keep the Club on, but to do that they’ll need to give the Club something it wants. Like, say, put more of what the Club wants on the shelves, or engage speakers on interesting topics to come and lecture on those topics.

Then comes the séance …

That’s it for this week. Enjoy!

Ripped from the Headlines: Behind A Wall (Night's Black Agents)

This week's post comes to you courtesy of an article in the Washington Post: China cultivated high-rolling crime families before turning on them by Shibani Mahtani, Christian Shepherd and Pei-Lin Wu.

For the scion of a crime family linked to human trafficking and enslavement, money laundering and global cyberscams, Wei Qingtao was brazenly public. His Douyin account, the Chinese-language version of TikTok, flaunted the excesses of his life in a remote corner of Myanmar by the border with China: Bentleys and Lamborghinis, rare cigars and private jets.

When the 27-year-old partied at the multistory, glass-walled nightclub he owned in a region called Kokang, he’d throw crisp Chinese yuan bills into the crowd as international techno DJs, chauffeured in along dirt roads, performed their sets.

In November, the good times rolled to a stop. Wei’s social media presence vanished. He soon appeared in a different kind of video: reading a scripted confession while in Chinese custody

The article's behind a paywall but I highly recommend it, if you can get to a copy. 

However, the bit that caught my attention talked about the Crouching Tiger compound, where hackers and scammers were corralled into a villa and kept there by force, the better to direct their efforts against victims of the syndicate. 

Clans also hired foreign security personnel to protect their interests. Alex Klisevits, a former Estonian navy officer, was among a team of 11 who arrived in Kokang after responding to a job ad seeking close protection officers for a “Chinese businessman.” Klisevits said he was smuggled in and soon realized he was not free to leave. The first day on the job, Klisevits said he saw a chained man beaten unconscious.

“When I saw how they punished people … I thought, ‘where the hell am I?’” Klisevits said.

If ever there was a Night's Black Agents plotline ripped from the headlines, this is it.  

Consider: when Stoker wrote Dracula he set the action in the Carpathians, which had the advantage from a writer's perspective of being difficult to get to and shrouded in mystery. That is no longer so. When you can buy tickets for the castle tour, the Count's lair loses its dangerous edge. 

The same can't be said of a remote crime fiefdom in Kokang. 

Kokang is a region within the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, aka Burma until fairly recently, the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia. Myanmar shares a border with China, and Kokang is on that border. Kokang was part of China until it was ceded to Britain in the late 19th century, and there's significant crossover between China and Kokang. It's a self-administered zone within Myanmar, which is probably for the best as it's infested with warlords and poppy smugglers. 

Image sourced from WP which got it from Google Earth

They're big on casinos in Kokang which is one of the main attractions for Chinese citizens. Like Macao, Kokang relies on Chinese tourists who can't gamble at home. Also like Macao, Kokang relies on extra-legal debt collectors, since gambling debts are unenforceable in China. Of course, these extra-legal groups don't stop at gambling debts, any more than a wolf stops at one sheep.

In the WP article a source describes the relationship between the two as “a Frankenstein monster that it [China] now can’t control.”

The Crouching Tiger villa was a hotbed of internet scams. The operators were kept at it 24/7, communicating with their Chinese targets and scraping off whatever they could get. Hence the guards; the actors and keyboard artists didn't want to be there and had to be threatened with violence to stay at their posts. Also, hence the raid, allegedly anyway; China got tired of the scams.

From the WP:

Many of the compounds for running scam operations were hosted in the same hotels and casino complexes long established by the clans. Others were purpose built, but had telltale signs like barred windows, high walls and even Myanmar military snipers on the rooftops, witnesses said.

This could be the setting for a very interesting introductory scenario. The characters are brought together by a mysterious Mr. Johnson in the usual way and sent off after an objective. The scenario in the main book, (S)entries, is exactly this sort of scenario. 

Except in (S)entries the agents are sent into a NATO base to retrieve a laptop. This time, the agents are sent into Kokang to retrieve a person.

Darkest Before The Dawn

Your mission: go to Kokang and retrieve Estonian operative Andrus Tamm, former First Infantry Scouts Battalion rapid response soldier turned bodyguard. Tamm has been swept up in a Myanmar military operation in Kokang intended to clear out a crime-infested region. He's currently in jail. It's believed that, if the agents don't intervene, Tamm will be spirited across the Chinese border and wind up in some quiet, remote prison, never to be seen again. 

Once successful, the agents are to get Tamm across the Indian border to a safe house in Mumbai, where Mr. Johnson will take possession.

All the agents are told about the target in the briefing is that Tamm was working for a crime syndicate, that he was brought in under false pretenses as bodyguard for an important official, and that until the sweep he was actually working as a guard at a cyberscam facility in Kokang called Black Tiger. 

Investigative point spends show that Myanmar would never have carried out a raid like this without Chinese backing and support. Tradecraft or similar indicate that China's secretive state agency Room 452 played a part in the raid. Further spends (Occult or similar) note that, in Chinese imagery, a Black Tiger is thought to ward off evil. However, at the compound, where there are graphic images of black tigers, none of them have the symbol of three horizontal lines connected by a central vertical line 王 (wang) meaning 'king', which normally decorate mythological black tiger imagery.

Enter the agents.

Option One: Hopping Mad. This raid was a proof of concept. Room 452 knows that Edom wants to use Dracula as an agent of the Crown, but Room 452 hasn't a hope of recruiting the great vampire. Instead, it has some tame (ish) jin-gui on the payroll, and this was its first outing. The ultimate intent is to create an anti-Dracula; China's fear is that Edom succeeds and, when it does, Dracula will give the UK an edge. Tamm is a witness to the hopping vampire's ravages, and Edom wants to debrief him. Mr. Johnson is on Edom's payroll, but he's had a change of heart - the Americans are offering more money. Crossing over into Mumbai will put the agents squarely in the crosshairs of Edom, Room 452 and some shadowy American intelligence types.

Option Two: Shaw Brothers. The raid was an attempt to put a vampire problem down for good. The Kokang crime syndicate was a Conspiracy node engaged in research on human subjects, and Tamm was one of the subjects. The Conspiracy was attempting to create a different kind of Renfield, one whose mental state isn't so ... fluid. Chinese forces were there to put down a crime syndicate; Room 452 hitched a ride hoping to gather up any loose intel the Conspiracy left lying around. Mr. Johnson is working on behalf of Tamm's relatives, who just want him back safe and sound. The relatives haven't got nearly as much money as they promised but they do have connections within the Estonian government, which is how they had the ability to arrange all this.  

Option Three: Encounters of the Spooky Kind. The raid, and the agents' involvement, was orchestrated by Room 452. They know that the Kokang crime syndicate stumbled onto supernatural powers; one of their new casinos happened to be built on top of an ancient tomb, and something crawled out during construction. Room 452 sees this as the perfect opportunity to get those supernatural powers for themselves, but they don't want to tip their hand. If they were seen to be directly involved in a snatch-and-grab in Kokang, that might alert Edom and every other vampire agency on the planet. If, on the other hand, some useful foreign pawns "snatch" the asset and take it to Mumbai, well ... it's so easy to lose inconvenient corpses in Mumbai ... Tamm is human but he's carrying the prize, and if he or someone else breaks the seal on that peculiar antique he's lugging around that will be problematic for everyone in a five-mile radius. 

That's it for this week. Enjoy!