My father has a bar billiards table. He got his from an American family. The old fella had been big in Hollywood back in the day and had worked on several films set in England; I believe American Werewolf in London was one of them. He picked up the bug for the game while he was in the UK and, as he had the money, he brought a table to his Bermuda home. However, all things pass and so did he, and the family wasn't interested in lugging what is quite a heavy object back to [wherever they may have been then]. So we picked it up.
The big thing to bear in mind, as Wikipedia helpfully reminds us, is that:
The play is time-limited. A coin will usually give around 17 minutes of play, dependent on region. After this time a bar drops inside the table stopping any potted balls from returning, leading to a steady decrease in the number of balls in play. The last ball can only be potted into either the 100 or 200 hole having been played off either side cushion.
Which lends itself to pub play and is probably why the coin slot was invented in the first place. You can't be at the table all day. Someone else has to have a go.
The table we have used to have a coin slot but someone deactivated it at some stage, presumably because it became too much of a faff to find old British coinage. Even if you can open up the slot and get it back again, at some point someone will lose your only two-half-groat-a-billibong, and then the table's shot.
The game is practically built for gambling. You bet on whether or not the player will make the shot, you bet on who will win, you bet on how much by, you bet on any number of things.
Which is interesting, because Bookhounds doesn't include a gambling mechanic. Never mind the Thrilling mechanic that Night's Black Agents uses. More than that, the game (in its current form) is new in the 1930s, which means all those pubs the Hounds go to probably have a bar billiards table. It's the modern fashion. The coming thing.
In Millionaire's Special I faced the same problem with Trail, and I'm going to adapt that solution to this problem as follows:
Use Athletics as the General ability if you're playing honestly and Filch if you're cheating.
If plot does not depend on the outcome of the game, then whoever has the highest Athletics or Filch wins.
If plot matters, then use dice. It can either be a lengthy competition (mechanically, like an Auction scene) or a one-roll game, depending on how important the result is.
With an additional rule if there are books involved:
If this game is determinative in an Auction, for whatever reason, then Auction can be used in addition to Athletics or Filch.
What do I mean by that? Well, this is gambling. I can foresee times when a book scout might want to wager, say, some nice 18th century German pamphlets on vampirism on the outcome of the match. That makes the match a species of Auction, which is what the Auction ability is all about. When someone wants to spend from the Auction pool they do that instead of spending Athletics or Filch.
Why do it this way? Well, as Storage Wars reminds us, an auction isn't about meekly standing in a row making bids. It's about showmanship, finagling, angling for an advantage, screwing over the competition. Sounds a lot like a game of chance to me. But as a mechanic it's only worth using if there's a book as the prize. The game is Bookhounds of London, after all, not Poolhounds.
All that said, let's talk about a scenario seed. To do that, I'm going to set this in a location I've discussed before: The Three Bucks pub.
This elaborate Edwardian building resembles an Italian palace gone slightly awry, complete with statues of saints and a copper-clad cupola roof. It was built on the site of an old Georgian traveler's inn, as a speculative venture by Gregory Harris in 1908 ... [the pub is haunted by a spirit] obsessed with blood and violence, particularly cutting ...
Snookered
Book Scout Allan Chessover (main text p85) is known to be a billiards fiend, and the Three Bucks has installed a new table. He’s there every Thursday night without fail, for a round or two with the lads.
The Three Bucks has an unusual reputation as it stands, but ever since the table came in the rumors have been flying thick and fast. People see lights where there oughtn’t be lights, hear the sound of billiard balls clicking when there cannot be players. Not least because Paddy Green and his sons don’t let anyone on the premises after midnight, not for any reason or for any inducement.
The Hounds want something from Chessover. It doesn’t matter what that something is, but for the sake of this example it’s a lead on a book they desperately want to acquire.
Right-o, says Chessover. I’ll do that little thing. If, and only if, you beat me at bar billiards at the Three Bucks. After midnight.
Option One: Action Room. It’s all a bluff. Chessover has no intention of showing up at the Three Bucks, whether after midnight or at any other time. He pays a group of Rough Lads to attend in his stead. The Rough Lads having a sense of humor, they propose a little game of their own: play billiards, and every ball you pot is a bone I don’t break. Miss the pot … well … What none of them appreciate is that the restless spirit of Gregory Harris, the pub’s former owner, will want in on the fun.
Option Two: Dirty Pool. Chessover has his own troubles. He’s been on a losing streak for weeks and is deep in the hole, financially. He owes a remarkable sum to the ghost hunters who frequent the Three Bucks looking for Captain Kidd’s revenant; one of them is a talented billiards player. The ghost hunters have been wanting to visit the Three Bucks after midnight for ages. Chessover can sneak them in but doesn’t want to be blamed for letting them in. Not if he can rig it so the Hounds get blamed instead …
Option Three: Silent Partner. Mike Green, Paddy’s eldest son and a fellow who never wastes a penny, lets a select group into the Three Bucks after hours to play the billiards table. Chessover is one of the lucky few. If Paddy knew about this he’d be furious. There’s just one odd little stipulation. Rather than pay cash for the table, you have to put a few drops of blood down the coin slot instead. Otherwise the table seems normal … just don’t go looking too long at any of the shadows …
When war breaks out and the Phoney War becomes all too real, as the Germans push through Belgium in May 1940, as the Battle of France begins and ends in a heartbeat, Dion Fortune does her bit to save England from the Germans.
She organizes the Magical Battle of Britain, with a cycle of rites beginning July 1940.
Bear in mind, that’s a busy month. You’ve got bombing raids on mainland Britain, the Cardiff Blitz; the Germans are chewing up the RAF in the Kanalkampf in preparation for Unternehmen Seelöwe; Vichy is the new French government, allied with its conqueror Germany; the country’s plunging into debt to fight a war in which it seems it will soon be the sole Allied combatant, with Churchill telling the country they’d fight on alone, seeking no terms or parley; the buying and selling of new cars is banned, the first of a series of stringency measures; everyone thinks the German invasion is imminent, including the Germans. It’s one of those times when you daren’t read the newspaper because you know what the headlines will be. It’s enough to scare someone into spiraling depression.
In all this, Fortune marshals the occultists of Britain to … actually, it isn’t entirely clear what the point is.
With a title like ‘Battle of Britain’ you expect, well, combat. Of some kind. Lonely duels high in the sky, where life and death is seen as a scattering of contrails punctuated by crashing aircraft. Explosions. Derring-do, that kind of thing.
What actually happens is a little less exciting.
Fortune gathers together a number of people, not all of them occultists but all known to her personally. She persuades them to meditate on a particular subject at a particular time and write to her with the results of their meditations. She then wrote back, instructing her correspondents that they weren’t to open or read the letters until just before the next session, at which point the cycle begins anew.
Fortune openly admits that what she’s attempting is more about morale building than anything practical. Victory, if it is to be had, must be fought for and won in the physical realm. What she’s after is more of a spiritual victory.
You know what that reminds me of?
ITV News
Again, bear in mind when this is happening. This is the bleakest point in the war, for the English. The news isn’t going to get better any time soon; the actual Battle of Britain is about to see some of the heaviest casualties, the most significant engagements. The Hardest Day is coming in August. Everyone knows a family where someone’s died, or is that family mourning a loss. Food is running short. Meanwhile Charles Lindberg the celebrated American aviator is telling his fellow Americans not to get involved; that so long as America is strong, none will dare invade her, and she need not intervene on another’s behalf.
People need to feel as though they’re doing something, even if it’s a gesture of defiance.
Foreign Correspondent (1940, Hitchock)
I have to wonder whether Fortune was drawing on her own war experiences in the Women's Land Army during the First World War. That was all about rallying round and doing your bit, even if it was less than spectacular and didn’t require a lot of derring-do. It’s also where she allegedly had her first serious spiritual experience and began her communications with the Ascended Masters. Was she intending some kind of mass recruitment to the esoteric cause? Introducing her followers to the Ascended Masters that first intrigued her so long ago, during another war?
As the war news improves, Fortune loses interest in the effort. It becomes more about what will happen after the war, when peace returns to the green and pleasant land. She begins developing ‘the Arthurian Formula’ where Arthur and his knights become dim and distant reflections of Atlantean forebears. Not that she has long; leukemia will claim her by 1946.
OK, that’s what actually happens.
How to gamify?
Probably the simplest method is to assume that Fortune embarks on the Arthurian/Atlantaen bit a good deal earlier than she does. The occultists she recruits - the player characters - are all Knights in her Arthurian army, and there are dragons on the horizon attacking the very soul of Britain itself. Their job is to use scavenged Atlantaen rituals (and later, technology) to establish a perimeter - castles, in her vernacular - first on the coast and, later, when those are bombed in the Battle of Britain alongside the coastal airfields, further within. From these castles the Knights defend the realm against foreign psychic incursion. The intent is to provide aid at first, when the country's need is greatest, and later, when the tide turns, a base for assault across the Channel against those same foreign dragons who were ravaging the countryside a few short months prior.
All Arthurian stories need a Mordred figure and in this instance there's one ready-made: occultist Aleister Crowley. He seems friendly enough to Fortune, but his smiles hide evil intent. He may present as an ally at first, but someone's working with the dragons, and it may well be the wickedest man alive.
Now, some options:
Option One: Yithian Malice Fortune isn't a free agent. She's been corrupted by the Yithians, who see the outbreak of war as their last chance to scoop up as much Pnakotic material and lost technology as they can before the war ravages what's left of their network. The Yithians intend to gather all this at their Oxford Camelot, a secret base where they'll hide all of their secrets until some future date when they can re-establish their network. The Yithians see this as a rescue mission - shades of Three Damsels of the Fountain - but the player characters may disagree, particularly since the Yithians follow an old human maxim: no witnesses. In this version, Crowley is Mordred, but Mordred isn't the real enemy of mankind.
Option Two: Dragons of Dream Fortune is facing real threats, but these are threats to the English Dream. The Dragons ravage the nightmares of all who listen to Haw-Haw's broadcasts and it's up to the player characters to perform miracles of resistance. They may be assisted in this effort by whatever's left of the Dreamhounds of Paris who may be trying similar methods of resistance in occupied France. In time the characters may become a kind of psychic Special Operations Executive; entirely unofficial, but there were many such unofficial, undocumented operations. A supernatural Small Back Room, with Fortune as the lead brain and Crowley as the greasy politico.
Small Back Room
Option Three: Accidental Arthur This borrows from Pagan Publishing's Golden Dawn and Pelgrane's Dracula Dossier, but neither are required reading. In the dying days of the last century Golden Dawn occultist Randolph Northcote attempted to bring back King Arthur to save Britain, but his attempts ended in disaster and Arthur's plans to reestablish his Shub-Niggurath cult were thwarted. Temporarily, at least, though some of Arthur's ideas and forbidden texts he and Northcote consulted found their way into the archives of a secretive supernaturalist organization within Military Intelligence. Now that same obscure branch of Military Intelligence is drawing on those old ideas to create a new Arthurian cycle, and in the process bringing back Arthur's Shub-Niggurath cult. Fortune the Golden Dawn inheritor, in this version, may be the heroic resistance, or may be a willing catspaw of British Intelligence; if the latter, then Crowley/Mordred is what little's left of the heroic resistance. The ultimate goal is to bring back Arthur the same way Northcote did, but Northcote didn't realize what he was bringing back, and neither does Military Intelligence.
That's all for this week! Next week, something completely different.
Violet Firth (born 6 December 1890 died 6 or 8 January 1946) was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1919, when she would have been in her late 20s. MacGregor Mathers, the founder of the Golden Dawn, had died the year before during the influenza epidemic and the Golden Dawn was under the occasionally shaky leadership of his widow Moina Mathers, working in partnership with an ageing J.W. Brodie-Innes. Brodie-Innes was himself not long for this world and would pass in 1923.
Firth came from a wealthy background and was well educated. Her father, anxious not to be seen as a money-grubbing parvenu, adopted the motto God, not Luck - Deo, non Fortuna - from which she would derive the pseudonym by which she is best known. Though in her view Dion Fortune wasn't so much a pseudonym as Violet Firth was her deadname.
Fortune had a long-standing interest in occultism before being introduced as a neophyte in Alpha et Omega in 1919. She was well versed in psychotherapy, the works of Freud and Jung, and had experience as a medium and psychic sensitive. She'd also served in the War in the Woman's Land Army but had never been posted overseas.
King says something interesting, though it's a bit of a non sequitur. He describes Fortune as a 'slim young girl' in 1919 and goes on to add that 'later she was to become very fat; for some reason most mediums seem to do this - probably there is some relationship between mediumship and the glandular balance of the metabolism.' Which, frankly, sounds like utter garbage, but in a game world where Y'Golonac exists there is something to be said for a fictional universe where mediums become enormous under psychic influences.
Fortune soon becomes disenchanted with the Golden Dawn's mismanagement and its lack of a rigorous training program. It doesn't help that Mathers is milking it for every spare dollar, pushing Alpha et Omega as if mystical learning is a self-help experience. Initially Fortune counters this by trying to bring in new blood, with Mathers' blessing. New recruits were a good thing for Mathers the Empire-builder. This creates the Fraternity of the Inner Light, a sub-group within Alpha et Omega, in which Fortune is a leading player. Mathers hates that idea; in Alpha et Omega, Mathers is Imperatrix, the only leading player.
Fortune and Mathers soon fall out, and Fortune alleges that Mathers engages her in psychic assault. This takes the form of a plague of cats. "I suddenly saw, coming down the stairs towards me, a gigantic tabby cat, twice the size of a tiger. It appeared absolutely solid and tangible. I stared at it petrified for a second, and then it vanished. I instantly realized that it was a simulacrum, or thought-form that was being projected by someone with occult powers." Fortune beats off this attack with her own occult powers but not without cost; when she goes to bed, she sees she has been scored as if by claws.
Again, going back to gaming, this can be significant in a game world in which dreams, mystic cats, and Bast worship exist. Was Mathers secretly a worshipper of the cat god, or had she, by chance, discovered a means of using Bast's powers? Was Mathers a Dreamer?
This becomes even more important later, when Ms. Netta Fornario, a member of Alpha et Omega, dies under very mysterious circumstances. She travelled to Scotland in 1929, evidently engaged in some kind of ritual exercise on the Isle of Iona, and was later found dead there. Possibly her death was the result of exposure to the elements, but there were deep score marks on the body and, before her death, Netta claimed she was being attacked psychically. Fornario and Fortune were friends. Fortune believed Mathers was responsible for Fornario's death.
By this time Mathers was dead; in fact, she died the year before Fornario's trip to Iona. Any further breach between Fortune and Mathers was irrelevant, at least in the physical realm, though Mathers' psychic influences may have remained.
Again, going back to gaming, this could also become in-game relevant if Mathers was a Dreamer, and if her Dream-self survived. Particularly if you, as Keeper, intend this to run contemporaneously with Dreamhounds of Paris, since Mathers will be in the Dream fomenting occult dissent just at the time the Dreamhounds are sculpting the Dreamlands in their own image. What would Mathers do if her Egyptian, Bast-centric artistic vision is interrupted by French Surrealists while she, at the same time, is continuing her feud with Fortune?
By this point Fortune is utterly disenchanted with Alpha et Omega. Fortune has effective control over her own Fraternity, and she's more interested in personal development than getting bogged down in psychic attacks and the day-to-day bother of running an esoteric society. She begins corresponding with other occultists across Europe, expanding her horizons and generally making a name for herself. Not just living occultists either; through meditation she contacts Madame Blavatsky, and more esoteric entities. Her career as a writer begins to flourish, and her most well-regarded book, The Mystical Qabalah, is published in 1935.
Ultimately, she approaches paganism, abandoning her former Christian beliefs. She begins to develop a mystical practice entirely her own, based on rituals of her own devising.
War approaches. The mystical Battle of Britain is about to begin ...
In the old year (feh! Fooey!) someone asked if I would write about Dion Fortune and the magical Battle of Britain.
Happy to oblige. Before I do, let's set the scene a little and talk about ritual magic.
Ritual magic, in Western traditions, is all about the big favors. You use it when you want to achieve a major result. In fiction this is sometimes with machines and modern (or at least modernist) technology. The Electric Pentacle and peculiar devices of Thomas Carnacki are an example of this type. You never know exactly what makes those devices hum. That isn't the point; the point is that they work.
Same with rituals. If you really want to, you can find out how they're supposed to work. I have proof of this: academic tome after academic tome, Histories of Magic, long lists of names and attributes. All wordy, windy, esoteric. Filled with forbidden knowledge and tempting illustrations.
However, from the point of view of the observer, how ritual magic works isn't the point. How impressive rituals are, is the point.
Faust 1926, Murnau
The peculiar technology used by Doctor Frankenstein in the early films (and later, in Young Frankenstein) are in this tradition. Again, the desired result is something spectacular: the creation of new life, from dead clay. To achieve it an appeal is made to the heavens, and peculiar technology is used to make that appeal heard.
Frankenstein, 1932
Early cinema, and plays like Marlowe's Faustus, latch on to this scene-play. They have those central dramatic moments when someone goes out to the crossroads on a dark night and evokes the weird. There's a suggestion that Faust and the rest are completing an esoteric ritual, but the details of that ritual are, at best, sketched in. So long as the visual is suggestive the means of getting there can slide a little bit.
Video games pull much the same tactic. Whether it's the Rite of Thorns in Baldur's Gate 3 or any one of a dozen summoning rites in World of Warcraft, the implication is that so long as you get enough people chanting faux Latin and standing in something approximating a circle, you've got yourself some ritual goodness and can expect great results.
In the historical record this often causes religious qualms. Appealing to forces beyond reality? Clearly diabolic. Burn those books. However, even the religious are not beyond a little magical temptation, so up springs a series of tomes that promise power from angels instead. Know the right angel, make the right appeal (in the Lord's name, of course) and you too can have whatever it is you desire. Or, if you're into slightly less work for slightly less reward, you can practice simple bibliomancy. Take out your bible, flip to a random page, and take the advice offered. A very simple ritual designed to produce a simple result.
But the key to ritual, whether religious or otherwise, is to know your terminology. You need to know the proper name of the angel (or whatever it may be) you're appealing to. You need to know the offerings that being wants, or the tools you'll need to make the appeal. You need to be able to recite the prayers exactly right each time, in the right order each time, as often as the ritual requires. You need to be able to do this while fasting, or while only drinking or eating the right things, or by only consuming the holy spirit, or whatever it may be. You need to get everything exactly right, possibly over a period of several days or even weeks.
Get one little thing wrong, and the whole effort is for naught. Or, in the case of devils, get one little thing wrong and put your body and soul in peril.
The interesting thing about a ritual, I think, is that it doesn't rely on the magician, or the magician's innate power. This is the magician asking for a favor. Commanding a favor, really. They know the cheat codes, they press the correct button sequence, and boom! Magical gifts. Angels, demons, deities of the hearth or saints in charge of who-knows-what, beings that have existed before Man and which will exist after him, beings that have seen the face of God and tasted the eternal joys, suddenly bow down to some clown from Croydon, so long as that clown pronounces their name correctly and chants in the appropriate tempo.
In RPG terms, naturally the Bookhounds (or whoever it may be) aren't really appealing to angelic or devilish forces. They're relying on the Mythos to power their Megapolisomancy, their Rough Magick, or whatever else it may be. The ritual found in that collection of scrolls may reference Thoth, but to those who know it's really talking about [insert Mythos here].
Which raises a question. Most Mythos forces aren't interested in humanity and certainly aren't interested in anything humanity wants. Cthulhu could care less. Nyarlathotep is probably interested to a degree but isn't about to fetch and carry for any mortal sorcerer.
There are at least two ways to answer that question.
The first is manipulation. Humanity isn't drawing directly on Mythos forces. Rituals are ways of channeling power, leeching power that would otherwise go to waste or be used for something else. This may be deliberate manipulation, or it may be an accidental effect, something that's survived from the days of Mu and which some mortal lucked into. When a sorcerer uses a ritual to achieve an effect that sorcerer is accessing Mythos forces that exist around us all the time, in the same way that we might dam a river or redirect a stream to irrigate cropland. We didn't create the river. We merely adapted it to our use.
The other is natural tendencies at work. Humanity is Mythos. There's some lurking corruption at the heart of us all, and when we manipulate forces to create a ritual result we're drawing on the Mythos inside us to do it. We bring ourselves closer to Cthulhu, or whichever Old One it may be. Perhaps that's what is meant by 'the stars are right' - not that some anticipated conjunction of heavenly bodies will bring about a result, but that we are the stars spoken of in prophesy, and when our devotions over however many millennia finally bear fruit, we will be the reason why Ry'leh rises and why the Old Ones return. Like ants building a mountain, we strive in our own cause, but build something beyond our scope or our ability to understand.
