OK! First post in February comes with some tooting of the horn. I'm writing material for Pelgrane's Page XX which will appear at some nebulous point in the future. To give you an idea of what I'm working on:
New Fun
A Trail of Cthulhu scenario in which the investigators are tasked with finding a new comic talent for the funny papers.
The Giffard Auction
A Trail of Cthulhu scenario set provisionally in Lovecraft Country, in which the investigators are hired as protection for an auction bid.
Blood Cocaine
I’ll grind your bones to make my bread. [folktale, Jack & the Beanstalk]
A Night’s Black Agents Node which distributes Blood Cocaine and is linked to several smaller criminal syndicates which may or may not be part of the Conspiracy proper.
That's enough of that.
Now, back in the Before Times I asked whether there was a campaign setting you'd like me to sketch out. There were several votes for different things, and more than a few asked for Night's Black Agents. Fine. That's February's project.
It does lead to a question, though. Which flavor is your favorite?
As with most of the Gumshoe settings, NBA comes in several possible types and has the additional challenge of several possible adversaries. As a reminder:
BURN: In burn mode games, psychological damage is more intense; the actions Many of agents must take inevitably burn away their humanity. Your Stability is capped at 12 and degrades faster. Killing is never easy, and never free.
DUST: Recreate the gritty, lo-fi espionage world of Anthony Price or Charles McCarry, similar to the TV series The Sandbaggers or Rubicon, or films like Three Days of the Condor, by “de-powering” the game. The vampires and their agents will be far more challenging and powerful in open combat.
MIRROR: In mirror mode games, your contacts and even your team are unreliable; your partners can help you with Trust or destroy you with Betrayal. Unlike the other modes, mirror mode games encourage player vs. player story lines or active conflict.
STAKES: The characters derive their actions from a higher purpose than mere survival or “get the job done” ethics: patriotism, the search for knowledge, protection of the innocent, or even justified revenge.
Meanwhile those pesky Vampires can be:
SUPERNATURAL: Their markers are strange superstitions, often surrounding childbirth and burial customs; their emphasis is hunger.
DAMNED: Their markers are holy symbols and symbolism; their emphasis is seduction.
ALIEN: Their markers are various uncanny effects; their emphasis is invasion.
MUTANT: Their markers are medical symptoms; their emphasis is infection.
So! My question to the madding crowd: which, from this smorgasbord, would you like to see? Pick a setting type and an OPFOR type, and I shall go from there.
To add to the mix, whichever campaign I sketch out will begin with this scenario from the Free RPG day collection:
The Van Helsing Letter. The player characters are about to obtain a letter from Van Helsing to the director of the hospital where his son died, a letter that hints at a (second) failed attempt by British intelligence to recruit Dracula as an intelligence asset. The clues in that century-old letter will lead the Agents to cross paths with modern-day minions of Dracula.
The weather's about to get very cold down here. Storms inspired by whatever-it-is happening in the States right now have impacted the island. If you'll excuse me, it's time to prepare for harsh weather and potential power outages.
This week's post is inspired by this article over at the Guardian. It's a photographic spread featuring actors/military portraying OPFOR in military exercises.
Once upon a time I wrote about Hush-Hush Houses and described two possible locations, Glen Eagles and Brinkley/Piccadilly.
Glen Eagles is the code name for Pitfour House, a hunting lodge in the Grampians. Built in the Scottish Baronial style, this property was requisitioned by the SOE early in the 1939-45 war and has remained in Government hands ever since. The property is remote and inaccessible; the best way in is by air, via helicopter. In its day it was a training ground first for Polish commandos and bag and burn experts, until Edom acquired it in 1940. There's plenty of evidence of the former occupants, from graffiti on the walls to the marks of hobnail boots on the floors, as well as the old explosive ordinance testing grounds.
Brinkley is a 1970s urban brutalist build on the outskirts of Manchester. It's always been government owned but has housed a variety of government offices and schemes; currently its main tenant is MoneyForce, an organization whose purpose is to help armed forces members with money management. Anyone with Architectural or Military Science knowledge will wonder about those preternaturally thick walls and peculiar sightlines; its almost as if an iceberg settled in a suburban district, its deepest secrets hidden deep below the earth.
The original article assumed both locations were Cool or Warm, as per the Dossier's usual formula. The Guardian photoshoot kinda pushes things towards Warm; it's difficult to imagine someone trying to pull off a complicated test case like this without a pre-established testing location.
However, it could be interesting to imagine a Cool site becoming Warm.
Suppose that there was an Incident. It doesn't really matter what, except that Incidents usually come with body counts and embarrassing headlines. Fine, say the Princes; lessons learned. We need more field testing before anything like that happens again. Don't we have some old field test sites on the books? Let's reactivate those, shall we?
It could even be a good starter scenario for beginning Agents. In this campaign frame the Incident, whatever it was, has already happened. In fact, the players' Agents may have been on the periphery of the Incident. Not directly involved; they'd be dead. But they saw the bodies first-hand. They helped clean up the mess.
Now, their first task: reactivate Glen Eagles and repopulate it with actual NPCs, so Edom's finest can start live testing again. [I could do both Glen Eagles and Brinkley, but I think Glen Eagles has more potential as a large-scale live fire testing zone.]
A reminder:
Cool: While still on Edom's books officially, nobody's paid attention to Glen Eagles since the 1970s. This quietly crumbling edifice is home to bats, birds and rats now, keeping lonely watch over a forgotten part of Edom's history. Potential clues to the 1940 mission or a series of 1970s interrogations can be found here, but any important files have long since been transferred elsewhere. The fake French street built adjacent to Glen Eagles, with its wonky wire-operated targets, are all that's left of the Kill House. Some old remnants of Edom weapons tech circa 1940 are rotting away here, possibly even a live round or two for those who like playing with out-of-date potentially lethal explosives. Poachers sometimes come here but are put off by the poor quality of the game; it's almost as if something's blighted the land.
I like starting with action, so in this case I'd start in the immediate aftermath of the Incident. The Agents are carting out bodies or attending forensic examination of the recently deceased. They get to see first hand what happens when things go tits up.
[a good hook] poses a problem that the players have to solve.
In this instance the problem is how to set up a testing base, preferably a live fire base, at short notice and in an inaccessible location?
Well, there are several optional scenes involving potential Edom support. They could:
Go to the Archivist to find out more about Glen Eagles.
0 point: get plans of Glen Eagles to help the rebuild effort
1 point: find after-action reports, diaries and other records concerning Glen Eagles in its last days of operation.
Go to Tinman or Fort for supplies to rebuild.
0 point: get supplies.
1 point: get some kind of personal input into the rebuild, eg. the Prince lends their personal support staff or some other kind of valuable assistance.
Go to E Squadron to find out more about their operational needs from a Hush-Hush House.
0 point: get insights that help efficiently develop Glen Eagles.
1 point: an E-Squadron assistant (eg. Veteran Rating) is assigned to the project as an advisor.
However, ultimately the Agents will be getting into a chopper and flying out to the depths of the Grampians to see Glen Eagles for themselves.
As we already know there are several potential plot points to be discovered, among them:
Potential clues to the 1940 mission
Potential clues to the 1970s interrogations
Remnants of Edom weapons tech circa 1940
As Keeper you could add something else, like a Sealed Coffin, but ultimately you should pick one and stick with it, not sprinkle in all three or four. Given kittens three possible toys to play with and they will try to play with all three at once. Give them one. Then, if they don't like that one, you can always add another.
Whatever that one thing is, it should probably tie directly to that 1 point spend they made earlier. If, say, the Archivist's 1-point (the after-action reports and diaries) leads directly to the potential plot point at Glen Eagles, that only reinforces the value of point spends and you want the players to be spending points all the time. The more reward you offer for point spends, the more likely it is there will be future plot spends.
Then there will be something along the lines of a training montage, in which the Agents rebuild Glen Eagles. In game, this is best represented by Thrilling dialogue (provided by the Agents, natch) and some point spends. These point spends build up Glen Eagles, effectively providing a Preparedness pool for the firing range. Exactly what that looks like in play is up to you and your table. Do they hire roleplayers to fill roles within the defence team, as the Guardian article suggests? Do they go more high-tech with screens and electronic gunplay? Do they go old-school with wires and moving targets?
Eventually the montage concludes. By this stage we're at the Midpoint. The questions posed by the Hook have been asked and answered. What questions are being asked at the Midpoint? Probably something along the lines of 'is this new Hush Hush House fit for purpose.' Also, 'where does this plot point lead?'
That second question I'll leave floating, as it can only be answered by Rome, and it's not part of this exercise to tell you where Rome is. Only that there has to be a Rome. There has to be a final destination of some kind.
If, say, your final destination is Betrayal (eg. one of the Princes is a rogue agent and the reasons for their betrayal are linked, somehow, to the 1970s mole hunt) then you can start to lay the groundwork now by having that Prince subtly undermine the agents' efforts to rebuild Glen Eagles. Your final destination will vary. But whatever that final destination is, this is where you start to drop hints.
However, that first question (is this new Hush Hush House fit for purpose) can only be answered by a field test.
Sounds like the perfect opportunity for a Thrilling [fill in the blank, probably Sneak, Hunt, Hit or Destroy]. The veterans of E-Squadron are the ones on the attack, the Agents, working through the new toys at Glen Eagles, are the ones on defence. If the Agents hold up E-Squadron long enough, or if they prevent E-Squadron from achieving their objective, then the Agents win. If E-Squadron busts through with ease, then the Agents have failed.
Failure or success in this instance does not mean It's All Over or We Are The Champions. It means bureaucratic failure or success, which can be just as lethal. After all, in future scenarios the Agents are going to rely on support from their bosses and the higher-ups to get the job done. That's going to be difficult if the very first thing they did was embarrass themselves in a live-fire demo at Edom's hush-hush house.
Here, the PCs are brought together by a mysterious scholar or spymaster who has a copy of the Dossier. For some reason, the spymaster can’t go into the field himself (he’s too old/too frail/has to avoid cameras because of facial recognition programs – the government’s searching for him/has to maintain his public persona), so he gives the player characters assignments to carry out based on annotations in Dracula Unredacted.
“Go here,” he says, “and find out everything you can about Klopstock and Bayreuth, Bankers”
Dracula Dossier Cuttings and Additions, p41.
Let’s play with this idea and put together a Secret Triumvirate.
ANTONY.: These many then shall die; their names are prick’d.
OCTAVIUS.: Your brother too must die; consent you, Lepidus?
LEPIDUS.: I do consent,—
OCTAVIUS.: Prick him down, Antony.
LEPIDUS.: Upon condition Publius shall not live,
Who is your sister’s son, Mark Antony.
ANTONY.: He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him.
Let us suppose a conspiracy within Edom, assisted by China’s Room 452, represented in this drama by the Chinese Agent (p110 DD).
Antony, a senior agent within Edom, (Hopkins? perhaps) wants promotion. Antony's deep in the counsels of one of the Princes (it doesn't matter which, for the sake of this narrative) and expected advancement as soon as one of the Prince slots became available. Antony's been told that's not going to happen.
Antony turns to the Chinese Agent to help him shake up Edom, in the course of which Edom will lose a Prince or two (so sad) and enable ambitious juniors to get what they deserve. Lepidus, the Archivist, is brought in because Lepidus has the Dossier in his possession. Antony needs that as bait for Octavian; Octavian won't make a move unless there's sufficient reward on the table.
What the Antony of this piece does not know is that China's Octavian has, on his payroll, the Assassin. The intent being to clear the road of both Anthony and Lepidus as soon as the two have outlived their usefulness and provided that all-important Dossier.
Why do this?
Well, it’s fun. Which should always be the first point.
Second, if you’re going to have a Mysterious Scholar or secret spymaster of some kind handing out the missions it’s helpful if you have a defined endpoint in mind. After all, this game is meant to be about the player characters. If you have a Mysterious Scholar pulling the strings with no defined endpoint in mind, then there’s a risk that the narrative becomes about the Scholar and not the agents.
In this case the defined endpoint is the dissolution of the Triumvirate, quite possibly courtesy of an Assassin’s bullet. Because Octavian suffers no fools and has his own agenda.
Third, if there’s more than one figure in the mix then that gives the agents a mystery to unravel. Unravelling mysteries is what this game is all about. In this case the mystery is ‘who’s really pulling the strings here? Octavian, Anthony, Lepidus? Are we doing this for King and Country, or is there another player on the board?’
This works for Edom characters in the obvious way: Antony, the new Edom mole, brings them in to help him chase up Dossier leads. He's doing this because he has to prove provenance to Octavian's satisfaction. If he does this, Octavian helps him shake up Edom thus providing the impetus needed to push Antony to great heights within Edom.
If non-Edom, then the characters are brought in by Octavian. The Chinese Agent needs a useful bunch of go-betweens to help him bring the Dossier out of storage and into the light. That's not going to happen unless Antony gets what he wants. So the Agents are brought in by China to do Antony's bidding, rushing about the place looking for clues sourced from the Dossier. Once Antony's happy, Lepidus brings the Dossier out of storage at which point Octavian snatches it. Octavian has no reason to care what happens to the Agents after that, leaving them in the traditional Burned status that all good games start in.
Essentially the Triumvirate acts as a Conspyramid in miniature. Its narrative purpose is to give the agents a small conspiracy to deal with, in preparation for the larger conspiracies to come. With the added bonus that this particular conspiracy puts them in direct contact with the all-important Dracula Dossier, which is the big McGuffin of the piece.
Think of this as the first act of the campaign.
When I discussed the first act a long, long time ago, for Bookhounds, I said:
The whole point of the first act, in any campaign, is to establish mood and setting … They don't even have to encounter the Mythos, or anything supernatural, in the opening act, so long as the opening act is true to the overall mood … What you as Keeper ought to be doing is getting the players to concentrate on the things that matter (at least in the short term): the setting and the starting location.
The same thing applies here.
When it comes right down to tacks, Night’s Black Agents is about spy stuff with vampires, and Dracula Dossier is about spy stuff with vampires and added Dracula hot sauce. In Bookhounds, you had the shop to concentrate on in the opening act. In NBA, you have the spy stuff.
You can add the hot sauce later. In Act Two.
By all means hint at the hot sauce in Act One, have some mithering Renfields or old Conspiracy hotbeds like Whitby or Hillingham show up. But let these serve as hints of what’s to come, once the agents get their feet wet.
The big advantage is a wider canvas. Bookhounds is ultimately a one-city setting, but in NBA you can send the agents literally anywhere. Probably anywhere in Europe, bearing in mind the Dracula Dossier, but still, this week France, next week Romania, week after that, who knows?
Don't feel limited. Klopstock and Bayreuth, Bankers, is a worldwide enterprise, after all. Maybe this week it’s the Board of Directors meeting in Dubai? Or a clandestine rendezvous with that activist investor in Montana?
The point to concentrate on is the spy stuff. The surveillance, the suborning, the gathering of intelligence, the car chases and showdowns. This does two important things: it keeps the agents on their toes, and it introduces them to the mechanics and tropes of the world they inhabit. Is it Dust? Mirror? Something else? What’s its history, its forward momentum? These are things the players will need to understand in order to portray their characters.
All of which is driven by the Mysterious Scholar who starts off as an unknown quantity and is revealed to be an Edom insider, perhaps mere moments before bullet meets grey matter.
At which point the Triumvirate dissolves, Octavian makes his getaway (or tries to), Lepidus is dead or in the wind, and that precious artifact, the Dossier, is in play.
Add hot sauce. In large quantities. It’s time to start Act Two.
a Node should be treated no differently from a Villain, for the purposes of campaign design. A Node should have power to affect the plot. A Node has things it wants, things it's in charge of, things it's prepared to kill for. A Node has personality, and it's up to the Director what that personality ought to be.
A manufacturing facility makes something, a collection facility stores it, a distribution hub delivers it, and an analyzing facility investigates.
What do all these facilities have in common? They need:
Security, and,
Monitoring.
Someone has to keep the facility maintained and safe from prying eyes. This may mean a simple padlock on an important door, or a full-fledged electronic surveillance system. Also, someone has to monitor what's going on, whether the facility is doing as it should.
How do these concepts work together?
In Night's Black Agents a Node is an enemy power center. It can work on the local level, affecting only a small area. It can control a city, a country, a continent.
It can control more than one facility, or only one. As a general rule it's a good idea if all facilities controlled by one Node have the same Security and Monitoring statistics, so you as Director don't have to keep track of too many numbers. It also makes sense from a worldbuilding POV. The Node will want to maintain a standard.
It may even have the same security firm for each Facility, providing you a chance to drop some handy clues. 'Cerebrus Security? Again? You know what that means ...' Or 'the cybersecurity protocols here are exactly the same as those we encountered at that corporate headquarters, and you remember who was in charge of that ...' As for Monitoring, 'didn't we see that middle manager before? Don't tell me ...'
However, it's reasonable to suppose that one Node might have several different facility types. It might have Manufacture and Distribution facilities working together, or Collect and Analyze.
Let's go a step further and ask four questions:
What is this Node supposed to do?
What does it actually do?
What are its resources?
What are its methods?
I want to talk a little bit about 1 and 2, which seem contradictory. However, if you think about it, just because the bosses up top said 'do this' doesn't mean the Node is only doing this. It has personality, goals and the means to achieve them. If the bosses aren't paying close attention to the Node it might drift from its stated goals.
Think of this as a long-term project. If ever you've worked with a team you know from personal experience that, just because Bob is assigned to X within the overall project structure, does not mean that Bob is actually doing X. Bob might be ambitious and is plotting for his own advancement. Bob might be lazy. Bob might have misunderstood his role in the team, or be quiet quitting, or be doing any number of things that are not X.
Or Bob might actually be doing X but you, as project lead or fellow team member, misunderstood the true nature of X. Oops. Maybe Bob should have your job.
OK, so how does all this work in practice?
Let's take an example from Dracula Dossier: Billington & Sons, Solicitors, Whitby.
A small law firm, mostly handling wills and other property deals for local clients. The firm’s musty offices occupies the bottom two floors of a house on Flowergate Street in the heart of Whitby; their archives, dating back to old Samuel F.’s era in the 1890s, are crammed into the attic on the top floor. Dracula employed them as his local agents to receive and convey his fifty boxes of earth to Carfax.
I'm assuming for the sake of this example that Billington is a Level One node, with assets local to Whitby. It doesn't matter what kind of Conspiracy this is.
Its function is to Collect. Dracula picks up all kinds of odd things, documents, grimoires, title deeds - you name it, Dracula keeps it. However, often what happens is, Dracula picks up, say, an occult tome and has no need of it right away, so he shoves it at Billington for safe keeping until such time as he remembers to take it back.
The Collection process is handled by outside forces, couriers (a different, Distribution Node), who deliver the items to Billington. The job of the firm is to make sure they're securely held.
However, old Tom Billington, the traditionalist head of the firm, is the only one who believes in the mission. His sons John and Michael are taking it on themselves to Analyze what they have. The sons have noticed that nobody ever comes to get any of the many, many documents in their keeping. Nobody would ever know if they studied some. Not take - they're too cautious. But if they follow the rituals or chase up on some of the clues, they could get themselves some real power.
If Tom found out, he'd be devastated. The kids have managed to keep him out of the loop - so far.
I'm assigning Low Security and Medium Monitoring, which applies to all Facilities held by this Node. So, what Facilities does it have?
Billington & Sons, of course, which is where the critical documents are kept. What else?
A lock-up garage (for immediate storage or low-priority items).
A couple of bribed cops whose job is to provide extra security.
A ritual chamber under the Star Inn. It used to be a smuggler's haven; now it hosts darker rituals.
A safe in the storage area of the Whitby Museum, and a curator who's been persuaded to keep an eye on it. (this is for the valuable stuff).
A special grave in the Church of Saint Mary, for visiting dignitaries.
Robin Hood's Bay Books & Curiosities. This one's for John and Michael. This is where they conduct their studies. They don't want to be caught by dear old dad looking at the company books. The owner, Sam Carmichael, has a private arrangement with the Billingtons; they pay a high rent and get the back room, undisturbed. The Billingtons don't realize Sam is also studying the papers they bring here.
That should be enough. You could make it more complicated, of course. This is a level one, and I chose it specifically because level ones aren't usually that complex. A National level Node will probably have dozens of Facilities.
Point being that a Node, like a Villain, has power to affect the plot, personality, goals. Its Facilities will reflect those aspects of the Node. This is a low-level Collection Node; it's not going to have elaborate safes or many assets. It's going to have a few Network Contacts (eg. the local council members, members of Tom's Masonic Lodge, criminals that owe Tom a favor) but none of them are going to be Special Forces or talented necromancers.
Of course, if you as Director discover that the agents are making a bee-line for the Museum, no problem. You already know that it's Low (difficulty 3) security and Medum (difficulty 4) monitoring. The agents should be able to break in without too much effort but will have to keep an eye out for that meddling curator. The meddling curator in turn can call up those cops on the Billington payroll if things get complicated. Or as a conspiramid reaction Tom Billington can call in a Network favor from some of his low-level criminal clients.
As for Resources and Methods, Billington probably doesn't have too many Resources and its Methods aren't going to be gung-ho, release the hounds sort of thing. They can't afford hit men. They can afford to have someone Intimidated or rough someone up.
This is the sort of place Dracula would never visit, except out of a sense of nostalgia. However, the auditors - or what passes for Conspiracy auditors - may drop in at any time to look at the Node's policies and practices. Which could cause all kinds of complications ...
Why go through all this trouble?
Because you want to scatter clues. Any Node has to be a clue-rich environment, to give the agents a direction to follow. Remember, all clues lead to Rome and you want them to get to Rome at some point. The vampire temporarily staying in that grave at Saint Mary, the documents in Books & Curiosities, the contents of the safe at the Whitby Museum, they all contain clues and those clues lead further into the narrative. That way if the agents miss out on the actual clue that you intended they find at (wherever it may be) there's no reason to panic; they can find it again at (wherever they actually go).
The ruined fortress of New Slains Castle overlooks the small village of Cruden Bay, on the northeast coast of Scotland. The castle was built in 1597, and extensively reconstructed in 1836. For most of its existence, it was the seat of the powerful earls of Erroll. The 20th earl sold the castle to the secretive shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman in 1913; he never lived there, but leased the property for a few years before allowing it to fall into ruin.
Bram Stoker visited Cruden Bay many times. One of his novels, The Mystery of the Sea, is set there, and there is a distinct resemblance between the ruined castle and Stoker’s description of Castle Dracula in the novel ... Dracula Dossier Director's Handbook p176
Silhouetted against an expanse of fields that were once the scene of a bloody slaughter of the Danes by the Scots, the ruins of Slains Castle casts an eerie shadow over a rocky coastline where, legend has it, the ghosts of shipwrecked sailors emerge from their watery graves once a year.
Now the dramatic fortress, which fired the imagination of horror writer Bram Stoker and is credited with being the true inspiration for Dracula's castle, is itself about to rise from the dead - to become a holiday home for tourists ... Guardian, 'Dracula's ruin' comes back from the dead
In 2004 it was reported that the Slains Partnership was preparing plans for the restoration of the building and conversion into 35 holiday apartments. In August 2007 the scheme was granted outline planning permission by Aberdeenshire Council, but the plans were put on hold in 2009 due to the Great Recession ... Wikipedia
What if it wasn't?
Alternatively, what if it wasn't the Great Recession that killed the conversion plan?
The architect behind the rebuild is extensively quoted in the article, and claims to intend to rebuild Slains much as it was in Stoker's day. The exterior would be meticulously preserved. The interior would be something else again of course, but you can't have everything.
If you're wondering why this comes to my mind now, it's because of another Guardian article, this one much more recent, talking about the author's walking tour around Cruden Bay. It took him about five hours more or less, and he saw barely a soul. He ends up at the Kilmarnock Arms, a very pleasant hotel by all accounts. It's all part of the recent anniversary of the novel, which saw a record number of Draculas turn up at Whitby - but that's a whole 'nother story unto itself.
The Cool and Warm versions of Slains in the Handbook both suggest Edom involvement, but the Cool version presumes Edom abandoned ship some time past. The recent planned rebuild is discussed in a throwaway line, but not seriously explored.
Cruden Bay is much like Whitby, without the cliffs or Abbey. A small-ish seaside town, once known for fishing, now not much to look at. It survives largely on tourism and some runoff from North Sea Oil, and a significant portion of its current population are actually commuters from larger towns wanting somewhere a bit more rural and pleasant for the kiddies to grow up in.
Its big landmark is the castle, and if that rebuild had taken off it would probably be the significant employer in Cruden Bay. Slains was meant to have 35 luxury holiday flats, after all; Kilmarnock only has 19 en-suite rooms, and while they look perfectly nice it'd be difficult to call them luxury.
The castle's described as ruined, and while that's true the word ruin conjures up a desolate and picturesque crumbling monument, which isn't quite what Slains is. Slains lacks a roof and the interior's basically gone, but unlike Whitby Abbey the Germans didn't try to shell it flat back in the Great War. Visually Slains looks in relatively good condition. Like a house that's been abandoned for less than a century, which (broadly speaking) what Slains is.
Incidentally I tried to find out more about the drowned sailors mentioned in the article, but came up short. The closest I could get was this piece from Lippincott's Monthly which talks about smugglers and a peculiar Monsieur saved from a wreck, but nothing about a ghostly crew that emerges from the depths at a particular time of year.
Let's take two suppositions.
In the first, Slains was rebuilt shortly before the recession. That meant its grand reopening fell flat and the investors lost their shirts, but the building's basically luxury residential with all the mod cons. It's just a little ... neglected. The roof leaks, housekeeping isn't all it could be, and the on-site restaurant wouldn't know a health and safety inspector if one bit the chef on the leg. Thirty-five luxury flats built to the highest standards, struggling to make a go of it as a glorified Air B&B.
Meanwhile the locals that work there - of which there aren't as many as you'd think - are very unhappy but remarkably close-mouthed. It's as if they were terrified of something, but can't afford to leave.
In the second, the Slains rebuild was killed off but not by Edom. At least, not the current Edom. Elements within Edom influenced by the 1970s mole or whatever network that person left behind killed off the project, because the Conspiracy had plans for Slains and a rebuild didn't factor in. This is a one-hand-doesn't-know situation, where Edom proper has no idea what happened but Edom (Conspiracy influenced) did the deed.
Slains Rebuilt is nominally owned by a consortium of which the largest shareholder is a Trust based in Gibraltar. The Cruden Bay Trust is, through various cutouts, ultimately owned by Edom. Edom wanted to resurrect its vampire holding plan and thought that the most convenient front was a working hotel. There would be one set of rooms for the public and a hidden set for 'special guests'. This was largely influenced by Edom holdovers from the 1970s with one eye on Edom's history; after all, most of the anti-vampire blocks were already in place. Shame to waste them. Except the plan rather depended on the hotel being a working hotel, and it really isn't.
For some, like Hound, this is actually a bonus. This faction of Edom uses Slains as a kind of stopover before you get to Proserpine, a secure location for the ones who need interrogating but don't need to have E-Squadron step on their neck a few times before they'll answer questions. The soft-spoken drug reliant interrogators operate from Slains. Dr. Sykes (Field Manual p84-5) is often here, as is the archivist Henry Poole (Field Manual p.90-91) as Slains makes an excellent backup archive. Edom has collected a ton of research material over the years, and it can't all fit in the Ring/Exeter/Carfax/Asylum.
Slains In Ruins is, like its rebuilt version, ultimately owned by The Cruden Bay Trust, which in turn is an Edom front. The difference is, the faction of Edom that runs Cruden Bay is heavily influenced (if not outright owned) by a section of Edom that was tainted by the 1970s mole. This agency within an agency knew that Edom wanted to resurrect Slains as an anti-vampire prison, and they weren't having it. Instead they wrecked the project and did everything they could to put a Red Room in Slains. Whether or not they succeeded is a matter for conjecture.
What is certain is the ruins of Slains are a desolate, horrible place. Every so often a bloated pale victim of the sea is found floating near the ruins, and the people of Cruden Bay shake their heads. It's not the first time and won't be the last. All they can do is bury the poor soul discreetly, in the traditional manner, and hope they don't find their way out of the grave again.
These drowned victims coincide with a visit from 'the Londoners.' It's a different set of Londoners each time but they always stay at the Kilmarnock and their rooms are always booked by the Cruden Bay Trust. After a few days they vanish, never to be seen again - but their bills are paid, their absence unremarked on.
Standing, Sam sank his hands in his pockets, shook his head, and, rather as Jerry Westerby might have done, began meandering about the room, peering at the odd gloomy things that hung on the wall: group war photographs of dons in uniform; a framed and handwritten letter from a dead Prime Minister; Karla's portrait again, which this time he studied from very close, on and on.
appearance:An oil painting on cheap canvas. Painted by the artist Francis Aytown, this painting depicts the faces of two men, one old and one young. The features of the two men are extremely similar, and might be father and son, or possibly even the same man at different stages of his life.
The elder has a strong, aquiline nose with oddly arched nostrils, a high forehead, thick white-gray hair and a white mustache. His heavy eyebrows and teeth are emphasized by the artist, and his dark eyes seem to follow the observer around the room. He has a livid red scar on his forehead.
The younger figure has dark hair and a mustache, and appears full of youth and vitality. In contrast to the paleness of the elder, his face is ruddy. The artist appears to have been indecisive over whether or not the subject had a beard - the younger figure’s chin appears muddy and was painted over several times (Photography: X-ray analysis shows that the figure was originally bearded). The same scar is present, but much less noticeable due to the change in complexion.
The neck and shoulders of both figures are merely hinted at. In both cases, the portrait is oddly unsettling, as the proportions and perspectives are subtly off ...
In this second novel Smiley is now the Circus ringmaster, but the old place has fallen on hard times. Nobody knows who to trust; the networks and agents promoted by Karla's man were deliberately chosen to be ineffective, and the Americans - the Cousins - have no faith in the Circus now its lead performer has been exposed as a fraud.
The Circus rebuilds - or at least it tries to. Thus begins The Honourable Schoolboy.
One of the recurring elements in that novel is Karla's portrait, which Smiley has deliberately placed at the heart of the Circus so everyone who visits Smiley in his offices can see it. The portrait is a slightly ghoulish reminder of the Circus' recent failings, and it appears again and again in the opening chapters.
Which made me think of that mysterious portrait of Dracula, listed as one of the items the agents might find in the Dracula Dossier. As with all such items it might be Major, Minor or Fraudulent - that is, really useful, moderately useful, or bogus.
Karla's photograph might have been put anywhere. It might have been on Smiley's desk, where only he could see it. It might have been in some secure vault, or hung in the lavatory. Smiley deliberately gives it prominence front and center, where everyone can see it. What's more, by hanging it in the same room as those wartime photographs of the old crew and the congratulatory letter from a dead Prime Minister (presumably Churchill, though it might as easily have been Clement Attlee) Smiley links Karla with the glorious past. It's a reminder to everyone who visits the Circus that the past is tainted, and hints that the Circus needs to redeem itself.
Which brings me back to that portrait of Dracula. Again, what matters isn't so much the portrait itself - though the portrait is important, and might be very important. What matters is where it is displayed, and by whom. A portrait doesn't exist simply to exist. Like all art it exists to be seen, and how it is seen determines its effect and thus its value to the onlooker.
Dracula's portrait hung in a pub corridor that leads to the Gents is worth little. It might have been picked up as a job lot with half a dozen ink sketches of hounds at bay and a few ill-conceived bits of taxidermy. Dracula's portrait hung in the corridors of Edom has a completely different kind of significance, even if those corridors happen to be moldering and forgotten.
Dracula's portrait hung in the ultra-modern offices of the new and improved Edom has a different significance again.
So as an exercise in gamification, consider: what is that room like? What significance does it hold?
I'm going to assume for the purpose of this exercise that the room has the same significance as the portrait and might have similar, or related, characteristics. As you know, there are several different flavors of vampire chronicle: damned, supernatural, alien, mutant. I'm not going to delve into that here since exactly how that factors into your room will depend entirely on you. I'm simply going to say that it naturally will have an influence on the room. A Damned chronicle bears Damned fruit, after all.
I'm also going to assume three kinds of room: modern Edom, decayed Edom, other non-Edom. The other non-Edom could be anything from a superyacht's stateroom to a Legacy's apartments in Rome to a museum or art gallery. The precise location is up to you as Director.
With all that in mind:
Major
In his obsession, Aytown captured something more — he caught some psychic essence or echo of the Count ...
Modern Edom (eg. the map room at HMS Proserpine, the conference rooms at Seward's Asylum).
This portrait is among a collection of valued trophies, diagrams, schematics and satellite photographs of recent areas of operation. It is deliberately placed there by D as a reminder to the modern Edom of the kind of asset they are dealing with - cruel, implacable, and dangerous. Fort and Tinman have rigged its glass case with explosives as an anti-theft measure; if anyone tries to remove the painting the detonation should destroy the painting but leave the rest of the room more or less intact.
Decayed Edom (eg. some forgotten offices near Whitehall, an abandoned military installation, Ring).
These dusty offices had some importance back in the 1970s, which is probably the last time any of the Dukes visited this place. The place stinks of mold and rats. Old filing cabinets long emptied of their secrets loll like hanged men, their tongues - the cabinets - swinging free. Photographs from the Second World War and old silver trophies and cups from some regiment still shine in their cabinets, but that regiment was amalgamated and forgotten back in the 1960s and not even the most dedicated military historian bothers to remember the regiment once had its home here.
Other Non-Edom
This is a peculiar collection put together by someone with an amusing mind. The portrait is in a place of honour where everyone who enters by the main hall can see it, but it is matched with Surrealist masterpieces and a rather nasty-looking portrait of the inmates of a a lunatic asylum, either a Goya or someone heavily influenced by the old Spaniard. The effect is dizzying; there is no corner of the room any observer can look at, and find comfort.
Minor
Aytown’s portrait can be used to recognize the Count, but it has no other supernatural powers.
Modern Edom
This hangs in the offices of the commandant, perhaps D or the officer in charge of E Squadron. These are spartan rooms, and the portrait is the only art in the place; there isn't even a photo of the commandant's family on their imposing desk. It hangs there sullen and silent, like a child summoned to the Headmaster's office. All meaning seems to have been surgically removed, as if so many uncaring eyes having stared at it for over a century has sapped the painting's will - always assuming it had one in the first place.
Decayed Edom
At some point some forgotten bureaucrat thought it would be a good idea to strip the place of its valuables and put them in storage, but the plan never got quite so far as 'storage.' The portrait is in a back room along with a score of other items, carefully labeled back in the 1980s, and there are packing crates here in which the job lot was clearly meant to be sealed up. Whether money dried up, the bureaucrat lost interest or some other minor disaster happened, who can say? It's all a bit King Tut's Tomb, though if there is a curse it probably hit its expiration date long ago.
Other Non-Edom
The white patches on the wall indicate what happened to the actually valuable art. What's left are the dregs of a collection, some moderately interesting modernists, some Scots Baronial stuff, and a rather odd collection of statuary all jumbled together with no sense of order or style. Whoever acquired this portrait mislabeled it at Jacobethan, and (if this is an art gallery) is trying to sell it for at least twice its actual value.
Fraud
The portrait was actually painted by Viv Aytown-Baptiste, in an attempt to copy her great-grandfather’s style.
Modern Edom
This hangs in the offices of an Edom underling and was bought as a joke that didn't quite come off. It shares space with two Gantt charts and a dartboard, and has acquired several unfortunate holes in consequence. The dartboard has a photo of one of the Edom princes at its center; who can say why?
Decayed Edom
Once upon a time someone thought this was the real deal, and paid rather a lot of government money to purchase it. Embarrassment followed on swift and noisy stamping feet, and the prize was hurriedly moved somewhere where nobody important had to look at it. The typists in the pool, who have to look at it every day, sometimes wonder what happened to that high-flier who thought he was on to something good. Rumor has it he occupied that office at the end of the hall, the one that's now used for storage, until his dismissal in the middle 1990s. Or perhaps he was moved to the offices in Edinburgh. Or perhaps shame killed him.
Other Non-Edom
It's odd what some people think ought to hang in the second lavatory, the one used by guests. Maybe it was meant to be a joke. It looks more valuable than, perhaps, its owner thinks it is.
appearance: This crumbling folio (approximately 33 cm × 27 cm) is bound in dark, wrinkled leather with a long grayish stain in a narrow band around its middle (A 1-point spend of Chemistry confirms it as the residue of badly tarnished silver, perhaps from a chain once used to keep it closed). Its 211 parchment pages give off unsettling, varied odors: one handler might smell sulfur, while another smells nothing but grave rot ...
supposed history: Agents with Occult Studies know that Le Dragon Noir (The Black Dragon) is reputed to be the more dangerous and powerful companion to Le Dragon Rouge (The Red Dragon). Both come from the “Solomonic grimoire” tradition of the late Middle Ages ...
So what is this mysterious real-world grimoire, The Red Dragon?
Its progenitor is the notorious Grand Grimoire, which Owen Davies, author of Grimoires, describes as 'the first explicitly diabolic mass-market grimoire.' First printed in 1702 (there is some doubt as to the exact date) its desirability lay in Lucifer's alleged powers over all the riches and treasures of the world. If you were the sort who desired riches, or wanted to find a specific treasure, then you wanted a chat with Lucifer. The Grand Grimoire could make that happen.
For those of you getting M.R. James flashbacks, you're not wrong. Whenever James or other Edwardian ghost story spinners talk about wicked clergy using magic to find or keep wealth (as in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas among others) he's talking about the mystic rites found in the Grand Grimoire.
"The Grand Grimoire was not only a manual for diabolic communication," says Davies. "The mere possession of it came to be seen as an act of pact-making. In 1804, the same year that Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, a trial in Amiens deliberated on the case of a man found with a grimoire, most likely the Grand Grimoire, with which he said he could call up the Devil by merely touching it."
The Dragon Rouge is a 19th-century redraft of the Grand Grimoire. It benefited from much better access to printing presses, and soon became a popular item. Previous books of occult lore had entranced due to their rarity and therefore their supposed secret mysteries, but the Dragon Rouge sold by the hundreds for a few sous - a sou being 1/20 of a franc. A British pound of the period would be worth about 25 francs.
A similar spin-off from the same period, La Poule Noire, did much the same as the rest. It promised to help its owner find treasure, this time by sacrificing a black hen under specific conditions at a specific location. The Devil would appear and offer the ritualist a black hen, one that laid gold and silver eggs.
Pretty much everyone who wanted money bought one of these books, which means copies of the Dragon Rouge should not be difficult to come by. In that sense they're not dissimilar from the Kung Fu Manuals and Charles Atlas supplements so popular in the 1970s. Promises of power and strength are just as popular as promises of money, and the lure in each case is that you don't really need to work hard to get what you want. You just have to practice the ritual.
However it was punishable by law to own a devilish grimoire, so their owners kept them secret. If found, the authorities might burn them. In any case they were mass-produced, not elaborate, well-made medieval missals. Time would crumble them quickly enough. Collectors can still find 19th century copies if they look for them, but there aren't many survivors from the thousands upon thousands that came off the presses.
Again, not unlike comic books. There's a reason why those old comics are worth millions, and it's not their intrinsic value as an art form or their genre-breaking storylines. They were made to be read, by kids, and then thrown away. They were cheaply printed, not made to last. Even the ones that were kept weren't stored properly. They just fell to bits, over time. The surviving copies are worth money because there are so few of them.
The big difference is while there are many out there who want near mint copies of Batman #1 there are very few interested in mint copies of The Dragon Rouge.
The Dracula Dossier makes a point of distinguishing the Dragon Noir from its better-known progenitor the Dragon Rouge by saying the Noir wasn't printed but hand-crafted, its illustrations not woodcuts but hand-drawn images. This preserves its rarity value; if it's scarce, it must be powerful, neh?
That sounds awfully like marketing talk to me. "This? Oh, it's very rare. Very valuable. Not like its mass-market cousin, oh no. See the hand stitching? The delicate penmanship? I'll have to charge you extra, friend - it's only fair." Meanwhile there's stacks of Dragon Rouge out back on a pallet waiting for the shipper.
Which fits the timeline. Remember, Dragon Rouge is an iteration of the Grand Grimoire. Rouge doesn't really become a thing until the 1820s, and is very popular in the mid-to-late-19th century. If Noir is an iteration of Rouge, then it probably didn't exist until the 19th century. So why is it trying to look like a much older book? Simples! Rarity = value, and the more old-timey it looks the easier it is to make the customer think it's rare. Again, comic books - all those 1990s variant covers, published specifically for collectors to go nuts over.
Why own one of these? Nobody summons Satan for his garlic dip recipe. It's all about the money, specifically gold and lost treasures. If someone goes trotting out to Dracula's castle at midnight with a gibbous moon overhead and an occult book in their hand, it's because they think they'll find sweet, sweet loot. Not a long-dead Wallachian with a blood fixation.
The obvious comedy value of a magic chicken is easily ignored if there are golden eggs at the end of the trail. Any other lure - it might be sex, it might be political power - pales in comparison to gold. There are other devils you can summon up if you want victory in war. Lucifer is all about the Benjamins.
So all that said what to do with the Dragon Rouge?
Let's gamify this by putting it into a joint Bookhounds-Dossier mini-campaign. The first session is 1930s, the next 1970s during the mole hunt, the last modern day.
The 1930s section will take place in a bookshop. I'm not going to go into great detail about the shop, as that's something best dealt with between you and your players. For purposes of this example I'm going to call it du Bourg's.
du Bourg's learns of the Dragon Noire through its usual means, and discovers that a friend of the store desires it. Obtaining the book may be a Windfall. As luck would have it a copy is allegedly for sale, but the vendor is a disreputable German recently arrived in London who claims to have obtained it from the estate of a nobleman who died in the Great War and whose family has fallen on hard times. Rumor has it the book is stolen property.
The German, Jan Lachs, says he will offer the book up for private auction to be held at an East End pub. A local Rough Lad, Oscar 'Mutton' Burley, will host it. Several people on the occult fringes have expressed an interest, and one or two of them have deep pockets.
The pub, The Grapes, is in one of the rougher parts of Limehouse so those attending need to be careful how they get there. Cursory inspection notices several Rough Lads hanging around the public bar being very circumspect about how much they drink - clearly security, probably hired by Mutton. They're not organized but they will check everyone going upstairs to the meet for weapons.
The ones actually on the door seem dazed, confused - perhaps drugged. The reason for this becomes clear when the Hounds go inside and find Mutton dead, exsanguinated, along with any early bidders who arrived before the Hounds did. Jan Lachs is nowhere to be seen, and neither is the book.
A quick questioning (Interrogation, Intimidation, Flattery, core clue) of the people downstairs discovers that someone matching Lachs' description was last seen vanishing down a dark alley 'like Hell was on his heels.' He did have something in a parcel - the book, perhaps?
A Hound with sharp eyes notices that one of the people in the bar (it might be a Rough Lad, it might be one of the drinkers, it might be one of the occultists interested in the book) has a peculiar mark on their right wrist, a weal that is, as they notice it, bleeding. Occult knows that those deep in the mysteries might have a Satanic patron, or belong to some kind of cult, and this is one of their marks. [In fact, this is either a fully-paid-up member of the Satanic Cult of Dracula or one of their many servants.]
The Hounds now have three goals:
Find out who killed Mutton.
Find Jan Lachs, and hopefully the book.
Find out why this book is important enough to kill for.
Complicating factor: one of the people who wants the book is convinced it will help him discover a cache of lost loot, buried somewhere in London by Dracula when he was here last. While not strictly an antagonist, this character will go out of his way to make life difficult for the Hounds. If the Director hasn't got someone in mind for this role, use Clarence Inkpen.
Moving on from the 1930s we go to the 1970s, and the mole hunt.
The nature of this section will change depending on whether the agents are with Edom or are freelancers. If freelancers, then they are hired by one of the Dossier's 1970s people, or the latest Legacy. Naturally the 1970s person is their younger self, not the version seen in the Dossier.
The agents' employer discovers that an obscure unsolved murder which happened in Limehouse back in the 1930s may have had something to do with a missing copy of the Dragon Noir, and the agents are tasked with following up.
The Grapes, which I'll reimagine as a Mods bar complete with frippery and scooters, hasn't much to offer at first glance. However there are two potential leads:
a moldering old codger who always drops in for his pint of mild the same time every day was there on the night in question. [It might even be Clarence, if he survived the original scenario.]
The rooms on the upper floor are rumored to be haunted, and for once those rumors have some truth to them.
The exact nature of the haunting will depend on the nature of the vampires in your campaign, so I shan't detail it here. It might be bleeding walls, it might be Mutton clanking chains and moaning, it might be time dilations or creatures hiding behind every mirrored surface.
Bonus: Ian McKellen, at this point a jobbing actor with headline roles at Stratford and soon to make his Broadway debut, might appear in a Grapes scene.
Further research (library archives, old police reports, possibly auction records, core clue) discovers that the antiquarian booksellers du Bourg's were somehow involved, and as luck would have it the bookshop still exists. One or two of the Hounds may still be alive, doddering old wrecks in the back room who enjoy a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.
Things get unexpectedly messy when one of the people the agents have questioned (the codger, the landlord/barman/customer at the Grapes, one of the booksellers at du Bourg's) turns up murdered in a back alley shortly after the agents talk to them. The killer's easily found, a heavily tattooed and leather-jacketed Rocker who says they got in an argument. In fact the Rocker was currying favor with the Satanic Brotherhood and was told to do it. The lawyer who ensures the Rocker gets away with the minimal penalty is also a minion of the Brotherhood, distinguishable by his fancy signet ring.
The agents now have three goals:
find out what happened to the Dragon Noir back in the 1930s, and if it's available, recover it.
find out why someone apparently so obscure had to be brutally murdered.
find out what really happened to Jan Lachs back in the 1930s. The Hounds may have their version, but even if Lachs ended up dead did he stay buried? Where did Lachs get the book from, anyway?
Complicating factor: the Mole also wants to get his hands on the Dragon Noir, presumably to hand it off to his Conspiracy backers - or perhaps its some complicated double-bluff designed to throw off the mole hunt.
Additional complicating factor: the events of the 1930s spawned feral vampires, and some of them are still hanging around, trying not to get staked.
In the modern version Sir Ian McKellen now owns the Grapes, and his wizard's staff from Lord of the Rings hangs over the bar. du Bourg's may or may not exist - probably not, or at least not in its original location which in London's heated property market is worth more than the store and all its contents. du Bourg's may have become an exclusively online presence, with warehouses out in North London.
Whatever happened to the Dragon Noir back in the 1970s, it's lost again. Perhaps it's misfiled on a dusty shelf in the Ring's library, or in some collector's den. It's a very mobile McGuffin.
The action begins when a suspected foreign agent working for [insert agency here, preferably one of the other vampire programs] turns up dead after a meal and a pint at the Grapes. It's supposedly a straightforward heart attack but forensic investigation discovers the incident was drug-induced.
As an added complication, the foreign agent was last seen talking to [Important Person - a Legacy, or one of Edom's Dukes]. The [Important Person] claims that the agent wanted to know the current whereabouts of the Dragon Noir, and as [Important Person] didn't know that was the end of the conversation. Or so they say.
Further investigation of the dead agent's fancy phone (core clue) discovers a cache of documents concerning Jan Lachs, which confirms everything the 1970s agents may have found out about Lachs and further claims that Lachs was a catspaw for Germany's Unternehmen Braun and was intimately involved with Projekt Mandragora - whatever that is. Lachs went off-script and fled for reasons unknown, and the Germans were very keen to get hold of him back in the 1930s. If the German program still exists then they're just as keen now as they were then.
For that matter Alraune may also be interested in Lachs, assuming Alraune is part of your campaign narrative.
The agents are put on the case either by Edom or by a Mysterious Employer, and if the latter then that Employer is probably that same 1970s character as before, only older.
The agents have three tasks:
Find out who this foreign agent really was, and who they were really working for.
Explore the agent's connection with [Important Person] and find out whether [Important Person] was behind the agent's death.
If [Important Person] didn't kill the agent, who did?
Since everyone seems interested in the Dragon Noir, best to recover it from wherever-it-is ... for safekeeping, of course. This may mean breaking-and-entry; it certainly will mean researching the 1970s incident, and by extension the 1930s incident.
Complicating factors: all the complicating factors from the 1970s reappear, if they weren't dealt with before. The feral vampires, the haunting at the Grapes, all of them resurface.
Complicating factor: remember that treasure Clarence Inkpen was after back in the 1930s? Someone else is just as keen to get it now, and thinks they need the Dragon Noir to find it. This person might be a great-grand niece or nephew of Inkpen, or might be a suitable 1970s person (the psychic, say).
Complicating factor (modern): the dead agent's agency wants to know how their agent ended up on a mortuary slab in London.
Potential Time Dilation: this game is spread over several decades but has several locations in common: the Grapes, du Bourg's (even if it's an office conversion in the modern day, the building still exists), possibly other locations like a morgue, Ring, and so on depending on the events of your campaign. One capstone would be to have the 1930s, 1970s and modern day characters all interact with the same location at the same time of day on the same date, thus crossing over each other. They, and one or more of the complicating factors, could all jostle for position in, say, the Grapes, crossing paths and timelines both.
At the heart of it all is the Dragon Noir, that mysterious McGuffin that everyone's been after for so long. Is it real? A fake? Does it have special significance for the Conspiracy or is it merely a red herring? Now is the time to find out.
The Dracula Dossier goes into some detail about the Romanian mafia, though it is brief by necessity as covering it all would be at least one book in and of itself. I recommend the OCCRP as a useful source of supplementary information and this week I'm going to draw on it to sketch out a mini-scenario for you to use as you see fit.
The main book points out that the thriller relies on escalating thrills to keep the viewer engaged. The reward for danger is information; having information puts you into danger. When the hero rests, add more danger. (p180, NBA). Double Tap goes on to describe several different Thrilling contests (Digital Intrusion, Infiltration, Surveillance, Manhunts) and the Resource Guide includes Mission Skeletons. I'm going to be using all of these.
Just looking at the videos, a couple of interesting scene locations pop out: Spain, Popa Sapca Prison, Istanbul, a construction company, nightclubs. I can borrow from this pool to create the locations I'm going to need. Quick and dirty every time, mind you; this isn't the moment to be describing cities in detail.
Now I need to decide the kind of operation I want to create. The Resource Guide offers several options, any of which might apply: Destroy, Flip (an asset), Heist, Hit, Hunt, Rescue, Sneak, Trace, Uncover. I'm going to go with Flip, with a touch of Rescue just for flavor.
The asset I want to Flip is in Popa Sapca Prison. He used to be heavily involved in human trafficking, taking women from Turkey to Spain. He has information about a Conspiracy operation but he'll only talk if his conditions are met. Additional complication: Popa Scapa is unfriendly territory, and if he stays there then he may end up dead before he can talk.
Popa Sapca: Formerly for political prisoners, this is a working prison. If you don't work, you get half rations. You can work in the kitchens (very difficult to get assigned there, high demand), you can make wooden crates for transporting vegetables, you can work in a nearby concrete factory. This information dates back to the 1980s and things are almost certainly different now, but I can use this in plot so I'm keeping it. There's also a prison football team. Religious groups visit Romanian prisons. That's enough Google; it's easy to get bogged down in research.
So what have I got? A former Communist political prison now populated by some of the worst of the worst. There are work programs, a football team, and regular visits from an American evangelical religious group whose Chicago founders have Romanian links. Some of the work programs take place outside the prison, so in my fiction if there's any smuggling it probably happens via that work program; either the inmates or drivers/guards take packages into the prison.
In Dossier terms this is a Warm site, which means the Conspiracy has its tentacles here. It probably doesn't have a full-fledged Node, but there are plenty of former Renfields behind bars strung out for lack of the good stuff, and more than a few Ruvari Sgzani. There are no secrets in prison; the Conspiracy will find out if anyone talks.
The Flip target is Sorin Barbu, a former human trafficker now serving a five-year sentence. He used to transport women from Istanbul, Turkey, to nightclubs in the New Golden Mile, Marbella, Spain. He knows more than he should about Conspiracy operations in Spain thanks to his connections with organized crime there, specifically the Romanian syndicate Wolf Brigade. According to Sorin the Brigade carried out several hits while he was working in Spain supplying girls for the Brigade's hangouts in the New Golden Mile. He knows the hitters, the targets, some of the burial sites, and he knows these things because the Brigade coerced him into disposing of the bodies. 'You used to work in construction,' they said. 'You know how to dig a hole.'
Vampirology (0 point) soon realizes that some of these so-called hits are vampire attacks, and it's possible there may be some ferals down in the Golden Mile thanks to this creature's activities.
The Flip target comes to the agents' attention thanks to Charlie Popescu, an American evangelist trying to get attention paid to Sorin's case. Charlie thinks Sorin is unjustly imprisoned, and as a brother in Christ Charlie feels obligated to help Sorin out. Charlie's been talking to the American embassy in Bucharest, and he's been very indiscreet. If the agents know about Sorin, it's only a matter of time before the Conspiracy finds out.
Sorin's flip trigger (on the MICE scale of Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego) is Ego. He sees himself as a protector, and he wants to go on protecting people - specifically Fatma Yildiz, a prostitute he became close to. He knew Fatma was falling in love with one of the johns, and he also knew that the john in question was one of the hitters whose bodies he was burying. This could only end badly for Fatma, so he brought her back to Istanbul where she would be safe.
Flip condition: If the agents ensure Fatma's safety, Sorin will talk.
What Sorin doesn't know: Fatma was the one who turned him in to the authorities.
Danger: If the agents don't move Sorin, or arrange some kind of protection while he's in prison (Network is helpful here), then Sorin will end up shanked long before the agents can complete the mission.
Next step is to locate Fatma, which means going to Istanbul. I'm not going to go through a whole Google for that; Istanbul's a capital city, well known, unlike an obscure prison in Romania. Streetwise narrows the search to a Gecekondu (squatter district) on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, where Fatma's living with a dozen other women. She works as a dancer in a Kadikoy nightclub. Fatma wants to go back to her lover in Spain. She's convinced he'll marry her and she'll live the high life on a yacht. The Conspiracy doesn't have any direct ties to the Turkish mafya group that runs the nightclub, but they have a friendly relationship. Fatma served her purpose when she helped put Sorin behind bars. The Conspiracy doesn't care what happens to her, but it cares very much if she goes back to Spain and causes a fuss. The Turks have been given a fat bribe and asked to take care of Fatma if it looks as if she's going to bolt.
Twist: Fatma isn't going to bolt. She's going into business. When she worked with Sorin she met quite a few Romanian mafia, including people who worked for a rival syndicate, the Centurions (cue Yojimbo option). The Centurions want their slice of Marbella's New Golden Mile. Fatma's being promoted from prostitute to procurer, and the women in her Gecekondu are her first shipment.
So on the principle that Information leads to Danger, the Information that Fatma's in Istanbul working for a nightclub run by a Turkish godfather immediately leads to trouble when Fatma runs away with her Centurion pals, and the Turks assume these nosy agents had something to do with it. Violence ensues, as trigger-happy Turk thugs bust up the agents' safehouse looking for Fatma.
By this point the agents have probably racked up Heat. If Heat is 5 or more, cut scene: Interpol. Turkey's well known for using Interpol aggressively to punish critics and dissidents. The Turkish mafyia pulls some strings and gets the agents put on an Interpol watch list for alleged organized crime offences (people smuggling). Senior Agent III Svitlana Dobrovolska is assigned the case. Cut scene ends with her beginning her investigation. This scene threatens Danger to come, since the agents don't know whether Svitlana's on the up-and-up. An honest Agent can be reasoned with; a crooked one cannot.
The action moves to Marbella, Spain. The New Golden Mile is Marbella's latest attempt to capitalize on a vast sea of money. It's high end houses, businesses, golf courses, and expensive shops, as far as the eye can see. As to where all this money's coming from, it might have something to do with Marbella's corruption problem. Mayor after mayor has been jailed in recent years in a string of allegations of money laundering and bribery that goes back to Mayor Gil (1991 to his arrest in 2002). The town nearly went bankrupt in 2006, and was briefly run by an unelected, appointed council before elections in 2007 put the People's Party in charge. Marbella's heavily in debt, which makes it vulnerable to approaches from, say, Romanian organized crime.
Or the Conspiracy.
There's been a Node in Marbella since the days of Mayor Gil, and a lot of the Conspiracy's money was funneled through friendly Marbella banks. The Conspiracy invested heavily in local Golden Mile real estate as well, banking its cash in brick and mortar. This came to a crashing halt in 2007 when investigations began in earnest, and the Conspiracy pulled out some of its assets and almost all of its money, selling its Golden Mile properties. However things are looking more promising nowadays and the New Golden Mile promises to be as lucrative as the old one was.
The vampire in charge of it all, Anna Kaufman, whose antecedents go back to before the Great War when she worked in film, is taking charge of this effort. She's the power behind the throne for local drug gangs, and she works through a Renfield hitter nicknamed The Southpaw, also known as Zubi after the football player Andoni Zubizarreta. Through Zubi and People's Party politician Maya Bardina the Conspiracy exercises control over the New Golden Mile.
Anna has a problem. Back in the early 2000s when things were looking much better she promoted a Renfield to full vampire status: Gordon 'Bones' Honeybone, a former London hard boy with remarkably handsome features. Bones was an excellent enforcer with criminal contacts in the UK, France and Spain, but he was never management material. His new status went to his head. He sees himself as a cross between Michael Caine and Christopher Lee, and relishes it a little too much. He's the one Fatma's in love with, and he's also the one whose carnal appetites has created a batch of new ferals that Anna doesn't know about - so far. Bones has killed some of those ferals himself, but the rest are causing trouble.
Meanwhile the Centurions are muscling in on turf the Wolf Brigade controls. The Wolf Brigade has a mutual assistance pact going with Anna's drug dealers through Zubi, but the Centurions are hungry for power and see the Wolf Brigade as yesterday's villains. So far Anna's interests aren't directly threatened so she's happy to let all this play out - until the agents get involved.
Up in Popa Sapca, Sorin Barbu has a ton of information on all these players. He knows all the Wolf Brigade's officer cadre, and has a surprising amount of detail on Anna's people too. This includes businesses they own, operations they run and assets they control - but most importantly he knows which New Golden Mile mansions have bodies in their basements, because he put them there. If the agents can convince Sorin that Fatma is either safe or not worth protecting any more, Sorin will spill all kinds of beans.
If the Interpol option is active then Svitlana Dobrovolska is in Marbella, gathering information and planning her next move. She'll need cooperation from the locals, but if she can get that then a sudden GAR raid is all too likely ...
I've been asked to talk about how I would use (S)entries, the Harker Intrusion and the Van Helsing Letter as an introduction to the glittering treasure box that is the Dracula Dossier. This week I'll be discussing (S)entries, the opening scenario published in the main rulebook.
For those of you who don't want any spoilers whatsoever, stop reading now. I'm going to be as spoiler-light as I can, but any discussion must inevitably drift into spoiler territory.
The opening scenario of any game needs to do two things: demonstrate the core concept, and show off the game world. The core concept is the crunchy rules bit of the campaign. How do you do combat? How do you resolve tests, uncover clues, uncover the twisty turns of the plot and win the day? Is this grim and gritty, high stakes stuff? Le Carre, Bond or Bourne? Who are these characters and what is their relationship with the setting?
(S)entries is very good at this. By the time the agents have completed their task they will have had to engage with most of the core mechanics of the game. They will also have encountered an unusual adversary. Odds are one or more of them will be injured, but unless things have gone badly wrong nobody will have died. However there is the potential for things to go badly wrong. This isn't a cakewalk. Incautious agents will get reamed.
They will also have encountered a McGuffin, and may still be in possession of same by the end of the scenario.
Yes I know, you've seen that one before. It bears repeating. Particularly if you're new to this, you need to know just how disposable McGuffins are. That means if the players drop the McGuffin there is always another McGuffin round the corner. If, at the end of (S)entires, the agents no longer have the McGuffin that shouldn't bring the plot to a premature conclusion.
In the Dracula Dossier, the McGuffin is the Dossier itself. A copy of Stoker's Dracula that theoretically contains vital information which, if used correctly, can stop Dracula in his tracks. Or not. Several generations of spies have used it, and come up short. It is protected by the strongest and most lethal defenses Edom has to offer. Or it's been hiding in a box for however long. Or someone stole it. Or someone lost it.
'Someone lost it' is more common than you might think, in spy circles. Magician John Mulholland's Manual of Trickery, written to help the CIA, went missing for decades after MKUltra went blooey. It finally turned up in someone's desk drawer in the early 2000s. Peter Wright in Spycatcher mentions in passing clearing out his office safe, full of all kinds of oddments he'd squirrelled away over a lifetime of espionage. Files get taken out of archive and not put back. Things get taken out of the office even when every available protocol says they shouldn't leave the archivist's store. It's said it's better to seek forgiveness than ask permission - some people seem to spend their entire careers asking for forgiveness.
In this instance I would play it that the McGuffin found in (S)entries is a much smaller version of the Dossier. A few pages at most, obtained at great expense and effort. When I did this in my game I had the scanned pages on the hard drive of the laptop that the agents have to snatch, and played it that the NPC the laptop belongs to was negotiating with the Dossier's holder for full access. The scanned pages were to establish the holder's bona fides.
The physical book is part of the Dracula Dossier set. However there's nothing to say that you, as Director, can't buy a copy of Dracula and use it in your game. In fact if you're feeling particularly crafty you can get a completely unrelated book and switch out the cover for the first edition. People assume that first editions must be spectacular, high-end items with lavish production values. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Theoretically the actual first edition ought to be a fairly battered artefact. Even if its owner kept it as pristine as possible, when first released Dracula wasn't what you'd call highbrow literature. Nobody was releasing high-end limited editions. This is practically Mills and Boon mass-produced commercial tat. Yellow cloth cover with red lettering, and eight pages of publisher's advertisements at the end. The 1927 Doubleday edition is prettier. The 1931 dustjacket is more evocative. The annotated version is more informative. None of that matters. People don't buy first editions to read them. First editions are all about bragging rights.
In short: make your own Dossier. A little bit of Photoshop, and you're golden. Whatever it is, it's just as viable as any other version of the McGuffin. It can lose pages. It can be valuable, or at least desirable to a collector. Buy a cheap one second-hand and let the players keep it. Splatter it with blood or write on the pages with glow-in-the-dark ink. Treat it as disposable, because it very much is.
For reference, this is the back cover of an Agatha Christie White Circle Pocket paperback circa 1930-something. The inside cover has an advert for something called Pelmanism. The back page just says I WANT CADBURYS. This is the very definition of cheap disposable tat. I picked this up when I was last in London for three quid and a bit, as the condition isn't collector's standard. Haunt your second-hand shop and you too can come away with gold.
If I were using (S)entries as an introduction to the Dossier I wouldn't touch the scenario at all. I would leave it exactly as it is, but I would make sure that the McGuffin in the scenario either includes information that leads to the Dossier, or information about whoever has the Dossier.
I would also make this the very first scenario of the series. In part because it does everything you want a first scenario to do, and also because there's a decent chance the characters will end up with the McGuffin at the end which in turn can include information that leads to other scenarios.
The Director-controlled character who possesses the McGuffin at the start of the scenario is fairly undefined. He has a name and a plot function, but there's nothing in the scenario to indicate why he's interested in the McGuffin. He may not even realize the importance of what he has. The only change I would make to the scenario is to tie that character more firmly to the ongoing plot as a whole. There are several ways to do this:
The NPC is an agent working for X (Edom? The Conspiracy? Someone else?). In the course of the scenario the characters find out a little about X, and X's ongoing plot function.
The NPC is a Legacy.
The NPC is part of an independent group dedicated to finding the Dossier.
The NPC is a Stoker enthusiast whose search for a first edition has uncovered some very odd facts.
In each of these instances it may or may not be useful if the NPC is a recurring character. Alternatively the NPC's mysterious disappearance or death shortly after the events of the scenario gives the characters the first indication of the seriousness of their long-term situation.
There is one other optional change the Director could make: change the location of the NATO base.
The opening scenes take place in Bosnia, where the agents have to infiltrate a NATO base. However if you're playing the Dracula Dossier then some of the action - possibly a lot of it - will be taking place in Romania. As Director you're going to want to introduce the agents to the setting as early as possible. As luck would have it, there's a perfectly serviceable NATO base in Deveselu, Romania. It used to be a Romanian Air Force Base before it was shut down in 2003. Technically you may want to play with dates a little bit as NATO doesn't move in until 2016, and the usual modern day start date is 2014. That said, there's no law that says your game has to start in 2014, and if you wanted to move the occupation date for Deveselu forward a couple years nobody's going to cry foul. Plus an air base that's been mothballed for more than ten years in a relatively rural part of Romania sounds like the perfect setting for supernatural shenanegans.
Understand, I'm not saying put Dracula's Castle in sunny downtown Deveselu. I'm saying lay a little groundwork for what's to come. Perhaps Edom's cup insignia on some old monument, or a fleeting glimpse of a Node like Heal the Children. If a Director-controlled character like the Psychic is going to be important later, have the Psychic appear on local television. Just drop hints, with perhaps a bit of folklore attached, so when the agents come back to Romania later it can be more along the lines of 'I remember this from last time - and it was just as creepy then, too.'
In a previous post, Messing with the Protagonists, I give an example of what can be done with the McGuffin itself. I let the players obtain information, but it came with a sting in the tail: viruses, which infected their own hardware. As Director you should consider doing something similar with your McGuffin. After all, once the players have it everyone else wants it, and that means the players will constantly need to defend their prize. The whole point behind a McGuffin is that everyone wants it. If the characters aren't threatened 24/7 as long as they have it, why, it's not a McGuffin.
Anyway, that should give you enough to be going on with. Next time, a discussion of another scenario that can be used as a lead-in to the Dossier.
