The Wolf's Head (Night's Black Agents)

Money Heist trailer Antena 3

This week’s post is loosely based on this Guardian news article about museum robberies and a recent EUROPOL report. The report is timely; Friday that same week there was another article about a museum robbery in which a diamond necklace belonging to Egyptian royalty was snatched.

“Additionally, some thieves apprehended in recent cases appear to coordinate their efforts on an ad hoc basis, often recruited locally through social media and instant communication channels, without prior connections to each other. This differs from the usual structure of criminal networks involved in cultural goods trafficking, which typically operate in a core group organised around a leader.” EUROPOL report

The full report can be had here. It's not long. Broadly speaking, the papers published the bits everyone will be interested in. 

All of which made me think of Night’s Black Agents and the recruitment process. 

Night’s Black Agents’ central conceit says espionage assets brought in by the vampire Conspiracy are used, abused, abandoned, and now find themselves on the run from their former employers. In a Bourne-style world, what is it like when Treadstone (or the equivalent) is a supernatural horror show? 

One of the recurring issues in a setting such as this is how to bring the characters on board. What was the inciting incident?  

In another post I speculated a potential infection vector: the Kill Team.  

Thanks to EURPOL, there’s another way in: the Heist. 

The protagonists are all recruited to carry out a museum robbery. The target: Dacian artefacts held in a museum in Ghent. Once they complete the task they’re supposed to take the stolen items across the border to France, where they’re to hand off the artefacts to their paymaster in exchange for large bags full of cash. 

Why Dacians? From Wikipedia: 

Dacians: The German linguist Paul Kretschmer linked daos to wolves via the root dhau, meaning to press, to gather, or to strangle – i.e. it was believed that wolves would often use a neck bite to kill their prey. 

Done and done.  

The characters are brought in by an unknown third party who reached out via, say, Telegram. Their job is to break in and steal a particular thing, but they are encouraged to steal other things to make it look like a ‘normal’ robbery. Plus, anything extra they steal is a bonus to their pay packet. 

Ghent: a historic medieval port town in Belgium, once big on textiles, now big on tourism and shipping. Very significant architecturally, practically car-free in the old town center. Infested with religious architecture and churches, which may be significant to any supernatural element that dislikes religion or has religious Banes.   

Museum of Antiquity and Harmony (Double Tap Establishing Shot):

Statuary, paintings, and the wonders of antiquity surround you on every side.  You move along with other tourists, past bored museum guards and sophisticated alarm systems you could easily hack. The museum has high ceilings, a maze of large rooms filled with the detritus of history, and enough museum visitors to make action somewhat problematic.

extras and cameos: Knowledgeable historian, pretentious art student, clump of foreign tourists; Ex-con Forger, Hacker, Occult Bookstore Owner, Second-Story Man.

clues: Mysterious carved tablet recently put on display; obscure 17th century portrait that looks identical to a well-known billionaire; ancient weapon thick with legends.

rules effects: Spending a point of Art History allows the agent to befriend a museum administrator or art historian, giving them inside information about how the museum is run. Alarm systems range from Difficulty 2 to 6 against Infiltration tests, depending on the museum and the exhibit. Cinematic jewels or the main prize of the operation, of course, have multiple layers of security and a final, laser filled Difficulty 8 chamber.

in a fight: Ancient weapons and armor can still be used in combat; priceless statues too easily toppled; poles with velvet ropes still attached, used as crude bludgeons.in a chase: Dive through interactive exhibits of video and holograms; lift disguises from the museum gift shop; slow and mingle with the crowd as a maze of room displays blend into one another. 

Museum Backstory (core clue): this place has a peculiar reputation. It's privately owned and those guards aren't your standard retired cop looking for an easy gig.

Museum Backstory (point spend): This museum is privately funded by the Catholic Church. Certain dignitaries and experts are often seen here. Director's choice as to who that is. but it should be someone fairly significant, eg. Dracula Dossier's Mysterious Monsignor. The guards are former members of the Vatican's Rapid Intervention Group (GIR). Occult Studies will notice vampiric Banes in strategic locations.

The Meet Cute (Opening Scene)

The protagonists gather in a location assigned to them by their employer, probably a shady low-class hotel somewhere close to the Port of Ghent. It's the kind of place beloved by truck drivers and other transients who aren't here for tourism. This may be the first time any of them have met, though they may know each other's professional reputation. 

Whatever equipment they might need, including a vehicle, is supplied by their employer and can be found on site. A regular car, most likely, though if any of the agents have cherry level Mechanics they can specify that the car is souped-up or has a modification of their choice. Protagonists with specific equipment needs (the Hacker, the Wire Rat) can also have those supplied now.

The job is to hit the museum, grab a particular item (the McGuffin, assumed to be some kind of Dacian artefact of interest to the Conspiracy) as well as any other item(s) they see fit, and get across the border to France where the hand-off will take place in a warehouse not far from Lille.

Surprise Pregnancy (The Heist)

The agents hit the museum however they wish. 

On their way in they find themselves face-to-face with a significant, nemesis-level NPC. Perhaps it's the Mysterious Monsignor or someone of equivalent campaign importance. It might even be an Edom dignitary. The obvious one is Pearl, who was brought in by the Vatican to give his professional opinion regarding museum security. Whoever it may be, their mere presence in the scene ups Heat by 3 as alarm bells go off all across the continent, and this increases by a further 2 if that NPC is significantly injured (or, God forbid, killed) in the ensuing mayhem.

Additional complication: there is a Very Valuable Item, say, a diamond necklace, easily stolen. However, if the protagonists take it they incur the wrath of the owners, who lent it to the museum. The owners aren't the Conspiracy but they have access to considerable resources of their own, not all of them human. They launch a parallel chase, trying not to attract the attention of the authorities (or Edom or the Vatican) but they really want their McGuffin back and aren't fussy about the casualty rate. While this does complicate the protagonists' lives it opens up a Yojimbo option.

Why Choose? (The Hand-Off) 

Assuming the protagonists get away with it and get to that warehouse near Lille, they discover their mysterious employer mysteriously dead. At any rate, there's a corpse on the ground (possibly several) and their Telegram messages are going unanswered. Turns out there is a Third Party in the mix, the Conspiracy. The Conspiracy didn't want the heist, didn't need the headache it caused, but, well ... there is that McGuffin, all valuable and shiny ... gosh, it would be a shame to let it go back to that musty old museum ... you know what, let's just make lemonade out of these here lemons. In fact, if these resourceful little suns-of-guns want it, there's a job opportunity waiting for them in Lille. Of course, the benefits aren't great, but life itself is a benefit, don't you think?

The protagonists must make a choice. Do they want to work for the Conspiracy? If not, they'd better be prepared to go on the run, as of right this minute. 

In fact, not only will they be on the run from the Conspiracy, they'll also be on the run from the Vatican and whoever that other party was they unexpectedly ran into at the museum. If they carried out that Very Valuable Item robbery, well, that's another powerful enemy to worry about. Perils of greed, honestly.

For that matter, they still don't know who their mysterious employer was, or whether there's someone out there in the darkness connected with their mysterious employer who would really like to know what happened at that museum in Lille. So that's yet another complication to think about. 

Then of course there are the authorities. You know, EUROPOL. Who would like to arrest them. For crimes.

Gosh darn it all. If only the protagonists had some friends! 

That's it for this week Enjoy! 

Hush Hush House 2 - the NPCs (Night's Black Agents, Dracula Dossier)

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. 

Then we move to the hook.

Once upon I time I opined 

[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. 

However, conflict does lead to plot ...

That's it for this week! Enjoy. 

Johnnie To - Three (NBA)

OK, I'm on a little bit of a cinema kick.

Johnnie To is, by far, the best action cinema director working today. I'm going to take one of his films and make a Night's Black Agents Thrilling scene out of it. The film is Three, set in a hospital, where the cops have a robber in custody and are trying to get him to talk before manure hits the fan.

 Trailer sourced from Movie Maniacs

This is a Thrilling Interrogation.

It takes place in a Hospital:

Antiseptic, organized to a fault yet seething with chaos underneath. Security is tight yet not so tight; a little bluff, a little chutzpah, and anyone can get anywhere. Harried medical staff rush from crisis to crisis. Nurses exercise whatever authority they possess, as often as they can. Low chatter from the patients, sometimes moans, once in a while a scream. Expensive machinery hums and gives out information, to what end is unclear to anyone except the medical staff. High-powered consultants breeze in like little Gods, then breeze out again, leaving stressed medical staff in their wake. 

Extras and Cameos

Grim policemen watch over a captured felon. Injured Civilians from all walks of life kibbitz their fellow sufferers, offering unsolicited advice. Medical staff rest wherever they can find an empty space, smoking forbidden cigarettes. Relatives and friends hover on the sidelines, not sure what to do or what civility dictates, anxious and afraid. A Disgraced Doctor on their last day before they get kicked out, trying to steal as much as they can. Reporters in search of a story pretend to be relatives or friends.

Clues

There's a lot of activity in the Morgue for some reason. That Civilian's symptoms are familiar - is this an indication of vampire activity in the Civilian's place of work or home district? Why does that Doctor seem to be under the influence? Is it illicit drug use or something more supernatural? 

Rules Effects

It's easy to hide in this mess, provided you can score a medical gown and have any points in Surveillance. If that applies, refresh 3 points Surveillance at any time. Also, the difficulty for Preparedness for any medical-related task is reduced by 1. However, if an overtly violent act takes place Heat increases by an extra 1 point, due to the sensitivity of the location. 

In A Fight

Preparedness can be used to score impromptu weapons (scalpel, syringes, bone saws) and drugs. If your game uses tasers and stun guns, then assume that Medical Staff have access to sedatives and other drugs that act in exactly the same way as a taser but require a Called Shot (Limb) to work.

In A Chase

Hospital corridors can turn from calm to chaos at the drop of a surgical mask. Assume chases start Open and move to Cramped within two rounds. Hazards include pools of unidentifiable fluid on the floor, unexpected medical staff or civilians in a romantic clinch in what was supposed to be an empty room, cleaners trying to get rid of biohazardous waste.

Objective of the Exercise

A Renfield of interest to the agents has been brought in for emergency medical treatment. If they don't get that treatment they will die within 12 hours. The Renfield is refusing treatment, for reasons known only to them. 

The agents may be disguised as Police or similar, on a Preparedness check or a Cover spend. If they are not so disguised, they will need to justify their presence and may have to rely on Flattery, Flirting or other interpersonal skills. Anyone with 2 points Diagnosis can pretend to be a Doctor and avoid being challenged, but that only protects the one with Diagnosis, not any of their non-medically trained friends. 

The agents must successfully Interrogate the Renfield before one of two things happens:

• The Renfield dies.
• The Renfield's heavily armed associates arrive to bust them out of hospital. The Renfield may or may not welcome this intervention.

Potential complication: there is vampire blood on the premises. It can be there by accident; it can be there because someone smuggled it in. Regardless, if the Renfield gets hold of that blood they can access all of their powers. Otherwise, they are normal for their type. 

This seed assumes a base Thug template for the Renfield, with possible Gym Rat boosts. 

 

This is an Open interrogation for rules purposes, in that the Renfield is in a public area watched over by medical staff and civilian patients.

Assume for purposes of Maneuver that the Renfield is less ethically constrained.

Enjoy!

RPG All (NBA) - Plot Blocks & Pacing

 

Deutschland 89 Trailer via Sundance

I just finished the final episode, End of History.

My God.

OK, I've mentioned Deutschland 83 before, and recommended it. I waited till I could get hold of the blu-ray sets before seeing the rest of the series. Now I'm recommending the entire series, without caveat or cavil. It is by far the best espionage story I have ever seen, from the very first moment to the last.

But! It made me realize something very important about pacing.

See, this is a remarkably fast-paced series. It runs entirely on plot from start to finish and never wastes a shot, or a scene. This is all meat, all the time. There's never a moment when you feel bored, or think that things are going too long, or wish that the characters would just shut up and get on with business. 

Yet there's plenty of character development. You never feel as if you don't know these people, don't know what makes them tick. There's no exposition, no 'you remember that time in season one when we did the thing?' Nothing wasted. 

[There are some brilliant characters, by the way. Gary Banks? A villain's villain. Annett Schneider? Ice Queen. Nina Rudow? Stone Cold Killer. Steal these for your game. You will not regret it.]

So, what was the important thing about pacing?

Combat. Combat kills pacing.

Probably also Chases. 

See, there's combat and chases in Deutschland, but they're used sparingly. If this were, say, Justified, there'd be at least one gunfight and one chase scene per episode, probably more than one. There would be showdowns prior to those gunfights and chase scenes, moments where Our Hero is allowed to quip a bit, hogging the spotlight before the big finish.

In Deutschland, whichever series, while there are gunfights and fistfights they don't crop up once an episode, necessarily. Chase scenes too, but not every episode.

This means two things.

First: when those scenes do show up, they have impact. It's never certain who will win or who will lose. Nobody quips (praise be!). This means that, whenever they happen, you, the viewer, are on the edge of your seat.

Second, it means you, the viewer, don't waste time with unnecessary moments when Plot could be happening.

Think about it. You've probably seen any number of YouTube wafflers bibble on about Combat In D&D Sucks! This is How To Run Combat! Improve The Size Of Your Quarterstaff With These Combat Tricks! So on, and on, and on.

None of them ever ask the question, Do You Need This Combat Scene?

They all assume you need it.

Do you, though? Really? Because every combat and chase scene, however Thrilling it may seem at the time, is perhaps half an hour or more of game time that you will not get back. Combat diverts attention from plot. The crunchier the setting, the more time the combat scene will take up, which means less plot. 

This is even more the case if we're talking about a TV episode, like Deutschland, where the runtime is maybe 50 minutes. If you kill 5 or 10 minutes in combat and chases, that leaves you only 40 minutes for the rest of it. Probably less than that, when you realize that every one of those fast-paced action scenes will want a downbeat moment directly after, when the characters lick their wounds and the audience recovers from the events on screen. Do that kind of thing too often and you'll only have 30 minutes for the actual episode.

Or in your gaming session, when you have perhaps 2 hours at best, accounting for late arrivals and pizza interludes. Can you really afford to kill off even 20 minutes of that 2 hours dealing with an orc in a 10x10 room, guarding a chest?

Put it this way. Everyone remembers that moment when they faced down Dracula, or some other Big Bad that they've been chasing for however many episodes. Nobody remembers Mook #3 in that place with the thing. But Mook #3 in the place with the thing took up the same 20-40 minutes game time that the Dracula moment did. Possibly longer, depending on circumstances. 

Does that seem reasonable to you?

With that in mind, consider this Dicta:

1. Never have a meaningless combat moment if you can avoid it. All combats should be, or aspire to be, Thrilling.

2. In situations where a combat with minor foes, ie. mooks, is an option, make that combat Thrilling by introducing elements that raise the stakes. Is there a bomb that will go off if the combat doesn't end quickly? An abduction that will take place if the agents don't intervene quickly?

3. Reduce combat scenes to one per episode, or even one every other episode. 

4. Always remember, combat raises stakes. Make sure everyone understands the stakes, and that there will be real loss should the agents lose. 

5. Never let the agents feel that success is guaranteed. Loss is always possible, and there should be consequences for that loss.

6. Where there is combat, make it cinematic as possible, and as quick as possible. 

Deutschland 86

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

PS! I've been working on some DriveThru scenarios, expanding on the Many Mansions concept. I've written one so far, Your Number, Please, and am on the verge of completing a second, When Tides Are Right. Once that's done, I'll start on the third. 

Once all three are written I'll move to art & layout and then publish all three at the same time.

I'll keep you posted!

Boots - Night's Black Agents

Putin noted that Russian societal unity is critical for Russian victory in Ukraine.[2] Putin alluded to the Russian Revolution, noted that Russian society collapsed during the First World War, and urged Russians to maintain support and unity as the war continues. Putin stated that Russia "will not give up" its "own" territory in future peace negotiations — likely referring to illegally annexed territory in occupied Ukraine.[3] The Kremlin launched the Defenders of the Fatherland State Fund in April 2023 to oversee social support for veterans, elevate veterans within Russian society, and monopolize control over veterans activities in Russia. 

Seven—six—eleven—five—nine-an'-twenty mile to-day 

Four—eleven—seventeen—thirty-two the day before -- 

(Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again!) 

There's no discharge in the war! 

Kipling, Boots.

There’s an interesting narrative percolating about Russia and Ukraine, which goes like this: Putin’s at a point where he cannot afford peace because, if there’s a ceasefire, the troops come home. With all their military skills, their anger, and their stories about life on the front.  

This is a narrative that pokes its head up every time there’s a significant military action, no matter who’s at war or what they fought for. The soldiers come home. They can’t handle peace. They don’t like the government. They know how to take direct action; direct action is all they’re fit for. 

After the Great War British misfits came home to farm chickens, because they couldn’t stand being cooped up in an office building, liked to work outdoors, and were attracted to rural life. You see this plotline pop up in Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie.  

Christie uses the war and its disruption as a background for her soft-edged detectives Tommy and Tuppence, both of whom served in the war. Sayers uses the war as a background for her detective Lord Peter, but she also uses it to good effect in her detective story The Bellona Club, where the action is set in a member's club for military men, should you wish to steal it for Bookhounds or Trail. 

Meanwhile in modern drama, Peaky Blinders makes much of Tommy Shelby’s time at the front, how it made him the criminal genius he is today.  

There was a time when the villain of choice for an American thriller was an ex-Vietnam vet looking for a little action. Whether it’s something like First Blood or Taxi Driver, where the psychological damage comes out in misanthropic physical action, or something more direct like Dead Presidents, if you went to Vietnam you were one bad day away from being Public Enemy Number One.

Dead Presidents trailer

Really, the only difference in that evolving narrative is the war, and the strength of society to deal with the consequences of that war. It probably hasn’t taken you ten seconds to think of a movie drama with broadly the same text as Dead Presidents, only this time it’s about the Iraq War.    

Even the so-called ‘good’ wars, like World War Two with its Greatest Generation, has its examples. After all it’s that same Greatest Generation that gave us Hell’s Angels, and with it any number of biker rebel narratives.  

The Wild One

Ultimately it comes down to the strength of civil society. A weak civil society can't handle returning soldiers. A strong one can. There will be unrest, some disorder, a few thrilling moments and a shaky narrative, but the society will survive. Changed, probably. Change will come whether asked for or not. There's an argument for saying that returning soldiers accelerate the process, but it is an acceleration not a causation.

Russia has particular concerns. 

The original Revolution was kicked off by troubles on the Western Front. Russia wasn't the only nation that struggled; France and England both worried that slaughter on the battlefield would cause revolution at home. In Germany the Nazis came to power, in part, on the back of this fear that revolution was in the air. Yet it was Russia that fell to revolution, though there's a case to be made that, had Germany somehow lasted longer than it did, England and France would both have endured protracted revolutionary action.

Meanwhile, in modern times, the collapse of the Soviet regime came after the destruction of the Red Army in the Afghan debacle. The Wall came down, Yeltsin went out the door, and with him went the Soviet Union.

Russia’s modern history can be summed up as ‘troops come home, disaster follows.' Which suggests a strong reason for keeping troops in the field, but the problem with that is, no army can stay in the field forever. At some point, all wars end. 

Sometimes they end with an angry army attacking the leadership. That was what scared Putin half to death when Prigozhin took his Wagner mercenaries home. Sometimes they end with reverses on the battlefield or a protracted stalemate that turns into a peace agreement because nobody can force anybody to a different conclusion. That seems to be what might happen in Ukraine. 

In-game, groups like Edom have their own issues with returning soldiers. Specifically, their Jacks of E-Squadron. 

Here we have a group of heavily armed, well-trained troops up to their eyeballs on peculiar substances who go out, do unspeakable things, and come home again. 

Intact in body, perhaps. Longer lived, perhaps; the Seward serum does strange things to a man. But intact in mind? That's debatable.

You'd want to keep an eye on people like that. 

Psych Eval

Social Worker Neela Chaudri (Edom Field Manual) has been tasked with carrying out wellness checks on former E-Squadron personnel, of which there are perhaps a dozen, all-told. Rotated out, retired, living the civilian life. 

Some of them date back to the Second World War and aren't in the best of health. Most are 1970s-80s recruits, one is a 1990s man with artificial legs. All of them are psychologically scarred by their time in the trenches. 

Edom picked Chaudri for this job because she's already got the clearances, thanks to her work with Chain Home Deep. She just doesn't know it. Edom didn't care whether or not this overloaded Chaudri or caused her any problems. From Edom's perspective, the fewer people with their eyes on Edom's business, the better, and Chaudri is already a known face.

The problem with this darn fine scheme is, just as with Chain Home Deep, nobody at Edom is paying close attention to Chaudri's reports. After all, why should they? The point was to get a report, not to read the damn thing. Let alone take action based on that report.

Pity. Because, if someone did read them, they might notice disturbing similarities between the experiences endured by some of Chain Home Deep's crew and the veterans of E-Squadron. Particularly in the dreams they experience ...

Option One: A 70's Kid: The trooper, David Allenby, served during the time of the Mole Hunt and was there at the death, when the mole was run to ground. Allenby suffered a traumatic encounter with several SBAs in the final months of the Hunt and this left him with scars both mental and physical. However, it also left him a peculiar gift: he can spot Renfields. It takes him maybe 30 seconds, and his success rate is 100%. The thing is, he's convinced there's a Renfield near him now. At all times. Who can it be?

Option Two: A 40's Veteran:  This might be Van Sloan. It's certainly someone of similar vintage, who was there during Edom's assault on Schloss Karnstein. He remembers everything. He goes back there at night, in his dreams. Something is calling him there. Something in his dreams wants to get out. This could be an entry vector to the Carmilla Sanction in the Edom Files, or a postscript dream-sequence to that operation in which one of the entities killed during the assault on the Schloss wants to come back to life and is using the Veteran's mind and body to do it.

Option Three: The 1980's: The trooper, Simon Yellern, went through any number of peculiar operations back in the day but the one that sticks in his mind is the incident in Afghanistan during the Soviet's Operation Curtain. While attempting to extract Yellern and his team were caught up in a Soviet special forces raid against the mujahideen they were working with, and those forces were very special indeed. Yellern was the only survivor from his unit. Thing is, he swears he saw one of those Soviet troopers in England. Chaudri has it down as a nightmare due to carelessness with medication, but Yellern's convinced the man he saw was real - and died during that 1980s raid. Yellern should know. Yellern killed him.

That's it for this week!

 

The Floater (NBA, Dracula Dossier)

Floater: Person used for a one-time or occasional intelligence operation. Generally a floater is a low-level person, sometimes used unwittingly. A floater might be a waiter sent to a hotel room with a bottle of champagne allegedly from the management - in order to see who is in the hotel room.

Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage, Polmar & Allen, Random House 1998.

Retired KGB Agent Dmitri Lobanov. Lobanov was one of the KGB’s field hands during the late 1970s and ’80s, until he was burned by a former colleague and arrested in England — for assault and grievous bodily harm, not espionage. Ten years in Long Lartin prison followed; MI5 discovered Lobanov was a spy and debriefed him while he was incarcerated. These days, he’s a plumber doing odd jobs around North London. Dracula Dossier p97

Archives/Library Establishing Shot: Endless rows of metal racks hold dusty case files (or civil archives, or Securitate surveillance reports, or dissertations on medieval Romania). Strata of labels, each one stuck over its predecessor, trace the development of the filing system, from handwritten notes to typewritten ones to bar codes. Dracula Dossier p254

A North London archive of importance to Edom, the Conspiracy or a significant third party is penetrated by a Floater - the retired KGB agent. The agents are alerted to this after the fact through security camera footage, or perhaps they were conducting surveillance of the archive only to find Lobanov already on-site. Lobanov's a face, a known quantity. That he was even seen near the archive is a problem for the higher-ups. The higher-ups hate problems. 

The question that needs answering: is Lobanov a Floater, and if so to whom does he report? Or is something else going on?

After all, there are any number of legitimate reasons why a plumber might be on-site. It might just be bad luck for Lobanov that he was called out to this particular location. Or someone may have paid Lobanov to go to the archive to see what happens next. If the agents overreact, this might tip off whoever Lobanov's employers are that there's something interesting in the archive. 

They can't afford to be too gung-ho, nor can they ignore the situation altogether. This calls for delicate handling.

Additional complication: Lobanov isn't alone. He has a youngster with him. The kid might be an apprentice. A quick background check shows that Lobanov recently took his nephew into the family business. Is this the nephew? Or did whoever sent Lobanov think he needed additional support? 

Potential Thrilling Surveillance: the agents covertly pursue Lobanov and his apprentice across North London, to job sites, pubs and finally Lobanov's main gaff in Hammersmith. If Lobanov spots the tail and is innocent, he may assume that the agents are working for some leg-breakers he has reason to know all too well; he has gambling debts. If Lobanov spots the tail and is a Floater, then he reacts badly. It's been years and years since he was in the field, and the last thing he wants is to go back to Long Lartin - or worse.  This could turn the Thrilling Surveillance into a Thrilling Chase.

Potential Thrilling Interrogation: the agents corner Lobanov and try to get him to talk. If innocent, he assumes that the agents are working with Edom and are really here about the mole hunt, despite whatever they may say about archives. He went through all that years ago. He hates going through it again. If a Floater, then Lobanov assumes the worst and goes straight to combat, if he can. He had his suspicions about this job, and now they're confirmed. He doesn't know anything useful, but he doesn't think he can convince his captors he's just a pigeon.

Potential complication: The kid. He's maybe sixteen, but he has a mouth on him like a sewer and he's a little too handy with his fists. Treat as gym rat for stat purposes. 

As an innocent, he's actually the son of an influential Russian oligarch. The oligarch remembers Lobanov from the old KGB days, back when the two of them were in the same line of work. The oligarch is sick of his no-good, layabout son drinking all the time and getting into trouble. He figured a few months working a real job with his old buddy Lobanov would straighten the little turd out. However, just because the oligarch wants his son on a diet of bread and skilly for a while doesn't mean he wants him dead or up on charges. 

As a Floater, the kid's actually a Renfield and while he still has the mouth and the gym rat stats, he's considerably more dangerous. As are the rat swarms he can call on as backup, should the need arise.

Short one this week! Enjoy!

PS - I'm headed to Toronto later this year and am putting together a list of bookshops to visit. Any shop you'd care to add to the list?

Idiots In Charge (Night's Black Agents)

When you put idiots in charge, expect stupidity.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, there’s a quote that has been attributed to several different people and which may be apocryphal, about German officers and their qualities. It goes like this:

I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.

This particular paradigm has put the stupid and industrious in charge.

You can make a career out of stupidity. Mick Herron’s Slough House series of spy novels makes the bedrock assumption that a bunch of people with high security clearances had unprotected intercourse with the pooch and are now shitcanned to a dead letter office for spies. However, it’s not a career that allows for much upward growth. Which is the whole point of Slough House.

As vices go, though, you generally don’t expect people with high security clearances to demonstrate a great deal of incompetence. Ideally, if they were ever in the running for the top job, they would be competent and demonstrate that competence during their working career.

However, it sometimes happens that people, extremely stupid and incompetent people, are promoted to the top job. Perhaps it’s the old school tie. Perhaps it’s because they look good on television. The alcoholism or the bumbling is ignored for reasons that don’t really bear close scrutiny. Now the idiot has the corner office with the good view, and everyone has to wonder: when will this come to its logical end?

Let’s gamify this from two perspectives.

Let’s assume that Edom’s old CIA pals at Find Forever are led by an idiot.

Then let’s assume that someone in the Conspiracy is an idiot.

Remember what I said a while back about assets, powers and goals? Birds got ‘em, bee’s got ‘em, even educated fleas got em, and NPCs, nodes, are no different. That also applies to idiots, but let’s not think about idiots right now.

Let’s think about the people who work for idiots.

Each and every moron has a staff. Depending on the importance of the moron, they may have quite a substantial staff. This is important because staff counts toward the assets of the moron and bolster the moron’s power. 

However, the staff have something in common with the people of Czechoslovakia.

When Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Soviets in 1968, the newspaper Večerní Praha published “10 commandments”, writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.”

It's basic noncompliance. I bring this up because the staff of a moron are likely to be one of two types:

• Equally moronic, and therefore likely to follow the party line to the best of their ability.
• Noncompliant.

This will affect the capability of the moron in charge.

First let’s assume that the CIA Station Chief in London is a moron, in charge of the CIA’s assets and operations, and that Station Chief is briefed on Find Forever. Technically the CIA isn't supposed to be conducting active spying operations within a friendly nation like, say, running vampire assets in London. But technicalities have never stopped anyone before, and here we have someone who’s both stupid and industrious.

Someone who’s tasked with assisting Find Forever in their operations, by working with (or against) Edom to get access to their vampire, or the fabled Dossier.

It probably won’t take Edom long to work this out. Perhaps someone they know or someone in the public eye - the Journalist, let's say - is invited to the group chat, or perhaps someone leaves a laptop in the pub. There are all sorts of ways this can happen.

The question then becomes, what to do about it?

The most reasonable course of action, bearing in mind Edom can’t afford to antagonize the Americans, is to Flip someone or Reverse Trace something. That is, subvert someone on the moron’s staff, or cover up (Reverse Trace) the location of the Dossier, perhaps by creating a fake for the moron to go after. Edom doesn’t want to kill anyone. They just want the problem to go away.

However, this carries its own risks. If the moron decides to take things a little too far, people could die. Or operations could be blown.

Let’s say for the sake of this narrative that the CIA station chief becomes aware of something that Edom would rather not have general knowledge. The location of Ring, say, or the true identity of whoever-it-may-be currently kept at Proserpine. Then the CIA station chief promptly spills their guts and, in the process, alerts the Conspiracy to this vital knowledge.

Well, darn. Now the agents have to Defend that asset. All because the Find Forever guy is a thundering idiot.

This could turn into a miniseries worth of scenarios. What did Barney Fife of the CIA do this week? How will it make our lives worse?

Now let’s assume that someone high up in the Conspiracy is a thundering idiot.

Let’s say for the sake of it that the someone in question is dear old Uncle Albert of Bankhaus Klingemann.

Now, Albert is presumably good at his day job, or he wouldn’t have it. However, his day job is being a banker. That doesn’t mean he’s any good at anything else. He might be a complete idiot when it comes to, say, tradecraft, or interpersonal relationships, or any one of a dozen other things. Or he might be relatively sensible when sober but isn’t often sober. Dealer’s choice as to his particular issue.

However, if he has an issue, then he’s a threat to the Node in two ways.

First, he might authorize an Antagonist Reaction that’s completely inappropriate, or which gives away important information that the Conspiracy would prefer remain a mystery. Say, by using the zombie virus which the Conspiracy was saving for deployment a few months from now, thus giving the game away and giving the forces of Justice information with which they can invent a zombie vaccine. That kind of thing.

Second, his staff might become a little too ambitious when they realize they’re working for a cretin, because they want the cretin’s job. They might not know his job comes with Conspiracy strings attached. All they know is it comes with a corner office and a healthy pay bump, thank you very much.

This is where Czechoslovakia comes in, because staff like that are going to be very noncompliant to the higher-ups, but remarkably willing to cooperate with anyone who can get rid of the moron in charge. This lets the agents in on some of the Conspiracy’s best secrets.

Noncompliance means that the Node’s effectiveness is threatened.

Meanwhile, cooperation with the enemy comes with its own hazards. In this thought experiment the enemy doesn’t have to be the agents; there are any number of third-party agencies out there willing to do Bankhaus Klingemann a dirty turn. Say, Find Forever, or the Alraune. Or Carmilla. Again, dealer's choice as to who gets involved but somebody's bound to, once blood's in the water. 

Say that staff member reaches out to someone they think is reliable and that someone turns out to be the Alraune, who's been waiting for this opportunity. All of a sudden, the agents face a complication they didn't know existed, and all because dear old Uncle Albert is a cretin. 

Remember that old saw about having someone walk through the door with a gun in their hand. This opens up possibilities. Normally the door-walking so and so is a known quantity, but not this time. It could be absolutely anyone with a gun in their hand. All sorts of new clues can be sprinkled about the place in that situation. Which breeds plot, and plot is always to be encouraged.

Clue

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

The Secret Triumverate (NBA: Dracula Dossier)

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.

Enjoy!

Not Quite Review Corner: Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger: the untold story of the academics who became the Spies, invented modern spycraft and helped turn the tide of the war. 2024, Elyse Graham, Harper Collins

I still don't know what to make of this one. 

It's proven harder to read than I thought. I didn't take to it right away. I found it too easy-going, a little facile. I'm still not sure why the text rubs off on me the way it does. Maybe it's just writing style. If that's the case, then your milage will definitely vary.

However, the story it's telling is remarkable (though I question the 'untold' bit). Well worth your time, particularly if you ever intend to run or play Bookhounds of London, or Delta Green. This is the story of how the intelligence services in the West became true intelligence services. How they picked up those peculiar skills that would become the obsession of spy novelists in the decades to come. 

How the booksellers and academics turned into spies.

Most importantly it tells you who they were and what they got up to. I like to think I know a little bit about the subject matter, but I'd not heard of Adele Kibre before, for example. It's one of those times when you're reminded that actual spy work is not like a Bond novel. That John Le Carre had a point. Here's someone who did very important work, but who did it by talking, by finagling, by paying attention and taking notes. Not for Kibre the daring car chases and escapes across rooftops. She bought or acquired books. Lots and lots of books, and papers, and news. 

Judging by what is known of her she seems to be the kind of researcher who would have driven Barbara Tuchman to distraction; the kind that accumulated a wealth of knowledge but seldom put anything down on paper. There was always one more scrap to be had, one missing piece, and Kibre, by the looks of it, would rather have squirreled away that academic nut than published a single word.  

Kibre isn't the only character, of course. Graham covers a wide range, focusing mainly on American sources. Her subjects are recruited from their dusty academies, set to training with the likes of Fairbairn and Colonel Applegate, and then off they go to the war, which might be in Spain or Switzerland or France or a dozen other places. There they hoover up knowledge both academic and military, funneling it back to their shadowy bosses. 

From a Mythos perspective, or anyone with interest in running a supernaturalist spy campaign, this is definitely something you want to be looking at. This is Bookhounds taken to its logical extreme, where instead of the profit motive the squirrely bookish types are driven by loyalty to country and cause. Who knows what peculiar secrets they might uncover in that library collection?

I just wish I liked it better than I do. I've gone headlong into the likes of Barbara Tuchman and Liza Picard, and those are far more academically rigorous works. I rank Tuchman's March of Folly as one of the finest works of scholarship in the English language, and that covers about as broad a topic as you could wish for, with as much imagination - far more, I'd argue - than Graham displays here.

I suppose it could be writing style, or it could be a lurking suspicion that Graham's attention to detail is a little off. Never anything major, but several minor clangers that threw me out of the narrative. 

There's a bit in the section about breaking codes where Graham imagines a conversation between two bigwigs shortly after a successful North African campaign. One asks the other whether the academics figured out how to read Hitler's plans from the flutter of ribbons in little girl's pigtails.

"No," the other responds. "They thought they'd break U.N. custom and actually apply intelligence to their intelligence."

Which works as a comeback, just barely, but all I could think was 'U.N.? As in United Nations? But they don't exist yet, surely? Or is this meant to be U.S.N. as in U.S. Navy - presumably Naval Intelligence?'

It's things like that which throw me off. The minute I start wondering whether the author can be trusted to tell the story straight - the author, mind, not the narrator - I lose interest in the work. 

Part of the problem is Graham's use of fictionalized narrative to fill in the gaps, where historical information is lacking. It's a handy device in moderation. However, there's a lot of gaps, so moderation flies out the window.  You're never entirely sure which bit is backed by some kind of record (any kind, please our lord Herodotus) or whether it's emerging full-formed like a Greek God from a historian's head. You have to have a lot of trust in the author before you can easily swallow that kind of thing. 

It's a bit like the rant at the end of Murder by Death: 'You've all been so clever for so long, you've forgotten to be humble. You tricked and fooled your readers for years. You've tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You've introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before. You've withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it. But now the tables are turned ...'

Murder By Death (1976)

Which brings me back to the likes of Tuchman and Picard. I trust those authors, but they earned their trust by being academically rigorous from the start. Graham never did. She starts with fictitious narrative and carries on in that vein. 

Do I recommend it? Yes. After all, I've recommended far worse works, both fiction and non-fiction, precisely because even the bad stuff can be a source of inspiration. The Book of Spies and Army of Thieves, to name but two, are absolute stinkers. They can still be mined for useful ideas. 

The same applies here. I do not consider this a serious work of history. It's the historical equivalent of a summertime beach read. But it does have some interesting features and has enough of relevance to Keepers and Directors to warrant a read. 

Tho maybe not buy the expensive hardback version? Borrow it from the library; that's the better option by far.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image sourced from WP which got it from Google Earth

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

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

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

From the WP:

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

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

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

Darkest Before The Dawn

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

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

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

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

Enter the agents.

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

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

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

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Luxury On The High Seas

It’s not often that you see a cuckoo outside your coffee shop window.

I’ve been admiring the Ritz-Carlton's liner Evirma (from the Greek, Discovery) this week. It's conducting its first home port visit; the ship's on the Bermuda register, so it's been on Hamilton dock for a few days as I write this and will be gone by the time I post it, with some very well-heeled passengers aboard. It has the look of a ship built especially for vampires, all black and formidable. 

If you’re not familiar with the modern cruise ship market you might wonder why this seems remarkable but, trust and believe, it is.

The usual cruise liner packs them in like sardines and is painted like a kid at a clown festival. You know what it is by the tunes blaring out at ULTRA HIGH VOLUME (80's and 90's, please, none of the modern shit unless it's Beyonce) and the peculiar water slide that cannons guests into the pool which, as a visual, sticks out like a sore thumb. The Titanic's owners would go into conniptions at the very idea.

Whereas the Evirma is more like the classic ships of yore. It accommodates 238 people at a time in 148 suites and is much, much smaller than the modern liner. That means it can navigate ports that would otherwise be closed to a modern ship.

Bear in mind most of the ports that liners used to visit were originally established back in the 1800s or earlier and have narrow navigational access. Our own port of St. George’s is like that. The navigation channel through the reefs was blasted back in the early 1900s and assumed that all liners would stay petite; once their waistlines ballooned St. George’s lost access to the cruise liner trade.

The Evirma’s also a good deal more civilized than the norm. Michelin restaurant? Palatial staterooms with private balconies that actually are private balconies, not just glorified handrails that look over the ocean? Yes, please.

In game terms, a ship like Evirma has more in common with superyachts than it does with liners, with the caveat that the Evirma isn’t one man’s toy. It has several hundred guests aboard. So, while the rules effects remain broadly as before the scale is larger by far. It’s not just a handful of stews, crew and guests. Now it’s hundreds of passengers, scores of staff devoted to their welfare, plus the crew, cooks, and so on needed to keep this floating hotel functioning.

Why would the Conspiracy be interested?

Well, money’s always attractive. If there’s someone aboard that the Conspiracy wants, it’s a no-brainer. A ship that size is bound to have a fortune aboard, perhaps scattered in safes located in each stateroom; enter Raffles, or his equivalent, stage right. If there’s an exclusive franchise aimed at high-end patrons, like Belle Magie from the Edom Files, then there’s a decent chance there’s an outlet aboard the Evirma (or your campaign equivalent).

Or it may be that it’s not the ship itself that’s important to the Conspiracy, but its destination. Say there’s an old port that used to be high-end, back in the 1930s, but which fell off the radar and has become a shadow of its former self. Still picturesque, especially with that old monastery up on the hill, but not on the luxury itinerary anymore. Now the Evirma, built to get to out-of-the-way destinations like this, is going to pay a call. That exclusive tour of the old monastery might be more exciting than the guide suggests, but what happens when some bitten guest goes back to their suite on the Evirma?

If you aim for the pulpier end of the market and have organizations like the Satanic Cult of Dracula in our campaign, then perhaps some of the high-end patrons have booked this cruise for … let’s call them religious reasons. Got to use those Loyalty points, y’know. Perhaps there will be hideous rituals behind closed doors, out on the ocean deep where governments and those pesky Edom spies can’t reach.

With all that in mind:

The High Life

The agents find out (through their usual sources) that the Conspiracy intends to conduct a ritual aboard its latest acquisition, the high-end liner Trandafir, while it is in home port for its inaugural voyage. It's not clear what that ritual is, but it's something that has to be done on its first trip, not before in the shipyard or afterward. Perhaps it's something to do with attuning a Red Room, or perhaps it's something else. But if the agents want to know what, they have to get aboard and find out. Bonus points if they identify who it is conducting the ritual.

Option One: Board Meeting. Important members of the executive council will be attending to take formal possession of the ship. Once this ritual is complete those same members will be able to keep an eye on the ship remotely and, in certain special suites, use mental and magical powers (mind control, spread nightmares, that sort of thing) as if they were present in the room. They intend to use these suites to gain control over the high-end persons travelling aboard the Trandafir. 

Option Two: Time In Flux. Technical wizards employed by the Conspiracy, perhaps as third parties, will set up certain suites as pocket time capsules, perhaps to assist the creation of new vampires (see also Zalozhniy Quartet) or as miniature torture chambers for the unluckiest of patrons. It's difficult to keep your cool - and your control over your finances - if you think you're being aged to death in the space of a day ...

Option Three: Ghost Busters. The suites are being set up as haunted rooms, using artefacts sourced from Romania's finest castles. Each suite has its own special surprise, to be unleashed at a moment of the Conspiracy's choosing. In some cases the intent is simple possession; the visitor walks out a whole new person. In others, intimidation, or information gathering. The Michelin starred restaurant is the key; the menu is to die for. 

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Notices - Color Coded For Your Convenience (Night's Black Agents)

We had an exercise at work that involved INTERPOL which meant I had to look up their Notice system. It's the kind of thing that spices up your day job, and I thought the Directors out there might find it interesting:

• Red Notice: To seek the location and arrest of persons wanted for prosecution or to serve a sentence.
• Yellow Notice: To help locate missing persons, often minors, or to help identify persons who are unable to identify themselves.
• Blue Notice: To collect additional information about a person’s identity, location or activities in relation to a criminal investigation.               
• Black Notice: To seek information on unidentified bodies.
• Green Notice: To provide warning about a person’s criminal activities, where the person is considered to be a possible threat to public safety.
• Orange Notice: To warn of an event, a person, an object or a process representing a serious and imminent threat to public safety.
• Purple Notice: To seek or provide information on modus operandi, objects, devices and concealment methods used by criminals.

The Red Notice stands out, obviously. Eye-catching. Very Bill Browder. But a Director may get more juice out of the Blue, Black and Yellow ones.

Blue Notices are the ones most likely to apply to player characters. All that Heat has to go somewhere. A Solace might reasonably become the subject of a Yellow Notice. Black Notices, though, that has potential. You might find almost anything hiding under that rock. 

Operation Identify Me is an example of a series of Black Notices and I wouldn't go clicking that link if murder upsets you as it's a sad, long list of dead women. Cold cases going back 40-odd years, for the most part. However, if you want to invent a Black Notice of your own it gives a pretty comprehensive means of doing so.

Case name: The woman with the artificial nails

Case code: 2023-BEL06

Very simple case name. The code is year of entry on the system, location (BEL - Belgium) and number in the case file. In this instance she's the sixth in the Belgium list.

I find myself drawn to that case name. It's almost poetic. It looks like the kind of thing you might find on the cover of an old detective novel. Not an Agatha Christie, but perhaps a Dashiell Hammett or a Raymond Chandler. Even a Steig Larsson 

There follows some facial reconstruction and pictures of items found with the body, then a series of relevant points:

Date of death (estimated): 

Date of discovery: 

Location: 

Sex: 

Estimated year of birth: 

Estimated age: 

Height: 

Skin tone: 

Hair colour: 

Eye colour: 

Clothing: 

Tattoos, birth marks, scars: 

Jewellery: 

This is followed by a brief description of the case itself, the circumstances under which the body was found, likely point of origin and so on.

Yellow Notices work in a broadly similar way, except without the colorful case name as the names of the missing are usually known. The notice would include a picture of the missing person and some relevant information:

Family name

Forename

Gender

Date of birth

Place of birth

Nationality

Place of disappearance

Date of disappearance

Countries likely visited

Issuing country

Details

Father's family name and forename

Mother's family name and forename

Language(s) spoken

The police would have a more detailed version of each Notice so agents may find Cop Talk or Law useful, but in practical game terms if you wanted to use these in a session this is likely all you'd need to give the agents. 

All that said, let’s gamify. 

Black Notice: The Burned Body of the Mauerpark 

The agents come across this Black Notice through Tradecraft, Law or similar, probably as part of a general sweep for information in Berlin. 

The burned body is an adult female approximately 20-30 years old, found on 28th April 1992. The body was found in the Mauerpark, a public park on the site of the old Berlin Wall where the heavily guarded Death Strip used to be. The Wall crumbled in 1989 and the spot was designated a green space; these days it’s a popular spot, with a Wall memorial, Karaoke amphitheater and flea market as well as the green space where the East German defenses used to be. 

That was all in the future, in 1992. 

The body was discovered in the early hours of 28th April, by garbage collectors who noticed a peculiar smell and alerted police. She was short, probably between 20-30 years old, red dyed hair (original color light brown) no clothing when found. It was believed by investigators at the time that she was killed in another spot and then dumped here. No sign of sexual molestation. Fingerprint analysis came up empty. 

This case is as cold as it gets.  

Or it would be, if someone in the British secret services wasn’t making enquiries. Discreet ones, but not discreet enough. There’s just enough Heat on this one to attract notice, particularly if the PC agent in question has Berlin as one of their Favored Cities. It doesn’t help that [the Investigative Journalist / Human Rights Activist / Mysterious Monseigneur] is also poking around, and not being that subtle about it. 

Who was the dead woman, and why is she attracting attention now? 

• Option One: One Of Ours. The British connection is the Boffin, and he’s looking for a former associate. Way, way back he sent one of his assistants, Dani Forester, on what ought to have been a milk run to collect some important material on the German Vampire Program, and she never came back. The Prince of the day assured the Boffin that everything had been done that could have been done, but the Boffin never believed that for a minute. Now he’s retired he feels the need to kick over his traces and find out what really happened to Dani. The Americans, who have a vampire program of their own, would rather he didn’t find out that Dani was the victim of one of their botched operations, disposed of to cover up their own vampire’s misdeeds. The Prince of the day, eager to cooperate with his American cousins, collaborated in their cover-up. Chickens are about to come home to roost. 

• Option Two: One of Theirs. The British connection is the current Hound and she’s after what she thinks is evidence of the Alraune, aka Dani Forester. Back in the day Edom was closing in on her, and Hound thinks the fiery death scene was a fake-out. The [Investigative Journalist / Human Rights Activist / Mysterious Monseigneur] isn’t after the dead woman; they’re after the Hound and think that linking them with an old scandal may be the perfect way to drag Edom into the spotlight. What none of them appreciate is that it really was Alraune back in 1992, who faked a death to cover their escape. Now they have a life in Berlin, but wouldn’t you know it, they never bothered to change their appearance all that much. Someone showing an interest in a woman with her face, whether burnt in 1992 or not, isn’t helping her Cover one bit. 

• Option Three: One of the Enemy. The British connection is Cushing, who’s memory isn't as confused as he pretends. He's pushing old contacts to find out whether there was any evidence of a people-trafficking Node operating out of Berlin. He believed at the time that his superiors were covering up a nasty little scandal because there were important members of Thatcher’s government who might have been caught with their hands in the till. The [Investigative Journalist / Human Rights Activist / Mysterious Monseigneur] is after a modern version of that same Node, and isn’t aware that it goes all the way back to 1992. If they only knew, it actually goes all the way back to 1942; the Conspiracy’s ‘man’ in Berlin has been busy all that while, and there are more than a dozen bodies disposed of with roughly the same MO throughout the 20th Century. It’s still involved in human trafficking, but it’s gotten cleverer about disposing of the unfortunate accidents. 

That’s it for this week! Enjoy.