Vampire 5th Edition

I played Vampire in the 90s. I had that book with the green marble cover and the o-so-evocative red rose. My heart belonged to Wraith, but I couldn't always get players for that haunted setting. Vampire was always the more popular game, because it fed into the power fantasies that the players enjoyed.

I don't know where my old books are now. In the basement, probably. Or given away. I still have the Wraith stuff. I have a new gaming group now, and some of them remember Vampire fondly, so I picked up a copy when I was last in the UK, shortly after its general release. Ken Hite's name attached to the project lured me in. I see Neil Gaiman's in there as well, not sure where. Some of the background material, presumably.

This thing's huge, and it doesn't waste a page. Even the endpapers are covered with 50 vampire victims for the characters to snack on. Hardback, full colour, a thing of beauty. I found it difficult to read at times and I'm not sure why; I compared it to the old Wraith books and there doesn't seem to be a huge difference, except in line thickness and colour plates. The new book's thinner font may be the problem, or perhaps it's just the difference between colour and black and white. One's prettier, the other clearer.

Rules-wise, while there have been changes, seasoned veterans will soon wrap their heads round them. It's still the old d10 mechanic at core. You have a dice pool, you roll your pool against a target number, the more times you make or exceed the target number the more spectacularly you succeed. Botches and critical successes are possible. There's more to it than that, but if you can understand that base concept you're laughing.

The old game had backgrounds, blood-powered Disciplines, and so does this. It's all basically the same as before. There's just a lot more than there used to be. This wealth of information is bound to be intimidating to neophyte and veteran with poor memory alike, so be prepared for lots of hand-holding if you're the Storyguide. For that matter, if you are the Storyguide, read the main book at least six times. You'll thank me later.

Is this a horror game? Yes. In fact that may be its greatest weakness, because the original wasn't.

Back in the before times, Vampire aspired to be Gothic with two Gs and extra Vathek. Yes, you played Vampires, tragic figures cursed with a lust for … something, it's on the tip of my tongue. Gaze not into the abyss, lest it steal your credit card information and run up a whopping bill on Amazon. Play pretty people power gamers controlling things behind the scenes.

But horror? Nooo, never heard of that. You must be thinking of some other Vampires. 

This was a game that, more than most, was guided by its fans, and what the fans wanted was a power trip dosed with a hefty slug of Anne Rice - which, again, was pretty vampires doing Gothic things, often in a historic setting, without serious consequences for the main character.  Humans? They were your toys, but in practice what this meant was you controlled things behind the scenes - local government, state, the cops, the Feds. For someone in their teens, being able to tell the Mayor of New York where to get off, or the cops to go screw, was heady stuff. 

Yes, there was a Humanity mechanic, and going into Frenzy was a pain in the ass - but that could be contained, and there was always the promise of Redemption, where you went up to Nirvana on a big pink cloud so long as you filled in all the squares on your celestial Bingo card.

People, meanwhile, were handy-dandy blood tacos you consumed to power up your Bejeezus Stick. Few players gave serious thought to the mechanics of hunting, or what it might mean for the faceless, nameless prey. Humans were a means of recharging Disciplines, which you then used on the more important stuff, like Dominating the Mayor of New York. 

One Hunt stands out in my memory. I thought it might be interesting to play through rather than just handwave it, and God, was that a mistake. The player hadn't the least idea what to do. It was like watching Inspector Clouseau chasing a guy in a gorilla costume round a roundabout. In the end the prey got away. The player thought I was in the wrong for making him go through it. He just wanted a good time, and this wasn't it. 

The designers, poor lambs, expected people to get deeply involved in the lore, the political intrigue, the social cut-and-thrust. That was doomed from the start. You don't give a player a Bejeezus Stick and expect her not to smack some fools with it. Often quite a lot of fools. 

Maybe somewhere out in Neverland where the flying fishes play there was a group that played the political game, but it soon became clear to everyone, including the designers, that what the gamers wanted was More Power, Please and Thank You. That led to a deluge of books. Camarilla, Sabbat, setting books, Clan books, more Clan books, special Sabbat Clan books, each with upgrades to the Bejeezuz Stick, till the thing resembled a nuclear powered Christmas tree with extra smiting. If you were a Gothically inclined Munchkin, this was the game for you.

I referenced the Nietzsche bit earlier about staring into the abyss. That got quoted frequently in Vampire circles; it was heady stuff for those greasy teens. It sounds good, sure. Nietzsche gives quotable stuff, but if you're a self-obsessed 15 to 23 year-old, to you, the abyss is old hat. You're already convinced you're dark and tragic, and have a poetry diary to prove it. This is the kind of thing Vampire gamers flocked to; that pop psychology 'yes, I am both interesting and tragically flawed, even doomed' reinforcement of an idea you're already convinced is the Ultimate Truth. All that, and power too - the power you didn't have in real life. Very attractive message.

This thing, though? Vampire 5th Edition? It's horror through and through, in one large package. 

There's absolutely no question what you are, in this game, and it's not a tragic antihero. You are the enemy, touched with Evil, hunted, slaughtered on sight - and this is because you hunt, and slaughter. You don't run things. Your Bejeezus Stick is pretty nifty, but it won't save you if the Second Inquisition comes calling. Humanity is monitored the same way someone with life-threatening allergies checks each and every thing they come into contact with. Frenzy can be character-ending. The Hunt is real. All too real. 

You're no longer the baddest man in the whole damn town, friend. You're meat, and if you want to keep on … whatever it is you're doing … you'd better get with the program. 

The clearest indicator of this is the Thin-Blooded, who've come to the end of the bloodline and now know how much it sucks to be undead. The central conceit of Vampire is that, back in the days of Caine, there was a first generation of Vampires. Each generation sires another, and each generation is weaker than the last. Vampire 5E goes one step further and gives you the Vampire without a clan, because there wasn't enough of the clan left to go around. Like mules, they're sterile. Unlike their kin, they haven't the dubious comfort of a working Bejeezus Stick; since the warranty expired on their bloodline, they don't have access to the full set of Disciplines. They can fake it till they make it, eating a stronger Vampire to join an actual clan, but until then they're the lowest of the low.   

All the old institutions have been destroyed. The Tremere Chantry is gone, the Nosferatu hacker network blown away. There's a new player in the game, the Second Inquisition, and it's here because Somebody, naming no names, let the Masquerade slip once too often. Now governments know what Vampires are, where they can be found, and how to kill them. As you might expect, the 'how to kill them' bit is what really fires them up. There were Hunters in the old game, Buffy-esque Scooby Gangs of civilians and witchy folk who pounded stakes into corpses on weekends. Now they're out of the picture, replaced by Langley spooks and NSA watchers with drone squadrons at their command. So don't say anything on the internet or your cell phone you don't want Uncle Sugar to hear, or you might find yourself on the wrong end of a well-equipped government sponsored kill team.

I wonder where Ken got that idea from.

As a Vampire, you have to do some horrible things to keep going. So the game goes into detail about your style of hunting. Do you engage in Consensual vampirism? Cleave to your old mortal family, only ever drinking from your own people? Are you a Farmer, drinking only from animals, or a Bagger, taking only cold, bagged blood? Victim types, when described in the text, are precisely that - Victims. There is no romantic pretext that you're doing anything other than killing people. You might have been Compelled to do it by your lack of blood, but that's still a corpse on the ground.

Not just any faceless corpse, either. Remember those 50 Victims on the endpapers? That's Kevin, he was stuck in a dead-end job but wanted to be a poet. That's Faye, who wanted to fix the system. That's Maddie, who was trying to start her own business. 

Then consider some of the gruesome aspects of your chosen path. Cleavers feed covertly from their mortal family, which can include children. The most extreme Cleavers adopt children, marry a human, and try to maintain a family life for as long as they can [p176]. The Sandman attacks sleeping victims. The Siren feigns sex to get what he wants. Child abuse, sexual assault, stalking - it's all there, bubbling under the surface. 

If what you are looking for is a horror game, then this is what you're looking for. Ken Hite's on record as saying that if it were up to me nobody would ever get to play the good vampire ever again in any medium [NBA p126] and these most definitely are not the good vampires. These are the bloodsuckers, the killers, the villains, and if that is the game you are looking for - the game where you sink as low as you can go, and then sink further - rush to your friendly local game store and buy this now. 

Think very carefully about that for a second.

By now I'm sure you've heard that White Wolf no longer calls the shots for this franchise. Paradox, the parent, absorbed the White Wolf team into the company. Sections of the Camarilla book have been retconned, and by now I suspect unaltered versions of the Camarilla and Anarch .pdfs are very popular downloads on shadier parts of the internet. This is in response to a specific section of the Camarilla book, which puts vampires in effective charge of state-level butchery in Chechnya.

I've not read the Chechen section of the Camarilla book. I have read sections of it reprinted on various websites. I will say that if your RPG supplement ends up being blasted by Russian crime news sites then things have gone badly wrong. According to the author of the Chechnya bit it was an editing error more than anything else. Judging by some of the customer commentary there are certainly plenty of those.

[Side note: does nobody attribute, anymore? I've spent the last however-long trying to find out who wrote the Camarilla book. It might have been Winnie the Pooh for all I know. Nobody refers to the author by name; even the site linked above just refers to whoever it is as 'the author.' Mark Rein-Hagen and Matthew Dawkins provided 'insights and perspectives' which isn't the same as saying they wrote it, but I suppose that's as close as I'm going to get to solving that mystery. Vampire 5E has ten different people listed as writers or contributing writers, so I'm guessing that Rein-Hagen and Dawkins weren't the only two involved in Camarilla, but you'd probably have to own the book to know who the others are. 

Mind you, there's no Vampire 5E author info at White Wolf or Modiphius either; for all I could prove to the contrary, Vampire 5E might have been written by that talented polymath, Fartknockers McGee. If I'd talked Neil Gaiman into writing for my RPG setting I'd be shouting that from the rooftops, even if all he did was add an extra comma to paragraph 3, page 56. The only reason I know about it is I looked at Vampire 5E's front page. Until I did that, I had idea he was involved, and I've been following the progress of this book for a while.]

In this version of the game, those greasy teens and their power fantasies wrapped up in Gothic romanticism get a nasty shock. There's no disguising what you are, not even with a handy-dandy Nietzsche tag-line. In fact, I'm not even sure Nietzsche gets name-checked in the 5E book, though my memory could be faulty. You don't have the authority you used to, and forget about Dominating the Mayor of New York, lick. Stick your head up above the parapet, and a government assassin will blow it off. The moving hand has writ, and not one word or quote from your poetry diary can lure it back to cancel even half a line. You aren't the vampire you thought you were. You're the bloodsucker of the 21st century, a thin-blooded, bottom-feeding, treacherous asshole. 

Therein lies the problem.

Maybe the audience doesn't want a horror game where they're the monster. Romantic, doomed antihero, yes. However this time you have no redeeming features. You can pretend you have redeeming features, if you're into self-delusion. You can pretend to have a moral code. 

Kevin, the wannabe poet, might challenge your world view. 

If you're feeding off your family - including the kids - sneaking into people's homes at night to attack them while they sleep, tricking the gullible lovelorn into giving up all they have, there's no pretending you're anything other than evil. That's what makes this work, as horror. If horror is what you're looking for.

Like Charlie Hall over at Polygon, you may find this game isn't for you. Frankly, played straight, I'm not sure I'd want to play a full campaign of this. Some one-shots, sure. I don't know how my new gaming group will react to it either. The ones who played Vampire back in the day may be into it, or they may not. I can think of at least one player who won't want anything to do with it.

Charlie Hall brings up one more good point: how to do this so you don't squick out, weird out or emotionally scar the group. A White Wolf representative tells him the company wants to put out a series of essays about caring for the folks at the table, but it wasn't going to be available right away.

“We saw it as a separate product, as a separate SKU,” [Jason] Carl said. “I think the timing is inconvenient because we wanted to have it ready for Gen Con [when V5 will first be available for purchase] and I don’t know that it will be ready for Gen Con.”

Maybe a Gen Con release date without the essays wasn't wise, in hindsight; maybe releasing those at the same time would have blunted some of the criticism. Yes, a Gen Con release is good for sales, but this is going to be a tough one to find an audience for, which is all the more important because a quality production like this needs good sales to make its nut. One reason why, back in the day, black and white was preferable - less expensive means a lower break-even.

It's good stuff, well written, excellent production values. It's a mass-market book looking for players who want to be evil. Not murder hoboes, not doomed and tragic, not Gothic with two Gs and extra Vathek. Evil.

One tough sell.

Now, since I complained about attribution a while ago it's only fair I attribute:

Vampire 5E

Developed by: Ken Hite, Karim Muammar

System Design: Ken Hite, Karim Muammar, Karl Bergstrom

Story & Creative Direction: Martin Ericsson 

Written by: Ken Hite, Martin Ericsson, Matthew Dawkins, Karim Muammar, Juhana Petterson

Additional Writing: Mark Rein-Hagen, Karl Bergstrom, Jason Andrew, Freja Gyldenstrom, Neil Gaiman

Edited by: Freja Gyldenstrom, Karim Muammar, Jennifer Smith-Pulsipher

E.F. Benson and Ken's Mind Control (Trail of Cthulhu)

I'm a huge ghost story fan, and some of the best - the classics of the genre - were created by a relatively small group of Victorian and Edwardian era spookwriters.  M.R. James, E.G. Swain, Violent Hunt - her Tiger Skin is one of my favorites - Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Lafcaido Hearn, and a host of other cobwebbed creators. At about this time of year, when the weather gets colder, I like to reread some of the stories in my collection, and sometimes I get inspired by them.

Which brings me to E.F. Benson, and The Room In The Tower. Have a read of that - it's free. I recommend his short story collection - my copy's The Collected Ghost Stories edited by Richard Dalby - and while I can't say every one's a winner, I can say that when they win, they win big. Particular favorites include And the Dead Spake, The Shootings Of Achnaleish, The Bus Conductor, and The Outcast, the last of which is very similar in tone to The Room In The Tower.

E.F. Benson is the fifth child born to a family determined to win awards for Most Gothic as well as Overachiever. The father, headmaster of Wellington College when E.F. was born, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, was by all accounts a terrifying man. Among other things, he founded the Ghost Society at Trinity College, Cambridge, dedicated to psychical research. His wife Mary, or Minnie, was one of the cleverest women in Europe, according to British Prime Minister Gladstone. After her husband's death in 1896, she moved in with close friend Lucy Tait. Judging by some of E.F.'s stories, it's tempting to cast Minnie as a bit of a bloodsucker herself; so many of his stories feature predatory women, particularly mothers and wives.

Of the six Benson children, two died young, and none of the survivors had children of their own. E.F.'s sister Margaret, a ferocious intellect, was one of the first women admitted at Oxford and the first to be granted the opportunity to conduct archaeological expeditions in Egypt. Like her mother, she preferred the company of women. She died in the Priory after suffering a mental breakdown. Brother Alfred Christopher is best known for writing Land of Hope and Glory, but also wrote ghost stories, and suffered from manic depression. Brother Robert Hugh, appointed a Church of England priest, recanted, and eventually became a Catholic priest, while at the same time writing ghost stories and ground-breaking dystopian science fiction about the Antichrist in a world on the brink of war between the forces of Marxism, the Japanese Empire, and the American Republic. He died at the relatively young age of 42, in 1914, just as the Great War was about to start.

E.F. Benson meanwhile survived into his 70s, and died of throat cancer in the opening years of the Second World War. He very nearly wrote one novel for each year of his life, not including short stories or short story collections, or his non-fiction - over thirty published - or his autobiographical pieces. Best known for comic Mapp and Lucia these days, in his lifetime he was known as a superlative spook-story author. H.P. Lovecraft admired his stories, saying his work had "singular power" and was "lethally potent in its relentless atmosphere of doom."

Having read The Room In The Tower, what pointers does it have for vampire design?

First, the vampire is unquestionably evil, with a strong suggestion of Satanic influence. That whole business about being buried in an unmarked suicide's grave is a Christian trope of long standing, as is the postscript about a corpse that will not lie quiet in sanctified ground. But there's more to it than that; after all, here is a vampire who knows, while she still lives, that she'll become a vampire.

This suggests either that becoming a vampire is a matter of will, or that someone can deliberately damn themselves with the intent of becoming a vampire. I lean towards the former, because the narrator of the story says he's been having the vampire dream since he was sixteen years old. She's been grooming him all that while, and at the time the dreams began she was still alive. So she must have become aware of him at some point when he was sixteen - when he and her son were at school together - and decided he was her meat.

Ferocious personality she must have had.

Blood is a significant part of the narrative, but it appears in unusual places. The portrait leaves bloodstains on the hands of whoever touches it, the vampire's coffin is filled with blood, there's a bloody mark on the victim's shoulder - but there's no suggestion of an actual wound. It's as if whatever the vampire touches, or the vampire uses, leaves a gory trail, and implies heavily that, when the vampire isn't wandering abroad, it literally bathes in blood, like Countess Bathory..

Though the vampire has a physical presence, it's an insubstantial, almost psychic substance. It leaves behind a part of its shroud, when it vanishes into nothingness. There is an awful smell where it has been, but no footmarks, no evidence of tampering with the window or door. Moreover unlike many other vampire tales - including those by Benson himself - there is no moment of catharsis, with the destruction of the vampire. It is tempting to assume that Julia Stone is dealt with when her coffin is exhumed, but there's no reason in the narrative to think this was her undoing. For all the reader knows, she still may be wandering abroad, seeking prey. Certainly nobody ever finds her corpse.

However there is a strong presumption of a sense of place: that room in the Tower where she committed suicide, that patch of unconsecrated ground just outside the house where Julia Stone of evil memory is buried. Perhaps Julia Stone's powers grow weaker the further she is from her place of power. Perhaps whatever part of her still exists in the physical world is somewhere in that house - or perhaps she left many tokens, like that portrait, behind, as a kind of marker.

I rather like this as a kind of vampire template, but when designing something along these lines I'd lean heavily on Ken Hite's Zoom: Mind Control, since that seems to best model this creature's style of attack. This is a psychic or spiritual battle rather than a physical one; the scenario mechanics should reflect that.

This assumes a conventional scenario with more than one player character. In fact, a story like this seems better suited for Cthulhu One-to-One - but that's a subject I want to return to later.

The great thing about the Mind Control option is that it allows the scenario to play out over several scenes, possibly spread over several years. This is, after all, a battle for the soul, not a fight for territory. Moreover unlike the conventional, stakeable vampire, this time out the opponent can't easily be destroyed by applying garlic, sunlight or some other bane. The only way you win this time is by beating it on its own terms - which means overcoming its ferocious will.

Without going into tremendous detail - after all, that's in the Zoom - the Shadow Plays section of the Zoom seem best suited for this kind of scenario. In that, the struggle between the dominating force and the subject is played out over some form of mental battleground, with defenders or defenses made up of parts of the subject's psyche. The zone's defenders are constructed by using the subject's total Stability rating as Health statistics, and the subject's total General pool to work out statistics. So if the General pool is 60 and the Stability pool is 6, then in theory the subject could create 10 different defenders, each with an 6-point rating in a useful General ability, but could only assign 6 Health total between all of those defenders.

In the Zoom, the Shadow Play section assumes that the defenders are mooks of some sort - gunmen, thugs, whatever. In this kind of scenario I'd suggest that the defenders could be anything. A strong door, a meaningful symbol of some sort - particularly one related to a Source of Stability - all of these things could be assigned defensive roles and given a Health rating based on the subject's Stability.

The Zoom also states that the mental battleground is divided into three zones, the Superego, Ego, and Id, and that the Health budget will increase for the Ego and Id. The budget is multiplied by 2 for Ego targets, and 4 for Id, so in the 6 Stability example the Health budget would be 12 and 24, respectively.

So in this instance the vampire spends its time reducing the subject's defenses to zero in a series of nightmares, targeting the Superego, Ego, and Id. Once those defenses are destroyed, the subject dies, and becomes a vampire in turn. During the day the investigators may find signs of the vampire's presence - blood stains, clumps of grave dirt or scraps of shroud, awful charnel smells, perhaps claw marks on the windowsill or footmarks on the floor.

However these physical marks also point to a weakness - the vampire depends on certain physical anchors in order to survive. That coffin filled with  blood, the portrait on the wall, perhaps a particular room in a house or a grimoire in the library; the vampire needs all of these things, and if they are destroyed then its offensive capability is damaged.

Its offensive capability is determined by adding up the total of its General abilities, with Health as its Health stat. So using the Vampire example in Trail as a baseline, its offensive pool is 28, and its Health is 7, with its offensive pool refreshing in every scene. An offensive attack doesn't have to be a straight fang-to-the-throat; it can as easily be a sense of overwhelming dread, or a particular phrase - 'Jack will show you to your room. I have given you the room in the tower.' In a mental or nightmare attack, these blows to the psyche are just as crippling as a physical punch to the throat.

That said, these nightmare attacks might also reveal more than the vampire intended. After all, the narrator of the story knows what is coming because he has been here before; he has experienced the same nightmare for many years, and is very familiar with the room in the tower. Thus when he encounters it in the real world for the first time, he knows what to expect next - and that proves to be the vampire's undoing. So too can the Keeper drop clues in the nightmare realm as to the importance of certain things to the vampire - its place of rest, that grimoire in the library, the portrait. If those things are destroyed, then its offensive pool dwindles; exactly how important this is depends on the vampire, and its particular weaknesses.

When designing this kind of vampire the Keeper ought to be as creative as possible. Sure, a coffin filled with blood is an evocative image, but when dealing with vampires the players expect to find coffins, blood-filled or otherwise. What about a doll's house, designed exactly like the vampire's own place of power? Or a greasy deck of playing cards that the vampire used in life? A horse-and-carriage, or a railway carriage? An apple orchard? The possibilities are limitless.

Anyway, as I've now got to cook a turkey I shall leave it at this point - but Cthulhu One-to-One is the next stop.

Halloween (RPG All)

Tis the season, so let's talk about ghosts - or at least, about the day on which ghosts are celebrated. What exactly is Halloween?

It's a holiday now remembered for its place in the Christian calendar. Formerly celebrated in May, Halloween is the day before All Saints, also known as All-Hallows or All-Hallowmas. All Saints is celebrated each November 1st, and is, as you might expect, dedicated to all saints and martyrs known and unknown - which conveniently covers those gallant souls who perished somewhere forsaken and alone, as well as those more spectacularly martyred where everyone could see it happen. The festival was introduced by Pope Boniface IV in the 7th Century, probably to supplant a pagan ritual dedicated to the dead. Boniface's saint day is in May, which, when he first invented the festival, was also when All Saints was celebrated - May 13th, to be exact.

The date was changed by Gregory III to November 1st and has remained so to this day. It's not clear why Gregory felt the need to change the date. Gregory's time in the Papal seat is only a century after Boniface's. He was a great opponent of iconoclasm - the destruction of religious relics, on the grounds that idolizing relics is anathema - and was an enthusiastic builder, or rebuilder, of churches, shrines, and holy places. His changing the date may have had something to do with the changing emphasis of the church; up till now, its focus had been on the East, and the former Empire, but in Gregory's day the focus shifts to Northern Europe, Germany, and really anywhere Gregory could get support to help him against rampaging Muslims and Lombards. Since All Saints is ultimately an end-of-year festival, it may be that this shift in Papal focus, and climates, meant a shift in dates was prudent.

All Saints is followed by All Souls, on November 2nd. All Souls is when everyone who isn't a saint gets a place at the table. Many cultures have a similar point in their spiritual calendar, a day, or perhaps a festival, set aside for remembering the dead. For the Japanese, it is the Feast of Lanterns. China's fifteenth day in the seventh month of its lunar calendar is its Ghost Day, when the gates of Hell open and the living offer sacrifices to the wandering dead. In each case the day of remembrance is usually towards the end of the year, when crops have been harvested, new fields sown, and there is nothing to do but wait.

So technically Halloween, which in the West is celebrated on October 31st, is only the start of a three-day festival of the dead, and probably the least important of the three, but it's the one that's been drummed into us by commercial interests as being the only day worth remembering. However if you're worried about ghosts returning, the day you want to pay attention to is November 2nd, All Souls. For those Keepers setting their games in the 1920s and 30s, this is also when Catholic traditionalists will set out food and presents for the returned dead; I doubt it's something many Catholics in the United States do nowadays, though south of the border on the Dia de Muertos the ritual is still remembered.

Incidentally, Dia de Muertos was originally a summertime ritual - but as often happened, when Catholic Christianity took over, the date was changed to better reflect Catholic tradition. On the 31st children build altars to persuade dead children to return; on the 1st, the adult dead come back; and on the 2nd the living visit the dead in their tombs.

The trick-or-treat part of the celebration is a 1920s invention. There's always been a tradition of mummery or going about in fancy dress - ceremonial dress, really -  but sending kids out in costume to get candy by threatening the neighbors isn't really a thing until the later 1920s, and then only in big cities. The idea caught on, and it should hardly be a surprise that it did - just then. We think of the 1920s as the Roaring Twenties, the Bootlegger Era, and tend to forget that it was also the decade of the booster, the advertiser, and the Boom. If it could be sold, you could bet your bottom dollar they'd sell it. For them, Halloween was a gift from Heaven. Postcards, costumes, decorations, accessories, and best of all, candy, candy, candy, all yours at never-to-be-beaten prices. Rather like Christmas, Halloween was heavily kid-oriented, the purpose being to get children on board so they would nag their parents to buy things for them.

Give me a child until he is seven and I shall show you the man, Aristotle is supposed to have said. If only Aristotle knew what he was letting the rest of us in for. Soon trick-or-treat becomes part of accepted tradition, accepted because adults who remember it fondly support their children's habit, who then grow up to do the same.

So what does all this mean from a gaming perspective?

Well, among other things it strongly suggests that if your game is set in the Victorian period or earlier, there really isn't a Halloween as you know it today. There may be an extra service on the 31st, but that's about it. On the other hand, come the 1st, or better yet the 2nd, sparks begin to fly. The Keeper may choose to use this as set dressing - food for the dead laid out on the table, that sort of thing - or may decide to dig a little deeper.

This is the point at which I turn to some very good advice in Trail's book Rough Magicks, where Ken Hite says the Keeper should decide ahead of time what Magic really is. It might be spare energy left over from the creation of the Universe, or genetic inheritance from the Old Ones, or any of a dozen other things. Whichever Magic it may be, will determine to a great extent what ghosts are, which in turn affects Halloween and its attendant rituals.

Let's say that magic requires blood sacrifice as a means of providing your 'public key' to the cosmos. delivering DNA to Yog-Sothoth, and that sacrificing something other than yourself - babies, cattle - is like hacking the universe using someone else's account. So it's all about blood - the ritual's less important than the claret.

In this instance, a ghost is created by blood. It may even crave it, in vampiric fashion, but probably lacks the intelligence to set traps for it or otherwise get it directly. An excess of blood spilt - like a battlefield, or a gruesome murder - creates excess energy, by hacking the building blocks of the universe and then not doing anything with the power that results. A ghost is spoilt magic. It has no real human characteristics, but since it was created by humans it mimics them to an extent - borrowing human form, creating sounds, and so on.

In this version of events, the All Souls rituals - the feasts, candles, and such - are humanity's response to this spoilt magic. In order to give ghosts something to do, other than cause mischief in their relentless search for blood, humanity creates a magical ritual, which varies from place to place but always has the same intent: pacify or get rid of the dangerous dead.

Of course, as time goes by people become less observant. All Souls stops being the important date in the calendar; now it's Halloween, the 31st and not the 2nd, and now it's not about the dead at all, but about the living. Which would be fine if people stopped shedding blood, but instead they gush gore more enthusiastically than ever. Moreover they do it just at a moment, after the Great War, when a massive excess of bloodletting creates more specters than has been seen before. Humanity hacked reality, and then left reality's doors wide open. The 20th Century becomes the Century of Ghosts, as blood-hungry creatures roam the earth seeking just that little bit more, that drop, that gusher, which will slake their thirst - for a while.

Say you're running a different game, Night's Black Agents perhaps, or anything with a modern setting. In this kind of game ritual is often de-emphasized; it's less about Latin and incense, and more about doing cool things and looking cool while doing them.

At that point Halloween becomes more set dressing than ceremony. It really is about the parties, the costumes, the laughter and the free-flowing bacchanal. Depending on where you are - Italy, say - there may not be a Halloween at all, and All Souls is still the important date. Some locations may really play up the ghosts and goblins side of things. Whitby, for instance, has a Goth Weekend in the final days of October, and that's all thanks to Stoker and his charming fiend. If you're playing Dracula Dossier, and your agents want to visit Whitby, you'd be nuts not to take advantage of the local color.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Dry As Dust (Night's Black Agents)

I was going to talk about something else, but then a question popped up on Ken & Robin's podcast about Dust mode in Night's Black Agents.

It occurred to me that I've been working on just that very thing for a writing project I'd like to see come to fruition, so with that in mind:

Dust Mode

[REDACTED] is written with Dust mode in mind.

Dust tends to be less cinematic than the standard setting. Characters are still badass, but they’re not Jason Bourne badass. Death is an ever-present reminder that mistakes may be forgivable but are also fatal. The vampires and their human allies tend to be much more challenging in open combat.

Dust tends to work well with Mirror mode, that shifting morass of ever-changing loyalties which makes heavy use of the Trust and Betrayal mechanics described on pages 40-41 of the main book.

The following rules modifications are required for [REDACTED's] Dust mode:

·         Remove the MOS rules.

·         Remove Cherry benefits that result in automatic success.

·         Keep Cherry benefits that do not imply automatic success, eg Medical School of Hard Knocks with its bonus point in Diagnosis.

·         Cap Health at 10.

·         Keep the Thriller Combat rules.

·         Use the Guns Kill rules given on page 63 of the main book.

The Thriller Combat rules make combats more interesting, as do Cherries like Martial Arts. Equally the Athletics Cherry gives access to Parkour, which allows for better chase scenes.

The point being that simply having access to those rules does not imply automatic success; just because a character is experienced in Parkour doesn’t mean she won’t screw up the vault.

However the MOS rules and Cherries like Infiltration’s Open Sesame do allow automatic success, and therefore should not be used if the Director intends to play this setting in Dust mode.

There are some grey area Cherries, and the Director should make a judgement call as to whether to use them. Gambling’s Luck of the Devil Cherry, for example, allows the player to make a dice roll at the beginning of the session and decide when to use it. Technically this could allow an automatic success, or an automatic failure.

The Director must decide whether this benefit is applicable in Dust mode. In my Dust games I allow it, on the basis that the Cherry does not necessarily result in automatic success or failure; the Difficulty of the test still needs to be taken into account.  

If Mirror mode is to be used then players assign Trust as usual.

It sometimes happens in Mirror games that the Betrayer reveals that they’ve been working for ‘the other side’ all along, where the other side is often an intelligence agency. In the example in the main book, Beatrice tells her companions Jack and Luc that she’s been working for the DGSE, the French external intelligence agency, all along.

In this setting, it’s also possible that the Betrayer is working for one of the players in this high-stakes game, like [YOU BETTER BELIEVE THAT'S REDACTED]. The Director should consider carefully whether to allow this; it may be that aligning with one of the in-game agencies allows the player greater access to in-game secrets.

That said, it’s perfectly in keeping with Mirror mode to have a character announce she’s been bought off by one of the in-game agencies. If the Director wishes to allow it, by all means do so.

Why, Bob? Why?

Ultimately the point behind Dust mode is that it's gritty, more realistic, potentially more fatal. In Anthony Price's novels combat is rare, but when it happens somebody dies. In Price's war novels, like Hour of the Donkey, there's death by the bucketload; an entire unit is wiped out in the first few pages of Donkey. 

So the Thriller Combat rules have their uses. True, they add cinema, but they also increase the stakes, particularly if the Guns Kill rules are used. Plus, the players love Thriller Combat, possibly because it gives them the illusion of control. Never take away anything the players love. It's much better to destroy the things they love, preferably with as much drama and fanfare as possible. Try to arrange a brass band, possibly a few elephants. Elephants add class to every occasion.

That said, the MOS rules can be a problem because they allow the players to eliminate serious threats without rolling dice or spending points. One automatic success later, and the encounter that the Director thought would be challenging is reduced to a brief cameo moment, starring 'pink brain mist' in tonight's climactic scene. For much the same reason, Cherries that give automatic success are also difficult to deal with. Preparedness can be particularly annoying, but there are plenty of others.

Players become more concerned if they know they have to spend points to guarantee success, because their points pools are finite. Sure, at the beginning of the session they have pools for days, and can take on any foe, but they know and you know that, at the midway point, things change. The center cannot hold. 

To quote LBJ - or possibly John Wayne or Teddy Roosevelt - if you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. 

Inject anxiety into the equation. Make the players question whether they can hold out long enough. Once they start thinking they might not have enough oomph for yet another gunfight, they'll do their best to avoid another gunfight.

Finally, a word about the Guns Kill rules.

It's one thing to see those rules in print, something else again when the first player drops from, say, 5 Health to -6 in a single shot. The first time something like that happens, prepare for falling jaws to splinter floorboards. Assume Health 10, and two shooters, both of whom hit the target. On an average roll of 4+, the target is in serious trouble. If the total is much more than that - if one rolls 4, the other 6, say, or 2 5s - then the target is already on -6 Health, possibly in the first round of combat.

If that doesn't cause the players to rethink their John Woo ways, nothing will.

Enjoy!

Not Quite Review Corner: The Dracula Dossier (Night's Black Agents)

I backed this Kickstarter to physical copy level, but the copies have yet to arrive, so this review is based on the .pdfs alone.

If Ken Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan are, at this moment, incarcerated in rooms with very soft furnishings, and only given crayons to write with, the Dracula Dossier is the cause. This improvisational Night's Black Agents campaign setting, complete with the unredacted print copy of Stoker's first edition Dracula and a massive Director's Handbook, is beyond huge. It's one thing to write up Stoker's Dracula with little 'Dracula's a great big meanie' notes in the margins; after all, Stoker's done the heavy lifting there. It's something else altogether to take that text, all those marginal notes, and a hundred other things besides, turning it all into a 364-page document complete with supporting characters, locations, rival agencies, and Dracula's many possible conspyramids and plots. I'll give you my conclusion right up front: if you have any interest in the Night's Black Agents setting whatsoever, this is a must-buy.

The unredacted copy of Stoker's Dracula is as complete as any vampire aficionado could wish for. By complete, I mean it includes absolutely everything, including appearances from Kate Reed, curious journalist who some of you may recall from Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series; Inspector Cotford, unlucky official investigator into the De Ville menace; and Francis Aytown, damned artist and photographer who stumbles into horror and cannot stumble out again. All these characters were part of Stoker's original concept but, for one reason or another, were removed from the final text. An author's caprice, or the hidden machinations of a government agency determined to hide the truth?

Interspersed with the text are notes from previous owners of the book, who used it as a guide when carrying out their own vampire investigations. Some of these notes may contain vital clues, while others may be false leads, mistakes or other red herrings. Which is which? That's for you to find out, but bear in mind that every last one of those notes, no matter how trivial they may seem, has an explanation written down in the Director's Handbook. In fact, they have more than one ...

Hence my not-entirely joking quip at the beginning of this screed. Just as an exercise in collating data, never mind the purpose, this thing is a massive undertaking. If you're any kind of student of Stoker, you'll find layer upon layer of meaning here, and each layer translates to yet another node, or character, location, item, plot thread. Imagine trying to put all that together, yourself. Then be grateful someone else did it for you.

The Handbook takes all that information and runs wild with it. Sixty four different supporting characters, half a dozen detailed vampire-hunting official agencies, locations galore, sinister side plots, hideous monsters like Erzabet Bathory, Lilith and Count Orlok, Nodes glorious Nodes, side trips to Hong Kong, Argentina and elsewhere, random establishing shots, objects mystical and mundane, four detailed capstones, plus ... but you get the idea. There's a whole lot of plus going on.

What makes this unique is that each and every one of those possible locations, nodes, characters, items and so on are discussed in several different ways. First, if the thing in question has no immediate link to the Conspiracy one way or the other. Second, if it is an asset, belonging to one of the spy agencies tasked with finding and recruiting, or killing, vampires. Third, if it has fallen to Dracula, and is now part of his Conspyramid. If it's an item or a location, then the text may also discuss options, such as is it genuine, is it a major or minor item, is it a fake? Is this location Hot, as in a really important place, or Cold?

Should you go to Carfax, for example, there are several different ways the Director could play it, many different items or supporting characters you might find there, and many different consequences. What this means in play is that the characters can never be sure what they're going to discover, nor can they take anything for granted. It also means that the Director can play this several times, maybe with the same group, and it will never play out the same way twice.

Which leads me straight to my only caveat: this probably isn't suitable for neophyte Directors.

It's not that it isn't great. It so very much is, but there's so much going on here that, if you haven't got a few years under your belt, you may find it intimidating. Its improvisational nature means that it lacks the structure a new Director may need to get going.

Let me compare it, for a moment, to Horror on the Orient Express, and say why I'd recommend the latest edition of Horror to new Keepers.

Horror is huge. There's tons of things to do, a mountain of stuff to read, and at first glance it seems intimidating. However it has solid internal structure; the Keeper always knows where the campaign is, in the narrative, and can easily determine what's going to happen next. The latest edition in particular is very newbie-friendly, and while there's a lot to absorb, it's not impossible to digest. It would definitely be a challenge for a new Keeper, but it would be a challenge that could be overcome.

I'm not sure the same could be said for the Dossier. Its improvisational nature - which I endorse and enjoy very much - and the metric ton of stuff in it, means that it's very easy to get lost in its labyrinthine innards. For a Director who's had a few years of gaming, this will not be a problem. However as someone who indulges in improv theater from time to time, I can tell you that confidence is key. As an actor, even if you're playing a weak character, you need to be utterly confident in yourself and your ability to play a weak character. That's the only way to convince, and entertain, your audience.

I wonder whether a new Director would be confident enough to pull this off. Or whether one mistake - and there's really no such thing as a mistake in improv, but try telling a new actor that - will lead to two, and then more, as the Director gets more and more nervous.

That is my only caveat, and to be honest, I'd recommend a new Director buy this even if that Director never plays it as written. It's a masterclass in how the game is constructed, and how it can be played.

At the moment it's not available, but Pelgrane lists it as Printing, which means it should be on sale very soon. Meanwhile, let me offer my personal thanks, not to the authors - though they deserve every plaudit - but to my fellow Kickstarter backers. Thanks to your funding, something wonderful has been created.

Now let's make our players' lives a vampire-haunted misery!

Buried Treasure (Trail of Cthulhu)

... one day this Indian named Glode was out in his canoe. He had his little girl with him and when they got to a place where there is a point of land, he saw a ship sailing towards them. They were scared of strangers in those days, so he paddled to a cove and hid his canoe away in the woods. Then he climbed a tree. From there he could see everything that went on, and he watched that ship. It stopped, and the pirates on board took down the sails, lowered a rowboat, and four or five of them came ashore. They came straight to that point, chose a spot, and started digging. The captain gave the orders. After they got a trench dug deep enough, he sent two of them men to the boat for a big chest. After they had brought it up and put it down beside the hole he lined them all up and said, 'Have you got everything ready? Who's going to keep this money?' One of them says, 'Well, the other fellers don't say much. I'll look after it.'

'All right,' says the captain. 'You're to guard it for a hundred and fifty years,' and before the man realized what he had gotten himself into, the others grabbed him. They cut off his head then and put him in the hole with the chest. After that they drew a map, covered up the hole, and went away.

From Bluenose Ghosts, by Helen Creighton.  

Last time I talked about Captain Kidd, and touched briefly on the subject of buried treasure. Kidd is the only pirate known to have buried treasure, on Gardiner's Island, only to have it stolen out from under him by his so-called friend the Earl of Bellomont. Which neatly illustrates the central problem with buried treasure: once buried, any idiot can dig it up and claim it for his own. In the movies, this might inspire a pirate to design some really over-elaborate traps, but as can be seen from the Creighton extract, a real pirate hasn't got the time or patience for Oak Island-style miraculous engineering. Just put your basic corpse in your basic hole, and you're good to go.

Now, it's unlikely that many, if any, pirates actually did kill a victim and bury him, or her, with the loot, if only because it's unlikely that many pirates buried loot. Loot is for spending, not sticking in the ground. That said, it's probable that someone tried that trick. Superstition has followed in humanity's footsteps since we learned how to walk, and no matter how bad an idea might be, you can always find someone who thinks it's a genius scheme. Besides, in an RPG world, the rules are as you make them. Why shouldn't a pirate kill a sacrificial victim to create a guardian for his treasure?

The great thing about a story like this is that you can play it out almost anywhere along the East Coast of the United States as well as on any of the islands in the Caribbean. With a bit of tweaking you could probably also put it somewhere along the English or French coast, changing the pirates to smugglers. Or somewhere off the coast of Africa, or anywhere along the old Pirate Round. Or ... but you take the point. That said, in Trail of Cthulhu and Cthulhu games in general, one of the favorite settings is Lovecraftian New England, with its legend-haunted small towns like Dunwich and Arkham, quiet and forbidding. A pirate tale of buried gold and ghostly guardians is a natural fit, and could be an interesting beginning to a campaign, as well as a brilliant reason for the characters to get together in the first place. A group of treasure hunters who get too close to Innsmouth for comfort? Sold!

But what do you get when you cut off someone's head and bury them with the loot? Legend is cagy on the subject. The ghost is supposed to haunt the spot, with or without a head. It has significant power to defend its loot, but can only use that power against someone trying to steal it. Someone just walking by, without the slightest idea that Thomas Tew, or whoever it might have been, left a fortune there, won't be disturbed. Well, probably not, anyway; Creighton reports that several ghosts, tired of standing watch, started pestering passers-by to take the loot from them, and let them rest.

The tale is very similar to the barrow-dweller or hagbui of Norse folklore, and the story probably found its way to Canada via Scotland, which has an old history of conflict with Viking raiders. These creatures are often created from the corpse of a warrior, and left behind to guard loot. A draugr has incredible strength, but it can also move through solid rock, in mist form, and increase its size to that of a giant. Its stench is awful, far beyond the usual pungent decomposition stink, and its presence can sometimes be detected by the foxfire that glows at its burial place at night. Iron is potent against them; to prevent the dead returning, people sometimes pierced the corpses' feet with iron nails.

Buried treasure can't just be unearthed. There's rules to this sort of thing. Even if the ghost wants you to dig up the loot, it's bound by geas to defend it, so you might get attacked. Each treasure can be uncovered without risk so long as its ritual is carried out, and that ritual can vary from spilling the blood of a newborn, spilling the blood of twins, getting a hen and rooster to plough and seed the ground - no, really - and so on, and on. Each method is detailed by the pirates as they bury the loot, so if you want to know how to do it, better find a ouija board; or maybe someone helpfully wrote the ritual down somewhere. It's likely that a user of Goetic magic can think of ways past this barrier, or perhaps someone who knows the Saaamaaa Ritual can defuse the ghost's defenses.

When digging for treasure, you must go at night, and you must never, ever speak. Speaking gives the ghost power over you; until you speak, its abilities are limited, but once you speak, it can do as it pleases. Because of this, ghosts will usually try to trick you into speaking, using powers of illusion or suggestion to get you to say something. If you absolutely have to address a ghost, always invoke the power of God, as in 'In God's name, speak.' So long as you do that, its power is reduced.

If the ghost attains its full power, it can do a great deal. It has supernatural strength, and is capable of lifting or throwing great weights, far beyond the capacity of a normal human. It can summon other supernatural entities to help it. It can remove the treasure instantly, to another location, or deep underground where it can't be reached by digging. It will not hesitate to kill, but will not pursue a victim, so if the treasure hunters run away they won't suffer its further wrath. It's often armed, perhaps with sword, pistol or musket. Being a ghost, it probably can't be killed, and certainly not with conventional weapons.  

Of course, that all assumes that a ghost really is a ghost, and follows Occult rules. It could as easily be the Devil, or one of the many Black Dogs. In a Mythos tale, it could also be something from beyond the stars, or a vampirish mist, or a Deep One compelled to return to the spot each night by a magic-using pirate, or ... again, you get the point. Such creatures don't need to follow the usual ghostly rules.

With all that in mind, here's a treasure for you:

Rooster Island's Gold

You've dreamed three nights running, a sure sign that the dream is a true one, that there's treasure buried out on Rooster Island, one of the tiny, rocky outcrops between Plum Island and the mainland, perhaps an hour by boat from Innsmouth. According to the dream, there's a large, flat rock, the size of a dinner table, not far from an immense elm tree. Under that rock is the treasure, but in your dream you've seen a coal-black kitten playing on that rock, and you believe that kitten has some significance, though you aren't sure precisely what. You're convinced a fortune lies out there for the taking, but aren't sure of the specifics.

Library Use, Oral History or similar discovers that Rooster Island was thought to be where Billy 'Black Dog' Seavy hid the loot from his piratical adventures during and after the war of 1812. Seavy, a Massachusetts-born filibuster, captured twelve ships in all, before being run aground and shot off the coast of Cuba, in 1816. His most notorious exploit is the capture of the merchantman Belle, when he's supposed to have locked the crew and passengers below decks and set the ship on fire. Seavy's mentioned in several books on witchcraft, as a pirate captain who supposedly could command the wind and waves, drawing victims in by stealing the wind from their sails and putting it in his own, or using storms to drive them towards him. Seavy's supposed to have boasted, before being filled full of grapeshot in the summer of 1816, that only the Devil knew where his loot was hid, and the Devil was obliged to keep it for a hundred years, or until an angel came knocking on the Devil's door.

Occult, in combination with information gained from the dream, can work out that the best time to get the treasure is an hour after midnight, when certain constellations are overhead, since that's the time the dreamer thinks the dream takes place. The kitten, probably a kind of guardian, needs to be pacified in some way, before the dig can take place.

Cthulhu Mythos knows that the stones on Rooster Island have strange, malign symbols carved on them, that cultists sometimes use in their dreadful rituals of appeasement and summoning. Lights have been seen on Rooster Island at night, and it's thought that necromancers come to that spot to summon up dreadful creatures, as messengers to their dark gods. Some Innsmouth families regularly make pilgrimage to Rooster Island and other places like it, dotted up and down the coast, always returning to the same spot year after year, as if called there.

Forgotten Lore (Bookhounds of London)

In the wake of Ken Hite's recent KWAS, Goetia, I'd like to talk about grimoires. What are they, and what can a Keeper do with them?

A grimoire can best be described as a magic text, filled with occult secrets, intended to instruct the reader. Often the instruction contains information on how to cast a spell, to summon forth demons, angels or other spirits, and how to attain supernatural power. Supernatural power is a wide-ranging term, but it doesn't mean the ability to chuck fireballs about; it means the ability to find things, or do things, that the user otherwise cannot find or do. Often this means finding treasure, coercing someone to fall in love with you, or some other relatively mundane feat which the user desires, but cannot achieve himself. This is usually tailored to the customer's specific desires; for example, many military men, even in the Enlightenment, believed they could increase their martial skill through diabolic means, or attributed a rival's ability to the machinations of the Devil.

There are several things to bear in mind when considering grimoires, but the chief fact is this: people prefer to believe that the best kind of magic is exotic magic, from some foreign source. The West looks to the East for its magical inspiration, while the East looks to the West. This is one of the reasons why Hoodoo magic, for example, often draws on European sources for its mystic authority. The publisher William Delaurence, also known as De Laurence, of Chicago, cribbed much of his knowledge from authors like Levi and Waite, turning their work into his mail-order Book of Moses. Meanwhile Levi and Waite were getting their information from sources like the Kabbalah, and Levi happily prattles about an eternal knowledge that can be found 'the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies ...' 

Mystic isn't what you find next door. Mystic is what you find in far-off lands, where there are foreigners and strange, spicy foods. It's even better if your source is both foreign and old; age gives even the most crackbrained of philosophies a dignified patina.

Another thing to bear in mind is that grimoires are often banned, or at any rate frowned upon by the powers that be. Delaurence's work, for example, is still outlawed in Jamaica, even today. Sometimes this can lead to less-than-amusing instances of mistaken identity. Dungeons and Dragons, in the 1980s, was frequently condemned by hard right-wing and conservative Christian movements, and people like Patricia Pulling and Jack Chick tried to convince us all that the game's Satanic underpinnings led to suicide, and worse. 

The third thing to bear in mind is that you don't really need any kind of qualification, or experience, to write a grimoire. Anybody can do it, and with mass publishing, many hundreds of thousands have done it, often under assumed identities, occasionally under their own name. Delaurence knew that putting his own name on a book guaranteed a sale, such was the power of his reputation, but frequently the imagery used to promote his books is pseudo-Hindu, evocative of the mysterious East. Even today, it's not at all difficult to find many hundreds of small presses churning out occult text after text, most of them almost certainly rehashing the grimoires of old, much as Delaurence himself did.

What does this mean for Bookhounds of London?

To begin with, it means that, if the protagonists' shop becomes known for selling grimoires and odd incunabula, they are probably going to run foul of the law. Someone will make a complaint, probably some busybody who glanced in the window and saw something they didn't like. The police, even if they don't really believe in magic, are going to be very interested in the kind of shady customers who do, and who probably frequent the shop. The police may even begin to suspect that the characters are involved with pornography, or worse. As for the local church, while the Anglicans have always been a bit live-and-let-live, there's bound to be a firebrand out there somewhere willing to camp out on the characters' doorstep and accuse them of corrupting minds, or working in Satan's army.

It also means that there will be dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of self-published or small press authors, besieging the bookshop monthly. You sell this stuff, they say, so why not sell, or even publish, mine? Here, I have the authentic mysteries straight from the trackless jungles of Tibet, or the scorching deserts of India, the mysterious pyramids of Timbuctoo ... and so on. Some of them will actually know what they are talking about, but most won't. Lack of knowledge has never stopped an author yet.

Meanwhile the customers will be after texts that service their peculiar needs. It might be true love, promotion at work, hidden treasure - most likely along the lines of 'where did granny put the will' rather than heaps of gold, but treasure nonetheless - success at cards, success on the stage, or any one of the thousands of other desires that people come up with. If your shop is frequented by theatrical types, they will want a specific kind of grimoire. Bored housewives will want something else, and so on.   

Ah, but what about the true mysteries? After all, the Goetia KWAS isn't about fakers and cheesecloth ectoplasm; it presumes spirits can be summoned up.

To begin with, it's reasonable to assume that, most of the time, the Bookhounds will be selling on these texts, rather than using them. All kinds of ideas can flow from this. For example, what about the dissatisfied customer, the one who bought your forged grimoire, tried it, and found that it didn't work? That could result in something fairly mundane, like a Reversal in the shop's fortunes, as the bad press gets around. It could also have unforseen results, as with the customer who thought he was summoning up one demon, but in fact found himself summoning up something else altogether, thanks to a misprint or your Hounds' careless forger. In that event, the entity summoned up might want to return to the store, either to have a little bit of fun with the people responsible for its release, or because it needs something - the bits of its book that the Hounds didn't use in the forgery, for example.

It's also possible that the customer who successfully summons demons might want to use them against the Hounds, for whatever reason. Imagine the lovelorn suitor, passionately pursuing, say, the book scout, or owner of the shop. That customer might send a demon in to seal the deal. Or someone wanting more books might send demons to the shop as a persuader, either to get the Hounds to find the books for her, or to get the Hounds to lower their price. Or the collector who's trying to get hold of all published editions of a particular imprint, sending the Hounds to demon-haunted places in pursuit of his prize.

But suppose for a moment that the Hounds decide to summon some demons of their own? There might be many reasons for doing so, but one of the most likely is financial, to keep the shop going, or to engineer a Windfall.

Well, demons are notoriously unreliable fellows. They might stick around, haunting the book stacks. Or the same ritual that summoned them might have let lesser spirits in as well, things which could make life very tricky for the Hounds. When asked to exterminate these pests, the original demon might reply that it's not in the Pact for it to play rat-catcher, or it might acquiesce, for a fee, of course.

The chief thing to bear in mind is, whatever this spirit, fallen angel, or Cthulhoid remnant is, it has a personality, and it has goals. The summoner might see it as a tool, or a servant, but nothing could be further from the truth. A demon is an intelligent entity, and it knows what it's getting into when it responds to a summons. It's done this many thousands of times before, after all. Some demons are warlike, gnashing their teeth and stamping the ground, relying on intimidation and fear. Others are whining, flattering little toadies, promising everything, delivering very little. There may be smooth politicians, envious belchers of hate, careless gluttons, glamorous seducers, and thousands of other types among the demonic ranks.

If you rely on them, beware, for they are not and never will be your friend and ally.

God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/faustus/Dr-Faustus-best-quotes.php?pn=4
Copyright © RiseNotes.com

 God forbade it indeed, but Faustus has done it. For the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years has Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill in my own blood; the date is expired, this is the time, and he will fetch me ...

God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/faustus/Dr-Faustus-best-quotes.php?pn=4
Copyright © RiseNotes.com

God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/faustus/Dr-Faustus-best-quotes.php?pn=4
Copyright © RiseNotes.com

The School of Night, Kit Marlowe and Bookhounds: The Dagger That Slew Him

Ken Hite's KWAS edition The School of Night brings into focus something I've been thinking about for a while, and I'd like to discuss what it could mean for Bookhounds of London.

Often the Bookhounds end up chasing Mythos texts of one kind or another, and that's fine, but it does mean that they end up doing broadly the same things that any other Cthulhu investigator does: hunt down obscure Mythos facts and save the day. Problem being that you, as Keeper, can't have them stumbling over the Necronomicon every other week. There must be other books, other mysteries to unravel. What could they be?

Dramatist, author and probable spy Christopher Marlowe lived a very eventful life, before his murder in May 1593 at the hands of Ingram Frizier. To this day nobody's entirely sure what happened. The three men in the pub with Marlowe at the time claimed it was an argument over money, but all three seem unreliable witnesses. Robert Poley was an intriguer and professional liar who once said 'I will swear and forswear myself, rather than I will accuse myself to do me any harm,' Nicholas Skeres was a confidence trickster, while Ingram Frizer, the alleged assassin, was also a con man as well as an agent of Thomas Walsingham, a patron of Marlowe's. The coroner's report, discovered in 1925 by Shakespearean scholar and literary detective Leslie Hotson, said that Frizier had acted in self-defense, and acquitted him. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in Deptford.

Marlowe's plays were published posthumously, among them The Massacre at Paris, which no longer exists in manuscript; the edition in publication is a reconstruction, based on the memories of the actors who performed it. One page allegedly exists, as part of the collection gathered by notorious forger John Payne Collier, who regularly created Shakespearean documents in an attempt to 'prove' his own theories. He even went so far as to insert his forgeries into the original record, by amending existing texts. The Massacre page, known as the 'Collier leaf,' is thought to be authentic.

The Massacre at Paris describes the events of the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre in 1572, a three day butchery of Protestant Huguenots by Catholics which left somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 dead. The Catholic mob believed it was necessary in order to prevent a Huguenot coup d'etat; women and children were hunted down and slaughtered, and the bodies of the dead were flung into the Seine.

Now consider this possibility: your Bookhounds discover, at auction, a bundle of papers described as 'an Elizabethan miscellany.' The papers include one or more pages from an unpublished manuscript, as well as some legal documents. A quick scan leads the Bookhounds to suspect that the manuscript is actually Marlowe's Massacre, and the legal document is an attestation from the Coroner, William Danby, that 'the attached poniard is that same weapon with which Ingram Frizier did rob Marlowe of his life.' The Bookhounds then realize the hitherto unsuspected significance of another item up for auction, an Elizebethan era dagger, listed as 'provenance unknown.'

Suddenly a world of possibilities open up. Talk about a Windfall for the shop; two, even three pages from Marlowe's missing play? The very dagger that killed him, with documentation attached as provenance? Fame, fortune, glory; it could all be theirs.

Now try to prove it.

Scholars are going to go mad about this discovery. There will be condemnations as well as accolades; if there's ever been the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing connected to the characters, this fantastic find will be dismissed out of hand as a blatant forgery. The Bookhounds may need to find a tame scholar of their own, an acceptable face to announce this new find to the world. But where to get one?

There are other problems. Suppose the pages can be traced back to Collier, whose proclivity for creating his own evidence is well known. Does that mean that these pages are forgeries too, or are they, like the Collier leaf, genuine?

What about that dagger? Proving it to be the actual weapon that killed Marlowe seems an almost impossible challenge. However there are going to be plenty of desperate Elizabethan scholars out there determined to own it, and some of them might be desperate enough to kill. Collectors can be strange folk. So too can occultists; imagine the kind of sympathetic magic you could perform with such a weapon.

Going further, what about the School of Night? Consider what you, as Keeper, could do with an occult group of conspirators operating in the Elizabethan era, fighting against strange and supernatural threats against the throne. Catholics versus Protestant, wrapped up with witches, Rawhead, ghosts, and many other things that go bump in the night. There's every reason to intersperse a Bookhounds campaign with School of Night adventures, all leading up to that fatal moment in Deptford when Marlowe is murdered - but why? Which of his enemies orchestrated the deed? Is he in fact dead, or is there some cover-up allowing him to retire in peace after years of intriguing?

Suppose the Massacre contains a coded message, perhaps even some kind of warding spell. The play itself features a mysterious English Agent, generally considered to be Marlowe himself. Say Marlowe tried to protect his life by transferring some of his essence into the manuscript itself, much as wizards in old tales are supposed to have hidden their hearts away in secret places to avoid death. Does this mean the manuscript is haunted, or will it try to rebuild itself in an attempt to revive Marlowe? Is this the work of malevolent Dust Things, or is there really a chance Marlowe might come back?

If it is a spell, does it still work? Marlowe may have wanted to protect England against the same kind of religious turmoil that gripped Paris, but suppose that, in its damaged form, it actually provokes them. Could discovery of this document lead to Protestant massacres of Catholics, on the streets of 1930s London?

Ultimately, my point's this: you can do a lot with a literary mystery, beyond have the Bookhounds seek out Von Juntz's miscellanea again and again. Try a little mix-and-match with other settings or ideas, see where it takes you. Maybe you'll find out who really killed Marlowe, and why; maybe you'll put an end to a literary time bomb that's been waiting centuries to go off. You might attempt occult rituals with that dagger, or you might just spend all your time trying desperately to prove that the fabulously valuable literary artifact you discovered really is what you say it is.

Have fun!