A heads-up for the moment, but if you're planning on attending the UK Chaosium Con in May 2026 you may see me there, in one of them there speaking roles. Keris McDonald and I will host a panel at the Expo, all about Yanks and their peculiar ways in the Gaslight era. Come one, come all!
I will also be at the Birmingham Expo but I shan't be hosting any panels there. Popping in on the Friday to see the sights and buy stuff. Not a lot of stuff, my suitcase won't stand it. But, y'know, stuff ...
There's been some writing gigs as well, and you may see my name attached to a project I hadn't thought was on the bingo card in 2026. However, more on that later once it becomes more of a thing.
This does mean I shall be off island and away from keyboard in May, from about the 17th to the end of the month, so if you're wondering why I shan't be posting over that period, now you know.
Speaking of, I do have a Bluesky account if any of you want to pop over and say hi.
It's kinda the iconic UK destination. Not iconic in the sense everyone wants to go. But it's the sort of place everyone thinks of as quintessentially UK, in much the same way that Main Street USA is quintessentially American. It has that 'green belt but with houses in it' vibe that many English towns strive for. Or at least, it's supposed to have it; having never been, I can't say for sure.
I mention this because I've got to go through Milton Keynes to get to Cranfield, where the Expo's held. I'm curious to see what the place is actually like.
Of course, in period there's no such thing as Milton Keynes, at least not the modern version which was founded in the 1960s. The older version is a gaggle of villages, hamlets and stately homes a short(ish) train ride outside of London proper.
It's the sort of place you might find many a 'maudlin and monstrous pile,' a stately home with little of the stately left. The gothic-tudor-baroque mess put together at some point in the 1800s by someone with more money than sense, now rotting thanks to death duties and other unfortunate accidents. Bletchley Park of sainted memory was one such.
With that in mind:
A Visit to the Country
One of the shop's more reliable scouts has come back from a trip to the countryside. According to the scout there's a blessed pile moldering up near Milton Keynes, put together by some nabob back in 1820-somthing-or-other and left to rot after the grandson caught a packet at the Somme. Or perhaps it was the great grandson, but whichever it may have been there's none of the family left now and the place is in the hands of the trustees. Apparently there's some legal kerfuffle and the relatives, all of whom live in the States or the Colonies, are fighting it out among themselves.
Meanwhile here's the pile, out in the country miles from anywhere, looked after by some doddering old retainer. There's meant to be a fantastic library, at least as far as the old catalogues can say. The paterfamilias (or perhaps it was the pater's pater) was rather keen on tales of folklore and witchcraft and built up a significant collection before popping his clogs the day before Edward VII's coronation. Dicky heart, they say.
Do the Hounds fancy a visit to Milton Keynes?
Option One: Trust But Verify. Yes, the pile exists, and yes, it is looked after by a doddering retainer. Lonely spot out in the middle of nowhere, check. Valuable library, check. Is it ripe for the plucking? Well, theoretically ... if someone can deal with the ghost that's haunting it. The deceased is meant to be a witchfinder of the olden days bound to a collection of trial documents, but that could be a load of old piffle. Whether the spectre is or is not a witchfinder, there's something in that library.
Option Two: It's More of a Cult. The dead collector was an important member of the Witch-Cult, and surviving members of that same cult keep an eye on the place in their memory. Occasionally the woods near the house are used for sacrifices, and the doddering retainer is far less doddery than they seem. There are wards in place to keep the library secure.
Option Three: Can't Get The Staff. The retainer has had plenty of time to study the texts in the library. They fancy themselves a bit of a Faustus and are working up the courage to attempt a summoning. Up till now they haven't felt the urgency. There's always tomorrow. But if the Hounds start poking around the place the retainer will realize that tomorrow's come earlier than expected, and will start the ritual they've been planning all this while. The consequences will be spectacular.
OK, I fly off to the Brighton UK World Fantasy thingummygig tomorrow and will be incommunicado for two weeks! If anyone needs to keep in touch for that period best bet is Bluesky, and if you're not already aware you can get me at @karloff0734.bsky.social. I will try to post a couple Skies while there but otherwise will be enjoying the time off and dealing with family stuff.
I'll drop by what used to be Raining Books, my uncle's Brighton bookshop, but only to say farewell. I know a couple of you used to visit the shop and by now you'll be aware he died earlier this year. I'm not sure what state the building's in; I expect it will be passing into new hands by now, if it hasn't already.
Question for the hivemind! If someone like me were to dip their toes into online, what virtual tabletop best suits Cthulhu or modern gaming? Roll20 is the obvious one. It does pretty much everything, and Kickstarter promises all kinds of other virtual TT experiences. Which, in your opinion, is the best of the bunch? Looking at user friendly as much as options available; I want to use my time wisely.
Now, let's dabble in travel and suppose that your Bookhounds are travelling from London to Brighton in search of whatever they may find. They may have a definite object or they may just be on the knock, trying to source some rarities by knocking on doors to see what can be had.
One route to Brighton, as The Brighton Road (Charles G Harper) helpfully illustrates, takes the Hounds through Horley, where they might find the Six Bells Inn:
The nearest neighbour to the church is the almost equally ancient “Six Bells” inn, which took its title from the ring of bells in the church tower. Since 1839, however, when two bells were added, there have been eight in the belfry.
The stranger, foregathering with the rustics at the “Six Bells,” and missing the old houses that once stood near the church and have been replaced by new, very quickly has his regrets for them cut short by those matter-of-fact villagers, who declare that “ye wooden tark so ef ye had to live in un.” A typical rustic had “comic brown-titus” acquired in one of those damp old cottages, and has “felt funny” ever since. One with difficulty resisted the suggestion that, if he could be as funny as he felt, he should set up for a humorist, and oust some of the dull dogs who pose as jesters.
The Six Bells still exists today. Judging by the image, its exterior has barely changed in a hundred years. If it was called Six Bells in 1839 the suggestion is that it's been on that spot for many years prior. From the Hounds' POV, the Six Bells is at least a hundred years old and probably older. The rumor of a passage underneath the inn that leads to the church is an old tale; there isn't an inn pub in existence that hasn't had that story told about it.
Church Inns aren't uncommon, particularly in the UK.
This is the third edition of Brighton Road, published 1922, so most of the facts (or purported facts at least) will be relevant to 1930s Hounds. Though the book doesn't say, I'm guessing those houses close to the Church were owned by the Church. If the author misses them in 1922 then presumably they existed in 1892, when the book was first published.
In any case, fiction can do as it pleases.
Brown-Titus
The Hounds are on their way to Brighton for reasons of their own and have stopped in Horley for a bit to have a pint and pie at the Six Bells before pressing on.
While there, one of the locals presents them with a scrap of a larger manuscript hoping to sell it to them. The man, John Henry Bristow, is an old resident who lives on charity and a small pension. The Hounds don't know if he realizes what he has, or whether there's more out there.
Four things about the manuscript:
It dates to the 1830s and tells a story about something that happened in the 1750s.
It's not clear what the something is, but it might be a witch trial that took place locally. There's not enough of it here to be certain about it.
The paper and printing are genuine enough. There are peculiar brown stains on the paper which might be mold.
ROME. Whatever that may mean in your narrative.
Four things about John Henry:
He says he's more than four score and ten and judging by appearances he's in his eighties.
There's something hypnotic about his eyes.
Nobody at the Six Bells likes him much. If anything, they're scared of him.
For someone his age, he moves well and has an iron grip handshake.
John Henry says the rest of the manuscript is at his cottage and will take the Hounds to see it, if they are interested. His cottage isn't far from the Six Bells, but he won't take them there till after dark. He'll want a few pints at the pub first.
Option One:Hideous Cravings. John Henry found this manuscript stuffed under the floorboards of his cottage. It tells the story of a 17th century trial in which the accused claimed to be a werewolf, and to have suffered this curse after meeting a mysterious dark figure at a nearby crossroads. Anyone with Mythos realizes that this is actually an account of someone becoming a ghoul after encountering another ghoul. While John Henry isn't a ghoul, he's becoming very interested in some ghoulish practices after reading the manuscript and is hoping for a taste of Hound flesh.
Option Two:Hideous Hijinks. John Henry isn't local. He's a plant. One of the Hounds' rivals knew they were on their way to Brighton and is hoping to hold them up long enough so the rival can get to Brighton before they do and scoop the prize, whatever that is. John Henry is a minor Magick user with hypnotic abilities, who will use those abilities to keep the Hounds busy for as long as he can manage it. The manuscript doesn't exist and never did. John Henry Bristow is an assumed name; the Hounds might recognize him as Lewis Ackerman, a Book Scout with some acting talent.
Option Three:Hideous Mold. There is no John Henry Bristow. What passes as him is actually a mold colony that grows in one of the last remaining old cottages clustered near the Church. The Colony uses the John Henry illusion to collect new building material - like the Hounds. Think of it like a vampire but made of fungi. It knows better than to attack the locals, who might decide to destroy it; but outsiders are fair game. The mold keeps Horley people in check by clouding their minds with its spores; the Hounds may realize the locals are under what amounts to mass hypnosis, which may be their only warning that John Henry is not what he appears to be.
My father has a bar billiards table. He got his from an American family. The old fella had been big in Hollywood back in the day and had worked on several films set in England; I believe American Werewolf in London was one of them. He picked up the bug for the game while he was in the UK and, as he had the money, he brought a table to his Bermuda home. However, all things pass and so did he, and the family wasn't interested in lugging what is quite a heavy object back to [wherever they may have been then]. So we picked it up.
The big thing to bear in mind, as Wikipedia helpfully reminds us, is that:
The play is time-limited. A coin will usually give around 17 minutes of play, dependent on region. After this time a bar drops inside the table stopping any potted balls from returning, leading to a steady decrease in the number of balls in play. The last ball can only be potted into either the 100 or 200 hole having been played off either side cushion.
Which lends itself to pub play and is probably why the coin slot was invented in the first place. You can't be at the table all day. Someone else has to have a go.
The table we have used to have a coin slot but someone deactivated it at some stage, presumably because it became too much of a faff to find old British coinage. Even if you can open up the slot and get it back again, at some point someone will lose your only two-half-groat-a-billibong, and then the table's shot.
The game is practically built for gambling. You bet on whether or not the player will make the shot, you bet on who will win, you bet on how much by, you bet on any number of things.
Which is interesting, because Bookhounds doesn't include a gambling mechanic. Never mind the Thrilling mechanic that Night's Black Agents uses. More than that, the game (in its current form) is new in the 1930s, which means all those pubs the Hounds go to probably have a bar billiards table. It's the modern fashion. The coming thing.
In Millionaire's Special I faced the same problem with Trail, and I'm going to adapt that solution to this problem as follows:
Use Athletics as the General ability if you're playing honestly and Filch if you're cheating.
If plot does not depend on the outcome of the game, then whoever has the highest Athletics or Filch wins.
If plot matters, then use dice. It can either be a lengthy competition (mechanically, like an Auction scene) or a one-roll game, depending on how important the result is.
With an additional rule if there are books involved:
If this game is determinative in an Auction, for whatever reason, then Auction can be used in addition to Athletics or Filch.
What do I mean by that? Well, this is gambling. I can foresee times when a book scout might want to wager, say, some nice 18th century German pamphlets on vampirism on the outcome of the match. That makes the match a species of Auction, which is what the Auction ability is all about. When someone wants to spend from the Auction pool they do that instead of spending Athletics or Filch.
Why do it this way? Well, as Storage Wars reminds us, an auction isn't about meekly standing in a row making bids. It's about showmanship, finagling, angling for an advantage, screwing over the competition. Sounds a lot like a game of chance to me. But as a mechanic it's only worth using if there's a book as the prize. The game is Bookhounds of London, after all, not Poolhounds.
All that said, let's talk about a scenario seed. To do that, I'm going to set this in a location I've discussed before: The Three Bucks pub.
This elaborate Edwardian building resembles an Italian palace gone slightly awry, complete with statues of saints and a copper-clad cupola roof. It was built on the site of an old Georgian traveler's inn, as a speculative venture by Gregory Harris in 1908 ... [the pub is haunted by a spirit] obsessed with blood and violence, particularly cutting ...
Snookered
Book Scout Allan Chessover (main text p85) is known to be a billiards fiend, and the Three Bucks has installed a new table. He’s there every Thursday night without fail, for a round or two with the lads.
The Three Bucks has an unusual reputation as it stands, but ever since the table came in the rumors have been flying thick and fast. People see lights where there oughtn’t be lights, hear the sound of billiard balls clicking when there cannot be players. Not least because Paddy Green and his sons don’t let anyone on the premises after midnight, not for any reason or for any inducement.
The Hounds want something from Chessover. It doesn’t matter what that something is, but for the sake of this example it’s a lead on a book they desperately want to acquire.
Right-o, says Chessover. I’ll do that little thing. If, and only if, you beat me at bar billiards at the Three Bucks. After midnight.
Option One: Action Room. It’s all a bluff. Chessover has no intention of showing up at the Three Bucks, whether after midnight or at any other time. He pays a group of Rough Lads to attend in his stead. The Rough Lads having a sense of humor, they propose a little game of their own: play billiards, and every ball you pot is a bone I don’t break. Miss the pot … well … What none of them appreciate is that the restless spirit of Gregory Harris, the pub’s former owner, will want in on the fun.
Option Two: Dirty Pool. Chessover has his own troubles. He’s been on a losing streak for weeks and is deep in the hole, financially. He owes a remarkable sum to the ghost hunters who frequent the Three Bucks looking for Captain Kidd’s revenant; one of them is a talented billiards player. The ghost hunters have been wanting to visit the Three Bucks after midnight for ages. Chessover can sneak them in but doesn’t want to be blamed for letting them in. Not if he can rig it so the Hounds get blamed instead …
Option Three: Silent Partner. Mike Green, Paddy’s eldest son and a fellow who never wastes a penny, lets a select group into the Three Bucks after hours to play the billiards table. Chessover is one of the lucky few. If Paddy knew about this he’d be furious. There’s just one odd little stipulation. Rather than pay cash for the table, you have to put a few drops of blood down the coin slot instead. Otherwise the table seems normal … just don’t go looking too long at any of the shadows …
I spent rather a lot of money on books. Also DVDs, but mainly books.
I don’t know what kind of stress tests they do on carrier bags to make sure the handles can handle it, but they clearly had me in mind when they designed them.
A couple random thoughts before I go over the purchases: it is always worth sticking your nose into a charity shop; ditto those odd little places that describe themselves as antiquarian shops; Guernsey is a lot of fun; never pass by a London street market without poking your nose in; good things come in messy packages.
To begin.
The Mystery of the Blue Train and The Secret Adversary, both Agatha Christie, republished collectables in the style of the original publishing. I remember picking up a copy of Murder on the Orient Express a while ago in a similar format, but this is the first time I’ve seen anything quite like it. I originally thought this was a new series, but having researched a bit I think this must be an old boxed set that someone broke up and started selling in second-hand shops. Possibly more than one boxed set. I saw these for sale in at least two different London stores.
Very, very pretty. Worth picking up as props for a Bookhounds game. Moderately pricy at 25 quid a pop, but not insane money. The set is 26 novels and I don't know which ones were picked for the collection - Christie published 74 novels, after all - but it's a pretty broad group, including folks like Parker Pyne as well as Poirot. If they're available in second-hand shops, they must be on ebay and similar. Picked up at Boom Cat Books, Camden Market.
The Tao of Igor, collected Dork Tower by John Kovalic. I already had most of these in comic form but never knew how it ended. Now I do! Picked up at Orc’s Nest.
Black Chrome (Cyberpunk) and Cthulhu City (Trail) both picked up at North London’s shining star, Leisure Games. I haven't had a chance to read either yet but Cthulhu City is just my cup of arsenic. Looking forward to it!
Death of Mr. Dodsley, one of the British Library’s crime collection. These are usually fun but there’s an added bonus: the victim is a bookseller and the story involves a lot of book lore. Bookhounds players/keepers, take note. I read this within a day or so of purchase and highly recommend. Picked up at the Lexicon in Guernsey.
Fracture, picked up at Blackwell’s, Oxford. Quick word about Blackwells: they have outposts all over the country but, for my money, if you want anything interesting or academic you need to go to the Oxford shop. That's easier to do now the Elizabeth Line is working, which wasn't the case when I was last in the UK. This is a history of the 1920s-30s and it covers absolutely everything. I really do mean everything. Ordinarily this sort of thing focuses on, say, the UK, or US, and has one particular topic in mind. This covers the whole schmeer, from astrophysics to Marlene Deitrich, across Europe and North America. Anyone who wants to know more about the world according to Call or Trail of Cthulhu needs this book in their library.
The Saint Sees It Through, Leslie Charteris, 2nd edition with the original jacket. I have a weakness for this sort of thing (see also the Agatha Christies mentioned above). I’m not a huge Saint fan but if you want to know how to write pulp, this is a great starting point. Beware period views on race and sexuality. Picked up at my uncle’s second-hand place in Brighton, Raining Books on Trafalgar Street, within easy walking distance of the train station. My uncle’s a great bloke; organization is not his strong suit.
The Ingoldsby Legends. Picked up at Curiosities, an antiquarian shop in Guernsey. It’s often worth your while poking your nose in that sort of place, particularly in somewhere not often frequented like Guernsey. You never know what might be hanging around. This is the 1898 Richard Bentley edition, with illustrations, and is a collection of all three books. The originals would have been published in the 1840s as single volumes. Comic ghost stories and verse. I'm not a huge fan of comic verse - it goes on a little long and I find it wearisome - but the stories are entertaining Gothic and might give you inspiration for your own tales.
The Bailiwick of Guernsey by CP Le Huray. part of the King's England series, published 1952. Picked up in a Guernsey charity shop. Interesting, detailed, a little dry. Since it's immediately post-war it does cover the German invasion but not to a great degree. Judging by the frontispiece this was one of a series that covered the whole of the UK; if you have a particular interest, it may be worth seeking out some of the others.
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell. I used to have a copy of this but I’ve no idea where it went. Very pretty edition with what looks like a period-ish cover. Again, the sort of thing worth using as a prop in a Bookhounds game. Picked up at Boom Cat Books, Camden Market.
The Warriors, Sol Yurick. Bet you didn’t know there was a book on which the film was based! The film bears almost no relation to the book bar the central premise, but that doesn’t mean the book isn’t fun. It’s gritty and reality-based, rather than the knockabout free-for-all the film becomes. Picked up at Foyles.
The Cliff House, by Christopher Brookmyre. I’m a huge fan and have pretty much all of his stuff. This is a new one on me. Picked up at Foyles.
I Am Not A Number by Alex Cox. The Prisoner: an explanation; pretty detailed. An interesting piece. Workmanlike writing style but he covers all the bases and gives the reader a clear idea of what happened and why. Not a must-have, but if you enjoy the Prisoner it's worth considering. Picked up at Blackwell’s, Oxford.
Occult London, by Merlin Coverly. Picked up at Foyles. I haven't read it yet so I can't say how good it is, but it has some strong selling points. First, it covers a broad timeline from the Elizabethan period to the modern day. Second, one of its appendixes is all about occult bookstores in London. Bookhounds players/keepers should at least consider this one; whether or not you purchase is up to you.
Quatermass II, Nigel Kneale. This right here is why you should always pay attention to London street markets. I’m sure this needs no introduction. Found on my last day, Rare Books and Curios, Greenwich Market. On a side note, if you want a decent pint and don’t want to end up in a tourist pub, I recommend the Plume of Feathers on Park Vista. It’s a short stroll from the market proper, near Greenwich Park. Atmosphere’s good.
DVDs: as you ought to have learned by now, streaming only works so long as the service provider is willing to let you keep streaming. Things you thought you bought vanish in a heartbeat. Picked up mostly at Fopp, Timeslip in Brighton, and Music & Video Exchange in Greenwich. I’m basically filling in gaps in my collection at this point.
Prince of Darkness I first saw this on the big screen at the Greenwich Picturehouse years ago, before COVID. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen if you can manage it - but I'd say the same for all Carpenter films.
I'm going to be in the UK for two weeks as of Mon 24 July. Among other things this means I shall be as quiet as a mouse for those two weeks (squeek) so don't get alarmed if I go silent.
Lots of train travel in my future, so let's have a train piece.
The 1930s are Britain's Golden Age of trains. Cars exist and are clearly the way of the future, but there aren't yet the roads to accommodate them. If you're going anywhere for any kind of distance, odds are you're doing it by train. Or alternatively, if you're being murdered in a picturesque way, you're doing it by train.
Agatha Christie's a premier exponent of death by choo choo. You've got the Mystery of the Blue Train, originally set aboard the Plymouth Express; the 4:50 From Paddington; and, of course, the Orient Express.
Why so train-happy? Well, it's an interesting way of setting the same old locked door problem outside the country estate, or the library. The plot might be exactly the same, but the location is exotic, interesting, and just familiar enough to be relatable without being so familiar as to be overdone.
Plus, trains have the same attraction as cruise liners: they have that element of luxury, cheek-by-jowl with the third-class passengers. The Flying Scotsman is probably the most famous steam train in the world and in its heyday was without peer. Luxury? Its first-class accommodation is as good as anything you'd find on the Orient Express. Plus, you can't beat the views all the way up to Edinburgh, non-stop from London. Eight and a half hours. That's about how long I'll spend flying to London, but I'm sure the accommodations on the Scotsman would be more comfortable.
All that said:
Flying Dead Man
Rumors circulate that a very special auction is to be held aboard the Flying Scotsman on the return leg from Edinburgh to London. The prize is [insert useful Mythos text here] but the catch is that the auctioneer is a dead man.
The deceased is Alan Laughty, a well-known bookseller from Edinburgh who, it's said, was on his way to London to negotiate the sale of his prize when he died of a heart attack while having a shave in the luxurious barbershop aboard the Scotsman. Nobody was able to find the text among his possessions, and many looked.
According to the story the auction is to be held precisely one year to the day from the date of Laughty's demise, aboard the Scotsman, in the barbershop, which will be closed off to the public for the duration of the exercise. A prominent member of [Mythos Cult] is making the arrangements and paying the bribes to make this happen. All moneys go to the widow and orphans, naturally. Presumably, if this works as intended, the book will appear at the barbershop.
First, the investigators have to score an invitation to this ghoulish little auction. Then they have to beat out the competition ...
Option One:Dead Man's Prize. Hounds who do a little digging find out that Laughty was, when he was alive, a prominent member of [Mythos Cult]. However, he was in bad odor with the Cult's hierarchy; they felt he was holding out on them, keeping some of the best items - including [Mythos text] - for himself. The prominent member of [Cult] arranged for Laughty's death but didn't realize he'd have the last laugh from beyond the grave.
Option Two: House Cleaning. [Cult] has a problem. It knows that one of its own killed Laughty. It doesn't know who, and there are three prime suspects. [Cult] arranged this little charade to flush out the killer. What [Cult] doesn't realize is the actual killer has hired the Hounds to act as their go-between. After all, reasons the killer, why risk your neck when you can risk someone else's?
Option Three: Tell No Tales. Laughty was poisoned by one of the train's staff, who wanted him dead for unrelated reasons. Now, it seems, Laughty is about to return. What to do? Good job there's still plenty of poison ... after all, the best witnesses are dead witnesses.
Mick Herron's Slough House series, a must-read for Night's Black Agents players and Directors alike, has two major themes that it rams home again and again.
The English are their own worst enemy.
Boris Johnson is an arsehole.
Which is fair enough so far as it goes. I don't think anyone would disagree with point 1. Point 2 depends largely on whether you believe Boris is a Blofeld or an idiot. Or both, but personally I lean towards idiot and have done for many years. For that reason I think Herron gives Johnson too much credit.
The Slough House series is set in modern Britain of the mid-to-late 2010s. It presumes there is a dead letter office for spies, Slough House, where the cack-handed and past-it are sent to while away the days waiting for retirement. Its nominal leader is Jackson Lamb, a cold warrior whose glory days are so far behind him you couldn't see them with a telescope. He's the anti-Bond, charmless and bullying, who somehow manages to get things done despite everything. Underneath him are an ever-changing band of misfits. One or two may drop off the twig from book to book, but Slough House survives.
The main antagonist of the series is Joris Bohnson, aka Peter Judd, who crops up again and again in several different roles across the series. He doesn't have it in for Slough House per se, at least not in the early books (I haven't read the entire series). However, his latest wheeze always seems to involve Jackson's lambs somehow, whether on the periphery or as the main event.
Herron had a very tedious trick in his first novel, Slow Horses, which I'm glad to say he has dropped. Slow Horses revolves around a kidnapping by a British terror group, BNP-adjacent white supremacists who've decided to execute a British Pakistani Muslim in retribution for some tedious thing or other. In that novel Herron would strongly suggest in the narrative that X has happened when in fact it was Y, and when Y is revealed Herron does a little dance to show how clever he has been. This misdirection is fun once. Fun twice. On the three-hundred and forty-ninth repetition it gets wearisome.
Thankfully he does not overuse it in the other Slough House novels.
He does do one thing he deserves praise for: he mentions Brexit. Not by name. Rather like Yog-Sothoth, Brexit must not be named. However, it does turn up as a plot point, which is something I've not seen other authors working in modern-day settings do.
Real Tigers has a plot device that Night's Black Agents Directors, and possibly Dracula Dossier Directors, ought to steal. Without giving the game away, the device is this: the British Secret Service keeps what it calls Grey Books, a series of files about conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. They do this for two reasons. First, the people who believe that the Queen was in fact a Reptilian are sometimes one Armalite away from doing something tragic. Second, there might (just might) be some useful intel in there somewhere.
The villains of the piece want those Grey Books and coerce Slough House into getting it for them.
The Grey Books are plausible. You can imagine every intelligence service keeping something like them, and there are real-world examples. In Night's Black Agents there's every reason to think those Grey Books contain useful intel about everyone's favorite conspiracy theory: the vampires that secretly Rule The World. They'd be prime targets for every Night's Black Agents group and the great thing about it is, every national government would have something like those Grey Books. You don't have to restrict this to a London setting. It could as easily be the Vatican, or France's DSGE, or German's BND.
To that end:
Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
Your tiger team is tasked with breaking into the national intelligence agency's archives and stealing the Grey Books, their version of the nutjob files. Every conspiracy theory that gained traction is in there. It's considered a relatively safe thing to steal; not exactly the crown jewels of the nation's security secrets, but important enough to be kept behind a door with more than one lock.
Your supposed Mr. Johnson (no, not that Johnson) is a high-ranking politician who wants to tweak the tail of the security services. They think that embarrassing the current Head of Security will get them leverage in their latest political scheme. What Mr. Johnson doesn't realize is that his second-in-command has personal reasons for wanting that file and will take the first opportunity to steal it from the group.
That leaves the agents swinging in the wind. Mr. Johnson, seeing how his scheme has fallen apart, will deny all knowledge. Hire a tiger team to test national security services? Never! Not our Mr. Johnson. Meanwhile the second-in-command is in the wind and the agents are effectively on the run - unless they can somehow get that file back. Even if they do, will they be able to buy their way back into the government's good graces or are they permanently ruined?
On top of all this: just what's in that nutjob file that everyone seems to want so badly?
Although the phrasing is Michael Heseltine’s – he who famously drove a stake through Maggie Thatcher’s political career – the sentiment is one for the ages. It’s a generally accepted truth in coups, revolutions, and Shakespearean tragedies that the people who kick off the shooting match by taking direct action at the leadership do not survive the weeks, months or years of chaos that follows. Either the powers that be retain control, in which event there are bloody reprisals, or the knife-wielder ends up everyone’s target in the ensuing melee.
Oddly enough it’s a factor that you’ve seen play out yourself more than once, though you may not have realized it at the time. In every competitive game you’ve ever played there has always been a point where one player is clearly in the lead, at which point every other player joins forces to bring the leader down. Even those who clearly have no hope of winning themselves start cooperating with those who do, or might.
Of course, if you wield the knife you might at least be remembered, as Richard III has been remembered. Buried under a car park, mind you, but remembered nonetheless. Whether the annals of history matter to you while the worms gnaw your desiccated remains is a matter for conjecture.
Knife follows knife, more often than not. Julius Caesar famously crossed the Rubicon and defeated Pompey Magnus in civil war, only to die at the hands of men who themselves died on the battlefield. Robespierre saw Louis XVI to the guillotine and himself ended up under the guillotine, but he was not the last so to die.
In RPG settings there’s a lot to be gained from bloody revolution. It’s an excellent plot hook and motivates action. Of course, the characters are likely to be on the sidelines at first, perhaps hired by [INSERT NPC HERE] to be one of the Act 3 Scene 3 Murderers. Or perhaps something else, but whatever their actual role adventurers are used to being hired by someone else to Do A Thing.
If this were Night’s Black Agents, for example, it is definitely in keeping for the agents to be hired by [WHOEVER] to Destroy, Hit, Flip, Heist, or whatever it may be. They may not realize, or care, that they’re working for vampires, at least not at first. A job is a job, after all.
The problem comes when they’re forced to realize that it’s not just a job. That the Heist they were paid to take on was carried out in furtherance of someone else’s scheme. That the Nodes at Tier 2 of the pyramid are looking hungrily at the undead at Tier 1 and wondering if they have what it takes to overthrow the leadership. To become Caliph instead of the Caliph.
After all, if he who wields the knife seldom wears the crown, what do you think happens to the lackeys of he who wields the knife? Shakespeare doesn't even tell you what happens to the murderers in Macbeth. It probably isn't pleasant but if Shakespeare can't even be bothered to say 'dead in a ditch' - well, that's just rude.
An alternative which puts the players at the heart of the action is to have them being the ones actively seeking power. Cyberpunk 2020 or Cyberpunk RED has an obvious means of making this work: have the characters be important executives in a corporation. Probably a smallish one; not Arasaka, but maybe a weapons supplier or manufacturer. A corporation that might be bought out by one of its competitors. That way the characters have a honeypot to reach for: being the ones with all the shares when the white knight swoops in with cash in hand.
Swords of the Serpentine has a section in the early part of the book that talks about a similar group concept: the Family Business. I’m going to quote that section here:
You may be a prestigious member of the Ancient Nobility, the merchant princes behind a major Mercanti guild, or even a close-knit family of commoners who have taken up a life of crime. For you, family is everything — and when family and friends get threatened by personal or political enemies, you turn to heroics to get your own back. This style of game deals with family politics and social pressure as much as external threats; you may have just slipped into a rival’s office to poison their wine, but is that going to make your mother proud of you?
In Serpentine the Noble Houses can be powerful, influential, wealthy – but it’s just as likely that they’re decayed husks of their former glory. Yes, they have property and titles, but no, they have nothing of actual value. Plenty of glory, and no bread to eat.
With that in mind:
The Gritti Saga
The characters are either members of the family proper, or part of the mansion staff. Perhaps they even hold a meaningless title – Keeper of the Falcons, when there hasn’t been a bird in the coop for decades. Or Nanny, in a house with no babies. The Grittis have a splendid history and plenty of property deeds for houses and ships that either no longer exist or are well out of reach. A squatter’s haven in Sag Harbor that used to be a Gritti shipbuilder, or concession rights to a particular business that has long since been carved up by rivals who care not a snap for rights on paper when they have the rights in practice.
At the top of this tree is Tomaso Gritti, your beloved … well, perhaps not so beloved. The characters have all sorts of ideas about how to revitalize the Gritti line. They may have allies, loyal servants and the like.
What they don’t have is power. Tomaso is the one in charge and he will brook no defiance. Nor does he care very much for whatever scheme the characters have come up with. Why revitalize the house of Gritti? What need is there? Gritti is magnificent and needs no modification. Gritti shall be as it has always been - so long as Tomaso is in charge.
If the players are to achieve greatness one of them has to wield the knife. Which one will it be?
This week's post is partly inspired by recent events in Barbados, as encapsulated in this TL/DR video:
Now, this isn't the only bit of media I've seen bewailing the fate of the Monarchy and wondering what will happen when the Queen finally goes to her well-deserved rest. However as someone born in a colony and who's lived in the Commonwealth nearly all of his life, I thought it might be time to lay some myths to rest.
1) Never forget, she is who she is. Nobody swears allegiance to the Monarchy in the abstract. Yes, Queen Elizabeth II is popular but that's because she takes service to the nation seriously and people respect her for it. If she'd been a different kind of monarch we wouldn't be having this discussion and probably there'd be no Commonwealth. There's a reason why PM Owen Arthur (c. 7.54) said he'd struggle to swear allegiance to Harry; this is it.
2)She came here, and we remember. Early in her reign she travelled the Commonwealth and there are plenty of plaques all over the place to mark the spots she's visited, which is another mark in her favor for those who remember the visits. Problem being, the ones who do are in their eighties, so the public memory's fading. The rest of the family don't seem to travel as much; Charles does, but he's no spring chicken. See also: the Pope. There's a reason why His Holiness gets on a plane and jets off to wherever-it-may-be, and it's not because he's racking up frequent flier miles for that dream holiday to Aruba. The personal touch matters. It keeps people engaged.
3) We don't read the Sun. The British have a very different view of the Monarchy than the Commonwealth does, and that's because the average Englishman's concept of the Crown's been shaped by God alone knows how many newspaper articles, paparazzi shots, TV shorts and a thousand other things besides - most of which we never saw. The big change in the Crown's popularity in the UK came in the 1980s and 1990s, when the media became far less deferential and Spitting Image clowned around. As far as the Commonwealth's concerned, none of that ever happened; it wasn't on our TV or in our papers. We don't even get the BBC, for crying out loud, and that seems a missed opportunity. We'd probably pay a license fee for it, if asked. [possible exceptions: Canada and Australia, which both seem to get more UK media than the rest of us.] In fact until the Internet became everyone's media source of choice we only ever got the Crown's highlight reel, and that rarely. Now we get YouTube vids every time Meghan Markle farts. That changes things, but it still means the Commonwealth doesn't share the same perspective the British do.
4) We need a loud voice. The Commonwealth is made up of small nations, for the most part. When small nations try to strike a bargain with larger powers - and everyone's a larger power - we get squeezed. So there's a very useful benefit to being part of a larger Commonwealth of Nations with the Crown at its head, one worth preserving. However, see also Brexit; the less relevant the UK becomes, the less useful our relationship with the Crown. See also see also CARICOM. If the Crown isn't our voice of choice, we'll invent our own. Bermuda's an associate member, and frankly that's only because we're still a dependent territory of the UK which means all our foreign policy is controlled by London. If we ever vote for independence I expect our full membership of CARICOM will follow five minutes after we formally go independent.
5) The prosperous middle classes. Stop me if you've heard these acronyms before: RICS. ICSA (now the CGI). CIOB. CIPD. CIAT. RIBA. RIN (remember, we're surrounded by lots and lots of ocean). And so on ad infinitum. If you're a lawyer, accountant, administrator, architect, engineer and so forth, and you live and work in the Commonwealth, odds are you belong to one of the many Royal or Chartered Institutes, not least because our legal systems are based on the UK's. That means you probably spent several years in the UK or at the very least went there for a crammer course to pass your exams. Your Chartered Body's HQ is almost certainly in London. If you have legal training, odds are good you've eaten at least one dinner at the Inns of Court. The Institutes have done more to keep the Commonwealth a Commonwealth than anything the Queen could manage if she lives to be two hundred, because they provide shared experiences, shared standards, and most importantly drive tens of thousands of students to that sodden, pestilent isle every year. Even if a Commonwealth nation decides to throw off the yoke and completely reshape the government, the people who do the reshaping will have been trained in the UK to a UK standard - there's no escaping that influence.
And finally:
6) Brexit and Racists. There are plenty of reasons why a Commonwealth made up largely of non-white citizens might not be madly in love with the UK right now, and they have nothing to do with the Queen. Remember earlier when I mentioned the Internet as a news source? Yeah, turns out we know all about Bojo's racism. We notice when former English Defense League head honcho Tommy Robinson gets BBC coverage. When I was a kid having an English passport meant a gateway to a world of possibilities; post-Brexit, an English passport means a narrow lane to a grey failed state where frothing fisherman and mountains of slaughtered pigs are the new symbols of sovereignty. The Queen's death might provide a convenient excuse to cut formal ties, but let's not kid ourselves; those ties have been fraying for a long, long time and most of the reasons why have nothing to do with the Monarchy.
Anyway, that's it for me. Normal service will resume next week!
There's a reason why this story starts with a fight in the marketplace. It elevates the action immediately. This is no political intrigue, no intricate cat-and-mouse duel of wits. It's a straight-up stabfest, and it's there to demonstrate the stakes, just in case anyone was asleep when the narrator told us two star-crossed lovers were about to bite it.
Pelgrane's Resource Guide has a useful section in the opening chapters: Initiation. Agents who have already had a close encounter with the undead conspiracy describe how that came about, and what consequences arose. Each segment looks something like this:
Afflicted
You were attacked – mentally or physically – by a supernatural threat, a horror you had no words to describe.
Changes: Gain Vampirology +1 and Sense Trouble +2. Either reduce Health by 2 or gain PTSD (Night’s Black Agents, p. 84).
Unanswered Questions:
What scars do you still bear from the encounter?
Do you recall the encounter clearly, or only in fragmented nightmares?
Did the affliction heal naturally, or does it still trouble you?
Resolution: Kill the creature that injured you. (Alternatively – if the wound is unnaturally hard to heal, find a cure.)
It arises from a fairly basic premise: whatever happened left its mark, and now you, the one affected, have to deal with the consequences. It's a version of what has been called blue-booking, where players describe what happened to their characters in rules-lite terms. Often it's used to flesh out backstory, play out moments when X first meets Y, or how Z came to be. It usually takes place between games, so as not to interrupt play in formal sessions.
Often this is a solo experience but it doesn't have to be. I first encountered the term in Cyberpunk's Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads! where Blue Booking was described as roleplay between GM and player. In the example, Media Emile faces down some of Arasaka's Executive VPs at gunpoint in a meeting room on the 47th floor of Night City Tower. There's gunplay as well as roleplay but no random element, no checks, no dice; it's an extended yes-and improv moment in which the player gains information and is presumed to survive but not necessarily escape unscathed.
In fiction you're encouraged to start with action. Whatever the most interesting moment in the character's life-to-date is, that's where the opening chapter finds the character. Nobody cares about Bilbo's many years of more or less blissful stuffing-his-face-in-Hobbiton life. What we care about is the moment when Gandalf the wizard pays him a visit, and inscribes a fateful rune upon his otherwise pristine painted green door.
In RPGs you're also encouraged to start with action. If there isn't a swordfight in the marketplace within two minutes of the opening, start one. Bite your thumb at someone, or just bite your thumb, but whatever you do make sure blades are flashing.
In this particular campaign there are questions that need answering, chief among them being how the agents first meet the King. I've already discussed how you should design the King; but what was that first fateful encounter that bound the agents to the King?
I'm going to propose to you now that the opening chapter should be a Session Zero Blue Book, borrowing elements from the Resource Guide's Initiation chapter. In that Session Zero there shall be no dice, no random element, but neither shall it be a solo act. All the players will be at the table. The Director will be the Director.
Traditionally a Session Zero is a pre-campaign meeting and is often dealt with in a kind of checklist format, where players reel off the things they want to see and don't want to see, going forward. That's not what I'm proposing. This is more in line with the Initiation format, which tries to describe how the characters first became involved with the Conspiracy.
So start with action.
The Initiation section starts each moment with a brief, short descriptive header: Afflicted, Betrayed, Collateral Damage, Criminal Traces, Head-On Collision, Impossible Analysis, Old Files, the Trade. As a group decide which descriptive header best suits, either from that list or create one yourself. It can be a mixture. Ultraviolet uses Betrayal with a mix of the Trade, and opens with the sudden disappearance of a Met Detective Sergeant shortly after one of the DS's contacts tries to spill the beans on a criminal conspiracy, only to be brutally murdered. Action, action all the way.
Develop the scene from there.
Let's say that your opening scene is a version of Head-On Collision in which some of the soon-to-be agents are breaking into [BLANK] in order to [BLANK] and some are part of the protection detail. It doesn't really matter what BLANK is, but for this example let's say that the job's an assassination to take place in a fancy London high-rise, either an office or an apartment block.
It doesn't have to be a London high-rise, of course. It could as easily be a pre-handover Hong Kong. Greg Rucka got good mileage out of that in Queen and Country (v4 Definitive Edition). Anywhere in the Commonwealth will probably do, but for the minute let's stick with London.
Let's set some ground rules:
Every character comes out of this changed in some way, and each player gets to decide how their character is permanently altered. Other players can offer suggestions, but it's the player's call as to what happens to their character.
Every positive change (+1 to Vampirology, say), is balanced by an equal penalty to a pool or some kind of permanent affliction (eg. PTSD, chemical dependency).
No more than +3 benefit total, and therefore a -3 penalty (or equivalent).
If using Trust, assign Trust points based on the events of this scene.
The individual player gets to decide what the Resolution should be for their agent, and that's the character's long-term goal in the campaign.
The players get to resolve the scene, as a group - that is, they decide how the Head-On Collision ends. In the example, was the target killed? Did the target turn out to be something damned/supernatural/alien/mutant?
Those permanent changes can be anything you want; be creative. Not everyone has to have an addiction or mania. It might be something more mundane, like a +1 or 2 to Heat whenever operating in [wherever it might be] because your reputation precedes you. Or Difficulty for Stability tests increase by 1 under certain specific stressors (whenever encountering Bhuta, say).
Either during, or as a result of, this scene, the King comes into the agents' lives. Thanks to their actions the King now wants to be their patron. In much the same way, Philip Quast's character in Ultraviolet decides to bring Jack Davenport's DS Colefield onto the team as a consequence of his relationship with the policeman-turned-vampire Jack Beresford.
Anyone who dies in this scene, dies. This can be a way to permanently alter a character, by taking up to -3 Network and describing how their comrade in arms was [burnt alive / crushed to death / taken by Them]. Someone who dies can be encountered in future scenes or scenarios, of course. That's what ghosts (and vampires, for that matter) are all about. This is also a good excuse for taking the Revenge drive.
At the end of this Blue Book Session Zero the players should have decided how their agents first encountered the Conspiracy, and what the result was. They have a relationship with the King, which in turn will lead to future scenarios. They have a goal to shoot for - their Resolution.
Last time I introduced the concept: a Night's Black Agents game set in Blair's Britain. The next step is to establish the terms of this tragedy. Who's on stage? What do they want?
In tragedy we start with hamartia - the fatal flaw. Often this is hubris, or overweening self-confidence. The essence of hamartia is to miss the mark, to fall short in some way, and in Greek tragedy the one who falls short is often also the one with all the gifts. The hero, the prince, the semi-divine, the one whose fall from grace is all the more poignant because they started so well.
From hamartia the peripeteia results - the reversal of fortune. Somehow the protagonists' falling short causes, inspires or otherwise brings about the tragedy that irreversibly dooms them. Not just them; in a Shakespearean context a tragedy usually brings about the destruction of any number of hapless bystanders, like Ophelia in Hamlet, or Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet.
Though in this instance the better text might be Marlowe's Faustus, in which the hero with many gifts sells his soul for material gain.
1967 film adaptation with Richard Burton and Andreas Teuber
Before I talk about who's on stage, it would be better to set the stage.
Cool Britannia is a 1990s phenomenon that began before Blair's premiership, but Blair made it his own. It's a youth culture movement, Britpop, Four Weddings, Tracy Emin's bed and half a shark all mixed up in an over-sugared trifle. It's all the pent-up optimism that had been smothered in the 1980s, suddenly bursting free. The generation that might have been born in the 1970s but has no memory of strikes or Harold Wilson comes of age.
It's also, incidentally, the early budding of Brexit. If you're 20 in 1997, you're mid-40s, rapidly approaching your 50s in 2021. All those ambitious dreams, fading away, optimism replaced by bile, ready to be persuaded that it's all someone else's fault. After all, it can't be your fault that something which began so well ended so drably. Boris Johnson's a political columnist in the 1990s, dripping his poison. Domenic Cummings is in Russia, trying to build a Sanara-Vienna airline. UKIP's political journey begins in 1993. Nigel Farage is floating adrift, politically, after leaving the Conservatives in 1992, and is trading commodities in the City. David Cameron's an ambitious young wannabe, flitting from the Treasury to the Home Office to the private sector; at the time of Blair's first victories he's working for Carlton Television.
So you've got an early burst of overweening optimism, of pop culture and youthful exuberance - a colorful repudiation of the grey and stodgy Conservativism John Major came to represent. Ultimately the Tories get swept aside by Labour in 1997, as Cool Britannia crests.
That's the stage. Who are the players?
Blair's the Sun King in this narrative, but having the UK PM as an actual person the characters can interact with, and by extension manipulate, is probably counter-productive. This story doesn't need a Sun King; it needs a Gary King.
The World's End opening scene, sourced from SceneScreen
The one with all the gifts, the natural leader of the group - the one who'll become the biggest disappointment. If this is a straight Edom Files game then this is probably one of the Dukes, but let's say it's not. What then?
Whoever this is, it has to be a patron figure, potentially an Icon if we're using 13th Age concepts. Someone who provides not just money but also motivation, a walking, talking inciting incident. The one with a big enough mouth and personality to get the gang together. and back together again after the inevitable bust-up.
This isn't someone who takes attention from the PCs. Whoever this King is, their job is to alert the agents to danger, to uncover hot spots, and ultimately fail. Again, if the Icon rules are being used then this Icon will ultimately be dethroned - and whoever replaces them may not be inclined to help the agents in any way.
Finally, this King needs to fit whichever concept the campaign is designed around, and for a reminder those concepts are:
Mutant:Their markers are medical symptoms; their emphasis is infection.
Supernatural:Their markers are strange superstitions, their emphasis hunger.
Damned:Their markers are holy symbols and spiritualism, their emphasis is seduction.
Alien:Their markers are various uncanny effects; their emphasis is invasion.
Since we have four concepts let's have four potential Kings: the Politician, the Media Mogul (alternately the Financial Mogul), the Tech Guru, and the Priest.
The Politician's a fairly obvious pick: a Blairite, someone who might be on the Cabinet someday but for now is holding down a senior post in the government.
The Tech Guru is probably building one of the many Dot-Bombs in 1997 - though of course nobody knows that yet. Awash with cash and charisma, famous and adored, the Tech Guru flits from Big Moment to Big Moment, and never misses a First Tuesday. Nobody questions anything they say or do. It wouldn't be proper. Their genius means they're always right, a quality they share with Doctor Who - tho Christopher Eccleston won't revive that character till 2005.
The Priest might be an Ultraviolet-type quasi-bureaucrat, (first aired 1998); it's never very clear who Philp Quast's ex-religious is meant to be working for, though there's a strong Catholic vibe to his character.
There is another way to go. Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins, a female priest turned Deliverance exorcist, gets her start in 1998. Women have been able to be ordained as priests from 1992 but none are ordained until 1994, and women as bishops is a contentious issue right up to the first appointed female Bishop, in 2015. Merrily's a useful example because not only does she represent the very new, she also finds herself entangled in the ancient. She'd fit well into a Supernatural or Damned game, where a Philip Quast type is more generic.
Midwinter of the Spirit trailer, sourced from Acorn Media US.
With all that in mind, let's create some Garys.
Mutant:Their markers are medical symptoms; their emphasis is infection.
Politician: Malcolm / Nicola Fleming, a spin doctor with the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship. Fleming's authority is murky at best; at times Fleming appears to have the PM's ear, while at other times Fleming's in temporary exile to some forgettable post within the Department. Fleming's a political troubleshooter who deals with some of the government's messier problems. A firm proponent of the Third Way, Fleming's no old-school socialist nor yet a union sympathizer. Fleming didn't get to where Fleming is today by ignoring friends; their Network is legendary. A Cambridge graduate (Trinity), Fleming has friends at the Science Park to help Fleming with any science-related crusades.
Fleming's current obsession is BSE and infected beef, which Fleming believes is linked to something far more sinister. Fleming suspects this is the first in a series of attempts to weaken the country through artificial manipulation of infectious diseases - to what end?
In Play: abrasive, confrontational and aggressive when pursuing an agenda, all charm and smiles when dealing with anyone outside the Department, particularly the Media.
Hamartia: insatiable curiosity. Fleming has to know, and doesn't care about the cost of knowing.
Supernatural:Their markers are strange superstitions, their emphasis hunger.
Financial Mogul: Bruno / Teressa Montgomery. born Melnyk to Ukraine immigrant father who left after the war and married late. Montgomery changed their name in the 1980s to Anglicize it. A financial genius who got his start in Thatcher's Britain, Montgomery is a staunch Labour supporter thanks both to his father and his mother, a coal miner's daughter with family ties to Neil Kinnock. These days he's moved from fund manager to guardian angel, providing start-up cash to some of Dot Com's most promising tech startups. Montgomery is as likely to be seen at First Tuesday events as they are in the board room. Montgomery is no grey little gnome; Montogomery is a petrol head with a penchant for classic cars, and owns at least two 1920s Bentleys formerly toys belonging to Woolf Baranato. Rumor has it Montgomery has tried to match it against France's Blue Train, in a recreation of the famous 1930s races.
Montgomery's eldest child, Martin, suffered a tragic accident that left the boy in a coma. That's when Montgomery was first approached by a group Montgomery calls the Syndicate, which made them a proposition: do as we ask, and you can have your son back. Montgomery, a lapsed Catholic, went back to the Church instead. Since then Montgomery has made it their mission to find out all they can about the Syndicate; Montgomery hates losing, to anyone or anything.
In Play: urbane, talkative, more British than the British and very fond of traditional hunting/shooting/fishing pursuits. Enjoys being the smartest person in the room.
Hamartia: overwhelming ambition. It isn't enough to have money; Montgomery must have the fame and power that goes with it.
Alien:Their markers are various uncanny effects; their emphasis is invasion.
Tech Guru: Alan / Elaine Augustin, founder and CEO of MilesToGo, an online retailer dealing in luxury travel and leisure. Augustin's a poetry geek and a tech geek, and is fond of quoting Robert Frost at business meetings. Augustin, a former model turned tech wizard who can dress the part as well as talk it, is as well known in Paris couture as they are in London's tech scene. Less well known is Augustin's addiction to Madame JoJos, a seedy Soho nightclub, but if you want Augustin's attention that's where you must go to get it. Make a splash there, and you've a fan for life.
Which is how (and where) Augustin first met what Augustin calls The Queen. Terrified and intrigued in equal measure, Augustin has been tracking The Queen ever since. Augustin won't rest until their curiosity is satisfied, though whether this is about knowledge or domination is anyone's guess.
In Play: Bumptious to the point of arrogance, with broad gestures and wild flights of fancy. Everyone expects a tech genius to be eccentric, even flamboyant, and the burden of living up to those expectations is exhausting.
Hamartia: tragic error. Augustin fundamentally misunderstands The Queen, though in what way has yet to be determined.
Damned:Their markers are holy symbols and spiritualism, their emphasis is seduction.
Priest: Emelia / Arthur Prentice-Jones, a new recruit to the Church of England's Deliverance ministry. Prentice-Jones is a former psychiatrist who suffered a crisis of conscience when a patient committed suicide. This traumatic event persuaded Prentice-Jones that there was more that could be done to help people, and that faith was the beacon that lit the way forward. An overachiever, Prentice-Jones soon won plaudits for their work and it's thought that one day they might ascend to a Bishopric; for now, their latest challenge is to reform the Deliverance ministry and bring it into the modern era. This they do with a will, travelling across the country to discuss spiritual and Deliverance issues with priests and people around the UK.
This peripatetic life led to an unexpected encounter in Suffolk, at the University, where what at first seemed to be a nervous breakdown proved to be what Prentice-Jones now knows is Renfielding. When Prentice-Jones sought to bring this to his superiors' attention he was rebuked, and now they wonder whether the rot is actually within the Church itself.
In Play: Calm, collected, very nearly bloodless - some call them the Cardinal, as they seem to be addicted to power and to ritual in equal measure. A deep well of compassion for the afflicted hides under that austere demeanor; Prentice-Jones got into this to help the desperate, and will do anything towards that end.
Hamartia: intense drive and passion for advancement. Prentice-Jones knows that they are right and the world is wrong; they brook no obstacles, no delay. If it must be done, it must be done immediately.
That's it for this week. Next time out, the first steps.
It's remarkable to me how all these events are happening at broadly the same time. As First Recon marines charge into Iraq in fall 2003 with a nervous Rolling Stone reporter hanging out of a humvee like a golden retriever on a road trip, the fallout from Enron's collapse in 2001 is ongoing; Skilling and Lay won't see the inside of a courtroom until 2006, and their former employees and investors are bankrupted. Meanwhile the major players in the 2008 financial collapse are galloping towards the finish line. By the time 2008 hits the Iraqi conflict is very much ongoing, and the marines Wright wrote about and Fick led have, in many cases, gone on to multiple tours, some of them suffering grievous injuries in that conflict.
There's a common through line: the willing complicity of those put in power, to guide institutions and countries, in their own destruction, for reasons that don't hold up intellectually or philosophically. Hubris, and pride. From Dick Cheney massaging intel until the White House could swallow it, and Colin Powell standing up in front of decision makers and spouting a lot of what proved to be nonsense designed specifically to bamboozle his listeners, to Enron's financial wizards and, later, the major banking institutions' accountants, auditors and risk analyzers willfully manipulating data to make the onlooker believe the risk was minimal or, at best, appropriately managed, we've been living through twenty years at least in which the facts on the ground never mattered, funded in part by the economic machine that is the United States running full tilt until it couldn't run any more.
A significant portion of the US electorate has now been conditioned to believe in bullshit and elect bullshitters, and there are times when I wonder whether this modern variant of a much older story can be traced, ultimately, to the politicians who cooked up the Iraqi conflict all those decades ago, and the businessmen who fleeced their investors and employees; the ones who abandoned any semblance of truth when truth didn't achieve their goal.
This has been the age of lunacy.
In the United Kingdom, this was the age of Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007. He's there for Enron and Royal Bank of Scotland, there for Kosovo, Afghanistan, for Iraq, and bows out just as the economic disaster he helped create is about to explode. I lived in the UK more or less from his earliest days as PM almost to the end of his run; I was still a uni student in the 1990s. Personally I would have preferred his predecessor John Smith, but when Smith died of a heart attack Blair was the logical candidate.
Blair has extraordinary talent, and his premiership ought to have been glorious - were it not for his many wars. Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and the one that broke him - Iraq. His willingness to follow George W. Bush's government into an unpopular and deeply divisive conflict cost Blair all the political goodwill he'd gained up to that point. Labour's majority shrank, and by the time Gordon Brown took office the writing was on the wall. It would have taken a much better leader than Brown to save the party from defeat, and in 2010 a hung parliament eventually gave David Cameron his shot at the brass ring - a chance Cameron dismally mismanaged.
Blair's UK is also the UK of Greg Rucka's Queen and Country, one of the ur-texts of Night's Black Agents. Rucka's Tara Chase is very much a creature of Blair's government, cooperating closely with the US' war on terror, and Blairs' wars are her wars, from Kosovo (the scene of her first adventure) through to an abortive attempt to remove Zimbabwe's Mugabe.
It occurs to me that Night's Black Agents, and its offshoot the Dracula Dossier, suits Blair's UK more, perhaps, than any other timeline. It's fresh enough that most people can remember the details, albeit through the fuzziest of lenses. The technology's not completely foreign to today's gamer; the internet now isn't the internet then, but it's not as if they were still using 3.5 inch floppies back in 2000. The first generation iPhone hasn't turned up yet nor yet the iPad, but that's the only major difference most gamers are going to notice. That, and the strange freedom air travelers enjoyed, before the towers came down.
It's the age of lunacy - and who better to take over the asylum than the pre-eminent lunatic, Dracula?
So for the next few sessions that's what I'm going to talk about. A Dracula Dossier / Night's Black Agents game set in the early 2000s, during Blair's premiership. What would change? What would stay the same?
This post is inspired by isolation booths as used in schools in England to which I can only reply, if Orwell were alive today, imagine the novels he would write.
The principle is understandable. There needs to be a penalty for disruptive behavior in the classroom. In this instance, the penalty is to be shoved into isolation for hours, perhaps days at a time. In some cases, allegedly, weeks. No social interaction whatsoever. Just sit and do work - or sleep, or whatever, so long as it's quiet.
Image taken from the Guardian
Problem being that disruptive behavior can mean anything. It can mean mental health issues, learning disabilities, not wearing the right shoes, talking out of turn. In a BBC study, one student was put in isolation after contracting fibromyalgia. Given that schools are graded by academic performance, there must be a strong temptation to put underperforming students in isolation, as a first step to easing them out of the school altogether.
There's enough demand for booths to inspire its own cottage industry, at £175 a throw. It's the numbers that enthrall me. Imagine the school that needs a hundred units worth of isolation booths. How many disruptive pupils can any one school have? How many isolation rooms - not booths, rooms - can any school need?
There's a short step from this to Esoterror.
The Summer of the Kooks
The OV's attention is drawn to the problem by a whistleblower in the school system, or a member of a pressure group like Lose the Booths.
Pupils across the UK are vanishing. There are always runaways, always heartbreaking little mysteries, but this seems different. The numbers are higher than usual but, more than that, the kids who vanish share similar symptoms - dizziness, lethargy, unwillingness to communicate, except on one topic. They all seem fascinated by someone they call Little Man, who makes all kinds of promises - happiness, sunshine, play, all the best things. Anything's better than the dark little isolation booth they regularly get shoved into at school.
At the same time, there's also a sharp uptick in unexplained deaths. Messy, gory deaths. A few teachers, a PCSO, some parents of missing children, some children. Not enough in any one place to draw official suspicion, but always the same small details. It happens in or near school. There are no witnesses, electronic or otherwise - cameras always seem to be broken, or recordings wiped. There's always something missing, usually noses, ears, in one case bearded cheeks and chin. Bitten off, it looks like.
In one case a victim, before she died, sent a text to her sister that said Picture for yourselves a little man, broader than he is tall, tender and
greasy like a ball of butter, with a rosy face, a small, constantly
laughing mouth and a thin, adorable voice of a cat wishing all the best
to its master. Which is a quote from Pinocchio, in the original Italian, about the Coachman who whisks naughty children off and turns them into donkeys, to be sold. The Coachman in the story had a habit of disciplining his donkeys by biting their ears off - some distance from Disney's round-faced unctuous Cockney.
Odd coincidence, as it happens, since the schools affected all have isolation booths with colorful murals on the walls, scenes out of Pinocchio's Land of Toys. There, at the back of the picture, sits a cheerful little butterball with a cat's grin.
For the Kooks aren't coming out of the woods this time. They're coming out of those pretty murals, and there are so very many of them now …
