Members' Voluntary Liquidation (Night's Black Agents)

You may have seen recent news articles about Gate Ventures, a British entertainment investment company that, its Chinese investors allege, ripped off its shareholders while at the same time making massive loans to celebrity backer Sarah Ferguson, (aka Fergie, aka Duchess of York) and handing out multimillion pound freebies to its former chair, Hong Kong businessman Doctor Johnny Hon. The company's investors put in over £24 million between them; the company now has less than  £5 million left, and can't afford to pay its lawyers, who recently quit. The company's current chair, Lord Grade, is now personally fighting the court case being brought by angry investors. Fergie and the Doctor jumped ship in 2019 and 2017 respectively. 

The Brits among you may remember that this isn't Fergie's first brush with financial unpleasantness. She was stung by a News of the World reporter back in 2010, in a cash-for-access exposé. There was loose talk about bankruptcy at about the same time, but Jeffrey Epstein, (yes, it is he), saved her with a loan. Her husband had an altogether different relationship with Epstein.

Johnny Hon, meanwhile, is doing very well for himself. The motto on his coat of arms, granted in 2018, is Ambition, Perseverance, Success. Apparently you can get that sort of thing from the Lyon Court if you own property in Scotland and are prepared to pay a fee. One wonders if Fergie lent a hand.

You may be wondering what members' voluntary liquidation is. In brief: if you are a company and want to die, you have to be wound-up. It's not unlike the reading of the will in a detective novel, except this time all the weeping relatives are actually weeping creditors. Their grief is none the less real, I'm sure. The assets of the company are then disposed of, in an exercise that can be prolonged or brief, depending on how much the company has in the bank and how angry the weeping creditors are. The longer it lasts the less cash there will be for the members, as whatever the company had left after paying its debts will be spent on admin and legal fees.

In a members' voluntary, all the members - the shareholders - have to agree that the winding-up should take place. In this instance, the shareholders were offered a carrot. They were told that if they agreed, the chair would be able to dispose of what was left of the company at a good price, thus allowing the shareholders to take home more money. If they had agreed, the winding-up process would be much easier.

They did not. One investor in particular, Zheng Youngxiong, aka Quentin, wants to know what happened to all those loans and freebies. His fellow investors, many of whom were sucked in by celebrity-studded investment drives held in Macau, are just as angry.

You have to wonder how Lord Grade thought he'd get away with members voluntary, particularly since the rats leaving the ship ought to have been a clear sign that she was holed beneath the waterline and the pumps were shagged. Or to put it in current terms, when the founders of the company vest their stock options and take long vacations in the fabled land of Anywhere But Here, now is the time to update your CV.

Now, what's in a McGuffin?

Video sourced from Overly Sarcastic Productions, highly recommended for lovers of tropes and history. Sometimes both at the same time.

When Hitchcock was still above ground, McGuffins were often plans - of the fort, the bomb, the experimental aircraft, whatever. The spies want it, so it's important. In the Cold War it made perfect sense that McGuffins were tools of war. In the modern world of fractured loyalties it's all about the dolla, dolla bills, so financial records make perfect McGuffins. They might be Worthless (my God! someone wiped the hard drive!), Tactical or Walking. In this instance someone like Quentin would be the Walking McGuffin, the only living person who really knows where the financial records are buried. It's the agents' job to make sure he lives long enough to testify.

The great thing about a financial scam is that it gives the Director an excuse for having scenes in smoke-filled rooms, casinos, or parking garages, where the agents try to flip an informant. Scenes without gunfights, very Dust plus a hint of Mirror, with looming dread of what might come. After all, if you follow the money, you don't know where it will take you.  

With all that in mind:

Members' Voluntary Liquidation

The agents are hired by a third party to go to Macau and meet with Cindy Cho, a financial expert and professional investor, who according to rumor is the whistleblower in a major scandal that's about to hit the City. Cindy is a significant investor in a gaming, gambling and entertainment mutual fund run by a London-based LLC, Eden Soul. The company's face and CEO is [insert celebrity here - or if playing the Dracula Dossier, insert Legacy], but according to City gossip the CEO's backed by some fairly dangerous characters. The City thinks it's a scam run out of Saudi Arabia to launder money, but the agents may wonder if the Conspiracy's involved.

Eden Soul is on the rocks and wants to wind up its affairs. The CEO's appealing to the shareholders in an attempt to get the company wound up without public fuss. Cindy Cho bought Eden Soul stock specifically so she would have a voice in company business; she represents a bloc of Chinese investors who bought into the mutual fund, since its business is gambling and Macau's a gambling town.  In the process she learned a lot more about Eden Soul than she ever wanted to. She knows where the money went, what it bought, and who benefited. She's making a stink, and if she and her notes ever see the inside of a courtroom it will be bad times for Eden Soul and its CEO, never mind those mysterious backers.

The agents must make sure she does have her day in court. If she doesn't live long enough, they have to get her notes to the press, or the financial regulator.

But, the agents may justly wonder, who is this third party who hired us to get it done?

• The Cushing Protocol. The third party is a well-heeled vampire hunter, possibly backed by the Vatican. The vampire hunter suspects, rightly, that Eden Soul is a machine designed by the Conspiracy to part suckers from their money so it can be spent on Conspiracy projects. The CEO is a hapless pawn, with minimal knowledge of Conspiracy affairs but a healthy regard for their own skin.  
•  The Hellsing Sanction. The third party is a Conspiracy puppet. The Conspiracy wants Cho silenced and the agents are Judas Goats whose purpose is to deliver Cho to them on a silver platter. The CEO is neck-deep in Conspiracy dealings but wants out, and the CEO knows the truth about the third party. The agents might find the CEO is an unexpected ally, if they offer some kind of deal.
•  The Hades Directive. The third party is a wealthy investor who knows nothing about the Conspiracy but thinks that Cho's the real deal, who can help the investor stick it to Eden Soul and its sneaky CEO. The problem with that plan is Cho's actually a plant, designed to draw the third party out into the open. Then the Conspiracy can deal with the pesky investor once and for all.

Finally, the McGuffin: 

•  Cho and her photographic memory. Treat as Civilian with effective 3 point pools in Accountancy and Bureaucracy, no self-defense skills whatsoever, Hit Threshold 3, Health 1. Allergies, you know …
•  Cho's laptop/external hard drive. Of course it's encrypted. The question is, who encrypted it? If it was Chinese Military Intelligence, then it's probably as well protected as any electronic device can be, with extra spicy viruses waiting to snap the trap shut. If Cho did it, the encryption is basic stuff bought from a civilian vendor. If it was the Triads, then chances are good the drive itself is bogus and the McGuffin worthless; the Triads wouldn't leave anything like that hanging around for ordinary people to look at. Or maybe their crypto guy screwed up and wiped the drive when trying to protect it.
•  Cho's notes. She doesn't believe in electronic devices. Those things can be hacked. Besides, she thinks better on paper. Yes, those are coffee stains. Yes, they are heavily annotated in her own personal shorthand. Why yes. they are scattered across several different journals so they can be easily separated and carried off by mischievous thieves, spies, or vampires. Why do you ask? 

Enjoy!

Darling Anna (GUMSHOE, Night's Black Agents, Mutant City Blues)

You may or may not be aware of Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey. As Delvey, Russian expatriate Sorokin scammed the rich and famous out of substantial amounts, by pretending to be a German heiress. Her scam wasn't the most sophisticated con game ever. She relied on charm and chutzpah, plus a little forgery, persuading people to lend her cash or pay her way. She racked up several hundred thousand worth of debt, and tried to get a $22 million loan to fund her Foundation. It was never going to last, and now she's been found guilty in court, sentence being four to twelve years, with the likelihood of deportation after release.

M Allen Henderson's Flim-Flam Man  is well worth looking at. Henderson lists these bunco traits:

• Inclined to hold a low opinion of humankind, although this inclination is usually well-hidden.
• Charming and personable.
• Persistent and thick-skinned. He won't let a little failure get in the way of eventual success.
• An actor who can fake emotions better than he can feel them. His act seems realer than real because he half believes it himself.
• Not exclusively a con artist. He has engaged in, and will continue to engage in, other businesses, both legal and illegal, especially sales.
• Proud of his ability to outsmart others, and expects others to outsmart him.
• Lacking in conscience. 
• Disrespectful of police and others in authority.
• On the move, changing residences and businesses frequently.
• Fond of showing off and is a big spender.

Sounds a lot like Dracula. Charming, personable, holds a low opinion of humankind, persistent and thick-skinned, lacking in conscience, fond of showing off, big spender …

Sorokin seems to demonstrate most of these traits, bar one; her addiction to Manhattan high life kept her in New York, when she might have been better served by travel.. Mind you, she took New York for every last penny she could get, and her success in that sophisticated city that never sleeps is what makes her famous. Other people stole more, but they didn't take New York's social scene for such a nasty ride. If her Foundation had ever opened its doors - an 'extremely pretentious private member's club', according to the Guardian's Hadley Freeman - it would have fit right in. New York has thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of plausible grifters like Sorokin. 'I lived in New York for a long time,' says Freeman, 'And that is the kind of … bullshit that you hear from people like that, in that area.' Sorokin wanted to fit in, and that is exactly what she did.

Let's gamify this.

Assume she's an asset in the world of Night's Black Agents. She's a natural chameleon who lives on social media, paying her way on someone else's credit card. She knew that, as a high-flying socialite spending a lot of money, hotel owners and restauranteurs don't want to challenge her. It's bad for business. So she can keep pushing the limit. It helps that she looks the part and keeps overtipping. Statistically she's a Civilian with effective High Society, Flirting, Flattery and Intimidation pools of 1 each, the Intimidation only useful against businesspeople and shop owners. However because she keeps pushing the limit she can be very successful, as a con artist. If there are two Bucharest Rules phrases that exemplify her, it's Build Your Own Network, and Keep Moving Forward.

As a Conspyramid asset, she's a free-roaming grifter looking for a likely target. She wants validation and fame, so she'll be especially dangerous to agents who rely on High Society and interpersonal abilities. She fits into that world. Several Edom dukes, such as Osprey, Pearl and Tyler, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of infiltration, as are some of the Legacies. However playing on Sorokin's MO, her most likely targets are other women; people she can befriend, be a buddy. Then she starts to mooch.

She probably doesn't run whichever Node she's affiliated with. Her handler would have to keep her at arm's length. She's not someone you'd trust with the Seward Serum. However her background in art may give her unusual ability pools, or Network contacts. She's the kind of person who gets by on her friends network, so it's reasonable to say she knows a lot of peculiar people in all lines of work. She probably knows a few low-level thugs, and bodyguards, along with the fashion plates and restaurant owners.

She may fit better into a Mutant City Blues game, which is all about crimes and the criminals who commit them. I haven't seen the 2nd Edition document, so everything I say here is based on my knowledge of the original game.

As a Mutant criminal, she most likely has passive power sets. This isn't someone who throws fire blasts around or sprouts fangs. This is someone who gets what they want through manipulation. Possibly Sexual Chemistry fits, but she really doesn't seem to be the siren type. She's more likely to use Memory Alteration, Possession or similar; some form of mind control or influence. At most she might display Psionic Blast, but even that sounds a little too violent. The one thing she definitely will not have is Nondescript. Her entire grift depends on her being seen, especially with the right people.

However it could be more interesting to have her as an ordinary con artist who everyone thinks is a Mutant, either because that's the way she plays it, or because nobody wants to admit they've been taken by a Normal. Mutants in particular will never, ever, in a million years, willingly admit they were conned by someone who isn't themselves Mutant. That Resist Influence power the mark boasted about is looking pretty thin right about now.

Alternatively she could be a beard, a front for a mind-influencing Mutant who is Nondescript but who seriously loves the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Sorokin and her pals jet off to a luxury holiday in Morocco, and nobody ever notices that an extra face is along for the ride. When Sorokin gets busted, the Nondescript recruits another wannabe socialite. The girl who ends up in jail might swear up and down she has no memory of doing all those things people say she did; what of it? Nobody in prison's guilty. Everyone was railroaded.

Enjoy!

Guilty! The Witchcraft Act (GUMSHOE Bookhounds, Dracula Dossier)

If you, as Keeper, want to throw a wrench in the players' ordered little lives in Bookhounds or a UK-based, pre-1950s Dracula Dossier mission, why not prosecute them under the Witchcraft Act of 1735?

The Act states that anyone claiming magical powers, or practicing witchcraft, could be imprisoned for a maximum of one year. It remained in force until the 1950s, when it was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which in turn was replaced by Consumer Protection under the 2008 Regulations. The 1735 act is the successor to a string of similar acts, all of which had one purpose: to seek out and punish witches, necromancers, and other frauds.

If you look up the Witchcraft Act 1735 you'll notice that the only politician to voice an objection to it was James Erskine, Lord Grange, who is remembered for two things: first, abducting his wife, claiming she died, and holding her prisoner on the Isle of Skye; and second, his opposition to the Act. He opposed the Act because he believed in God, and he, along with John Wesley and others, was reluctant to condemn witchcraft, as it was felt that giving up witchcraft was on par with giving up the Bible. After all, witches were proof of the spirit world, which in turn meant the religious world. Without proof of life after death, where is God? Nebulous claims of Scots political considerations that weighed heavily on Erskine have been floated, but this makes it sound like all of Scotland was witch-ridden, where in practice all of Scotland was merely God-fearing and wanted no truck with an Act that seemed to deny God.

Lest you think this is something that existed but was never enforced, rather like all those Elizabethan statutes that allegedly claim able bodied men have to turn up for archery practice of a Sunday, prosecutions were fairly common up to and after the First World War. This was a time when, if you could bring back the dead for a chat with their grieving relatives, you could make a fortune. During the war the authorities became increasingly concerned that fortune tellers and mystics were having a deleterious effect on morale, particularly since some of them were throwing caution to the wind and making prognostications about the war effort. Telling people who would win the war, or particular battles, was the Government's job, not Miss Millie's, and the authorities took a very dim view of Miss Millie's continued interference.

It got somewhat embarrassing for the plainclothes detectives and undercover agents sent to gather evidence when they discovered that soldiers, even officers, were also going to Miss Millie. Elizabeth Sixsmith, known professionally as 'Madame Betty' - and why she ignored God's gift of a surname I do not know, as Madame Sixsmith to my ears sounds much more impressive than Betty - claimed many soldiers among her clients. In 1918, when Detective Inspector Bedford burst in on medium Marie-Charles to deliver an arrest warrant, he found her in consultation with a Brigadier General.

This activity peaked during the War, when people were at their most vulnerable and desperate for any kind of news. It declined afterward, though the casualty lists ensured there would be a large number of people who wanted to talk to the dead in the 1920s. However as the decades wore on and people became less accustomed to going to fortunetellers and mystics, prosecutions became less common. There's a resurgence during the Second World War, but nothing on the scale of the mischief people were getting up to in the Great War, and once the conflict was over old habits began to die out. There were only a handful of prosecutions under the Fraudulent Mediums Act, and now the whole shebang is shoved in with dodgy tellies and fell-off-the-back-of-a-van stuff you find in the consumer protection regs.

What does this mean for your players?

To begin with, it's an excellent method of harassing them. Are they getting too big for their britches, and pursuing ghouls through Covent Garden without any thought for what might happen next? Time to pull them up and remind them that the outside world isn't something they can just ignore. Sooner or later blatant bullshittery comes back to bite you, and in this case it bites to the tune of one year in chokey. Or perhaps just bound over, if the Keeper's feeling generous. Don't forget that elements of this legislation are still in force in Israel and South Africa to this day, or that it was in force in Northern Ireland long after its repeal and replacement in England in the 1950s. Something for your agents to bear in mind, as they merrily skip across borders accumulating Heat.

Of course, if the government actually has some kind of supernatural or occult-interested research group - say, Edom - then a conviction under the Witchcraft Act could be synonymous with a quick trip to a secluded spot, there to be interrogated at leisure.

As an element of backstory, it can be very useful. Here's Miss Millie, dotty old dear, and here's her gang of hardened thugs. Where did she get hardened thugs? Oh, you can learn a great deal banged up in Holloway for a year. Plus you meet fascinating people like Norah Elam, suffragette and proto-fascist. This works for player characters as well as NPCs, bear in mind, so if you as player want to justify that point in Streetwise and some of your less savory contacts, this would be a good way to do it.

On top of all that, there's one other obvious direction to take: the prison scenario. This last is very much up to the Keeper, but consider: if you want a one-off in an unusual setting, and think a bit of hard time could be an interesting route to take the campaign, the Witchcraft Act will get you there in style. I recommend a good old-fashioned haunting, with the execution of Edith Thompson - and possibly also her unborn child - as a catalyst, but really, with a prison that's been there since the mid-nineteenth century, you could do anything.

Enjoy!
 

Flim Flam

Recently I started sorting through my book collection, trying to get it into some semblance of order. I came across this little wonder: Flim-Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions, by James Randi. This is an old - as in 1980's - expose of psychic frauds and the scientific community's reaction to them, and is a lot of fun to read. Most of Randi's books are like that; he has a very forthright style, that can be a lot of fun. However it reminded me of something that I've often thought should be a focus for Cthulhu adventures; fakes, frauds, and dodgy occultists.

Most Cthulhu adventures, whether Trail or Call, assume that the events the protagonists are meant to be investigating are all basically true. Very rarely adventures like The Westchester House for Call of Cthulhu - seen in the The Secrets of San Francisco and The Asylum and Other Tales - tackle the fraudulent side of hauntings and occult phenomena, but this is very rare. Usually the scenario takes the funny business at face value; there are no frauds, no trickery, nothing that isn't above board. If the initial indication suggests that vampires are the scenario's Hook, they're probably also its Awful Truth. Psychics are genuinely gifted, all Mythos knowledge is by definition Knowledge with a capital K, and everyone's telling the truth no matter how outré that truth may seem.

Bookhounds of London is one of the few settings that takes as part of its subject matter the issue of fraud. The protagonists in that setting can forge books, cheat their customers, and generally commit any kind of deceit in search of hard profit. It also assumes that protagonists can be taken in by frauds; after all, without the possibility of trickery there's no use for abilities like Textual Analysis. However even Bookhounds doesn't spend a lot of time discussing frauds, and abilities like Forgery tend to lead players to believe they will be the ones committing fraud, not that cheats will try to trick them.  

That isn't reasonable. If the setting is to resemble the real world in any way, shape or form then the tricksters ought to outnumber the truths by at least 100 to 1. Given that, there ought to be plenty of people trying to take advantage of the players, and any number of fake Mythos secrets floating around. If that doesn't happen then there is no real mystery; just a sequence of events that leads to a climax scene. Without the possibility that the protagonists might be wrong there's little dramatic tension, and the best way to demonstrate that to the players is to offer up some actual frauds for them to deal with.

There's a section in Flim-Flam that talks about psychic surgery, as practiced by tricksters in the Philippines, Brazil and elsewhere. These are people who practice faith healing, claiming to remove tumors and cysts with little pain and often little or no surgical tools. Instead they reach into people's stomachs and remove the offending cancers by hand, with a lot of dramatic bloodletting. Randi points out that this is best achieved with a fat patient, since the flesh can be kneaded and folded in such a way as to hide the slight-of-hand used to produce the chicken guts and other substances the surgeon has on-hand to convince his patient. Naturally they expect payment for this service, and when Randi was writing about them the surgeons refused up-front payment but took their cut in the form of donations and fees for the use of surgery rooms and other services.

Where this comes in for a setting like Bookhounds is this: health frauds have always been popular, and often prey on the most vulnerable - the poor - who lack the resources to get anything better. This would have been particularly true in pre-National Health London, where the only way the poor could get medical services was through charity and Poor Law offerings. This is also a time when abortions were illegal and poorly understood; when surgeons were still feared as patients went under the knife and never came out of the operating room alive, with little explanation as to why. In that kind of environment quackery flourishes, and in a horror setting what better quackery than withcraft with a Mythos element?

So, let's talk about a potential NPC: Cephas Norwood, alias Albert Pinckney, a South London trickster. Cephas puts himself forward as a faith healer from Trinidad who has access to secret knowledge passed down from his witch doctor grandfather. He occasionally hold seances, but this aspect of his business has died down almost two decades after the Great War ended. These days he gets most of his money from cures - and, in a Sordid setting, abortions - sold to the working poor of London. Cephas claims to get most of his knowledge from the guiding spirit of his grandfather that he keeps in a rum bottle, but he also has his Dream Book for reference in extreme or obscure cases.

Abilities:   Assess Honesty 6, Art: Music 1, Bargain 4, Biology 1, Credit Rating 2 (4) Conceal 8, Disguise 8, Filch 10, Fleeing 8, History 1, Intimidation 4, Medicine 1, Occult 2, Oral History 3, Pharmacy 2, Reassurance 4, Scuffling 9, Theology 1, Weapons 9
Alertness: +0
Stealth: +0
Damage: Fist -2, Knife -1

Cephas uses Disguise to make his skin seem much darker than it is, and Intimidation combined with Occult to bolster his reputation. His actual Credit Rating is 4, but he pretends to have a lower Credit Rating to fool gullible people. Allegedly he lives a humble, ascetic life without need of cash but he burns money - actually a Filch-based scam - in front of his grandfather's bottle to appease his spirit and buy power to heal the sick. He's supposed to have put curses on several people, all of whom suffered terrible accidents of one sort or another. His big trick is to cure people of diseases by "pulling" the sickness out of them, often with dramatic special effects. In Sordid settings abortions are carried out in much the same way, but are accompanied with a "health-restoring purgative" - actually a herbal mix based on large quantities of Tansy - to induce a miscarriage. The mix is highly toxic, and unless the subject makes a Difficulty 4 Health check they take +2 Damage. Though Cephas has never been further West than Soho, he uses slang terms to bolster his alleged Trinidadian heritage, words like:

• duppies: ghosts
• doogla: mixed race person
• eh eh: exclamation of surprise
• pan: steel drum band, a sound which was invented in the 1930s and which Cephas claims proficiency in
• vex, vexed: angry, upset
• wah-jang, wah-bean: slut, loose woman

His Dream Book and rum bottle are two items that the protagonists may be interested in. The grimoire is leather-bound and suitably worm-eaten, and the bottle has been known to shake and buzz when Cephas asks it a question. The bottle is a simple trick with cotton thread and ventriloquism, but the book is slightly more interesting as its frontispiece is a Yellow Sign. That's the only thing about it that is in any way Mythos-based, and the Sign was probably taken from a different book. Cephas uses the Sign to "prove" his credentials to anyone who questions his mystical ability. Otherwise the Dream Book is worth 1 pool point Occult, and confers no other benefit. 

Someone like Norwood could be encountered in several different ways: as a self-proclaimed expert, a potential mystic adversary - perhaps even trading "curses" with the protagonists - or even as a customer. After all he does have a fair amount of Credit Rating, and he must be spending it on something ...