Murder Most Foul (Bookhounds, Hauntings)

All the gruesome murders!

This week's post comes courtesy of Cambridge University and its labour in the fields of the Lord, the Murder Map. Gaze upon its medieval splendor! Marvel at its gruesome grue!

You’ll notice the map only includes the City of London. That’s what London was, once; the wider area which we now think of as London was, mostly, open fields and mud.

What I find fascinating about this is the effort the University took to provide voiceovers. It makes a difference, hearing all those old tales of grim killings. Like, say, Brother Henry's accusations of embezzlement and subsequent murder, in the old ward of Cheap, City of London. The Hospital mentioned no longer exists. It was dissolved durin the Protestant reformation, and the property probably passed to the Mercer's Guild. It's not immediately clear what happened to it. 

Let’s make a Bookhounds story out of it.

Before I delve deep into that, though, a reminder that I’ve spoken about hauntings before. I said:

There are any number of tales that could be told, but there are some things the Keeper should bear in mind:

1. The truth of the haunting will probably never be known for certain, since most of the facts are unavailable.
2. It cannot be dealt with in the same way as, say, an ordinary antagonist encounter. Ghouls, for example, can be shot, or bargained with. There is no way to communicate with a haunting of place, and probably no way to kill it.
3. It has a great deal of power behind it, possibly magical power. That means other people besides the protagonists are going to be interested in it. That also means it could be very dangerous.

This haunting is a little different in that some facts are available. Those facts exist, in the 1930s, in old documents, transcripts, scholar’s research and other esoteric places. They’re not public. What information is public, is a garbled, watered-down (or sexed-up) blow-by-blow passed down from generation to generation. It bears about as much resemblance to the truth of the matter as I do to Greta Garbo.

I’m going to assume, for the sake of this narrative, that some of those old documents are available in an archive of some description, and that more important documents can be had by going somewhere esoteric – Coleshill Abbey, let’s say.

OK, all that said: the haunting follows on the murder of Brother Henry in what was the old Hospital of St Thomas of Acre, long since defunct. That's Rome, for this scenario.

The Knights of St Thomas who used the Hospital as their base of operations were a military order and would have still been one when Brother Henry was beaten to death. By the time of the dissolution, they were a much less violent organization. Charitable work, running a grammar school, that sort of thing. They had links with the Mercers before the reformation (the Mercers used it as a meeting hall) so the purchase and takeover was (probably) friendly enough. The buildings were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. 

I see there would have been a cemetery once upon a time. I also see that the old Hospital would have been involved in the ransoming of captives from the Holy Land, according to Cambridge scholars. Both these facts might come in handy. The Hall as it existed in the 1930s was extensively remodeled during the London Blitz by Hitler's bombs, which has the unintentional advantage of making it much easier to tell lies about the place. 

Let's take all this and make something of it.

Bad Brother

Megapolisamancers linked to the shop (shop employees? perhaps) have been trying to complete a working using the Mercer's Hall as a lever. They encounter an unexpected obstacle: the place is haunted, and the ghost is interfering with the working. It must be dealt with before the lever can be established.

Signs of haunting: areas of extreme cold, unexpected bruising, elevated rage levels, doors open and close without visible cause, stink of sweat and fear, sounds of pleading and shouts of anger.

Written records (public): The story gets a brief mention in a history of Cheapside, Diary of a Clergyman c 1858, author unknown, slightly scandalous for the period but mild as milk to 1930s audiences. The haunting is blamed on the brown monk who is supposed to have seduced a maiden back in the 1600s.

Records (verbal history): The servants and staff of the Mercer's Hall call the ghost old Henry but accounts vary as to who Henry was. Most agree that he was a bad old man but disagree as to why.

Records (Coleshill): In a book of old trials and legal records there's mention of a murder at the Hospital where a brother whose name is no longer remembered was put to death for his crimes, including embezzlement. 

Extensive research similar to that conducted by Cambridge (multiple sources, records from the period, access to private archives) uncovers the truth behind the killing of Brother Henry. 

Option One: Henry's Repentance. It was really Henry who took the money, and he tried to blame Richard. The haunting can be dealt with by expiating Henry's sin. This can mean repaying his debt through donations to charities approved of by the Mercers, who effectively represent the heirs to the old monastic order.

Option Two: Henry's Vengeance. It really was Richard who took the money. The haunting can only be dealt with by exacting vengeance on Henry's killer, Richard of Southampton, Master of the Chapel. This can mean somehow bringing Richard himself back for punishment, or it can mean vengeance against Riichard's representative, the current head of the Mercers. Bonus points if Richard is still alive in the present, perhaps because he turned into a ghoul or is still remembered in dust-thing form.

Option Three: A Misunderstanding. The rents were embezzled, but neither Henry nor Richard were involved. This must somehow be proven to Henry. If it is successfully done, then and only then will Henry dissipate. This version can result in a Henry-shaped tulpa or megapolisomantic entity.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Brown Finger (Bookhounds of London)

Today, friends of his sell sexy French and American magazines. These are nearly all second-hand. Customers who buy such a magazine can sell it back at half-price. 

This way Johnny meets potential customers. Scribbled inside many of the second-hand magazines are pencilled messages using a Monomark or similar box number, and inviting an exchange of letters with the previous reader. 

Anybody foolish enough to follow up on this pen-pal invitation will find himself - or herself - tempted deeper and deeper into obscenities.

Then comes the invitation to the Blue Show! But not until the victim is utterly committed by his own letters ... London After Dark, Fabian of the Yard.

This is a Sordid plot thread. 

The Hounds may or may not sell second-hand sexy magazines. However, even if they don't, they'll know a shop that does. They may find a collection of such magazines in the next auction job lot, or some house clearance or other.

They may find themselves enmeshed by Brown Finger Johnny. 

'He smokes endlessly,' says Fabian. 'His plump crinkled fingers are caked with nicotine. His fingers are also brown with photographic chemicals. It is from both these that he gets his nickname. Johnny began as a commercial photographer, attending weddings and twenty-first parties. He had his own darkroom and made spare-time pin money by developing and printing at cut rates for amateurs. One such roll was of nudes. Johnny developed it. With amazing rapidity the news spread. Soon Johnny found dozens of similar films sent to him to be treated. Commercial firms will never develop any film showing any kind of nude, even if it is supposedly 'artistic.' ... Johnny put up his prices ...' 

From Bookhounds: The Keirecheires are the largest Y’golonac cult in human history … so far. They have nearly 40 active cultists in Brichester, London, Cambridge, New York, and Paris, all involved in academia or the arts. Each branch has perhaps 20 or 30 debauchees (usually called Sons), in addition to the actual cultists in charge.

In this narrative Brown Finger isn't a Cultist or even a Son. He's a convenient middleman for the Keirecheires. He's the one the Hand turns to for new recruits, indoctrinated as Sons at the Blue Show, but not before they're led down hideous paths thanks to those second-hand magazines and the correspondence they provoke. All handled by Brown Finger, who maintains a stable of letter-writers scattered across London to lure the insufficiently cautious in. 

Hounds may notice a pattern in these second-hand magazines, or the correspondence, if they get hold of some. Relatively harmless in and of themselves, closer study shows Mythos-themed subliminal suggestion, just enough to confer 1 point Mythos if 4 or more separate sources are consulted. 

Once that point of Mythos is conferred, and the subject follows up asking for more material, then and only then are they invited to one of the Blue Shows. These are hosted by the Keirecheires and may have a Son in attendance but not a full-fledged Cult member. It's at this point that the Cult starts looking for potential recruits, gauging their susceptibility.  

Meanwhile Brown Finger gets his cut day in, day out. He provides the magazines and the letters, and he provides the venue for the Blue Shows. He knows just enough to know it's better for him to keep his mouth shut and keep taking the Cult's money. That's all he needs to know.

A Curious Pastime.

One of the shop's regulars drops off the radar for a few weeks, to a point that the Hounds may become concerned they've lost them for good. Then the regular shows up again, shaken, a little frightened. 

They ask for help. They're reluctant to say why at first, and Reassurance may be needed. 

It turns out that they were lured away by letters, correspondence with a mysterious figure calling herself Ms. Bloomsbury. The regular claims to have gotten her mailing address from a magazine they bought second-hand. 

It will take the Hounds a scene or two to work out that Ms. Bloomsbury is one of Brown Finger's regulars. Brown Finger doesn't mind losing the shop customer's business; not everyone can be a Son of the Keirecheires after all. However, blabbing cult secrets is a problem that Brown Finger may not be able to deal with easily.

Option One: Brown Finger Intervenes. The middleman is forced to use force. At first this is intimidation courtesy of some Rough Lads, directed mainly at the errant shop customer but also at the Hounds, just to make sure nobody's tempted to do anything they shouldn't. This may limit itself to bruises and broken bones. Brown Finger isn't a violent man by nature, but he knows what will happen if the Cult decides to get involved. A little persuasion now beats a lot of pain later. 

Option Two: Brown Demotion. The Cult finds out about this little discrepancy before Brown Finger can do anything about it, and the Cult is not pleased. Brown Finger becomes a Rat Thing in short order, and his first task as rodent overlord is to deal with the Hounds and their shop. Cue rat packs galore, as Brown Finger starts to get into his new role as Mythos henchman to darker forces. However, the Hounds may be able to turn to Brown Finger's network, and the elusive Ms. Bloomsbury, for assistance. Brown Finger's network is terrified of ending up on the Cult blacklist and is willing to help anyone who can keep them off the Rat Thing's menu.

Option Three: The Fat Man Returns. It gets worse. The shop regular didn't just correspond with Ms. Bloomsbury and say a few indiscreet things. They went to a Blue Show, with disastrous results. It turns out that the regular is absolutely the last person who ought to go to a Blue Show and see its subliminal imagery. The regular's innate Magickal skill, such as it is, plus the Son's ability, plus the Mythos in the Show all adds up to a very bad night, and it hastened the Son's conversion to an Avatar of Y'Golonac. This wasn't something the Keirecheires wanted. Now it has a missing Son to deal with, an unwelcome breach of secrecy, and a particularly messy event to cover up. If only there was some convenient scapegoat to blame all this on ...

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

The Tin Man (Bookhounds of London)

Newmarket has over fifty horse training stables, two large racetracks, the Rowley Mile and the July Course, and one of the most extensive and prestigious horse training grounds in the world.[4] The town is home to over 3,500 racehorses, and it is estimated that one in every three local jobs is related to horse racing ...

Hamilton Stud Lane, on the Exening Road, is the haunt of Fred Archer, the great jockey, who died in 1886 aged 29. He is also thought to ride on the race-course, and to have caused several horses to shy or stumble during a race ... Haunted Britain, Antony D. Hippisley Coxe 

The next day, Monday 8 November 1886, he was at his residence, Falmouth House, Newmarket, under medical supervision. About 2.25pm his sister, Mrs Colman, visited him in his room and he asked her to send the nurse away. Colman was looking out of the window when Archer got out of bed. She then heard him say "Are they coming?" and saw he had the gun in his hand. She sprang towards him, and while she was struggling with him, he put the gun in his mouth and fired the revolver. He died bleeding in her arms, the bullet having passed out of the back of his neck. The doctor was on the scene very quickly and pronounced him dead ... He was buried in Newmarket cemetery on 12 November ... Some of his effects are now on display at the National Horseracing Museum, including the gun with which he shot himself ... News of Archer's death reached far beyond racing. In London, special editions of the evening newspapers were issued, with crowds queuing in Fleet Street to buy them, and omnibuses stopped to allow commuters to read the billboards. ... 

In which an unscrupulous gambler uses a dead jockey to win Newmarket and unwittingly unleashes horror.

Newmarket in Suffolk is horseracing's Vatican. Its jockeys and horses are worshipped, and Fred Archer's name still rings out long after his suicide. The Classics - 2000 Guineas Stakes, 1000 Guineas Stakes, the Oaks, the Derby, the St Leger - are world-renowned, and have been going for decades, in some cases centuries. Someone wins that, and their name is made. Leaving aside the bountiful financial rewards, of course. 

Fred Archer took them all.

He was known to be rich and reputed to be a miser - hence the name Tin Man, as in Tin, slang for money. Not, say, slang for lacking empathy, although it might be fair to say Archer had a bit of that problem. 

Nobody knows what Archer meant by 'are they coming?' though there are plenty of theories. In this scenario, the assumption is that there's some kind of Mythos context, though the exact meaning is left deliberately vague.

For purpose of this storyline, I'm going to use a fictional version of The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, a sister publication to the Illustrated London News. The Sporting and Dramatic was first published in 1874. Archer would have read it and there would have been a special edition published upon his death.

The Tin Man

One of the Hounds' regulars is pursuing copies of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic, with intensity. It's not clear why. Nor is it entirely clear which one they want. It's as if they don't know themselves, but they're willing to pay almost any price. 

In its day it was a weekly paper. As might be guessed from the title it isn't always about sports; even Agatha Christie appeared in it, back in 1929. This means copies can be had from those interested in the theatre and dramatic arts as well as racing enthusiasts. The British Library is also known to have a complete set. 

Judging by the regular's buying habits, it seems they're only interested in editions published in 1885 or prior, and they're not interested in anything published before 1880. That leaves a five-year window. Further investigation (Oral History, Reassurance, Flattery, Art History, History) indicates the regular is only interested in those papers in which Fred Archer appears. Given Archer's talents, he appears in multiple editions. Archer won the Derby, the Oaks, 1000 Guineas, 2000 Guineas and St. Leger in that period. Not counting overseas victories at the Grand Prix de Paris or the Prix du Jockey Club. 

In fact, riding the horse Melton, he took both the Derby and the St. Leger in the same year, 1885. Melton went to stud eventually and died in 1910, at the ripe old age of 28. By that point Melton had outlived Archer by 14 years. They both died in November; Archer in November 1886, Melton in November 1910.

If the Hounds pursue this line, they discover that the regular has discovered there's a racing cheat using Mythos Magick to make a gambling fortune and relying on Archer's ghost to do it. The regular wants in on the deal and enlists the Hounds to help them. All the regular knows for sure is that the cheat, a fellow named Auburn Salt, is using the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic to do it, but the regular doesn't know which edition, which is why the regular's chasing up any and all copies they can get their hands on.

Option One: Idle Hands. Salt is a member in good standing of the Devouring Hands, or Keirecheires. Technically he's not a full-fledged member; he's a Son, following one of the cultists based in Doncaster. However, the expenses of being a Son are catching up with Salt and Salt thinks he's found a foolproof means of guaranteeing income. Salt is using techniques borrowed from his Father and copies of the Sporting and Dramatic as well as a horse sired by Melton to assure himself of winnings at those same races Archer triumphed in back in 1885. What Salt doesn't appreciate is that unsanctioned use of Keirecheires techniques will earn him the ire of his Father, and the stern, punishing hands of the Cult.

Option Two: Dead Horse. Salt is Archer, reincarnate. He has the same look, same lean, tall build, and would be a rider himself, were it not for the fact that horses are terrified of him. Salt doesn't understand whether he's actually Archer back from the dead or simply bears a resemblance, and he doesn't care. What he does care about is money. He's cultivated his appearance and adapted his personality to be as much like Archer as possible and has gathered together a small group of like-minded occult types with one goal in mind: take the Derby and the St. Leger. What Salt doesn't appreciate is that his actions have raised the actual Archer, whose ghost is now causing havoc. Or perhaps he does know and doesn't care.

Option Three: Melton Resurgent. Once, long ago, the jockey Archer found himself indebted to the kind of Mythos forces you don't want in your life. It was thanks to this influence that he was so successful, relying on a totem he kept near him at all times to win the day. At least, so says the horse breeder Auburn Salt, who has a colt spawned by Melton in his stables. Salt is doing everything in his power to ensure that his colt, Balfour, performs just as well as Melton did, but for that to happen Salt needs to recreate the totem Archer made. Salt isn't entirely sure how to do that, and his attempts are only causing problems for anyone and everyone near Salt's stables. Not that Salt cares, so long as he races a reincarnate Melton.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Dungeons and Dragons DMG, Monster Manual 2025

A while back I posted my thoughts on the new PHB release, and I wasn’t thrilled. I said at the time that it “feels as if there's not as much there” and that in spite of its increased length there didn’t seem to be as much going on under the hood.

I also said I would have to reserve judgement until I saw the DMG.

Well, that proved prophetic, because I didn’t see the DMG for months after my initial purchase. There was a shipping delay followed by an unexpected cancellation followed by … I’m not sure what, actually. But it meant more delay. I picked up the Monster Manual before I saw the DMG. Not entirely by choice, but I figured since it was on offer I ought to give it a go.

What do I think?

Ehhhhhhh … pass.

As with the PHB, there’s more stuff on offer. Pages of it. The previous edition clocked in at 320 pages, more or less. This one has 60 extra pages of new material. About 20 pages of that is devoted to Bastions, a new concept for this edition, and another 20 pages or so are maps of various generic areas - Barrow Crypt, Crossroads Village, Spooky House, that sort of thing. No monster lists or anything like that. Those are for the Monster Manual, which is packed full of everything that walks, crawls and flies. 

Factor in the various trackers, each with their own page, and you've got the bulk of the new material in the DMG.

Very little of it intrigues me.

The only bit that I find genuinely useful is the collection of trackers. I don’t care which edition of Dungeons and Dragons I play, I’m swiping those. But I don’t think I paid north of $60 per book for a set of trackers I could pick up for free from teh internets. Or create on my own with a modicum of artistic skill, come to that.

The bit about Bastions seems a little over-the-top. Apart from anything else, the whole point of adventuring is to go on an adventure. To leave the comforts of home behind and defy dragons, or cleave goblin chieftains in twain, befuddle ogres till they turn to stone by dawn's early light, that kind of thing. Not to spend however many hours in the day keeping track of all the things going on at the hobbit hole I left behind. I don’t mind the concept so much as the execution. This starts at what level, now? 5th? Really? For why? At 5th they've just this minute become heroes, not homebodies!

The Monster Manual is by far the best item in the bunch. Its reorganization of everything alphabetically is a nice touch, and for once the mantra ‘more stuff!’ pays off with, well, more stuff. All sorts of monster entries packed in like happy little sardines, and the stat blocks are sufficiently generic that you could probably mix & match these creatures with the previous edition and suffer no pain. There are probably some changes that might affect CR. Nothing I choose to worry about.

Besides, when in doubt I can always just dip into Mordekainen’s or Volo’s or any of the other books and use their stuff instead.

I mentioned the art last time so I suppose I should go into it again. Worth repeating: not an artist, not trained to appreciate art. But as with the PHB there isn't much here that doesn't seem generic, and the bits that don't seem generic feel as if they were lifted bodily from previous products. Little of it feels inspiring, or interesting enough to be worth more than a glance. Including a hexmap of what I think must be the Forgotten Realms is a nice touch. I'd have to tear it out of the book to be certain that's what it is. A handy resource, if so.

I’m going to be playing the game with some new gamers soon. I think I mentioned the play I’m performing? Tonight's the last night, as I write this; by the time I publish the cast party will have come and gone, leaving me exhausted. I shall break legs. Well, two of the cast are keen to play and I said I’d be happy to run a game for them. There’s a local venue where space can be rented for a fee, so we’ve booked a spot. One of them is so keen to play that she had already grabbed a copy of the previous PHB, not realizing that there was a new one. She and her husband are busy devising schemes and PCs as I type this.

When I mentioned that there was a new edition, she wanted to look at it.

Seldom have I seen a more sour expression. 

She criticized the art right away. It didn’t look anything like the art in the previous edition. Nothing like as inspiring, as heroic, or as interesting. Next it was the rules. Too many rules, too confusing. She put it aside after half an hour; not interested.

We’ll be using the previous edition in our game. 

For me, I’m not in any rush to pick up any other book in the new version. Not that I was ever going to be in a hurry to grab up, say, the Forgotten Realms material. But still. I said a while back now that the only reason I got back into this game was because of Ravenloft. That creaky old Gothic mansion was my inspiration, my guiding star.

I can play Ravenloft in the old edition.

I will. 

Insects (Bookhounds)

 

Behold its antique glory.

First purchased in the early 1900s by a retiring Military officer who was coming to Bermuda to take up a Colonial job, later to live out his days in the subtropics, it has been in the same family ever since. Until now. The owners are going to the UK to be closer to their kids, the cost of shipping was exorbitant, the kids didn't want it, and I said that if their choice was between taking it to the dump or giving it to me, give it to me.

They did.

See, down here, antiques are not prized. Ironically, we have too many of them. Not that the island's a hotbed of things that would make the antiques roadshow crew weep with joy, no no. These are the midlevel items. The decent repair stuff, the slightly dinged, the much-loved. The local National Trust, which looks after old homes and heritage, is always overwhelmed with 'gifts' from people who can't bear to see granny's old whatsit go to the great furniture repository in the sky but who don't want to keep it themselves. The Trust hasn't the heart to tell them that granny's old whatsit is a fairly mediocre example of the brand.

However, I've wanted one of these for a while, because of our insect problem.

I like books. I think you know that by now. I do not like cockroaches, but I have them anyway - not by choice, mark you. Other insects too, for that matter. Some of whom are really far too fond of antiquated binding. Many's the time I've brought home something from the Argosy, put it down somewhere for a day or two, and found a hole chewed in it. See, the little beggars love them some leathery or leather-adjacent goodness, particularly if it's seasoned with dried-out bookbinding glue or old sinews.

There's a couple ways of combating this. A dedicated extermination campaign, for example. More difficult than you'd think, even with the off-brand and probably illegal insecticides you can get in the islands. Some form of internal climate control to reduce humidity and discourage insect activity, which does work but tends only to be available to the ungodly rich, since electricity on that scale costs a bundle.

Or one of these bad boys. 

Removing the books to a place where the insects can't get at them is great. Traditionally I've moved books that might be vulnerable to a place in the house I don't use for anything else; roaches tend to prefer living close to humans, probably because we leave crumbs and other goodies lying around. Now I can start putting the vulnerable items behind a thick glass door. 

It's not a perfect system. There's still risk involved. But it does work, or at least it works better than leaving things out in the open on an uncovered shelf.

There are all kinds of insects that eat books. I'm personally fond of the deathwatch beetle, that beloved staple of old homes and old ghost stories. Their distinctive tapping or ticking noise used to attract mates is what gives them their name. Ghost tradition has it that the knocking is a harbinger of death, and in old books like Bluenose Ghosts you can find ghastly tales of soft knocking on the door from hands that aren't hands - three of those, and you're sure to die within the year. 

Ironically there is biological precedent. The deathwatch beetle has a three-tap rhythm. Males usually tap first, and females tap only in response to males. A female responds within 2 seconds of a male tap. After the female responds, a male will tap again from 2 to 30 seconds later. 

Three ghost knocks.

When I was still in the building surveying trade I was assured that the deathwatch was on its way down the dodo's path, due to lack of available foodstuff. They like wooden wainscoting and similar things, which were prevalent in housing before the second world war but which died out with the modern building boom. Whether that's true or not I couldn't tell you, but that's what we were told.

Bookhounds touches on the subject of insect attacks but doesn't go that far. However, if worms which gnaw on wizards' corpses grow to become wizard themselves, it stands to reason that insects which gnaw on Mythos texts grow to be something hidjeous and vile. 

From which:

Deathwatch

Your store's staff are about to go on strike.

They claim to be terrified of the ghost knocks. Some maleficent entity must have come in the shop after the last big book-buying spree, they say, and ever since it's been haunting the place. Its knocking noise is causing a furor. 

That's not all it's causing. The Hounds notice that some of their most important texts are suffering insect damage. It's getting pretty bad, enough that the shop may suffer a Reverse. You can't advertise a copy of the King In Yellow as calf-bound first edition excellent condition if some little swine has nibbled chunks out of that binding. That brings it down to Reading Copy level pretty damn quick, with consequent knock-on to the price. 

Something Must Be Done.

What?

Option One: Crawling Chaos. It's not deathwatch, though it certainly sounds like deathwatch. It's actually Brood of Ehiort, which came in on the back of a house clearance in which texts beloved of the Severn Valley Cult were purchased. There aren't enough of them to constitute a simulacrum but more and more are breeding all the time. Left unchecked, eventually a pale man will form. Once that pale man forms it will start constructing a Fane in some forgotten part of the shop or basement, and soon after that it will start to contact other Brood in the area. A vast swarm could eventually gather ...

Option Two: Roach Swarm. A peculiar kind of revenant haunts the shop. It can only act through roaches, and it attracts roaches by the dozen. There are only a few of them for now, but they're forming peculiar patterns when they're on the march, and their blood leaves stains on the walls that are uncomfortable to look on. Time to start scrubbing the walls down and getting out the Blast-It bug repellent. Otherwise those roaches will take over the place, and that peculiar chant the staff are repeating will become more than just an earworm ...

Option Three: Enemy Action. This isn't an insect problem. It's a rival bookstore problem. Someone from a competing shop is dealing with its insect issues by making them march across to the Hound's shop. Every so often a staff member from the rival comes to the Hound's place and discreetly disgorges another batch. Perhaps they do this Great-Escape style by having the bugs hid up their trouser cuffs, or perhaps they leave a tainted book on the shelf like a calf-bound Trojan Horse. Either way, that shop's problem will soon become the Hound's problem, unless they take action.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Many Mansions - Miskatonic Repository

This week's post comes to you from a state of exhaustion.

I've been working on a play for the past (I have forgotten how many) weeks and we unexpectedly lost a cast member this Thursday gone, so we're starting off on the back foot. Her replacement's working out but it's still a slog at the end and I shall not be sorry when opening night has come and gone.

However!

I've been working on a Many Mansions series to be published via the Miskatonic Repository and thought it time to boost the signal by posting about it.

There are three scenarios:

In Memoriam - In which the investigators may attend a funeral in a church that does not yet exist.

When Tides Are Right - In which the investigators may find themselves adrift on Pilot Island.

Your Number, Please - In which our protagonists chase up rumors of a fault on the telephone line.

All of these stories take place in Kingsport, South Shore, in the 1920s. It's part ghost story, part Dreamlands, with a dash of Jacob's Ladder thrown in for fun - and if you recognize that film reference then you know where this is all going.

Part of this will be recognizable to those of you who followed the Many Mansions posts a while back. This is an extension of that concept. It's written for Call, not Trail. 

I don't want to beat you down with references and trivia since the whole point of a teaser post is to, well, tease (you naughty thing, you). However, since we're here, let me tell you a bit about South Shore and the Underwood Park cemetery, where the action takes place.

South Shore

The Many Mansions scenarios all take place in Kingsport and are focused on Kingsport’s South Shore neighbourhood.

South Shore is mostly residential with a smattering of tourist businesses. Some of Kingsport’s oldest, most historically significant places are in South Shore. 

The oldest part of South Shore is that section which is closest to the sea proper. Merchants and families of merchants used to sit atop their houses’ sea-facing walks and cupolas, watching activity in the harbour. 

The most modern sections, built in the mid-1800s or later, are towards the south of South Shore. These are often large, with walled gardens, and are some of the more expensive pieces of real estate in Kingsport. 

It’s very rare to find a house in South Shore built later than 1900.

As this is a section popular with tourists, street lighting is more common and better maintained here that other sections of Kingsport. The roads tend to be paved and in good repair, often with modern sidewalks. Cars are often seen here, and there are plenty of places where interested persons can rent pedal cycles.

The public wharves and Coast Guard station are in South Shore, as is the rather exclusive Stratton Yacht Club. While there are some fishers that operate out of South Shore most of them are in Harbourside, along the Water Street wharves. The boats that call South Shore home tend to be more expensive, delicate creatures, not workhorse fishing vessels. 

1. You’ll find more out-of-towners in South Shore than anywhere else in Kingsport. It’s not uncommon to hear refined French, Russian or German spoken; refugees from war-torn Europe with money in their pockets.
2. There are plenty of ghost stories in South Shore but most of them are gaudied up for the tourists. The most gruesome centre on Underwood Park cemetery, though that’s probably because most of the graves and tombs there are the over-elaborate and evocative kind favoured by wealthy, lachrymose mourners. 
3. Lawyer Charles Bompas has his offices in a grand-looking building on Beach Street, not far from the Coast Guard station. He deals mainly in real estate disputes and wills and is well-regarded, if not well-liked.
4. Rome: nearly every house in South Shore has a witch ball hanging in the window. These small glass balls are supposed to ward off evil. At night, at about one in the morning, they glow with a peculiar greenish light and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that something inside the ball is peering out. SAN 0/1 penalty.

Underwood Park

This is one of the most recent cemeteries in Kingsport; the others are much older, but for the most part are no longer used. Underwood is practically the only cemetery in town with empty plots.

The cemetery is unfenced and well-maintained. Its groundskeeper and stonecutter is old George Cotton, who lives in a cottage nearby. Old George knows almost everything there is to know about Underwood; he was born the year the cemetery was founded and grew up alongside it. His father Hepson Cotton was the first groundskeeper. 

Underwood Park was created by the Underwood family back in the mid-1800s. The Underwood family vault is one of the grandest in the cemetery and was the first ever built. One of the very earliest photographs of Kingsport features the Underwood vault, mid-construction.

The Underwoods wanted a cemetery befitting them and made sure it would be sizeable, verdant, and visible. They took land from the Read House to build it, making sure that Thomas Read would have to look out over their cemetery, at their vault, for as long as he lived. 

Thomas Read is not buried at Underwood. Nobody knows where his corpse lies.

1. Underwood is overstuffed with gaudy memorials. Weeping angels, somnolent cherubs, elaborate masonry and saccharine epitaphs prevail.
2. Underwood’s trails are well-marked and wide, but it’s still possible to get lost in them. Old George has to rescue tourists now and again, who find themselves at a loss how to get out of Underwood. 
3. Underwood has plenty of ghost stories and Old George knows them all. Once a year at all-Hallow’s Eve, Old George hosts a nighttime storytelling session out at the Underwood vault. Invitation only, and Old George is quite particular. Money doesn’t buy you entrance; Old George has to like you.
4. Rome: Those who go into Underwood at night say that the cemetery is much larger then than it appears during the day. Those who go there when the moon is full say that, if you stand at the Underwood Vault and look out over South Shore, you see a completely different, alien Kingsport. SAN 0/1D2 penalty at night, rising to 1/1D4 at a full moon.

That's it for this week! Enjoy!

Heath Robinson Redux (Night's Black Agents, Dracula Dossier)

Once upon I time I talked about Heath Robinson Assassination, using reporting on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as an example.

I based my discussion on a Guardian newspaper article which said:

“The operation was very complex and took place using electronic devices, and no one was present at the scene,” [Ali Shamkhani, secretary for Iran's supreme national security council] told Iranian media ...

A [Fars news agency] report said Fakhrizadeh and his wife were travelling in a bulletproof car along with three vehicles for bodyguards when gunfire hit his car. Fakhrizadeh exited the car to check the damage, the report said, speculating that he may have thought he had hit something.

“At this moment, from a Nissan car that was stopped 150 metres away from the martyr’s car, several shots were fired at the martyr from an automatic remote-controlled machine gun,” the [Fars] report said, adding that one bullet hit his back.

“Moments later, the same stopped Nissan exploded,” it said, adding that the owner of the car, which it did not identify, had left the country a month ago. It said the weapons may have been controlled by satellite.

The Iranian state-owned broadcaster Press TV cited unidentified “informed sources” as saying remnants from the attack showed Israeli arms had been used to kill Fakhrizadeh.

Turns out, some of this was a load of old hooey.

I’ve been listening to The Rest Is Classified podcast, part of the Goalhanger family of podcasts, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in spycraft. Night’s Black Agents players and Directors should binge this, but their recent MKUltra discussion will interest Delta Green folks too.

From the Classified discussion, I discovered a few interesting facts.  

Among them:

• Fakhrizadeh was not driving a bulletproof car. He was in his own car which was, in fact, the Nissan mentioned in the article. It wasn’t protected in any way; it was a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill, please-shoot-me-full-of-holes Nissan.
• Fakhrizadeh did not get out of the car. He was shot while driving, and fell out of the car, possibly trying to take cover. At that point he was seriously injured but not dead; the killing shots came directly afterward.
• The explosion that destroyed the Israeli vehicle, which was intended to destroy all the evidence, didn’t work as intended. The machine gun survived more or less intact, or at least intact enough to be identified as a Belgian FN MAG general purpose machine gun – an old warhorse. That puppy’s been around, in one form or another, since the late 1950s.
• The Heath Robinson machinery was smuggled in over a lengthy period, probably by people who didn’t know what they were carrying. Classified alleges that several people had been charged with smuggling in relation to this attack. 

Officially, nobody knows who did it, though judging by the comments made on Classified there doesn’t seem to be much doubt as to who did what to whom.

Honestly? A lot of this reminded me of the preamble in the Forsythe novel The Day of the Jackal, which describes an attempt on the life of General de Gaulle. Particularly the description of the kill point, with one car out in advance spying on approaching vehicles to see if Fakhrizadeh was coming, while the kill team lies in wait further down the road. 

The de Gaulle shooting was the Petit-Clamart attack of 22 August 1962, where the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) signaler was supposed to give the alert by waving a newspaper. At which point the gunmen further down the road were to take action. However, the whole thing went wrong when fading daylight made seeing the newspaper difficult. This delayed the shooting by a vital few seconds, allowing de Gaulle’s vehicle to slip past – though not unscathed.

It turns out, if Classified is to be believed, that the Fakhrizadeh shooting nearly came undone thanks to a similar problem, though this time it was distance, not fading light, that proved problematic. Thanks to the distance between the shooter and the kill site, the remote shooter faced a time lag of a few fractions of a second between the signal to shoot and the shot itself, which in turn affected accuracy. AI had to be used to solve the computational problem, allowing the instruction and the shot to happen simultaneously.

Still, consider: Petit-Clamart involved at least 12 people on the day, not including support staff and sympathizers, of whom 15 total were arrested. This includes the leader Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, who was the only one whose sentence of death was carried out. This was a devastating blow to the OAS, which didn't survive past 1963.

This is a significant difference from the Fakhrizadeh killing. In that attack, there were no operatives on the ground, either at the spotter car or the shooter. The whole thing was done remotely. We don't even know who was at the trigger, who the spotters were.

However, to my mind the biggest difference by far between the two assassinations was that de Gaulle was driven by a professional, Gendarme Francis Marroux, whose skills made the difference on the day. Fakhrizadeh insisted on driving himself. That may have been a fatal mistake.  

So! Some of my comments in the previous article are comprehensively disproved. Though I did rely rather too much on one source, which was my error. Turns out the source was talking out of his hat. 

Does any of this change the game advice I gave concerning Heath Robinson Assassination, Distance Shooter and Difficulty assessment? Not really. The advice stands. 

However, since we're here:

Uncover the Shooter

An important target (eg. Edom Duke) has been assassinated, by someone using a specially built, remote-targeted rifle. The target's organization is in an uproar, and the agents are brought in to find out who it was that carried out the attack.

For complete success, the agents need to discover both the organization that sponsored the attack, and the shooter. Partial success means uncovering the organization, but not the shooter. 

The assassination took place in public in a major European public place (eg. on the steps of Westminster Abbey, or in St. Mark's Square, Venice) and was witnessed by several people, including the target's bodyguards. An explosion took place seconds later which eliminated much of the evidence. 

Tradecraft indicates there are perhaps half-a-dozen freelancers, world-wide, capable of carrying out the attack, all of them Wire Rats. Assuming, of course, that the attack was carried out by a freelancer.

Military Science identifies the type of rifle used, despite the explosion. It's a Russian SVD which, in combination with the Tradecraft clue, narrows down the suspect list to two, assuming it's a freelancer. Most Wire Rats would use different tech.

Notice or Forensic Pathology indicates that the target was chemically dosed with an agent that created what amounts to a glowing bullseye, invisible to the human eye, to assist targeting. Occult knows that the substance used to create this target is an alchemical substance favored by some Russian Satanic groups. This narrows the freelancer list to one.

It was:

Option One: CIA. The killing was orchestrated by Find Forever, who mimicked the kill style of a particular Russian asset to throw shade on the Litsky Brava Russian criminal group. Find Forever is playing a Yojimbo Option; it wants the targeted side to start fighting with the Litsky Brava, at which point Find Forever will offer its services against the Russian threat.

Option Two: Alraune/Unternehmen Braun The killing was orchestrated by a German-based group, either the German vampire program or the deathless Alraune, and whoever it was used an old Rote Armee Fraktion asset to do it. The Red Army shooter has been around since the 1960s but is forever updating their methods; back in the day, its codename was Trapdoor Spider. The killing was an attempt to remove what the targeting organization sees as a nuisance. 

Option Three: Edom. The killing was orchestrated by Britain's vampire program, to take out an important Conspiracy target - though the agents may not know that the target was, secretly or otherwise, in the Conspiracy's pay. Edom hired an outsider to pull off the hit as it didn't want anything left behind that might allow the target's organization to work out who did it. The shooter is a former Turkish asset who wants enough money to retire, and who doesn't realize that Edom's bank accounts aren't as bottomless as they've been led to believe. This lack of funding may tempt the Wire Rat to betray his paymasters, at a crucial juncture.

That's it from me! Enjoy.