Blocks (NBA, Dracula Dossier)

Without wishing to post private business, things at my end got very complicated this week. Still processing. This will be a short post.

From the main book:

[Blocks are] something that blocks the passage, attack, or influence of a vampire. It may be an absolute bar, or she may be able to penetrate it with a successful Aberrance test against Difficulty 8. Penetrating a block may still do damage: +1 per incident, or per round spent across the block. Many banes (fire, holy water, iron, sunlight) also act as blocks.

 Fright Night (1985)

Two of the most famous Blocks are running water and crossing the threshold. Some might be forgiven for thinking that vampires have peculiar tastes.

Rivers and streams have a long body of folklore, predating written history. We sometimes find old remnants of these practices, sacrifices to the river gods. In Greek lore you might sacrifice to the river spirit to ensure safe crossing for your troops or give up something valuable to you in exchange for magical favors. You could enchant items in rivers for future use; if you knew the right ritual, you could bathe a silver coin in that running water and turn it into a lucky piece.

Thresholds are the boundary between the house, which is protected by house spirits, sometimes called genius loci. The Romans would maintain regular sacrifice to their house spirits to ensure good fortune. You hear echoes of that belief in stories about pixies, imps and similar who will work tirelessly for the family but which can take offence and leave, say, if someone gives them new clothes or new shoes. People would bury black cats in the walls of a new-built house, or put a penny under the hearthstone before it was laid. I know of at least two local examples of someone burying kinfolk under or near the front porch of the house. In one of those examples, the bodies were unearthed by accident when a future owner decided to lay some new plumbing. Now, whether they did that out of some folk memory or just to keep their loved ones close is an open question. But if you assume that entombing a cat in the foundations can give you protection and luck, how much more potent would a person be?

All of which to say. it's not the vampire who has peculiar tastes. The vampire knows what we have forgotten; that there's something in that river, in that building, which prevents them gaining access. To the vampire, that thing, whatever it may be, is probably as visible as a brick wall would be to us. If the Block is being caused by spirits or ghosts, the vampire can see those spirits or ghosts. 

Which suggests that the vampire can, if so inclined, bypass those blocks. If they really work at it.

It makes sense that the Block means something more to vampires than a simple wall, some supernatural version of the Go To Jail monopoly card. Or, in NBA terminology, some Mutant or Satanic version.

With all that in mind, and borrowing from the main book:

[Satanic] This is a full-blooded vampire, a descendant of Vlad the Impaler. Blocks: wild roses.

Evocative, but why?

It's said that when the Virgin Mary kissed a white rose it blushed and turned red, creating the first red rose. When the infant Zoroaster was placed on burning logs in an attempt to kill him, they turned into a bed of roses. Bacchus, when chasing a nymph, is supposed to have been blocked by a wall of thorns which he turned into a wall of roses, and then back into a wall of thorns when it suited him.

Given we're talking Satanic, the Virgin Mary connection seems the most suitable. The rose and its thorns are beloved of the Virgin Mary. When the vampire sees this plant it doesn't see a simple rose. It sees the Virgin.

Presumably there's something about the cultivation process which robs the rose of this association. So roses grown for a flower shop wouldn't do. But perhaps a rose bush encouraged to grow along the wall of, say, a convent, would, inasmuch as the roses aren't cultivated or controlled, just allowed to grow in a particular location.

[Alien] Fully awakened, an alien stone is a being of unfathomable power, potentially capable of altering gravity and space-time within tens of miles. Blocks:  chaotic streams (running water, random charge fluctuations, anything else that cannot be perceived as a whole. 

Again, evocative, but there are plenty of things that cannot be perceived as a whole. Oxygen, for instance. I'm sitting in a ton of it right now. I can't see it, and I can't perceive the full extent of it.

Would a running hose be sufficient to block an alien vampire? 

What even is a random charge fluctuation, in-game? Is this like the TV version of an electrical charge, all blue lights and crackly noises? Are we just talking static electricity? Could you Block an alien vampire by wandering around in a lightning storm?

The text suggests that they 'created' humans in their image, a result of early contact between the stones and our distant soon-to-be-intelligent ancestors. The text also suggests that perceiving their own perception sets up a feedback loop, trapping them in their own consciousness. I would be tempted to suggest that something like running water works in the same way; it forces them to perceive their own perception. Water reflects, after all. Running water also reflects, just not in a way easily understood by the onlooker. This would make something like the alien stone, to whom perception is all, frantic, their 'minds' constantly racing in an attempt to understand the thing it is 'seeing.'

Anyway, that's as far as I care to go this week. 

Next week, more stuff! 

Zero Company and Villainy (RPG All)

 

Zero Company final trailer

I've never been a huge Star Wars fan. Saw the original when it came out, loved the first three films, and after that just dropped off the rock. Gameplay-wise, I've never enjoyed shooters and flight sims only interest me if it's Great War biplanes stuff, so the Star Wars franchise never caught my attention.

However, I am an X-Com fan. 

When people started describing Zero Company as X-Com but in the Star Wars universe, I was on board.

This isn't Not Quite Review Corner so I shan't go into the bits and bobs, except to say that there isn't as much X-Com here as I'd hoped and the game overall feels as if they had a lot of ideas and not much execution. Plus, for a hero-based game, no romance options, which seems a little boneheaded. Even X-Com's Chimera Squad, which this closely resembles, hinted at relationships between the characters. The closest Zero Company gets to this is Bennic's puppy dog eyes. 

No, I want to talk about villains this time out. 

Once upon a time I said:    

The problem with villains is, too often they exist only to do one thing: be foiled by the player characters. Villains are punching bags, paper Nazis, colorful targets that sit on the far end of the shooting range and never shoot back, or at least not accurately. There’s nothing unique about them, nothing that makes the players think ‘I want to know more about this guy.’ If the players don’t feel engaged by the villain, they won’t respect him, and at that point the whole thing falls flat ... Consider this tactic, when designing your own villains. Find out what they want, what they fear people will find out about them, what they’re prepared to kill for. 

Zero Company has this problem in spades. 

Star Wars in general has a villain problem, to be honest. The setting doesn't have that many honest-to-God villains and, when it finds one, it re-uses that character again and again till whatever personality they once had has lost all meaning.

Fathom is the worst example of this. The definition of a punching bag. I have no idea what she wants or why she wants it. I know she's doing Bad Things and, as the hero of the series, I have a vested interest in stopping Bad Things. 

She has subordinates, Cultists. I have no idea what they want. Or why they let themselves get infected with this plague that seems to be the McGuffin of the narrative. It gives them cool powers and cool powers make the world go round, so here we are.

Let's design a cult. I haven't done that for a while.

Cults recruit on broadly the same principles as spies. They go MICE - money, ideology, coercion, ego. 

Cults, like OPFOR, have the same important characteristics:

1. Power, appropriate to their function within the narrative.
2. Goals.
3. Assets, to be used to achieve their goals.

Let's say for the sake of it that this particular cult got its start in a card game during the Great War.

Six young men sat in a bunker playing cards, waiting for orders. The game intensified. All eyes were on it. The stakes went as high as they possibly could. Then, at the moment of revelation, enemy shelling obliterated the bunker, and only one of those men survives.

That man is convinced that providence spared him only because the game wasn't over, and if it ever ended somehow, at that moment he'd die. 

He collected all the playing cards used in the game. The only one missing was one of the aces; he has no idea what happened to it, but he's convinced it's still out there. 

That man became the nucleus of a peculiar cult: the Players. 

It started within his unit. Just a few listeners to his crazy stories. They didn't take him too seriously, but it was a fun story and he told it well. Then they saw what happened next, how he dodged every bullet, bit of shrapnel or bomb. It was uncanny. Risks that would have killed a normal person, he survived. He started collecting medals, getting promotions. Soon he was in command of the company, and those few listeners stuck to him like glue, certain that whatever luck had attached to him would benefit them too, if they were loyal.

If. 

Living can go to your head. A man can be awarded medals, do remarkable deeds, but if there's no moral compass, no center - and in this case whatever was there before soon eroded to nothing - a man can be convinced the world exists to benefit him and him alone. 

After the war the hero went home again, followed by a few true believers. Old soldiers convinced their commander could do no wrong, utterly certain that the same luck which dogged his heels in wartime would follow him devotedly in peace. 

They were the first Players.

Now the former commander has set up a gambling operation in [select big city]. The Players are part of that operation, all sharing the same Ideology. Others drawn into the cult come in because of Money or Ego. Either they want what the cult seems to have (financial success) or they think they have what it takes to be winners (ego).

The commander has set up a household god totem somewhere in the gambling operation. It might be in his offices or somewhere close by, but it can't be outside the gambling house/casino. The body of this household god is trench art, made of old shell casings and bits of bone. Cordite stench clings to it. 

The commander believes he is becoming a vampiric entity and is pondering the utility of blood sacrifice. It's appealing. He has his eye on a couple luscious young things who might do. His reasoning is, it was blood sacrifice that got him this far, but those deaths can only power so much. If there is a way of living forever by consuming the lives of others, well ... 

He thinks he has five lives' worth of immortality juice right now: the five who died before that card game ended. But he doesn't know what five lives' worth is, really. Can it be measured in decades, years? Months? Does that mean he can be killed five times before the end and, if so, how many lives did he use up during the War?

The two recruitment vectors are the signature features of the cult: Money, and Ego. In any encounter with the cult or its supporters, those two factors are always evident. They show off all the trappings of wealth, or they inflate the ego of their victims.

The cult's Power comes from money and all that it will buy. It doesn't have legions of soldiers (though its core membership have military experience) and any expertise (safecrackers, pickpockets, card sharps and so on) are hired help. The experts might be seduced into the cult, but they don't start off as recruits nor are they loyal to the commander.

It has a private Goal and a public one. 

The private goal is to find a way to turn the commander into a vampire. Not all the Players are briefed on this goal; the commander is keeping it close to the chest. Thefts, research, the hiring of occult experts are all geared towards this private goal.

The public goal is to increase the status of the commander and, by extension, the Players. Political and economic power, mostly. If that means aligning with certain groups (eg. the Fascists) then that's what they will do. This power feeds the household totem, which in turn gives its benefits to the Players, increasing their luck, their ability.

The cult's assets include the gambling house/casino, a host of civilian gamblers and other low-level fodder, the Players (the main core of whom are ex-military) and any experts they might hire with the money the casino generates.

Now, the commander. What does he want, what does he fear people will find out about him, what is he prepared to kill for?

The commander wants immortality. Life is sweet: the War taught him that. He wants it all, every last drop. He likes being in charge of a casino, having loyal followers, and the Players are his friends. He would dispose of it all, including the Players, in a heartbeat if it meant he got to live.

He fears that missing card. It's out there, somewhere. Constant appeals to the household totem have not told him where it is. He fears that someone will find out his weakness, uncover that missing card, and put an end to him by finishing the game. He keeps all the other cards locked away in a safe, and if someone were to steal those cards he would become frantic.  

He's prepared to kill for immortality. It doesn't matter who he kills. It could be a baby in the cradle, but if killing that baby would give him even another decade of guaranteed life, he'd slaughter it without a second thought. 

I've deliberately not mentioned locations or settings. Obviously, this would work well in a setting after the Great War, so Trail of Cthulhu, Call, Bookhounds and so on, but it could as easily be made to work in a setting outside Earth - Eversink, say. You'd need to change little. Fireballs rather than shellfire, that kind of thing. Or Paris, rather than London, if you'd rather make this Dreamhounds than Bookhounds. Cairo, and make the commander a seeker into Egyptian promises of immortality, for a Tombhounds take.

It's your Cult.

Vitaï Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

Enjoy!

Guy Fawkes Day (Bookhounds)

 

Image taken from Gutenberg Holidays & Happy Days, HAMISH HENDRY

It's a bank holiday weekend and lightning is flashing outside, which makes me think of fireworks and the likelihood the electricity is about to go out.

With that in mind, a quick Bookhounds seed.

Remember, remember!

The fifth of November,

The Gunpowder treason and plot;

There is no reason

Why the Gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot!

From Wikipedia:

Bonfires were accompanied by fireworks from the 1650s onwards, and it became the custom after 1673 to burn an effigy (usually of the pope) when heir presumptive James, Duke of York, converted to Catholicism. Effigies of other notable figures have found their way onto the bonfires, such as Paul Kruger, Margaret Thatcher, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Vladimir Putin. The "guy" is normally created by children from old clothes, newspapers, and a mask.

Onlooker

With that in mind:

Gunpowder Treason

The streets are alive with the sound of urchins, begging a penny for the guy. Some of the urchins are a little mature; students from the local [medical college/university/fill in the blank] are pooling their resources for what they say will be a spectacular guy, to be burnt two streets from the Bookshop's door. 

One of those students, Larry Tinston, was recently caught shoplifting. At least, that's what the shop staff call it. Larry says he was just borrowing that peculiar book, as it gave him an idea. It's the kind of book [insert occult grimoire here] that the general public really oughtn't have in their possession. Fortunately the book was put back, no harm done.

Except it's gone again. Larry? Where is Larry now?

Option One: A Loud Bang.  The book in question contains alchemical secrets, and Larry wants it because it's given him inspiration for a really good firework. The sort that will get attention for miles around. The plan is to use it to blow the guy's head off, and it will. It will send out a signal to Cthughua too, which Larry does not appreciate.

Option Two: A Cacophany of Devils. Larry, ever the model-maker, wants this book because he wants to design a really splendid, life-size model of devils dragging the guy to Hell. There's something about the illustrations that calls to him. The devils are Nightgaunts, and while the models themselves are harmless their depiction will attract attention from one of the many cults of London. Intrigued, they descend upon the shop. Where is that book? There's a customer who wants it badly.

Option Three: A False Flag. Larry didn't take the book, honest. Someone else took advantage of the situation and half-inched it. Now Larry, amateur sleuth, will clear his name by finding the culprit. The thief is a megapolisomancer who's wanted this book for a while, but, more importantly, they want Larry's help making a model. If Larry agrees, the consequences may be felt later, when the megapolisomancer uses the model in their workings. Perhaps the Hounds should help amateur sleuth Larry before it's too late?

Enjoy!