Ripped from the Headlines: Behind A Wall (Night's Black Agents)

This week's post comes to you courtesy of an article in the Washington Post: China cultivated high-rolling crime families before turning on them by Shibani Mahtani, Christian Shepherd and Pei-Lin Wu.

For the scion of a crime family linked to human trafficking and enslavement, money laundering and global cyberscams, Wei Qingtao was brazenly public. His Douyin account, the Chinese-language version of TikTok, flaunted the excesses of his life in a remote corner of Myanmar by the border with China: Bentleys and Lamborghinis, rare cigars and private jets.

When the 27-year-old partied at the multistory, glass-walled nightclub he owned in a region called Kokang, he’d throw crisp Chinese yuan bills into the crowd as international techno DJs, chauffeured in along dirt roads, performed their sets.

In November, the good times rolled to a stop. Wei’s social media presence vanished. He soon appeared in a different kind of video: reading a scripted confession while in Chinese custody

The article's behind a paywall but I highly recommend it, if you can get to a copy. 

However, the bit that caught my attention talked about the Crouching Tiger compound, where hackers and scammers were corralled into a villa and kept there by force, the better to direct their efforts against victims of the syndicate. 

Clans also hired foreign security personnel to protect their interests. Alex Klisevits, a former Estonian navy officer, was among a team of 11 who arrived in Kokang after responding to a job ad seeking close protection officers for a “Chinese businessman.” Klisevits said he was smuggled in and soon realized he was not free to leave. The first day on the job, Klisevits said he saw a chained man beaten unconscious.

“When I saw how they punished people … I thought, ‘where the hell am I?’” Klisevits said.

If ever there was a Night's Black Agents plotline ripped from the headlines, this is it.  

Consider: when Stoker wrote Dracula he set the action in the Carpathians, which had the advantage from a writer's perspective of being difficult to get to and shrouded in mystery. That is no longer so. When you can buy tickets for the castle tour, the Count's lair loses its dangerous edge. 

The same can't be said of a remote crime fiefdom in Kokang. 

Kokang is a region within the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, aka Burma until fairly recently, the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia. Myanmar shares a border with China, and Kokang is on that border. Kokang was part of China until it was ceded to Britain in the late 19th century, and there's significant crossover between China and Kokang. It's a self-administered zone within Myanmar, which is probably for the best as it's infested with warlords and poppy smugglers. 

Image sourced from WP which got it from Google Earth

They're big on casinos in Kokang which is one of the main attractions for Chinese citizens. Like Macao, Kokang relies on Chinese tourists who can't gamble at home. Also like Macao, Kokang relies on extra-legal debt collectors, since gambling debts are unenforceable in China. Of course, these extra-legal groups don't stop at gambling debts, any more than a wolf stops at one sheep.

In the WP article a source describes the relationship between the two as “a Frankenstein monster that it [China] now can’t control.”

The Crouching Tiger villa was a hotbed of internet scams. The operators were kept at it 24/7, communicating with their Chinese targets and scraping off whatever they could get. Hence the guards; the actors and keyboard artists didn't want to be there and had to be threatened with violence to stay at their posts. Also, hence the raid, allegedly anyway; China got tired of the scams.

From the WP:

Many of the compounds for running scam operations were hosted in the same hotels and casino complexes long established by the clans. Others were purpose built, but had telltale signs like barred windows, high walls and even Myanmar military snipers on the rooftops, witnesses said.

This could be the setting for a very interesting introductory scenario. The characters are brought together by a mysterious Mr. Johnson in the usual way and sent off after an objective. The scenario in the main book, (S)entries, is exactly this sort of scenario. 

Except in (S)entries the agents are sent into a NATO base to retrieve a laptop. This time, the agents are sent into Kokang to retrieve a person.

Darkest Before The Dawn

Your mission: go to Kokang and retrieve Estonian operative Andrus Tamm, former First Infantry Scouts Battalion rapid response soldier turned bodyguard. Tamm has been swept up in a Myanmar military operation in Kokang intended to clear out a crime-infested region. He's currently in jail. It's believed that, if the agents don't intervene, Tamm will be spirited across the Chinese border and wind up in some quiet, remote prison, never to be seen again. 

Once successful, the agents are to get Tamm across the Indian border to a safe house in Mumbai, where Mr. Johnson will take possession.

All the agents are told about the target in the briefing is that Tamm was working for a crime syndicate, that he was brought in under false pretenses as bodyguard for an important official, and that until the sweep he was actually working as a guard at a cyberscam facility in Kokang called Black Tiger. 

Investigative point spends show that Myanmar would never have carried out a raid like this without Chinese backing and support. Tradecraft or similar indicate that China's secretive state agency Room 452 played a part in the raid. Further spends (Occult or similar) note that, in Chinese imagery, a Black Tiger is thought to ward off evil. However, at the compound, where there are graphic images of black tigers, none of them have the symbol of three horizontal lines connected by a central vertical line 王 (wang) meaning 'king', which normally decorate mythological black tiger imagery.

Enter the agents.

Option One: Hopping Mad. This raid was a proof of concept. Room 452 knows that Edom wants to use Dracula as an agent of the Crown, but Room 452 hasn't a hope of recruiting the great vampire. Instead, it has some tame (ish) jin-gui on the payroll, and this was its first outing. The ultimate intent is to create an anti-Dracula; China's fear is that Edom succeeds and, when it does, Dracula will give the UK an edge. Tamm is a witness to the hopping vampire's ravages, and Edom wants to debrief him. Mr. Johnson is on Edom's payroll, but he's had a change of heart - the Americans are offering more money. Crossing over into Mumbai will put the agents squarely in the crosshairs of Edom, Room 452 and some shadowy American intelligence types.

Option Two: Shaw Brothers. The raid was an attempt to put a vampire problem down for good. The Kokang crime syndicate was a Conspiracy node engaged in research on human subjects, and Tamm was one of the subjects. The Conspiracy was attempting to create a different kind of Renfield, one whose mental state isn't so ... fluid. Chinese forces were there to put down a crime syndicate; Room 452 hitched a ride hoping to gather up any loose intel the Conspiracy left lying around. Mr. Johnson is working on behalf of Tamm's relatives, who just want him back safe and sound. The relatives haven't got nearly as much money as they promised but they do have connections within the Estonian government, which is how they had the ability to arrange all this.  

Option Three: Encounters of the Spooky Kind. The raid, and the agents' involvement, was orchestrated by Room 452. They know that the Kokang crime syndicate stumbled onto supernatural powers; one of their new casinos happened to be built on top of an ancient tomb, and something crawled out during construction. Room 452 sees this as the perfect opportunity to get those supernatural powers for themselves, but they don't want to tip their hand. If they were seen to be directly involved in a snatch-and-grab in Kokang, that might alert Edom and every other vampire agency on the planet. If, on the other hand, some useful foreign pawns "snatch" the asset and take it to Mumbai, well ... it's so easy to lose inconvenient corpses in Mumbai ... Tamm is human but he's carrying the prize, and if he or someone else breaks the seal on that peculiar antique he's lugging around that will be problematic for everyone in a five-mile radius. 

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Musty Money (Night's Black Agents)

I've been reading a lot about money laundering (yes, I have a day job, shocker, I know) and this little gem from The Bermuda Monetary Authority's Financial Intelligence Agency report Q3 2018 leapt out at me:

Three Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) were filed on the suspect activity of two Bermudians, who were on financial assistance at the time. Over a period of two weeks, the two Subjects attended the agency with a stack of “very bad and musty smelling BMD $20 bank notes”. The teller described that the notes had the appearance of being stored in a humid area. The stack of notes amounted to BMD$2,500.00 each visit. During the first visit, the Subject completed a Customer Detail Form, and provided a driver’s license as proof of identification. The agency accepted the notes and advised the first Subject that a cheque would be ready in five business days.

Five business days later, the first Subject returned to the agency where again a stack of musty smelling BMD$20 notes was produced in the same condition, which amounted to BMD$950.00. The first Subject received two cheques from the agency for the value of the damaged notes submitted. The notes tendered by the first Subject were then destroyed by the agency. This incident was closely followed by a second Bermudian, who also produced damaged BMD$100 notes of the same description for exchange.

The reasons for suspicion that were identified were as follows:

• It is known that gangs in Bermuda keep their proceeds of crime in cash and typically bury them until they are needed to fund further criminal conduct.
• The timing of these transactions along with the similarity in nominal value and description of the notes suggests that these transactions deal with cash from the same source, which is likely criminal.

Breaking Bad, Sony

When money laundering rears its ugly head in fiction, it's usually somewhere in the millions or squillions and some minor character speaks knowledgeably about placement, layering and so on. Sometimes shell companies and elaborate corporate structures are invoked, and people whisper about exotic, sun-soaked money laundering havens like Delaware, South Dakota and Alaska. 

However, as the FIA article points out, money laundering can happen on the micro as well as macro level. Never mind the squillions; what about the hundreds, the thousands? How do you prove that the wodge of cash you want to deposit is yours?

It's all the more important as banks and financial institutions, whether it's Bank of America or PayPal, conduct most if not all of their business electronically, and vendors accommodate them by introducing new practices that all but eliminate cash from the system. Tap your card against the terminal, and thank you for your patronage. 

Imagine trying to buy a car, even second-hand, with cash alone. It'd have to be a junker with more miles on it than God before anyone even considered taking cash-only. 

Imagine how many red flags you'd set off if you tried.

Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock

Time was stacks of musty cash meant someone found treasure, and quite often  worthless Confederate loot. Scooby Doo pulled off that old chestnut back in the 1970s, Chester Himes tried it, and there've been plenty of pulp writers who did the same. Dirt-smeared stacks of cash hidden in someone's basement often have an unusual history, or - as happened in the Bermuda example - are too damaged to be used as cash, which presents its own problems.

OK, let's start talking about gamification. 

Here we have a situation where a low-power Node, street-level most likely, has accumulated a chunk of cash it can't easily spend. Maybe it's ordinary currency, maybe it's out-of-date, maybe it's antique. I'm not sure what you'd do with a stack of French Francs, for instance, now the Euro's a thing; I think I'm right in saying the last date of exchange was a while ago. Presumably, if you found a suitcase full of granny's retirement fund in the attic and wanted to spend it, you can still hand over old Francs for new Euro, but I've no idea how you'd do that. Nor, I suspect, does your average street-level Node.

But it wants to spend that cash, so it tries to exchange it at a bank or credit union.

Red Flag

The agents, trawling for information that might lead to the next link in the chain, discover a suspicious activity report in the data they harvested from [insert financial institution here]. Seems that someone's been trying to bank odd-smelling notes in unusual amounts, and this someone's hit the official radar before, for a slightly different crime: robbing a blood bank. What's going on here?

Option One: the man with the money stole the cash from a Level One Node. This hopeless wretch - someone roughly on a par with the Dracula Dossier's Madman - has been shadowing the Node for some time, as they know it's linked to the Conspiracy and there's nothing this poor deluded soul likes better than vampires. Tracking him down will get the agents some useful intel about the Node.

Option Two: the woman exchanging the cash is one of several mules this Level One Node uses to launder its cash. It isn't a perfect system; in fact it's a bloody awful system, as proven by the fact that they have to use a petty criminal to launder their loot. However their only other option is to stash the money in their mattress, and that won't work forever. 

Option Three: the person exchanging the cash is a vampire hunter/Dracula Dossier Legacy or similar, who found it while following up other leads. They're possibly a little naïve when it comes to money matters but they aren't vampire-friendly; quite the reverse. However, the Node knows the cash is missing and has a pretty good idea who has it, so unless the agents intervene this potential friendly could find themselves in deep trouble.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!    

Mr. Plot Hook (RPG All)

This week's post  is dedicated to Rent-A-Hitman, the only professional killer service with a HIPPA (Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964) guarantee.

The site, operated by Californian repo-man Bob Innes and not Guido Fanelli, alleged owner of a family business that's been in operation since the 1920s, has been in operation since Innes came up with the joke company back in 2005. Some people take it very seriously. Wendy Wein of Michigan hired Guido to off her husband, only to discover that Rent-A-Hitman was, alas, a fake site. You can't really call it a scam, since the intent was never to defraud. Innes keeps the site going as a modern version of the big store, with all serious enquiries passed to law enforcement for follow-up.

Wendy pled guilty earlier this month and will be sentenced in January. She's looking at a potential 9-year bit, possibly more. 

"I really didn’t think that people were gonna be that stupid," Innes told Rolling Stone. "Boy, did they show me." 

In RPG terms, Guido/Innes is a variation on Mister Johnson. He's the middleman who sets you - that is, you the characters - up with a job. Nobody ever sees his face. He's the voice on the other end of the phone, the admin behind the website. Except in this instance there is no Mr. Johnson; there's just a dude setting you up for a fall. 

Mr. Johnsons are often seen as shady types setting the characters up for a fall. It happens so often, in fact, that some systems go out of their way to explicitly say their Mr. Johnson is a stand-up fella who would never lie. The Esoterrorists, for instance, says outright that Mr. or Ms. Verity does not tell lies. They may not know the whole truth, but they won't stab you in the back. 

Whereas the handlers in Delta Green might well withhold information if it suits them, or set agents up for something nasty - particularly if this is Fall Of, where the agency is on shaky ground from the get-go. Meanwhile Shadowrun's iconic Mr. Johnsons are about as reliable as a chocolate teapot, and the less said about the fixers and bullshit artists of Cyberpunk, the better. 

Which got me thinking: how best to play with the Mr. Johnson concept?

The mysterious employer who turns up mysteriously dead has been used once or twice before. Perhaps the most notorious version is Our Good Friend Jackson Elias from Call of Cthulhu's Masks of Nyarlathotep, though the Dracula Dossier pulls a similar stunt with Hawkins. Call of Cthulhu also has Professor Smith from Horror on the Orient Express, who brings the characters together, funds them, sets them on their way and then keels over dead at the appropriate moment.  

The mysterious employer who turns out to be a bad-ass is less widely used, but not uncommon. Again, going back to Shadowrun, the Great Western Dragon Lofwyr occasionally masquerades as a Johnson, or in this instance a Herr Brackhaus. Dracula Dossier also plays on this a little bit, in that any of their Legacies or more esoteric Johnsons could turn out to be a master spy or supernatural entity playing at being human. 

The mysterious employer who turns out to be a puppet of sinister forces is perhaps a little too mechanically similar to the mysterious employer who turns out to be an evil back-stabber, or the main villain. Still, you could get some play out of that, particularly if 'puppet' in this instance is literal - that the Johnson is just skin, or a mask, with nothing organic underneath. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, says the Great and Powerful Oz ...

One possible alternative to the puppet scenario is a Mr. Johnson who's being squeezed, maybe because they owe someone money. This version will not have the characters' best interests at heart, but that doesn't mean they actually want to betray the characters. No, what Mr. Johnson wants is to be free of the complicating factor that's making his life a living hell. That makes him unreliable, but not automatically evil. If the complicating factor can be dealt with, Mr. Johnson's reliability improves dramatically.

Hitman the video game series makes good use of a Mr. Johnson - in this case, a Ms. Burnwood - who works with the titular Hitman to bring down the system from within. They both have their reasons for wanting to destroy the agency they work for, the International Contract Agency (ICA). While they marshal their forces they carry out a series of assassinations for ICA's clients, waiting for the day when they can turn ICA inside out and gut it. In that instance Ms. Burnwood is 100% (or, well, 99% at least) trustworthy, but the agency they both work for definitely is not.

E3 2015 Trailer

In Dracula Dossier terms, a similar arrangement could easily be had with Edom, the spy agency that brought Dracula in from the cold. The agents could be loyal servants of the Crown, at least outwardly, while their Mr. Johnson helps them take Edom apart from within.

Alternatively in DD Damned campaigns, or anything with a strong supernatural element, your Mr. Johnson could, quite literally, be working for God. The Mysterious Monseigneur is a DD classic, but really any setting with clerics who serve a particular deity would fit. In such a situation your characters aren't just trying to fulfil a contract or obligation; they're trying to please a supernatural sugar daddy. 

Again, Mr. Johnson can be exactly as they seem to be and yet not. So for example the Mysterious Monseigneur could have all the trappings and outward appearance of a man of God, and yet be serving Satan - which would be a magnificent third act twist.

That's enough for this week. Enjoy!

 

Bitcoin or Cannabis? Smoke it and See (Night's Black Agents, Esoterrorists)

 

From Moment News

West Midlands police thought they were raiding a cannabis farm when they bust into an industrial storage unit in Great Bridge Industrial Estate, Sandwell, on 18 May this year. All the signs were there: a drone they'd sent for a fly-by spotted massive amounts of heat gain, almost certainly caused by the lamps needed to grow all those valuable plants, and surveillance noticed people coming and going at all times of day and night, again indicative of nogoodniks up to shenanigans. If all that wasn't enough the unit bristled with surplus wiring ducts and new vent systems, suggesting massive energy use and a need to throw off heat as efficiently and quickly as possible. 

So in they went, and found a bitcoin farm instead. One that was stealing power from the local grid to the tune of £16,000 a month. While mining isn't illegal, theft from the power grid definitely is. Birmingham Mail seems to think 'three English nerds' are the mastermind behind this scheme, which ... I mean, it probably was computer geeks, well spotted, glad to see we've got journalists of that calibre working in British media today.

The Mail also alleges that the value of the electricity stolen was twice that of the bitcoin mined. Which just goes to show that crime doesn't pay, or at least doesn't pay as much as the criminals thought it might. 

Whether or not you think bitcoin is a scam, bitcoin mining is a big operation. Gone are the days when your PC humming away in the corner could earn you retirement money. The Sandwell operation, though one of the largest in the area, was a few hundred units altogether, a mere drop in the ocean compared to the massive setups that exist elsewhere.

From Top 5

Which looks remarkably like a Night's Black Agents scenario in the making.

I've discussed Facilities before. The Sandwell operation looks like a Low Security, Medium Monitoring Manufacturing facility. The miners clearly had no idea how to keep their operation away from prying eyes, beyond 'stick it in a shed and hope for the best.' They needed to monitor it often, to make sure its systems were working properly. Overheating must have been a major concern. 

The bitcoin mines mentioned in the Top 5 are clearly Medium Security, High Monitoring Manufacturing facilities. They have their special needs, cooling being critical, along with access to uninterrupted electricity supplies, and a compliant political environment. If your facility mines, say, 20 bitcoin a day, then at current prices it's earning something like $780,000 each day, easily billions of dollars each month. Well worth going to all that effort, even if as manager of the facility all you get is a cut of the net. 

Of course, that assumes those units are actually mining bitcoin. In game worlds where pseudo-science rules apply, all that computing power could be going towards ... almost anything. Uncovering all the secret names of God to collapse the universe. Mapping Satan's DNA and tracing His Satanic Majesty's lineage on earth. Creating a virtual reality environment powerful enough to store human minds. Creating a race of obedient AIs capable of - you get the idea. 

Let's say this is Esoterrorists. That setting is all about weakening the Membrane so strange entities can creep through into the mundane world, and the Terrorists of the title are the ones who want that to happen. Then the so-called Bitcoin Mine is actually some kind of esoteric device that either is deliberately intended to weaken the membrane, or which does so accidentally while in pursuit of other goals. 

One potential side effect is that smaller, less important entities may creep through just by accident, perhaps as a symptom of a larger problem. Like roaches round a garbage spill, these entities aren't main-plot relevant but the fact that they're here at all is evidence that things are going badly wrong.

An interesting twist could be that the 'bitcoin miners' are actually trying to repair the membrane with their esoteric device. They see something wrong in the immediate area and, since they don't have a Commissioner Gordon-style phone to call in the ghostbusters of OV, they do their best with what they've got. So destroying or disabling the device could actually make things much worse. 

Or it's intended as a remote working device. There are some entities which, when they burst through the membrane, destroy everything in the immediate vicinity. The casters know this, so rather than do the dirty work themselves - and get killed - they set up the bitcoin mine to remotely activate the ritual. Perhaps when the cops burst in, so the summoned entity has something to munch on.

Let's say this is Night's Black Agents. In that setting, the 'bitcoin mine' is either the creation of a vampire Node, or someone who wants to get the Node's attention. So whatever it's intended to do will depend on the kind of setting you, as Director, are shooting for. 

Supernatural: vampires are the result of magical or other supernatural activities on Earth; spirits, ghosts, witchcraft and the like. The bitcoin mine is one part of a larger ritual. Just as standing stones once established nodes on a network of ley lines, channeling supernatural power, so too do these new 'standing stones' establish connective points on a new network of supernatural energy. Their calculations are but a part of a larger ritual mystery, perhaps intended to bring forward the date of the apocalypse.

Damned: Vampires are the work of Satan or other explicitly demonic creatures opposed to mankind and God. That isn't a bitcoin mine, it's a demon summoned forth from Hell to serve at its master's pleasure. Maybe it's some kind of footsoldier awaiting command, or maybe it's an independent contractor scheming to its own ends. It undoubtedly has control over the internet in some fashion, perhaps just in its local area - for now. Or maybe the bitcoin it creates are themselves Satanic in some way, a corruptive influence to bring more people under the sway of His Satanic Majesty. 

Alien: Vampires are alien beings, or earthly beings who nevertheless follow different laws of physics. The aliens either want to go home or to make Earth more like home. For that to happen requires significant mathematical calculations, of a sort that just weren't possible till now. Sure, a mathematician working with an abacus in a cave could manage it eventually, but eventually takes a really long time. Now the aliens are able to significantly advance their plans, with borrowed technology. Even the mines' affect on climate change - all that heat - could be part of the aliens' ultimate goal. After all, they need Earth to be just like home ... whatever that is.

Mutant: Vampires are earthly beings infected or changed by (or into) some freak of nature. Even freaks of nature need funding. Up till now the vampires have had to rely on conventional means to make a dollar, but now they can generate cash literally out of thin air. This was just an experiment, to see what they could get away with. The next stage in the project is an even bigger mine, and now they know what mistakes to avoid to reduce the chance of detection.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Go See This Now - Crime, Ghosts, and Enormous Balls

OK, you know the drill: this is where I recommend stuff for you to watch. So you're not as locked down as you were before; so you can go to the pub if you want. Will you? Methinks not. I suspect you're still in the market for entertainment, so have a shot at these. 

Assume this is on Netflix, unless I say otherwise.

Time To Hunt

2020, Korea, crime, action, thriller 

Small-time criminal Jun-seok leaves prison only to find that the loot he spent three year incarcerated over is effectively gone, as South Korea is economically devastated and it's now illegal to exchange the all-but-worthless Won for any other currency. He and his pals Jang-ho and Ki-hoon resolve to escape South Korea by knocking over a gambling house, since the house has stacks of US$ in its safe which they can use to relocate somewhere sunny and economically viable. So far so good, but they make a huge mistake; they steal the hard drives that contain the house's security footage, as a safety precaution Unfortunately for them the house could care less about the cash, but it cares a great deal about that footage as it contains evidence of their illicit doings. So psychopathic and extremely well-connected hitman Han is sent to kill them all. 

The Hunt Is On. 

Why see this? If you're a Night's Black Agents Director looking for inspiration, this is it. The Heist, followed by the extended Thrilling Chase. Plus some excellent gunfight and stuntwork moments, especially in the final crimsoned scenes on a deserted stretch of wasteland near the sea.

Betaal

2020, India, action, horror, zombies, TV show

 

An Indian army detachment nominally sent to disperse terrorists, but actually there to wipe out some inconvenient protestors on behalf of a corrupt land developer, finds more than they bargain for when zombies start chasing them down. The risen dead are all members of an East India Company regiment whose commanding officer led them to damnation in search of loot. Now the living soldiers have to hide out in the old fort the dead soldiers used to occupy, hoping to hold out till dawn.  Zombies with guns? It's not going to go well for our heroes ...

A little cheesy but there are some great action scenes, and it's fun to see zombies used in a more imaginative way. Suchitra Pillai as Commander Tyagi is a standout.

The 9th Precinct 

2019, Taiwan, film, action, cop drama, undead

Street cop Chen Chia-Hao finds himself inducted into the 9th Precinct when his partner is shot dead in front of him, only to discover that dead isn't as dead as he thought. The 9th Precinct exists to police ghosts, and to resolve their situation as best as possible so they can move on or at least stop bothering the living. It's a nice mix between Beetlejuice's dark humor and a conventional cop drama, as the Precinct cops realize that the increased undead activity they're dealing with is actually linked to a vampiric entity that's manipulating them all to its own ends.

Great action scenes, unexpectedly funny in places, and the lead actors are very charismatic and fun to watch.  

Ladda Land

2011, Thai, film, ghosts, horror

Businessman Thee gets a promotion and decides it's time to move the family out to the suburbs. He has his eye on a magnificent detached house in Ladda Land, where everything is as perfect as can be. Except he soon discovers the neighbors are less than friendly, and his economic situation takes an unexpected downturn when his boss runs off with the company's funds. Economically trapped in a house he can't afford, Thee soon finds that his neighbors had good reason to be unfriendly - and that there was a lot about Ladda Land he didn't know before he bought a house there.

Remarkably chilling, and it has an elegant answer to the two classic questions: why don't you move away? and, given all the evidence, why do you think this place isn't haunted? Keepers need to watch this; some really brilliant scares, jump and otherwise.

Below Zero

2021, Spanish, film, crime, thriller

Cop and family man Martin has been transferred, and his first job at his new posting is to assist in a prisoner transport. Some of the cons in his truck are high-ranking mafia types, so the idea is to keep the whole process below the radar as much as possible. The truck and its escort will be moving through desolate, snowbound terrain at the crack of dawn, to avoid attention as well as traffic. Except someone knows, and that someone *really* wants to get his hands on one of the prisoners. Trouble begins when the escort is knocked out and the truck ambushed in the middle of nowhere, but things get much, much worse ...

Tense, but not a chase movie. Most of the action takes place inside the stalled transport truck, and if you'd told me ahead of time that this would be the perfect setting for what amounts to a locked room mystery I don't think I would have believed you. It almost makes me want to set a one-shot in one of those vans myself.

Pom Poko

1994, animated, film, Studio Ghibli

1960s Tokyo is expanding rapidly to meet the demand for suburban housing. This spells disaster for the tanuki, intelligent and supernaturally gifted raccoons who, up till now, have led peaceful lives in what was the countryside. Now their homes are under threat, either because those hills and fields are slated for development or because construction companies are illegally dumping construction waste onto whatever green spaces are left. It's time for all good tanuki to band together to fend off the humans, scaring the dickens out of those pesky construction workers with their shapeshifting powers.

OK, it's a Studio Ghibli, which means many of you will have heard of this one already. But have you watched it? Or is this something in your to-watch list, while more eye-catching fare like Porco Rosso and Spirited Away grab all the attention? If the latter, time to move this up in the queue. Brilliant ghost action; my favorite's the nupperibo scene, but there's plenty of options to pick from.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Malta's Golden Ticket (Night's Black Agents)

 Malta is in the news again, and for the same old reasons - its cash for passports scheme. Recent reports indicate the Maltese government has been very elastic when defining the term 'residency'; the prize for residency being an EU passport with all the mobility that goes with it.

When the Maltese government first announced its residency scheme, intended to show a 'genuine connection' to Malta, it seemed legit; someone seeking residency had to spend at least twelve months in Malta before they could claim it. Except, not really; some spent as little as sixteen days in Malta, perhaps endowing a charity or two, just to seem reasonable. In order to do this they rented an apartment for a few years, sometimes as many as twelve people per apartment - all claiming residence, of course. The rental agreement was more than enough to prove residency, and with it came that all-important passport. 

As schemes go, this is cheap given the prize on offer. You could spend relatively little on an apartment rental, particularly if you were splitting the cost several ways. A quick in-and-out visit to your country of residence, just to show your face, and boom! You're a European. 

From the Guardian article:

As part of their demonstration of a commitment to their new home, Malta’s golden passport applicants were also required to invest €1.15m in the country, including a property purchase worth at least €350,000 or a five-year rental at €80,000. [per annum]

Some of the properties that were rented were significantly smaller than the size an applicant’s family would realistically have required had they planned to live in the property. In one case, a Chinese national rented a two-bedroom apartment for €1,500 a month despite applying for citizenship for 12 people, including six children.

€80,000 is approximately $96,000, if you were looking to get an EU passport. About the same cost as a high-end sportscar, so if you can afford a Ferrari you can afford to rent in Malta. I shan't bother to quote the GBP value; after all, the English already had a European passport and they tore it up, so presumably no citizen of the UK would bother relocating to Malta now.

The article's information comes courtesy of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, a non-profit named after a Maltese anti-corruption journalist who was murdered in 2017. A Maltese businessman, Yorgen Fenech, has been accused of involvement in that car bombing, as well as being neck-deep in the government's corruption scandal.

For those of you wondering what you can expect from a property in Malta, I give you this Sotheby's listing. Which is ironic really, since the people we're talking about would never bother with any of these properties, beautiful though they may be. I mean, $23 million? Why would you? The kind of people in it for the passport wouldn't touch these high-end penthouses and detached palazzos.

All of which made me wonder: if it's good enough for Russian Mafia dons and dodgy high-net-worth individuals the world over, surely Malta's good enough for the Conspiracy?

I shan't go through the whole Quick and Dirty, but in brief:

Malta is a south European island nation in the Mediterranean, below the toe of Italy's boot and broadly halfway between it and the African continent. Humans have lived there since the dawn of time, but if you know Malta at all it's probably because of its role in the Crusades when the Knights Hospitaller were in charge.

Also, there's a film.

Given its location it's no surprise Malta has been influenced by every culture in Europe, economically, politically and architecturally. Independent since 1964; before that it was a British colony from 1814 onwards.

Geographically it's mostly low lying and rocky, with plenty of coastline. It can be rainy in winter, and is usually hot and dry in summer. What we think of as Malta is actually an archipelago, with only the three largest islands (Malta, Ghawdex or Gozo, and Kemmuna or Comino) inhabited - mostly Malta. 

Population, broadly 515,000, or about the same number as live in Sacramento, California. Valetta, the largest city, has about 214,000 inhabitants, so roughly half the total population of Malta; the vast majority of Maltese, c. 95%, live in an urban area of one kind or another. Mostly native Maltese, with about 21% other nations, and majority Christian (Catholic). 

Government: republic closely patterned on the UK's parliamentary democracy, with an elected President (chief of state) and Prime Minister (leader of the government). Three main political parties, being the Democratic Party (Partit Demokratiku), Labor Party (Partit Laburista), and Nationalist Party (Partit Nazzjonalista). PL is the dominant force, rocked with political scandals though it may be. 

There's one airport and two heliports, so unless you're planning on swimming from Italy your best bet is by sea - unless you're the sort of vampire who can get through airport security without setting off alarms. Malta is also known as a drug transshipment point, but as far as narcotics goes it's not a hugely important port. Mostly hashish from Northern Africa, bound for Europe.

So if I was a vampire what would I be looking for in a house?

Security. Isolation. Good transport links - I don't want to be schlepping everywhere on foot and horses are passé, always assuming one would let me ride it. Lots of acreage, for the hiding of things I'd prefer were kept hidden. In fact probably the exact opposite of the kind of house the passport-hungry want to rent, but I have needs that a grotty little hole in Valetta isn't going to satisfy. 

In fact, something not unlike this Sotheby's advert. A 5 bed farmhouse, renovated to exacting standards with 20 tumoli of land (a little over an acre), a stable and a large garage. Somewhere far enough from other people I can do as I like. Ideally it would also be somewhere on or near the coast; a private cove for the yacht would be ideal. It fits the James Bond / Hitman fantasy to a T, and is exactly the sort of place I'd use in a Stakes game.

However if I was going a little Dusty I'd skip that luxury - tempting though it is - and go for the grotty apartment in Valetta, owned through some dupe in, oh ... South Africa, why not. Someone who's never going to visit in person. Because if I'm really Dusty then this is all about the passport, and the great thing about an apartment like that is its anonymity. If I need passports for my Russian goons, or whoever it may be, I just funnel them through my Valetta hideaway and they emerge on the other side a new man. Or thing. Whatever. Anyway, they have the passport and that's all that matters, isn't it? No need to fake a cover when the real thing works just fine.

Of course, they do have to spend some time in Malta - a little over two weeks, more or less. Think of it as a holiday. It does make you peculiarly vulnerable for a couple of weeks. Alone, in an unfamiliar country. Anything could happen ...

Scenario Seed: WHAT IS LEAST EXPENSIVE WHICH COMPLIES W/ PROGRAM.

The agents, through their usual efficient means (Accounting most likely, possibly also Criminology, Traffic Analysis, High Society) become aware that the Node they're trailing has a peculiar subsidiary: Tumoli Ltd, a company registered in Gibraltar that exists to own one asset, an apartment in Malta. This same apartment has been used as a residency address for at least half a dozen disreputable types that the agents know of, and probably more besides. It's a nasty little roach hotel on Testaferrata Street and as luck would have it someone of great interest to the agents is in Malta right now. There's no telling how long they'll be there; they only have to be physically present on the island for a few days to meet residency requirements. If ever the agents want to catch up with this person of interest, to gather information, carry out a discreet assassination, or some other reason, now's the time. 

Funny thing: when you provide temporary accommodation for blood drinkers, it creates problems for the neighbors. Nosferatu had his rats - lots of rats - and it turns out roach motel is more than just a moniker, this time around. A strange disease ripples up and down Testaferrata Street and some say it just isn't natural. Of course the government doesn't care; there's always something wrong with Testaferrata, someone's always complaining, there's always another community action group.  

To find out what's really going on the agents will have to take a close look at that little place on Testaferrata. Perhaps talk to the rentals agent who looks after the property, that twitchy woman with the bad case of polymorphic light eruption, also known as sun poisoning. At some point they'll have to catch up with their target, whoever - or whatever - that might be.

Then things really will kick off ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Ripped from the Headlines: Ghost Boat Cocaine

Inspired by this Guardian article about an 18-foot fiberglass boat that washed up on the Marshall Islands, stuffed to the gunwales with cocaine, an $80 million haul. The Maritime Executive has a slightly longer version, with photographs.

Sourced from CNN via jonastur68

I've talked about ghost ships before. From North Korea's fishing boats to the Mary Celeste, pausing briefly to admire cruise ships stuffed with cannibal rats, derelicts infest the ocean blue. This one's a bit of a head-scratcher. You just don't take an 18-foot putt-putt far from shore. Not if you value your life and cargo, and someone must have valued this cargo if not the life of whichever shmuck was paid to pilot. Presumably it wasn't piracy, or the cargo would have vanished. 

So it was probably a coastal storm of some description, bad enough to wash the pilot overboard but not bad enough to sink the boat. Fiberglass is difficult to sink, but every other year here in Bermuda hurricanes prove that difficult is not the same thing as impossible. You regularly see boats sunk at their anchorage, perhaps a bit of the bimini sticking above the surface. The pilot almost certainly drowned, and if he didn't he must have wished he had. Explaining that sort of thing to the bosses is not an easy task.

The bit I like is at the end of the Guardian article:

University of Hawaii researchers conducted 16 computer simulations of drift patterns from the Mexico coast and found nearly all eventually arrived in the Marshall Islands.

The Maritime Executive has an interesting addition:

Some of these lost-and-found narcotics re-enter the supply chain: earlier this year, a resident of  remote Ailuk was caught and arrested after trying to board an airplane with three kilos of cocaine in his possession. The source, he told investigators, was from a different batch of lost "bricks." 

The Marshalls have been independent since 1986; before that it was part of the American-administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and before that it bounced from pillar to post in the usual that-colony's-mine-until-I-don't-want-it way that was so popular from the 1500s onwards. Before that it was one of the many islands settled by Micronesians, well before the birth of Christ. These days it's a parliamentary republic with an interest in fishing, selling flags of convenience to shipping companies, and bitcoin, not necessarily in that order. There's not a lot of ways to make money if you're the Marshall Islands. 

A little under 78,000 people live there, the vast majority being Marshallese. The islanders have their own language, but English is widely spoken. Median age is (roughly) 23, and the population mostly lives on the atolls of Majuro and Ebeye. The US takes care of defense and the Marshallese police take care of internal issues.

Past nuclear tests nearby have left a toxic legacy. While compensation has been granted it has not been paid, and some of the atolls are completely uninhabitable due to radiation poisoning. 

According to the CIA, no TV broadcast station; a cable network is available on Majuro with programming via videotape replay and satellite relays; 4 radio broadcast stations; American Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) provides satellite radio and television service to Kwajalein Atoll (2019). 

Roughly 40% of the island has internet access.

With all that in mind:

Lost and Gone (Fear Itself, Esoterrorists)

It ought to have been simple. When the boat drifted ashore with its load of cocaine at Ailuk, a remote and lightly-inhabited coral atoll about 200 nautical miles to the north of Majuro, the plan was to burn most of it and turn over a few bricks for the DEA to analyze. A couple agents were given the onerous task of flying over to collect - never let a chance for a visit to a semi-tropical paradise pass you by, must be the company motto. The bricks were supposed to be kept secure at the air base at Bucholtz, on  Kwajalein Island. 

Nobody knows where those bricks are. As for the ones that were supposed to be destroyed ... rumor has it that not all of those found their way into the incinerator. Each one's practically a pension for whoever has them. Bucholtz is being torn apart in the search for the two that were supposed to be there, and the cops who had possession of the rest are under intense scrutiny.

Meanwhile rumors are flying, strange lights are seen out at sea, and some fishermen say a new boat's been seen out on the water at night - one without a pilot, yet it seems to be getting about just fine.

• Free Meal. The original pilot was attacked by a Skitch (Unremitting Horror) and killed, but that left the insect-like meat eater with a problem. Once the boat was out at sea, there were no ways to spread its eggs. The Skitch was at the very end of its life cycle when the boat drifted up to Ailuk, its carcass smeared across the deck. Some of it was snatched up by birds, some by rats and crabs, before the boat was discovered. These have slowly found their way back into the human food chain, through cats (who eat the rats and birds) or other means. The bit about the missing cocaine is a red herring; the real problem is the skitch eggs which are now spreading rapidly through the local population. 
• Bad Trip. That wasn't cocaine. Perhaps it was Liao, perhaps something else, but whatever occult substance is in those bricks someone at Bucholtz knows what it really is. That person isn't a cultist nor yet trained in mystic arts but they know just enough to know how insanely valuable the stuff is. Far too valuable to go up in an incinerator. So this person arranged for the cops to hand over their supply and made sure the two bricks kept for the DEA went missing. Meanwhile they sent out feelers to people they knew in Hong Kong and Macau: does anyone want to take this stuff off my hands? Now the problem is how to keep everyone bribed and compliant long enough for someone who actually knows how to handle the drug to show up and take it away.
• Bright Lights. The boat was targeted off the coast of Mexico by Something - say, Greys from Delta Green. Those same Greys tracked the boat all the way across the ocean, wanting to carry out an ocean drift patterns experiment of their own. Where would it end up? Now the Greys know, but evidently that wasn't the end of the experiment. Whatever it is, it's still hanging around in the skies above the Marshalls, dogging whoever came into contact with the boat or its cargo. The cops who stole a pension, the army guys who 'lost' a couple bricks of cocaine, they're all being tracked, abducted, experimented on, and returned to their ordinary lives - perhaps a little traumatized, otherwise fine. The question is, what do the Greys really want - and what will it take to persuade them to go away?

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays! I'm going to take a break for one week, so no Ephemera next Sunday. After that, we'll kick off the New Year - and may it be better than 2020! 

The Roleplayer's Guide to Heists (San Jenaro Co-Op)

Disclaimer: I backed this collection of 35 Heist scenario seeds published by San Jenaro Co-Op on Kickstarter, to PDF level. I've no other connection with the product or the Co-Op.

OK, first things first: is it brilliant? God no. Is it good? Yes. Is it good enough for you & your game?

In any collection of 35 scenario seeds, no matter what the theme, there are going to be some you think are great, some utter garbage, and the rest doable with a little effort. Speaking personally I disliked a few, the one with the dead God floating in the sky reminded me of those old 1970s-ish trippy flying ship posters students buy for their dorm rooms, and some I want to run. Especially the haunted ships Piracy scenario, which sounds like an excellent way to spend Halloween. I'm not sorry I backed it - now there's a glowing endorsement!

San Jenaro, for those who aren't familiar, is a US-based 100% creator owned profit-sharing group. The writers on this particular product are Liam Ginty, Olivia Hill, Kate Jeanne, J.R. Zambrano, Keith Evans, Ren Ginty, JW van Heerden, Chris Falco, Heather Rusk, Amanda Allen, Alvhild Sand, Jon Garrad, K. Rountree, Jay Henningsen, and Heather Rusk. Artists are Dyer Rose, Hector Rodriguez, Daniel Walthall, Brian York, Donald Kirby, Galen Evans, and Federico Sohns.

Each seed in this collection contains the basic outline of a heist scenario of one type or another. The majority are set in the US in the modern day, with a couple fantasy and sci-fi heists thrown in. Though intended for any RPG most are fairly standard urban fantasy stuff whose appeal will greatly depend on whether or not you like the source material. If you're not a Harry Potter fan, for example, the Harry Potter theme scenario will not appeal to you. If you don't really get on with Judge Dredd or Harry Dresden then the sci-fi scenario set in an arcology will not appeal, and so on. 

That's inevitable. Let's not talk about the inevitable. Let's talk about the meat.

The format for each scenario is broadly the same. Introduction (plus image & teasers). The Site/Building. The Score. Security. Getaway. Descriptive text as per normal, important stuff in bold. Each is about four pages long. It's all stat-free and since this is meant to be improv none of the scenarios give you more than the basics. No detailed maps, no list of important NPCs (with some exceptions), no in-depth 'this is how you're supposed to crack the vault' box. You do you. 

This is one of those emergency collections Dungeon Masters buy as insurance against that fatal day when you realize you haven't got anything planned for tonight's session and are feeling just a wee bit desperate. There's just enough meat on the bones you won't feel lost, and not so much detail you feel as though you have to slavishly follow what's on the page. 

It has problems. One or two writers, naming no names, need a placard next to their monitor: Omit Needless Words. Either that or tattoo it onto their pet's shaved backsides, whichever works. Kill Your Adverbs is also good advice. Some of the collection's four essays feel tacked-on; two are wanted posters, and while I liked the idea once I saw the first one I was expecting more than just two. The tables (fantasy loot, different locks or lockboxes, security systems and so on) were a good idea but some of them (Mooks in particular) needed more work. 

Its biggest issue is that it feels very lopsided. Of the 35 scenarios, one is set in the US in the 1890s, thirteen in modern day US (mostly California), two on islands in the modern day, seven in modern day locations elsewhere in the world, seven fantasy, five sci fi, and of the sci fi locations one's in New York and another a NASA base. 

So if you're, say, a fantasy or sci-fi Keeper looking for inspiration, you're going to feel left out. Ditto if you're a gamer looking for material set anywhere other than North America in the 2000s, really. The problem's fixable - change up some names, fiddle with the locations. Still, with about 40% of the scenarios set in the US or a US-centric location, mostly modern day, the collection feels unbalanced. 

That might be a Me problem. I don't live in the US, and as I live on a small island I have to look outside for inspiration. If I only wrote about Bermuda I'd quickly run out of source material - or at least, source material anyone wants to read. So I'm happy to research locations I've never lived in or experienced first hand, and alternate time periods. Whereas if I lived in California, which is larger than Bermuda, perhaps I'd think that California was the center of the universe and everyone wants to hear about California. 

 Enough teasing. The verdict:

This is a well-thought-out product currently selling for $20 at DriveThru, and if you want a closer look without shelling out dosh there is a free preview. If you run a game set in the modern day - Nights Black Agents, say, Vampire: the Requiem, or Esoterrorists - you will probably be able to harvest three or four of these straight away and another ten or so with a little work. Exactly which ones will depend on you and your group. Alternatively if you just want something you can run as a one-off any of them can be slotted in for a night's worth of fun. In fact some of them can really only be run as one-offs; I can't see the Kraken scenario as anything other than a one-off, for instance, unless there's someone out there running campaigns of Toon. 

It could work really well with modernish games that have a tinge of strangeness or sci-fi, so something like Troubleshooters or The Strange. I don't play The Strange often enough to make a judgment call, but several of the scenarios seem well suited to its lets-change-up-the-setting gimmick. The Troubleshooters is eagerly awaited ... [gnashing of teeth.]

It's less useful to any Keeper playing in a time period other than the 2000s, so Call of Cthulhu, Trail, Bookhounds, Dreamhounds, and similar. The McGuffins are often very modern, or the situation/setting and adversaries are similarly unusable outside a game set in the present. Also, those of you hoping for material for your swords & sorcery or sci-fi setting might be disappointed. There'll be something here for you, but it's a small something in comparison with the material in the rest of the book. 

Enjoy!

Romanian Mafia (Dracula Dossier, Night's Black Agents)

Videos sourced from the Organized Crime & Reporting Project

The Dracula Dossier goes into some detail about the Romanian mafia, though it is brief by necessity as covering it all would be at least one book in and of itself. I recommend the OCCRP as a useful source of supplementary information and this week I'm going to draw on it to sketch out a mini-scenario for you to use as you see fit. 

The main book points out that the thriller relies on escalating thrills to keep the viewer engaged. The reward for danger is information; having information puts you into danger. When the hero rests, add more danger. (p180, NBA). Double Tap goes on to describe several different Thrilling contests (Digital Intrusion, Infiltration, Surveillance, Manhunts) and the Resource Guide includes Mission Skeletons. I'm going to be using all of these.

Just looking at the videos, a couple of interesting scene locations pop out: Spain, Popa Sapca Prison, Istanbul, a construction company, nightclubs. I can borrow from this pool to create the locations I'm going to need. Quick and dirty every time, mind you; this isn't the moment to be describing cities in detail.

Now I need to decide the kind of operation I want to create. The Resource Guide offers several options, any of which might apply: Destroy, Flip (an asset), Heist, Hit, Hunt, Rescue, Sneak, Trace, Uncover. I'm going to go with Flip, with a touch of Rescue just for flavor. 

The asset I want to Flip is in Popa Sapca Prison. He used to be heavily involved in human trafficking, taking women from Turkey to Spain. He has information about a Conspiracy operation but he'll only talk if his conditions are met. Additional complication: Popa Scapa is unfriendly territory, and if he stays there then he may end up dead before he can talk.

Popa Sapca: Formerly for political prisoners, this is a working prison. If you don't work, you get half rations. You can work in the kitchens (very difficult to get assigned there, high demand), you can make wooden crates for transporting vegetables, you can work in a nearby concrete factory. This information dates back to the 1980s and things are almost certainly different now, but I can use this in plot so I'm keeping it. There's also a prison football team. Religious groups visit Romanian prisons. That's enough Google; it's easy to get bogged down in research.

So what have I got? A former Communist political prison now populated by some of the worst of the worst. There are work programs, a football team, and regular visits from an American evangelical religious group whose Chicago founders have Romanian links. Some of the work programs take place outside the prison, so in my fiction if there's any smuggling it probably happens via that work program; either the inmates or drivers/guards take packages into the prison. 

In Dossier terms this is a Warm site, which means the Conspiracy has its tentacles here. It probably doesn't have a full-fledged Node, but there are plenty of former Renfields behind bars strung out for lack of the good stuff, and more than a few Ruvari Sgzani. There are no secrets in prison; the Conspiracy will find out if anyone talks.

The Flip target is Sorin Barbu, a former human trafficker now serving a five-year sentence. He used to transport women from Istanbul, Turkey, to nightclubs in the New Golden Mile, Marbella, Spain. He knows more than he should about Conspiracy operations in Spain thanks to his connections with organized crime there, specifically the Romanian syndicate Wolf Brigade. According to Sorin the Brigade carried out several hits while he was working in Spain supplying girls for the Brigade's hangouts in the New Golden Mile. He knows the hitters, the targets, some of the burial sites, and he knows these things because the Brigade coerced him into disposing of the bodies. 'You used to work in construction,' they said. 'You know how to dig a hole.' 

Vampirology (0 point) soon realizes that some of these so-called hits are vampire attacks, and it's possible there may be some ferals down in the Golden Mile thanks to this creature's activities.

The Flip target comes to the agents' attention thanks to Charlie Popescu, an American evangelist trying to get attention paid to Sorin's case. Charlie thinks Sorin is unjustly imprisoned, and as a brother in Christ Charlie feels obligated to help Sorin out. Charlie's been talking to the American embassy in Bucharest, and he's been very indiscreet. If the agents know about Sorin, it's only a matter of time before the Conspiracy finds out.  

Sorin's flip trigger (on the MICE scale of Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego) is Ego. He sees himself as a protector, and he wants to go on protecting people - specifically Fatma Yildiz, a prostitute he became close to. He knew Fatma was falling in love with one of the johns, and he also knew that the john in question was one of the hitters whose bodies he was burying. This could only end badly for Fatma, so he brought her back to Istanbul where she would be safe.

Flip condition: If the agents ensure Fatma's safety, Sorin will talk.

What Sorin doesn't know: Fatma was the one who turned him in to the authorities.  

Danger: If the agents don't move Sorin, or arrange some kind of protection while he's in prison (Network is helpful here), then Sorin will end up shanked long before the agents can complete the mission.

Next step is to locate Fatma, which means going to Istanbul. I'm not going to go through a whole Google for that; Istanbul's a capital city, well known, unlike an obscure prison in Romania. Streetwise narrows the search to a Gecekondu (squatter district) on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, where Fatma's living with a dozen other women.  She works as a dancer in a Kadikoy nightclub. Fatma wants to go back to her lover in Spain. She's convinced he'll marry her and she'll live the high life on a yacht. The Conspiracy doesn't have any direct ties to the Turkish mafya group that runs the nightclub, but they have a friendly relationship. Fatma served her purpose when she helped put Sorin behind bars. The Conspiracy doesn't care what happens to her, but it cares very much if she goes back to Spain and causes a fuss. The Turks have been given a fat bribe and asked to take care of Fatma if it looks as if she's going to bolt.

Twist: Fatma isn't going to bolt. She's going into business. When she worked with Sorin she met quite a few Romanian mafia, including people who worked for a rival syndicate, the Centurions (cue Yojimbo option). The Centurions want their slice of Marbella's New Golden Mile. Fatma's being promoted from prostitute to procurer, and the women in her Gecekondu are her first shipment. 

So on the principle that Information leads to Danger, the Information that Fatma's in Istanbul working for a nightclub run by a Turkish godfather immediately leads to trouble when Fatma runs away with her Centurion pals, and the Turks assume these nosy agents had something to do with it. Violence ensues, as trigger-happy Turk thugs bust up the agents' safehouse looking for Fatma. 

By this point the agents have probably racked up Heat. If Heat is 5 or more, cut scene: Interpol. Turkey's well known for using Interpol aggressively to punish critics and dissidents. The Turkish mafyia pulls some strings and gets the agents put on an Interpol watch list for alleged organized crime offences (people smuggling). Senior Agent III Svitlana Dobrovolska is assigned the case. Cut scene ends with her beginning her investigation. This scene threatens Danger to come, since the agents don't know whether Svitlana's on the up-and-up. An honest Agent can be reasoned with; a crooked one cannot. 

The action moves to Marbella, Spain. The New Golden Mile is Marbella's latest attempt to capitalize on a vast sea of money. It's high end houses, businesses, golf courses, and expensive shops, as far as the eye can see. As to where all this money's coming from, it might have something to do with Marbella's corruption problem. Mayor after mayor has been jailed in recent years in a string of allegations of money laundering and bribery that goes back to Mayor Gil (1991 to his arrest in 2002). The town nearly went bankrupt in 2006, and was briefly run by an unelected, appointed council before elections in 2007 put the People's Party in charge. Marbella's heavily in debt, which makes it vulnerable to approaches from, say, Romanian organized crime. 

Or the Conspiracy.

There's been a Node in Marbella since the days of Mayor Gil, and a lot of the Conspiracy's money was funneled through friendly Marbella banks. The Conspiracy invested heavily in local Golden Mile real estate as well, banking its cash in brick and mortar. This came to a crashing halt in 2007 when investigations began in earnest, and the Conspiracy pulled out some of its assets and almost all of its money, selling its Golden Mile properties. However things are looking more promising nowadays and the New Golden Mile promises to be as lucrative as the old one was. 

The vampire in charge of it all, Anna Kaufman, whose antecedents go back to before the Great War when she worked in film, is taking charge of this effort. She's the power behind the throne for local drug gangs, and she works through a Renfield hitter nicknamed The Southpaw, also known as Zubi after the football player Andoni Zubizarreta. Through Zubi and People's Party politician Maya Bardina the Conspiracy exercises control over the New Golden Mile. 

Anna has a problem. Back in the early 2000s when things were looking much better she promoted a Renfield to full vampire status: Gordon 'Bones' Honeybone, a former London hard boy with remarkably handsome features. Bones was an excellent enforcer with criminal contacts in the UK, France and Spain, but he was never management material. His new status went to his head. He sees himself as a cross between Michael Caine and Christopher Lee, and relishes it a little too much. He's the one Fatma's in love with, and he's also the one whose carnal appetites has created a batch of new ferals that Anna doesn't know about - so far. Bones has killed some of those ferals himself, but the rest are causing trouble.

Meanwhile the Centurions are muscling in on turf the Wolf Brigade controls. The Wolf Brigade has a mutual assistance pact going with Anna's drug dealers through Zubi, but the Centurions are hungry for power and see the Wolf Brigade as yesterday's villains. So far Anna's interests aren't directly threatened so she's happy to let all this play out - until the agents get involved.

Up in Popa Sapca, Sorin Barbu has a ton of information on all these players. He knows all the Wolf Brigade's officer cadre, and has a surprising amount of detail on Anna's people too. This includes businesses they own, operations they run and assets they control - but most importantly he knows which New Golden Mile mansions have bodies in their basements, because he put them there. If the agents can convince Sorin that Fatma is either safe or not worth protecting any more, Sorin will spill all kinds of beans. 

If the Interpol option is active then Svitlana Dobrovolska is in Marbella, gathering information and planning her next move. She'll need cooperation from the locals, but if she can get that then a sudden GAR raid is all too likely ...  

Enjoy!

Hiding The Body (RPG all)

You may have noticed recent reports about a tech entrepreneur murdered in NYC, found part-dismembered in his apartment. The killing has been described as 'a hit' and it is alleged the killer was disposing of evidence when the victim's sister interrupted him.

Disposing of a corpse is remarkably difficult. It can reveal itself in surprising ways. Here in Bermuda we have the cautionary tale of Edward Skeeters and his wife Anna, a childless couple who lived by the sea. Anna went missing one Sunday afternoon, and after a time her neighbors and friends noticed a peculiar phenomenon out at Long Bay channel. The waters were remarkably calm no matter the weather, and when this persisted a search party rowed out to see what they could see.

Reaching the calm, these two men were deeply impressed with the sinister character of the spot. "It was more conspicuous," they said, "than any other calm we had ever seen before. The calm would rise and spread out and then go away with the wind and tide. And then, the calm would rise again."

Corpses decay. They give off fat and oil. Oil calms troubled waters, as Pliny pointed out. There wasn't much left of Anna by this point.

Up came the skeleton; it was not a complete skeleton; it seemed to have broken in two. The legs were there - they were out straight - but the feet were gone and the arms and the skull; there was no clothing; the flesh was soft ... it was slimy ... there was a great stench.

Edward Skeeters hanged July 1879.

A corpse goes through several stages before it becomes a skeleton. It starts as a relatively fresh piece of meat. This when it goes through rigor, muscles stiffening and then relaxing, a process that was very popular in early detective novels as it gave fiction's greatest detectives a presumed time of death.

Then comes bloat, about 3 to 5 days after death. The gut begins to liquefy and gases extend the abdomen and limbs. Foul-smelling liquid is forced out of the mouth and nose due to pressure in the intestine. For those acquainted with vampire literature this should all sound familiar. The flushed and livid appearance, the gore at the lips - classic signs of vampirism. The corpse can be volatile in this condition, which is why William the Conqueror exploded at his funeral. It is also why funeral homes took to lead-lining their coffins, before embalming became popular.

Even then there can be complications. "A well-designed mausoleum will have the crypts inclined very slightly to the rear," according to a Vice article, "to a drainage pipe so that the fluids that come out will be drained away discreetly. And it will be designed in such a way so that fresh air exchange is constantly coming through the crypts themselves facilitating dehydration out of a discreet vent in the back of the building."

Active decay comes next. The remains blacken and putrefy. It gives off liquids and chemicals. The stench reduces. This is when those famous maggots become helpful, tracking the rate of decay.

After Active comes Advanced, when there isn't much left to look at. After Advanced comes skeletonization.

There are facilities devoted to the study of decay. The US has several body farms, but the practice has not been widely adopted elsewhere. The UK, for instance, does not have a body farm, though there has been a TV series with that name.

What does this mean for your game?

To begin with, it enables creative set dressing for a scene. Trail, Bookhounds, and especially Night's Black Agents generate corpses on a regular basis, but rarely are they interesting. Suppose, for instance, your Bookhounds find a corpse in the course of their investigation.

Arthur's swollen body lies in his bed, limbs akimbo as if in his last moments he reached for the heavens in protest. Foul liquid smears across his face, gore expelled from his lips and nose. His stare is horrible to look upon, and your eyes dart here and there so as not to see it - but you can't help looking. [Stability loss is usually 3, in this case adjusted to 4 if Arthur pops. By this point he's three days dead.]

Arthur's blackened skin seems oily and somehow loose, an ill-fitting suit. Foul liquid sloughs off the bed and across the floorboards, a fatty pool of decay that you do your best not to step in. Flies buzz about, Beelzebub's children on grisly errands, many of them battering themselves on the closed window. You cannot believe it took the neighbors this long to notice the smell. [Arthur's been dead at least 6 days by this point. Stability loss definitely 4 now, though it might drop to 3 once skeletonization sets in.]

It also should alert the Keeper/Director to a rule of thumb that often gets ignored: corpses are very difficult to deal with. The longer it's left alone the more difficult it is to handle, as it becomes soft, oily and liquid. There's a reason why crime scene clean-up is now a thing people do for money. When the body's fresh and relatively intact it can be moved around without too much mess, but the longer you wait the nastier it becomes.

So for, say, vampires, corpses become a real problem. You generate corpses on a regular basis. Unusual corpses, ones that will make a forensic pathologist sit up and pay attention. Which is fine if you're on a battlefield or in a place where random killings are a regular event, but if you're in, say, London, you need to come up with a way of dealing with the problem. Otherwise slayers will take notice and pay you a visit. How the vampires in your game deal with that problem can become a scene, or several scenes, all on their own. Is that removals van part of a Level One Node? That crematorium? Construction company? What happens when someone finds your corpse store?

For that matter, what about zombies? Those poor unfortunate deadfellas condemned to wander - how come their decay process is so wacky? Those dead bodies seem to last for-freaking-ever, defying natural processes. Which, okay, they're basically magical creations at this point, so a certain amount of denying-natural-yadda-yadda is expected. Still, it seems unusual and arbitrary. Surely once they reach the skeleton stage, when muscles are a thing of the past, they're basically helpless? What about the ones in the bloat stage?

A so-so zombie series, Walking Dead.

A much, much better zombie series, Kingdom.

Finally, a story seed:

Waking Ned Devine (Night's Black Agents)

Tourists Shocked By Corpse In Garden A group of friends who rented a house in the Lake District got a nasty surprise when they found a corpse floating at the bottom of the garden. 

"The body was found caught in the weeds at the riverside, at the bottom of the garden," said the police. Foul play is suspected ...

Corpse Farm Discovered in Pastoral Fenby Bridge Following on events that took place two weeks ago the police have discovered a body disposal site at a Lake District farm. Estimates suggest at least twenty bodies in various stages of decay were discovered ... 

The agents are dispatched to Fenby Bridge ostensibly as MI5 liaison officers attached to the police investigation, but they have a particular reason to be there. They need to check whether the bodies found were vampire killings, and if so who was involved in the disposal operation. The locals are less than thrilled to be the focus of the investigation - it's ruining the tourist trade.

Options:

• The corpse farm is actually an offshoot of a larger operation. The owners of a cemetery in a larger town have been digging up corpses and selling their plots on to other buyers. Of course this creates a body disposal problem, which the cemetery owners have solved by offloading the bodies in a more rural, secluded location. The Fenby Bridge locals are genuinely upset, and have a right to be. However one of the corpses was less than dead, and less than thrilled to find itself carelessly tossed into the bushes. It spent the last however many years starved and trapped in a hole in the ground, only to find itself thrown out like garbage. This feral is the reason why the body ended up in the river; it was careless when it made its escape.
• The Fenby Bridge locals are protecting one of their own, a man turned into a vampire during the Second World War. Through Aberrant influence and some natural charm it's been able to keep things quiet for decades, but as the tourist trade picked up and more and more outsiders came to the Lake District the problem became worse. The vampire refuses to acknowledge the danger, which means its human protectors have to go to greater lengths to keep it safe.
• This is part of a larger Node operation gone wrong. Corpses from all over the country are sent to Fenby Bridge and places like it, scattered across the UK. The idea is to 'disappear' people, but the problem is the Conspiracy generates corpses faster than its crematoria can handle them. So the excess are delivered to places like Fenby Bridge until such time as they can be properly dealt with - except of course that never happens because the Conspiracy keeps generating more corpses and the old ones get forgotten about. The locals are genuinely terrified of what might happen next. At any moment someone in a far-off office may decide there are too many witnesses, and what kind of horror will be unleashed then?

Enjoy! 

Locked Room Mysteries (GUMSHOE Any)

I recently watched a film I'd really wanted to see and came away dissatisfied. I shan't say which one, as this post might constitute spoilers. I'll just say CSI KYC and leave it at that, on the supposition that if you get the joke you've already seen the film and so spoilers mean nothing to you.

Part of my dissatisfaction is because it sets up a locked room mystery and then betrays the trope. The classic locked room is the Mary Celeste of mysteries. It sets up a situation that ought to be impossible, and then shows you not just that it's possible but takes you through the working until you see all the clues you missed along the way. It's called locked room because the classic example is the corpse found sealed away in a locked room, whose death seems inexplicable. Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is the original version, but there have been countless others since.

There have been a few real-life examples. The 2010 death of MI6 operative Gareth Williams, found padlocked inside a bag in his London apartment, is one. Williams, who might have been investigating Russian financial crime at the time of his death, went on leave and never came back. Nobody noticed he'd gone missing until his employers thought to make a welfare check, which is when his corpse was discovered. It's thought he went into the bag alive and the Metropolitan Police concluded his death was probably an accident, a sex game gone wrong. As a means of disposing of a body locking it inside a sports bag and leaving it in the flat seems unnecessarily theatrical, almost amateurish, especially if a professional espionage agency was involved. You'd think it'd be simpler to dump the bag in the Thames with weights wrapped round it. It's that Mary Celeste touch again - cups of coffee found still warm in the wardroom, everything apparently normal except there's no crew aboard.

The thing about a locked room is, it's never impossible. It's a puzzle box, and there's always a way to solve a puzzle box. The key is to disbelieve what's in front of you. The minute someone says 'judging by blood splatter, the only way it could have happened is ...' you know for a fact that, whatever else happened, the so-called only way is precisely how it didn't happen. A locked room works on magician's rules, and a magician's favorite trick is misdirection.

So if a corpse turns up in a burnt-out garage, for example, and dental records show that the corpse is Mister Bob Bingo who owed everyone a ton of money, then your first job is to look at those dental records and see if they're fake. Trust nothing, check everything.

As it's a puzzle the emotional satisfaction comes from solving the puzzle, and if the thing's badly designed or if the author cheats their way to a solution then the fun's lost.

Example from CSI KYC: at one point a poison's described as being lethal inside ten minutes. The characters go to a great deal of trouble to establish this. Then in another scene the same dose takes two hours, and even then the victim isn't dead. Which is it? 

In game, how would this work?

Remember this: once you introduce magic, or super-powers, or whatever it may be, the puzzle stops being a puzzle. The audience - the players - will assume magic did it. The problem switches from 'how does the puzzle work' to 'how do I show the solution isn't magic?' At which point you've probably lost the most important battle: capturing the audience's attention. 

So set the puzzle up in such a way that magic isn't the first or obvious answer. Maybe this is a Mutant City Blues game in which the necessary mutant abilities don't fit well into the Quade Diagram, or perhaps this happened during the day when vampires are powerless. Something quick, simple and obvious, so you can get on with the plot. This is why abilities like Night's Black Agents Vampirology are so useful, because one point spend will tell the agents 'a vampire couldn't have done it, at least not the way it was done,' without the Director jumping through hoops to show it wasn't vampire magic.

The best way to design a puzzle like this is to start with the solution and work backward. If you know who did it and how they did it then you should be able to come up with clues that show as much. Always remember this is a puzzle, and puzzles can be about anything. It doesn't have to be murder. It can be 'how did a virus get onto the system when it's not connected to the internet?" Or 'how did that burglar get into this hidden safe?'

Let's play with an example. Assume the setting is Night's Black Agents, modern day, so we're talking every conceivable current technology. Let's further assume that the crime takes place in an area patrolled by security robots which ought to have detected the intruder but did not. It doesn't matter what the crime is. The puzzle is how whoever did it foozled the security robots so they weren't detected carrying out the crime.

The software that operates the robots and monitors their activity reports no anomalies at the time of the crime. The incident reports show only that there was a brief interruption in patrol when a human employee fell ill. The robot stopped to monitor the situation and summoned a security guard, who confirmed that the person suffered a bad reaction to allergy meds. The sick person was escorted away and treated. 

The hardware that runs the show is not connected to the internet or the outside world. It's a purely internal network whose sole purpose is to run the building. It does everything from monitor the security robots to adjust the HVAC and make sure the goldfish tank in the exec suite is operating smoothly. Employees are expressly forbidden from attaching their own devices to the network, or using company property like laptops outside the building. There's no indication (via internal monitoring) that anyone did connect an outside device to the network, whether on the day or at any time in the past. So there should be zero chance of a virus corrupting the system. The hardware is in a security room down on the ground floor that is constantly monitored by cameras, sensors and human security personnel. 

So how was it done?

A virus was introduced into the system that prevented the security robots from detecting the intruder, or anyone at all, after a certain point. The target room and the corridors immediately around that room became invisible zones; the security robots could not see humans while they were in those zones. The agents may become aware of this when they realize that the robots did not detect the CEO even when he was in an area where he ought to be detected. He was working late on a big project, which is why he was in the building. 

How was the virus introduced? By our old friend the fish tank. 

The thermostat was recently replaced on the CFO's authority. That thermostat was the Trojan Horse which introduced the virus to the system. The CFO is the employee who had the bad reaction to allergy meds, which coincidentally enough happened at about the same time as the incident. The CFO doesn't remember authorizing the thermostat switch.

The CFO didn't authorize the switch; her secretary did. Turns out the CFO was poisoned by her secretary to create a diversion so the secretary could carry out the crime. While security and the robots were diverted the secretary got into the invisible area. She used 'I'm going to get your meds' as an excuse to leave the CFO's side and carry out the crime. The whole thing took five minutes.

So how would you do it?

Enjoy!