Treasure Maps (Bookhounds of London)

I've been re-reading Dorothy Sayers, particularly her short stories where she occasionally gets experimental and decided that her detective Lord Peter Wimsey will, this episode, look for buried treasure rather than unburied corpses. Usually the beak-nosed sleuth is asked to do so by some reluctant socialist (Uncle Meleager's Will) or similar hanger-on who wants the loot to do good with; sometimes Lord Peter stumbles onto it while rooting about in an antiquarian book store (The Dragon's Head), though even in those instances there's some helpless do-gooder in the background waiting to turn the loot into a cure for cancer. Heaven forfend people get the money so they can spend it and have fun. However it happens, soon Lord Peter is off solving crossword puzzles or doing something similarly useful in search of a fortune in ... whatever it may be.

Sayers isn't alone in this. M.R. James often had his protagonist out looking for buried treasure of one kind or another (Abbot Thomas) and E.G. Swain had his priestly Mr. Batchel out looking for Stoneground loot about one episode in three, more or less, often to be thwarted by his ghosts. 

Sayers is possibly a little unique in that Lord Peter regularly finds important clues in antiquarian books, or libraries. In The Bone of Contention, which features not one but two ghosts, the all-important will of Dead Rich Man is found in an edition of The Nuremberg Chronicle kept in the dead man's library, sadly neglected. It's because the book is stained with damp, but the will is not, that Lord Peter smells a rat. In The Dragon's Head, Lord Peter and his nephew Gherkins find clues to the location of pirate treasure in Munster's Cosmographica Universalis.  

M.R. James also hid wills or other important clues to cash in antiquarian volumes (Tractate Middoth) but tended to be less obscure; a biblical quote or two, certainly, but actual treasure maps, no. 

Consider: most people go looking for Mythos texts because they contain knowledge . Things Man Was Not Meant To Know (Or Spell. Or Smell, For That Matter). Which is all well and good, but what happens when someone who couldn't care less about occult knowledge happens to pick a Mythos text in which to hide the clues to the loot?  What if that book is a treasure map?

Sayers had one advantage over the rest of us. Her audience was keen to solve mysteries, which is why she could devote chunks of her narrative to, say, solving an actual crossword puzzle. I suspect if you, the Keeper, were to present the players with an actual crossword puzzle to solve before they could advance the narrative, there'd be a revolt. It might be perfectly in keeping to present the characters with a Latin Squares puzzle to solve - first invented in 1783, apparently - but you'd be unwise to present one unless you'd like the game to come to a crashing halt. 

Dungeons and Dragons is particularly fond of presenting players with abstruse trap-puzzles to solve lest the player-characters be perforated by pitchforks. Some DMs seem to find great pleasure in designing peculiar puzzle palaces. I often wonder how happy their players are to find these encounters.

No, while the average player likes putting together clues to advance plot nobody wants some kind of quasi-Resident-Evil hunt for the Rooster Key before they can go through the Rooster Door to find the Oyster which contains the Pearl which when combined with the Ruby and the Emerald will ... and so on. Besides, while the character might be an analytical genius capable of solving sixteen impossible challenges before breakfast there's no guarantee the player is. 

Hence the Clue system in Gumshoe, both Core and Optional.

Figuring out the puzzle is hard enough for a group of armchair detectives, without someone withholding half the pieces from them. GUMSHOE, therefore, makes the finding of clues all but automatic, as long as you get to the right place in the story and have the right ability. That’s when the fun part begins, when the players try to put the components of the puzzle together. 

Gathering clues is simple. All you have to do is:

1. Get your Investigator into a scene where relevant information can be gathered,

2.Have the right ability to discover the clue, and

3.Tell the Keeper that you’re using it. [Trail, p.51]

To expand on this, I'm going to rely on point 1., Get your Investigator into a scene where relevant information can be gathered, and suggest to you that the Core Clue scene can be layered with other scenes to create a treasure map.

Example: in Sayers' Dragon's Head Lord Peter, through the innocent purchase of an antiquarian book by his nephew Gherkins, discovers that the book contains information that will lead to loot. However, he cannot understand it. He knows the information's there, but doesn't know what it is. 

To completely understand what's going on, Lord Peter has to do two things. First, he has to learn more about the book's previous owner. He can do this anywhere; he doesn't need to be in a particular location or scene. Second, he has to go to the place where the loot is hidden and use the book in a particular way. In case you hadn't guessed, I'm trying to avoid story spoilers as much as possible; hopefully this doesn't make my point obscure. 

In short, he has the Clue and knows it is a Clue, but needs more information before he can completely appreciate the Clue. It is a layered Clue. It has multiple meanings leading to a final result, and that final result can only be obtained by going to a scene where relevant information can be gathered.

In game, Keepers sometimes express this layered Clue in terms of Pool Points. Reading this text, for instance, gives the player 2 pool points in Uncovering The Treasure. However, in order to use those pool points the character has to get to the scene where those pool points become relevant.

A Keeper in this situation is free to rule that spending one of those points allows the investigator to work out where (ie. in what scene) the Clue can be used. It saves time, is a viable use of the pool, and allows the investigator spotlight time. 

It's what I like to think of as a By Jove! moment. The Great Detective, thanks to an info revelation, suddenly knows who did it or what really happened. Often it's the Detective's Watson saying something apparently trivial that sparks this intuitive leap, but it can as easily be the Detective poring over some text or other looking for inconsistences. 

In this case By Jove! basically means the character works out, from the information in front of them, where they have to go next. It does not necessarily tell the character how to get there, or what's in the way. There may be sinister cultists waiting in ambush, or lethal traps at the story location. There may be logistic reasons why the characters can't just easily transition from one place to another; perhaps the place they need to get to is in the middle of a civil war, for example. All it does is tell them where, not how, or whether there will be problems along the way.

Let's put all this into practice. For the sake of example this is going to be a Bookhounds seed, but a Treasure Map could be used to fit many different situations and settings.

For this example I'm going to use one of the Ripley Scrolls as my Treasure Map. Alchemist George Ripley (c. 1415–1490) is alleged to be the creator of these scrolls, which are transcriptions or variations on a lost 15th century original text. Nobody knows whether this is so, but occasionally some of Ripley's poetry is found in the text so the scrolls became known as Ripley scrolls. These are examples of emblematic symbolism, less physical chemistry and more esoteric philosophy, perfect for my purposes.

Of course, it's a scroll, not a book. That doesn't have to be a problem but I'd prefer it was a book, since that muddies the waters even further by obscuring the true nature of the original text. 

I'm going to say that in this example the scroll has actually been cut up and tipped into a larger alchemical work compiled by an unknown academic at some point in the 17th century. Using the Shelfware and Foxing section of Bookhounds I shall also say that:

• At some point in the 19th century the cheap paper wrapper collection was rebound in morocco leather;
• That it is infested with alien insects (of which more later);
• That part of it is in code, a variant of Alphabetum Kaldeorum ("alphabet of the Chaldeans") 
• That it has no name or title, but is known as ex libris August Strindberg, after its most famous owner.

So here we have a text of dubious origin allegedly owned by a famous playwright and occultist, which has clearly gone through several hands since its creation in the 15th century. Always assuming it wasn't a fake to begin with.  

To add that Mythos tinge, let's go one step further and say that the Scrolls were created by someone - Ripley, or another - under the domination of the Great Race. That's why it is always infested with those strange insects; it is a point in space/time permanently linked with Pnakotus, and while not quite a functioning Gate it is just enough of a portal to allow small things through. This works both ways, so on the other side of the connection is a small pile of mouse bones, roaches, and other oddments from Earth. Nothing larger than a signet ring can pass, in either direction. 

This also means that destroying the book causes the portal to explosively decompress, allowing whoever destroyed it a close-up look at Pnakotus. Mythos shock, stability Loss +3, Sanity Loss +2, damage as pipe bomb (p 67 main text) which means everyone within 30 to 40 yards is in danger, and anyone who dies as a result is sucked into Pnakotus. In theory, if the Keeper is feeling particularly unkind, something from Pnakotus could be sucked through. Perhaps one of the Great Race, dazed and bleeding from transit, could spend a few rounds being unpleasant to everything nearby until it works out how to return to Pnakotus.

Skimming gets the reader 2 pool points Uncovering The Treasure. Poring over it gets +2 Mythos, no spells, and +1 Occult.

The Treasure is something completely unrelated to the Mythos text. It has to do with Strindberg, when he was going through his Inferno (1869 – 92) period.

Strindberg allegedly suffered temporary insanity, at least according to his contemporaries. A self-proclaimed  "socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is anti-reactionary!... I want to turn everything upside down to see what lies beneath," he switched completely and became a mystic Catholic. He claimed an outside force, The Powers, had forced this on him, causing physical and mental suffering as part of their revenge on humankind for their wrongdoings. 

One of the results of this period was his semi-autobiographical work, Inferno. The other, allegedly, was the Golden Fleece, which Strindberg accidentally discovered during his Parisian sojourn. Experts are divided as to whether this is a philosophical construct (as hinted at in Strindberg's letters to Nietzsche) or a physical artefact which, for whatever reason, Strindberg couldn't bring himself to sell to solve his money problems.   

Those who say the Fleece is a physical object claim that Strindberg hid the location of the Fleece in ex libris Strindberg. Wild-eyed literary wackos and get-rich-quick chancers from all over the world would give anything to obtain it, though whether they could understand its literary allusions is another matter. 

So there are plenty of people who want this book who have no idea what the Mythos is, and could care less. Given the treasure's alleged location, Paris, it could be interesting to mix this with Dreamhounds and say that some of those trying to understand ex libris Strindberg are surrealists who want ex libris for its philosophical underpinnings, not the Fleece. However, surrealists are poor as dirt and couldn't afford to be in the same room as ex libris, much less purchase it, so they're quite likely to want to 'liberate' (steal) it.

OK, we have a book, a treasure, and a potential locale, Paris. What next?

Divide up the sequence into the appropriate scenes.

The Opening Scene is the acquisition of the book. Maybe in a house clearance, an auction, or however, but the Hounds get ex libris. As a result of that acquisition they get their first Core Clue: The Map. They understand that the information leads to treasure, and they may even know what the treasure is, but they don't know how to interpret it.

Optional lines of investigation include translating the Chaldean code, finding out more about Strindberg, finding out more about the source of the book (who sold it and why), finding out more about the provenance of the book (is it what it claims to be?) Meanwhile there are other things going on. The alien insects make their presence felt. Maybe someone picks up on all that Mythos knowledge and makes some bad assumptions about the nature of the problem.

Play it all out, but remember the key point: while they have the information, they are not in the right scene to make full use of it. The Hounds are in London. To make full use of the Clue, they need to be in Paris.

The easiest kind of transition is geographic. To be in the right scene, the Hounds need to change location. It's not the only way to handle the problem. The Hobbit did exactly the same thing with hidden lettering on Thorin's map, making it so the map's secrets could only be read at a particular time of year, under certain conditions. So in that situation the transition is time, not location. In a related Hobbit scene, the transition is expertise. Only one person, Elrond, could translate and understand the map. Finally, the information the map provided could only be acted on at a specific time of year, in a particular location. 

Transition in time, in geography, in expertise - all in one map.

But for our purposes in ex libris, the transition is purely geographic. The Hounds have to get to Paris. this allows the Keeper a chance for transit shenanigans Orient Express style, with mysterious strangers on the train perambulating around like little red herrings - until one of them makes a play for ex libris. Whether for its Mythos importance or its value as a map. After all, the Great Race might be very interested in this little travelling portal to their time/space dimension and yet have no interest  in the Golden Fleece. Whereas your average treasure nut has little interest in the Mythos but really wants the Fleece.

Once in Paris the Hounds can use the Core Clues to their fullest, working out precisely where the Golden Fleece is from the information in ex libris. What they do with this information is up to them. As an artifact the Golden Fleece is incredibly valuable, but surely there's a reason why Strindberg didn't try to sell it. Is there some curse? Does it have magical properties? Is there a guardian - ghouls, perhaps, or a serpent?

All that's for you and your players to determine. 

That's a Layered Clue. Obtained in one scene, but can only be properly understood in another, the two scenes being divided by geography. 

This is a relatively simple example with only two layers; it's easy to imagine a Layered Clue with multiple layers, divided not just by geography but also time, and possibly other factors as well. A Layered Clue that can only be properly understood by someone with the In The Blood drive. Or someone with 1 or more Magic pool, That only gives its secret up when the right stars shine overhead, or when the moon is full. A complicated Layered Clue could be the centerpiece of an entire campaign, depending on just how complicated the Keeper wants to make it.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Bookhounds of London: The House Sale

A man died to bring you this blog post. His name was Ralph.

I never really knew him, though I probably met him at some point, as he was a friend of the family. He had a very nice old house with water views, the sort of well-built 1930s design that stands up very well to the test of time, unlike many modern builds. Like most of us, he filled his house with stuff, things that his family neither wanted or needed but had to get rid of, if they were to sell the place or live in it themselves. The word went out: house sale! Time to get some bargains!

Living on an island, you get very used to the concept of trawling round leaving sales and the like, looking for a good deal. If you buy new, you're paying the importer's premium - often a very high mark-up - for the kind of cheap(ish) tat that, you know in your heart, you could pick up for half the price in any larger, more well-stocked market. A house sale, particularly one like Ralph's, is a good way of buying quality stuff at knock-down rates. On the other hand, from the seller's point of view, you just want rid of all that junk as quickly as possible, and what a load of tat it often is! Dog-eared cookery books and old algebra texts used by young Ralph, aged 15, still gathering dust all these decades later. Sofas and chairs, rotten with age, that wanted new covers and restuffing ten years ago and now need putting out of their misery. Chipped novelty jugs from a long-forgotten vacation, bedside tables, prints probably worth more for the frame than the content, and pretty much every other tchatchke you can imagine, plus more besides.

For those thinking this sort of thing is unique to my situation, I can assure you it isn't, and I have proof from an expert authority: J.R.R. Tolkein. Mild Hobbit spoilers ahoy!

And so they crossed the bridge and passed the mill by the river and came right back to Bilbo's own door.

"Bless me! What's going on?" he cried. There was a great commotion, and people of all sorts, respectable and unrespectable, were thick round the door, and many were going in and out - not even wiping their feet, as Bilbo noticed with annoyance.

If he was surprised, they were more surprised still. He had arrived back in the middle of an auction! There was a large notice in black and red hung on the gate, stating that on June the Twenty-second Messrs. Grubb, Grubb and Burrowes would sell by auction the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire, of Bag-End, Underhill, Hobbiton. Sale to commence at ten o'clock sharp. It was now nearly lunchtime, and most of the things had already been sold, for various prices from next to nothing to old songs (as is not unusual at auctions). Bilbo's cousins the Sackville-Bagginses were, in fact, busy measuring his rooms to see if their own furniture would fit. In short, Bilbo was 'Presumed Dead,' and not everybody that said so was sorry to find the presumption wrong.

Which just goes to show that Tolkein must have been to one or two auctions in his time. The pattern remains broadly the same today. As with any sale, those who get there first get the good stuff, and many of those present aren't there to buy at all, but to poke their noses round the place and gather - or spread - good gossip. Prices are uniformly low, even for the so-called valuable items, because the priority is to get the stuff out the door and the higher the price, the more likely it is it will go unsold. Particularly in a family sale you will often find the family on site, more or less melancholy, depending on the situation. It's worth bearing in mind, as many of you may know from personal experience, that these situations seldom bring out the best in people. The potential for reawakening old quarrels is very high, and it is not uncommon to find cousins squabbling in the parlor or spouses in tears because they've been denied the whatever-it-may-have-been that their hearts had been set on. And that's just the family; the bargain hunters can easily spark off their own to-do, over some forgettable bit of rubbish that they wouldn't look twice at if it wasn't on sale.

From a Bookhounds of London perspective, this situation is a potential gold mine for the Keeper. Some points you might want to bear in mind:

First, remember that the objective, from the seller's perspective, is to clear the house. That means everything, from curtains to carpets, has a price tag. The protagonists may only be interested in books, but that doesn't mean everyone else there is. Depending on the scale of the sale, there may be scores of people crowding round, or just a few neighbors and family members. This is a time for Interpersonal Abilities to shine. Gathering information can be as important as getting hold of that valuable first edition, particularly if the protagonists want to know where all the really good stuff is, or went.

Second, the protagonists will need to dig if they really want to find anything. The seller certainly won't have done anything more than some very basic organizing. A lot of items may have been left exactly where they were found, particularly the furniture and heavy stuff. Other, smaller pieces will have been taken out and put on display, so the kitchen counter - for example - is bound to be covered with pots, knives, china, and everything else that, until the sale, rested quietly in a kitchen drawer. Bulk items, like the books, may have been gathered up into boxes and will be sold by box. Or perhaps not; they might still be on a shelf somewhere. If you want to find something interesting, you need to search the whole house.

The protagonists should be aware that what they buy may not be all they take away. We found, quite by accident. Ralph's wallet in a drawer of a side table we took away, complete with credit cards. One of the books I picked up has all sorts of old newspaper clippings and other ephemera tucked between its leaves. Look at your own house, or apartment, and imagine what's hidden in some bag, or box, or drawer. Anything could turn up anywhere, and while most of it is undoubtedly not worth the trouble of collection - sorry to say it, but it's true, and no less true of my stuff than it is of yours - every so often a gem will surface. The people running the auction will go through the collection looking for that sort of thing but, particularly in a large sale, they can't be expected to find it all.

The protagonists should remember that not everything has to be in their specialty in order to be valuable to them. Back in 2012 I wrote about Orwell's Bookshop, and it's worth referring to again now. Remember what he said about his lending library:  

Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was — Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific.         

Bear in mind, the protagonists are in business to make money. They might live for the day they finally discover the grimoire of their dreams, sell it, and retire to some blissful Pacific atoll on the proceeds; but in the meantime, they need to pay bills, and that means supplying what the customers want. Moreover I don't doubt for a minute that the buying public's consumption patterns have remained unchanged since Orwell's day. The Ethel M. Dells of this world still make a pretty good living, and while the critics may adore a literary phenomenon, that doesn't mean the phenomenon's books fly off the shelves. Finding a collection of some romance author's works can be a good way of keeping the shop afloat, and a useful reward for a protagonist determined to put the effort in to find it.

But what kind of property has a house sale? Broadly speaking, it's a middle class occupation, but that's a very all-inclusive term. A governess who spent all her life looking after other people's children, and who retired to a little cottage or flat, is as much middle class as the stockbroker who earned a very good living in the City and who owned a country house, even though each would have understood the subtle differences in their own social station. The smaller sales won't attract as much attention as the larger ones, of course, but that doesn't mean they're not worth paying any attention to. After all, governesses spend a lot of time in other people's houses, and often pick up things given them by their more well-to-do employers.

Not every house sale is, by definition, an auction, as not every decedent is a Bilbo. There are very many businesses that make their living out of going through a place and carting away the rubbish. Enterprising Bookhounds ought to be on very good terms with people in that line of work, but it's also worth their time poking through the items that don't get collected. You hear, every so often, about the incredibly valuable painting or other antique found in the skip after the house clearers have been. That could as easily be your players, if they're sharp about it.

Is this limited to Bookhounds of London? Not necessarily, though for obvious reasons it's most applicable to them. There's scope for Night's Black Agents, for example, in a house sale, but protagonists in that sort of game are probably going to be involved in more high-end auctions. There's limited interest in a James Bond type poking his nose in some granny's bloomer drawer, seeking bargains. Yet clearances aren't limited to grannies and the like; government archives are often throwing away valuable stuff, sometimes by accident. Or perhaps it's kept well beyond its sell-by. It's well known in London, for example, to those interested in such things, that lurking underground in forgotten tube stations and bomb shelters, there are still old records dating back to the war. The government had all kinds of blitz-proof hiding places and offices scattered over the city, and when the war ended, often the shelters and storage facilities were locked up and forgotten about. Imagine an old Nazi bunker in Berlin, not touched since the war, suddenly rediscovered during building works. Or imagine the sudden interest there might be in, say, hard drives from Russian computers, sold on by enterprising bandits or ex-internal security people, if people realized what kind of data was stored on them. That sort of thing can happen in many different circumstances; there's been interest, recently, in Silicon Knights' sale of office supplies and computers to Precursor Games, and Silicon had to prove that the hard drives were wiped before sale, as part of its dispute resolution with Epic Games. Tech companies go under all the time, and only those with the appropriate Abilities will be able to work out where all their - potentially valuable - stuff went. Or say an old Cold Warrior with unusual connections cashes in his chips unexpectedly. There's bound to be an interest in his belongings, and the only question is, can the protagonists beat all the other interested parties to the punch? 

This is intended as food for thought for the Keeper. There's plenty of mileage to be had from a house sale, whether as a one-off event or as the kicker for a more in-depth series of scenarios. Just bear in mind, someone's treasure is another person's trifle ... unless it turns out, as happened with Ralph's wallet, that trifles hide treasures after all.