Haw Haw (Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London)

Lord Haw Haw, like Tokyo Rose, was a propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War, who each night told the people of Britain that the war was a hopeless cause, and that Nazi victory was inevitable. There were several broadcasters who wore the Haw Haw mantle, but the one I'm interested in is William Joyce, who presents a unique opportunity for a Trail or Bookhounds Keeper. Theoretically he could also show up in a Night's Black Agents game, particularly if, in your Dracula Dossier, you're running the 1940s campaign. That's the great thing about the radio; it doesn't matter where you are. You don't have to find it. It will find you.

However from a Bookhounds perspective, the bit you're interested in is Joyce's pre-war career.

Though born in New York to Irish immigrants, Joyce's parents soon returned home to Galway, Ireland, where he spent his youth, and where he is now buried. Following what he claimed was an assassination attempt when he was fifteen, Joyce and his family went to England. Though he attempted to get into the army, he had to lie about his age to do it, and was soon found out. Denied entry to the military, he went back to school, and attended Birkbeck College at the University of London, hoping to go from there into officer training. While he was there he fell in with the British Fascists, thus beginning what was to become a lifelong obsession.

He was an enthusiastic campaigner from the first, and not just as a talking head. Front-line clashes with the political opposition were common in those days, and Joyce had his face slashed open in a brawl with Communist agitators. He claimed ever afterward that his attacker was a Jew. However for all his faults one thing Joyce didn't lack was physical courage, and he soon had a reputation as a brawler.

It was an age of street battles. Cable Street is the most notorious, with Stockton-on-Tees a close second. People fought with whatever they could get their hands on; it might be a chair leg, a chamber pot, or a thrown potato with a razor blade stuck in it. Confrontations tended to be violent and bloody, but with few, if any, fatalities. Joyce was in the thick of it. It was the kind of thing he enjoyed.

His great talent was for public speaking. He could electrify an audience, and soon became one of the British Union of Fascists' leading speakers. Under Sir Oswold Mosley, Joyce soon rose to great heights in the BUF, standing for Parliament under the Fascist banner, and ran the West Sussex branch of the party. Youth groups, rallies, public events, Blackshirt marches; Joyce turned West Sussex into a Fascist stronghold.

He maintained this position until 1937. He had hoped that, come the revolution, Mosley would make him Viceroy of India, but events turned out differently. The 1937 elections had been the party's goal, and it spent time and effort grooming candidates, only for its major political supporter, Lord Rothermere, to withdraw funding. Without its most influential backer, the BUF had to tell its supporters to abstain, and fight for fascism in the next election. Little did Mosley know what was to come; war would interrupt the electoral process, and there would be no election till 1945.

Without a victory in 1937, and lacking a big-money patron, Mosley had to cut back on BUF expenditure. One of those fired in the ensuing cuts was Joyce, who found himself at a loose end. Though he tried to stay in politics, and split with his former friend Mosley, by 1939 it was very clear to him that, if he stayed in Britain, he would be arrested and interned. Joyce and his wife fled to Germany, where they stayed for the duration. At war's end Joyce was tried and hung as a traitor, for his Haw Haw broadcasts. He was 39 years old.

From a Keeper's point of view, Joyce's main use is as an antagonist, though, in a Bookhounds setting, he could conceivably also be a patron. Any campaign involving Radicals could easily have Joyce as a prime mover, and if there genuinely are Nazi agents roaming around London looking for occult tomes, Joyce is bound to be assisting them.

There's no suggestion that Joyce was superstitious in any way, or believed in the occult, but a fictionalized version could easily turn him into a kind of Svengali figure, using his (Mythos inspired) hypnotic voice to sway crowds. Theoretically he could even be an avatar, or dupe, of Nyarlathotep, since the Old One likes causing chaos and disaster and Joyce is in a prime position to do it.

On one famous occasion Sherlock Holmes himself tackled the Fascists, tracking down and defeating a fictionalized Haw Haw. That suggests a potential Dust Thing connection. Suppose the Dust Things decided to oppose Joyce and his Fascist friends, perhaps because of a book burning that Joyce organized. What better way to get the protagonists to act as their allies against Joyce, than to recruit Sherlock Holmes himself, and get Holmes to lead the protagonists into battle? Best suited to an Arabesque style game, but - particularly if one of the protagonists is deluded into thinking he or she is Holmes - it could be an excellent roleplay opportunity for gamers who enjoy a bit of Baker Street sleuthing with their Mythos madness.      

With all that in mind, William Joyce:

Athletics 10, Driving 4, Electrical Repair 6, Explosives 2, Firearms 6, Fleeing 6, Health 8, Mechanical Repair 4, Scuffling 9, Weapons 8. In a Pulp game, assuming use of Hypnosis, then Joyce has Hypnosis 5/15, the number after the slash representing the bonus he might get as a Mythos-powered Svengali figure.

Alertness Modifier: +1
Stealth Modifier: 0

Damage: -2 (fist), -1 (knife, thrown brick or razor blade), +0 (handgun)

Special: Joyce can summon Radicals (Bookhounds page 55) to do his bidding. He can command the allegiance of up to 20 Radicals at a time, perhaps sending them on missions or using them as bodyguards. Radicals tend to have few useful General abilities, but are handy to have around when you want someone beaten up or knifed. This is in addition to any forces he may have at his disposal as a Nazi spy or Mythos agent, assuming he is one. 

Polish Nazi Ghost Trains: The Walbrzych Sanction (Night's Black Agents)

If you've been paying any sort of attention to things that go bump in the news, you've probably heard of the Mysterious Nazi Ghost Train buried somewhere near Walbrzych, Poland. Treasure hunters, historians, and other crazy people have been flocking to this tale like flies to honey, and it occasionally resurfaces in Western media.

Briefly, at some point late war the Nazis are supposed to have hidden a train packed full of goodies in an underground railway embankment, and then sealed off the embankment. As to what the goodies are supposed to be, it could be almost anything, but naturally everyone's hoping it's looted artwork, gold, and other valuables. Not, say, mothballs, dust, and rubble, which is possibly the more likely, if less romantic, scenario. Is the burial site sealed off with deadly, explosive traps? Will Israel lay claim to the booty on behalf of the Holocaust dead? Are the treasure seekers who claim to have found the train telling the truth, or perpetuating a grand hoax?

Buried treasure always gets people salivating. Rumors of lost pirate gold, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be, have kept idiots digging at Oak Island for time out of mind, and repeated, ignominious failure hasn't dissuaded any of them yet. So too with Nazi trains, lost Armada galleons, lost cities, and far too many other tropes to count. It doesn't matter if there's no proof. So long as somebody's granny remembers somebody's granny telling the tale of the Dread Pirate Salty Drawers' treasure, or whatever it may be, there will be a buffoon out there somewhere with a shovel and a dream, ready to dig it up.

However the fun thing about this particular ghost train is that it draws on old tales of Project Riese, which is worth discussing.

Project Giant, to give it its translated name, began in 1943, and was still in progress at war's end. It was meant as an air raid shelter for important, strategic targets, and consisted of seven separate installations in the Owl Mountains of Lower Silesia, now part of Poland. The project, though ambitious, never really got off the ground, because the Germans insisted on using forced labor, POWs and concentration camp workers. Kept in insanitary conditions and worked to death, these poor souls proved less than efficient, particularly since typhus was rife among them. This meant that the projects never really went anywhere, and by 1945 the Red Army was on the doorstep. All seven projects were left unfinished, as the Nazis withdrew.

The ghost train story is part of the Walbrzych network, centered on what was then known as Schloss Fürstenstein, or to give it its current name, Książ Castle, part of the Książ landscape park and nature reserve. The castle was taken over by the Nazis in 1941, and later made part of the Giant network in 1943. What wasn't destroyed or taken by the Nazis was looted by the Reds, so the castle was pretty much stripped bare during the war. It is currently a tourist attraction, and the upper levels of the tunnel network are open to tourists. The lower levels are used by the Polish Academy of Sciences, for seismological research, among other things. The remains of the old concentration camp, AL Fürstenstein, may or may not be there yet; I've been unable to confirm one way or the other.

Dracula Dossier Directors may already be making the leap to telluric vampires - I mean, there's an Academy of Sciences right there just begging to be taken advantage of - and that's certainly one way to go. But what about:

• The Nazi connection. An elder vampire, seeing the Reds on the doorstep, decided to pack a train full of snacks and push it into an abandoned railway siding, thinking to wait it out for, say, six months or a year. Then the vampire would escape after the Red Army had pushed though. Except that things didn't go according to plan, and the vampire ended up trapped down there for many decades. Now it's on the verge of release, which may or may not please the Conspiracy. After all, there's no real vacancy in the Cospyramid for it to fill, but at the same time the Conspiracy can't afford to be unwelcoming. For that matter, what kind of mental shape is this elder likely to be in, after several decades with nothing but dust-dry corpses for company?
• The Edom connection. One of the Hochberg dynasty that owned the castle before it was seized by the Nazis joined Edom, and after the war the information about the castle that he provided was very useful in defusing Soviet attempts to reactivate the Nazi vampire program that Project Giant was the cover for. After Poland joined the EU, Edom quickly established itself at Książ Castle, hoping to discover secrets buried in the lost tunnels. However Edom was to be disappointed; any such secrets had, apparently, been relocated back to Russia shortly before Solidarity brought Poland out from under the Soviet umbrella. Continued efforts occasionally uncover tempting prospects, but so far Edom considers Project Fürstenstein a bust. But is it? This train discovery could change everything, and nobody's more anxious than Edom to find out what's really down there. 
• The Conspiracy Connection. The vampires established themselves at Książ soon after Project Giant began, using Nazi cut-outs to cover for their own fiendish experiments. However the advancing Red Army forced them to withdraw, burying whatever they couldn't carry away. For a time their secrets remained safe, deep beneath the earth. When Poland regained its independence, the Conspiracy moved back in, suborning the Academy of Sciences to ensure that its secret installations would remain secret. Now the tunnels beneath Książ are its private preserve, and its plans are well advanced. If only those blasted treasure hunters would stop looking for Nazi ghost trains laden with loot, all would be well!

 Of course, that's just a sampling. No doubt you can come up with a few twists of your own, to plague your players. Just remember, secrets that have been buried for decades can still kill you. Or at least give your tourist trade a welcome bump. Nazi Ghost Train T-Shirts, anyone?

Enjoy!

Edit added 21 Dec 2015: According to that same Academy of Sciences mentioned above, the whole thing is a massive hoax. Or possibly an understandable mistake, depending on how you look at it.  The difference in the amateur train hunters' readings may be down to overhead power lines messing with their cheap equipment. Alas! No glittering hoard of gold and Nazi knickknacks. However the Discovery Channel is sniffing around, so it's likely we'll see the whole sorry story on one of those Godawful reality history shows before long.