The Bookseller of Crémieu (Night's Black Agents)

I had something else in mind this week, but I've been sick as a dog (woof woof) so ... 

Recently I had an article posted in Pelgrane's Page XX, Nosferatu. The medieval village of Crémieu features as a backdrop; let's play with that idea a little.

Crémieu is tiny, perhaps a few thousand souls, with a long and somewhat glorious history. Its heyday was long, long ago; it played host to a royal castle, monasteries and nunneries, a coin mint, and was an important trade hub. In more recent times its glory faded, but it still appeals to tourists, artists and lovers of history. 

In Nosferatu, Crémieu is the closest township to the tech startup Nosferatu, which makes a specialist kind of security system that apparently is designed with vampires in mind.

Pelgrane's Resource Guide gives several new creature types, among them the Fetch:

Fetches are the embodied ghosts of those killed by vampires. When a vampire drains and murders a living human, it can trap the victim’s consciousness in the dead body. The result is a fetch. Fetches look much like they did in life, only greyer and somehow diminished ... 

From all that:

The Bookseller of Crémieu

When Nosferatu first relocated to France, it attracted attention both international and local. 

One of those in Crémieu who paid it more than a little mind was the bookseller Adolphe Monteux. His shop La Librarie Antique on the Rue Saint-Jean is a decayed little fixture of the town, established by Adolphe's father soon after the War. It has a reasonable reputation as an antiquarian bookshop but has struggled in recent years, and anyone who looks at it can see why. The place is shabby, its collections disorganized, and the place stinks of damp. 

Adolphe is a local character. A perennial candidate for local offices who never once wins a race, a blogger on local history, a scandal-monger who manages to sniff out some of his neighbor's most guarded secrets, and a lover of conspiracy theories. Particularly if those theories involve aliens, alien technology, or alien infiltration of the government. He's the kind of local irritant who never quite hits what he aims at, but who throws enough shots to occasionally be embarrassing.

He has self-published a few pamphlets on local topics, ghost stories, witches and the like. He's also contributed to the Association for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Isle Crémieu (E.P.I.C), though his contributions to EPIC aren't always warmly received. Adolphe tends to let his passions guide him which doesn't always sit well with EPIC's editors. 

What happens to Adolphe depends on whether Nosferatu is Innocent, an Asset or a Minion.

If Innocent: Adolphe attempted to dig up some dirt on Nosferatu's partnership. He concentrated on Sue Choi; he'd heard about her peculiar experiences in San Francisco and speculated that she was being puppeted by alien masters. While none of this is true it did attract the attention of a French Conspiracy node. The node was curious about Nosferatu's intentions and background, and while it didn't see Nosferatu as a threat it did want to keep an eye on Nosferatu just in case its status changed. Adolphe became a Fetch soon after, installed to keep an eye on the tech startup. Sue Choi is aware of Adolphe's actions but not of his current status; to her, Adolphe is an annoying little man who tried to poke around in her private life.

If Asset:  Adolphe is being run by the other side. Before the War, Crémieu was host to a Conspiracy Node that, as luck would have it, was wiped out by the Germans who mistook it for a Communist resistance cell. Adolphe is the sole survivor of that Node; he's had to remake his identity as his own son to keep the pretense up. He was re-absorbed into the Conspiracy in the 1960s, but the Conspiracy hadn't much use for him until recently. The relocation of Nosferatu was a lucky break for this creaky antique; now the Conspiracy expects him to keep close tabs on the tech startup. His spy skills are dusty, rusty, and antique. However, his money spends as well as anyone else's, and he's been able to bribe a few Nosferatu workers who supply him with intel. He knows what Vermillion workers are and his superiors are becoming interested. Whether they become interested enough to send a strike team is, as yet, an undecided question.

If Minion: Adolphe has been a Fetch since the 1890s. Up until that point he was an investigative journalist in Paris, but his researches earned him a little too much attention. The vampire who created him kept him around for a while but forgot to keep an eye on Adolphe. The former journalist scarpered and made a home for himself in Crémieu, where he hoped to fade into the background forever and ever. After all, so long as his creator lived, so would he. Neither Adolphe nor his creator anticipated Nosferatu. As luck would have it, Adolphe's creator is one of those vampires sent to Nosferatu on punishment detail, expected to eventually succumb to one of the tech startup's test programs. This poses an impossible dilemma for Adolphe. After all, if the vampire dies, so does he. The former journalist turned bookseller has to decide whether he wants to risk it all to rescue his creator, knowing that if he's successful he'll be returning to a life of bondage. Or whether he wants to tip the scales and make sure the vampire dies, ensuring his own death in the process. What luck some Agents have arrived to complicate the situation; Adolphe may be able to manipulate them to his advantage.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Source Material: American Decades

I spend a lot of time talking about RPG materials, and not nearly as much time talking about inspiration. Today I'm recommending a book series: American Decades, published by Gale Research. Various authors and editors, but the copy I have in my hands is 1930-39 edited by Victor Bondi. I also have the 1920-29 and the 1980-89.

I first discovered these back when I was working on the Prohibition supplement for Call of Cthulhu. I was working on that in the happy carefree pre-Wikipedia era, and you might think that the internet has supplanted books like these. Well, you're right - to a degree. So long as you don't mind floundering in a sea of links and seemingly unrelated tangents, or relying on what might turn out to be a poorly researched YouTube rant.

Price tag varies. Amazon alleges you can get these new for stupid money, but you don't need new. You need second-hand, ex-library copies. Mine comes courtesy of the Johnson County Library, wherever that is. Ex-library can be had for less than $10 plus shipping. 

Why recommend this series? There must be other, better sources, right? Again, yes - to a degree.

I'm recommending these as a solid first stop for any project set in the US. It's not a deep-dive. It covers everything from world events, politics and the economy to fashion, lifestyle, media and sports. It's the whole package, 600-700 pages long.

So if you're thinking about a scenario idea that involves, say, sports, and you know very little about what sports were popular in the 1930s, American Decades can give you the basics, and also short biographies of important people active in that field at that time. It's not exhaustive, but it doesn't have to be. All it has to do is give you a starting point. You can conduct any follow-up research yourself.  

From the Sports section: 

America's Queen of Bowling

Never too late. America's greatest woman bowler in the 1930s was thirty-five before she even bowled her first game in 1923 - but Colorado's Floretta Doty McCutcheon kept getting better and better at it. By 1927 she was beginning to secure her reputation with a series of high-scoring games and exhibitions, and on 18 December she defeated world champion Jimmy Smith in a challenge match, making sports headlines across the country. When she went on tour for the Brunswick Corporation a year later, she was already something of a legend. She told women they could begin bowling at almost any age and in any physical shape.

Role model. Throughout the 1930s she continued to bowl professionally; she also gave free lessons at bowling alleys around the country and through the Mrs. McCutcheon School of Bowling, sponsored by local newspapers. She toured from 1930 to her retirement in 1938, organizing leagues and teaching classes for high school and college students. She saw bowling as one sport in which men and women could compete equally ...

OK, hands up if you'd ever heard of Floretta McCutcheon before now. Put those hands down, you fibbers. 

That's where this book comes in handy. No matter how much of a polymath you believe yourself to be there's always something you don't know. Like Helene Mayer, the Jewish German fencer who fled Germany for the US to avoid persecution, and fenced for Germany in the 1936 Olympics. Or the Rhens, a black basketball team from Harlem, New York, the best team in the sport between 1932 to 1936. Or Hold That Co-Ed, a 1938 film in which a girl dresses up as a boy to win a football game.

But OK, you cry, Wikipedia exists. Why get this when I have that for free?

Well, why do you buy Investigators' Handbooks? Players Guides? Keeper's Kits? You buy those things to have all those period details together in one place so you don't vanish down a clickhole of entwined links when all you want to know is what speakeasies were like. That's why you need these books.

Probably the best thing about American Decades - incredibly cheap on the secondhand market, I reiterate, maybe $6-7 per plus shipping - from a Cthulhuhounds' perspective is the series divides itself up into decades. Playing Fall of Delta Green? Get 1960-69 for maybe $9. Trail of Cthulhu? 1930-39 is maybe $5 on the second hand market. 

Will it cover every possible topic in exhaustive detail? God no. But in 600-700 pages it will cover most topics in some detail, and give you leads that you might not have found otherwise.

It doesn't do Victoriana, which is a shame. Its earliest volume is 1900, which by its nature must cover some 1890s material but not in any kind of detail. The latest volume goes to 2009, but TBH I doubt most of you will need that. 

Put it to you this way. If you're coming to Call, Trail, Fall, or any of the other Cthulhu variants for the first time and you want to run games, or write them, then you want something like this in your research library. It won't be the last book you buy. God no. But it will be one you turn to time and again when you want to remind yourself what the politics were like then, or the technology, or what was in the news, or who was important in, say, the film business.

It's a solid first step. It's cheap. Plus, it's big enough to use as a doorstop. 

Bonus!

Walk-Ins (Night's Black Agents)

A walk-in, or dangle, is a potential spy agency informant who claims to have information to sell or skills to offer, but in fact is an enemy asset whose sole purpose is to feed the target agency false information. Any spy agency, no matter which government it works for, has this problem. People approach the agency all the time, swearing they have valuable intel to sell. Some are crackpots. Some are idiots. Some are genuine.

Every so often, though, it's enemy action.

In fiction, From Russia With Love's Red Grant, a Cold War British Army motorcycle courier, defects to the Soviets, who spend considerable time debriefing him. Always at the back of their mind is the question: is this defector what he claims to be, or is he someone we should just kill, right now? It's only when Grant is ushered into his interrogator's office and sees an unaccustomed bowl full of red roses on the interrogator's desk that he knows he's accepted. 

In reality, when CIA analyst Brian Regan tried to sell his data to whoever would buy (most likely China, Lybia or Saddam Hussain, he thought) he had to figure out who would be most amenable. He settles on Libya and approached its consulate in Switzerland, only to be flung out on his backside. The Libyans were convinced Regan was either an idiot or an enemy agent, and either way they wanted nothing to do with him. 

It's generally good practice to treat an unsolicited offer with suspicion, whether you're a spy agency or an ordinary person getting enticing emails from iamnotaphishingattempt.com. However if you're in Edom's line of business there's an added complication: that woman who just walked in the door claiming to have seen a vampire may not realize she's lying. She might be under something else's influence.

Imagine if you have to evaluate the sincerity and usefulness of someone who's just walked in off the street and claims to have something you want. The more valuable the thing on offer the more suspicious you ought to be. Still, if the offer's tempting enough ...

The Night's Black Agents Resource Guide offers rules for Thrilling Interrogation, but goes on to say that these rules are expected to be used when the Agents have captured a tougher-than-average bad guy who doesn’t give everything up to a simple Interrogation spend, or for scenes where one Agent has

been captured by the police or some other mostly legal entity (domestic intelligence, corporate security) and you want to play out the cat-and-mouse game between interrogator and suspect. 

There's one other time when Thrilling Interrogation comes into play: when the characters have to assess the honesty of a dangle.

The Little Grey Room

The agents work for X (Edom? CIA? the Vatican? Someone else?) or are freelancers; it doesn't matter which. They're hot on the heels of some kind of Conspiracy Node or plot, and in the middle of the action are approached by a would-be friendly with information to sell. Is this friendly genuine? Is the information reliable? Has the Conspiracy already flipped this asset and are the agents being lured into a trap?

For this example I'm going to use a Cameo from Double Tap as the potential friendly, but don't feel obliged to do so if it doesn't fit the moment. I'm also not going to detail the information the friendly has to offer. Far better if it remain in McGuffinland, to be changed as you see fit.

It's just the agents, the friendly, and a little grey room where they can talk without being overheard ...

Bureaucrat Athletics 4 (gym membership) Lara didn’t expect this job when she graduated from college, but it’s better than living at home with her mother. She epitomizes paper-pusher, working in a basement office that time forgot. Neat, thin, blonde, and pretty, she is officious and far too serious for her age. She still dresses for the job she wants: a little too much personality in the scarf and belt. (Bureaucracy, Flattery, Reassurance) In play: There’s a place for everything, and everything in its place; pick lint off your knees and lap; explain in a patient voice why that can’t happen.

In this example Lara is the runner. She might be perfectly sincere (+0), desperate (+1), and/or under vampiric influence (+2). More likely one of the latter two options, but it's Director's choice. There may be other reasons why she'd get bonuses, and again that's Director's choice. 

The agents are the pursuers. They have +2 base maneuver and probably have a +1 bonus as this is an enclosed interrogation. They may be able to finagle more bonuses, but that's up to them.

The chase ability in Thrilling interrogations is usually Stability. NPCs traditionally aren't assigned Stability. In theory if an asset was being controlled by a supernatural entity the Director could use the entity's Aberrance score, but tactically this is a bad choice. Aberrance is usually fairly high, at least 7 and often higher. This means any runner with high pool is signaling that she's under enemy control, since how else would she get the high pool? 

I would assign the runner a pool equivalent to their highest pool +2. In this case Lara's high pool is Athletics, so total pool for Thrilling purposes is 6. I might adjust that higher if she's under supernatural control, but if so I wouldn't tell the players. I'd assign more points in secret and see if the players notice.

The difference between this Thrilling Interrogation and a standard interrogation is that the facts are not an issue. Lara's perfectly willing to tell everything she knows. Maybe she wants money, or maybe her ego needs a little stroking, (remember MICE),  but she's spilling her guts either way. 

The problem is whether or not Lara's sincere, or lying, or so completely under someone else's control that she thinks her lies are truths. 

For an added Thrilling element, assign a time limit. Maybe there's a bomb about to go off somewhere that only Lara knows about, or maybe a sniper's lining up crosshairs on Lara's forehead, or maybe it's something else again. If the agents don't make the right call before the time limit (ie number of rounds in the Interrogation scene) expires, something bad happens.

The chase begins either at base 5 (the normal starting point) or base 7 (if Lara's sincerity is in question, as it probably will be). If Lara wins the contest, then the agents will never know whether or not her information is trustworthy. They'll just have to decide whether to take it at face value. If the agents win the contest then they know whether or not Lara's bluffing, intentionally or otherwise. What they do next is up to them. 

Enjoy!