Happy New Year!

Lest old acquaintances be eaten by gruesome gribblies, and all that.

According to Funk & Wagnalls the New Year, as in 1st January, is a relatively recent innovation adopted at various times by various nations. You wouldn't see general acceptance in the West until (roughly) the mid-1700s. 

There's a school of thought that says the drunkenness, debauchery and let-the-good-times-roll atmosphere is a hangover from the Roman Saturnalia, but this probably isn't so. When Julius Caesar made January the first month, way back in the before times, that meant the first month fell directly after the Saturnalia, and nearly every Christian of the day (and later) deplored this as irreligious. You just don't celebrate a new year after getting bladdered in the last days of the old one, was their point. It verged on Satanism. The Council of Tours, to name but one, insisted that the New Year begin with fasts, expiation, the banning of dances and frivolity, and so on. Most Christian communities of the day had similar views: you might get toasted at Christmas (grrr, how very Satanic) but God help you if you tried the same at New Year.

Funk & Wagnalls goes on to point out that many cultures celebrate the New Year with parties and jollity, not just the West, which suggests that the celebration's joie de vivre isn't based on one cultures' idea of what is proper. Everyone thinks the new year should begin with celebration, so it does. The form that celebration takes is determined by the culture. It can be as relatively benign as first-footing (being the first to walk over the threshold of the house in the new year) or as robust as flinging balls of fire about the place.

Sourced from Steve Marsh's feed

Let's gamify this.

The NBA Resource Guide has this to say about markets:

A crowded market on the streets of an old city. Is the market themed – a Christmas fair, stalls full of antiques and old books, local crafts, or mass-produced plastic junk? Is it a seasonal event or a fixture of the city? Old European cities often have warrens of narrow streets and alleyways full of small shops; North African cities have a similar medina quarter. Push through the crowds, grab a snack from a food cart, and follow your target as they browse the bazaar. A street market’s a good place to meet a contact or pick up rumors and intel from the streets – and that fishmonger deals in black-market weapons if you know the right passwords ...

We've already established that this particular 'market' is in fact a New Year's event. You won't see that many stalls; plenty of food & drink stalls, mind, less so the antiques and plasticky tourist crap. Nobody will be selling fresh fish. While there will be stores, they'll be shut and shuttered. There will be an increased Police presence, which in game terms means Heat goes up by an extra point for any dodgy dealings, and up by two extra points for anything involving overt violence. So, punching out that mook out in the open earns you 2 extra Heat on top of the usual 1 point you'd get for what amounts to a mugging. On the other hand if you lure that mook down a dark, deserted alley before you give him a thumping that only earns you 1 extra point. Better for you, really, to find some other means of dealing with the pesky little fellow. 

I'd argue that one of the better 'quiet violence' options is to wait until there's a suitable distraction. A bunch of bagpipers and some firey balls ought to do it. Then you could bounce the little weasel's head down a dark alley without gaining extra Heat. Time it right and you could get away with no Heat at all. Say, if you dinged him and then covered it with 1 point Reassurance, Cop Talk or similar. 

Bond, Thunderball

All that said:

Rescue/Hunt the software expert, aka Candles Go Out.

Erika Donnadieu, Kube Group's star, has broken from her dubious employers and tried to alert France's Direction générale de la Sécurité intérieure (DSGI) but, due to Conspiracy influence within that organization, her alert only brought more Heat on her. Now she needs to get out of the country but the Conspiracy is hot on her trail. She's made it as far as Lille, on New Year's; she just needs to get out of France. In this scene the action takes place at the Grand Place, at the height of the celebration.

The Grand Place is where the Christmas Market traditionally sets up, complete with Ferris Wheel and other carnival rides. During the New Year's celebration it will be absolutely packed with locals and tourists. 

sourced from Wikipedia

Personally, I enjoyed going to Lille over Christmas while I was in the UK, which is why I picked it. Plus, thanks to the Eurostar you can get pretty much anywhere from Lille, which is a bonus from Erika's perspective. 

Erika's booked a room at Couvent de Minimes, a former convent turned four-star hotel, under an assumed name (effective 2 points Cover) and has disguised herself as a postgraduate arts student. Little does she know, her cover has been blown and the Conspiracy knows where (and who) she is. A snatch team made up of a half-dozen mooks, a Renfield team leader and local supernatural talent, a Strix left over from the 1630s witch hysteria outbreak, are in place to grab her. Their plan is to do it while disguised as an ambulance team; Erika will just be another poor unfortunate who got a little too merry and had to be taken to hospital during the celebrations.

It's the agents' job to get to her and get her out before the Conspiracy spirit her away.

The agents are acting as third parties; their employer is an anti-vampire organization (or individual, eg. the Mysterious Monseigneur) who knows about Erika and wants to get her out of harm's way, probably for their own nefarious reasons. 

Possible variations:

• In a Satanic campaign the Couvent is a natural Bane to vampires as it maintains an air of sanctity despite its modernization.
• The Stryx is all that's left of headmistress Antoinette Bourignon who started the witch hysteria. She still runs a school of sorts: a school of cultists. Thank heaven for little girls, as they say ...
• Perhaps Erika takes refuge in the Ferris Wheel, which mysteriously breaks down at the perfect moment. Time for an aerial rescue?
• There is a famous Lille ghost story set at Place du Lion d’Or, not far from the Cathedral, in which a small boy is said to have been tortured to death by his schoolmaster. He haunts the room where he died, trapped in an iron cage. Dickens used it for his A Christmas Tree collection, in which he transposed the legend to England and made the boy's tomb a wardrobe rather that Lille's iron cage. In real life Place du Lion d’Or is some distance from the Couvent, but why rely on real life? A ghostly child emerging from a wardrobe (iron cages are so last century) whether at someone's command or by pure accident (to add to the chaos) has to be worth your time. In a Supernatural game perhaps Erika knows the story and uses the ghostly wardrobe as part of her getaway plan ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Montague James and the Hounds (Bookhounds of London)

I did say we'd be back to normal this week.

I expect most of you have heard of M.R. James, academic, antiquarian and author of some of the finest ghost stories ever published. For those who haven't, there's plenty of chances to rectify that deficiency; you can even get the books for free on Gutenberg, and there are any number of people doing readings of his work on podcasts and YouTube. OutsideXbox's Luke Westaway is quite good at it, if you have an hour or so to spare. Christopher Lee is even better, but his stuff can be difficult to find.

M.R. James originally created these stories as live performances for his friends at Christmas, a tradition that goes back a long, long way but is probably best remembered through Dickens' Christmas Carol. James then published them to great acclaim, and enjoys the best distinction a writer could hope for; his work is still in print almost a century after his death.

This time out I want to focus on two of his stories and talk about their Bookhounds implications. I shan't spoil. If you haven't read these stories please seek them out.

The first is Martin's Close, first published in 1911's More Ghost Stories.

Some few years back I was staying with the rector of a parish in the West, where the society to which I belong owns property. I was to go over some of this land: and, on the first morning of my visit, soon after breakfast, the estate carpenter and general handyman, John Hill, was announced as in readiness to accompany us. The rector asked which part of the parish we were to visit that morning. The estate map was produced, and when we had showed him our round, he put his finger on a particular spot. 'Don't forget,' he said, 'to ask John Hill about Martin's Close when you get there. I should like to hear what he tells you.' 'What ought he to tell us?' I said. 'I haven't the slightest idea,' said the rector, 'or, if that is not exactly true, it will do till lunch-time.' And here he was called away ...

It transpires there's not just a story, there's a criminal trial.

I made search in the more obvious places. The trial seemed to be nowhere reported. A newspaper of the time, and one or more news-letters, however, had some short notices, from which I learnt that, on the ground of local prejudice against the prisoner (he was described as a young gentleman of a good estate), the venue had been moved from Exeter to London; that Jeffreys had been the judge, and death the sentence, and that there had been some 'singular passages' in the evidence. Nothing further transpired till September of this year. A friend who knew me to be interested in Jeffreys then sent me a leaf torn out of a second-hand bookseller's catalogue with the entry: JEFFREYS, JUDGE: Interesting old MS. trial for murder, and so forth, from which I gathered, to my delight, that I could become possessed, for a very few shillings, of what seemed to be a verbatim report, in shorthand, of the Martin trial.

OK, let's talk about this.

Bookhounds - and horror games in general - sometimes treat manuscripts as though every single one of them's a Necronomicon, bound in human skin and dripping with evil. That's far from being so. People publish anything and everything. Most of it is rubbish. That's why the Hounds are always on the lookout for some unmemorable 18th century tat that they can rip apart and use the binding and papers for something more valuable. However, one man's rubbish is another man's gold. 

Here we have someone who's looking for the transcript of a trial. They can't find a copy anywhere, and it seems there may not be one. Yet by chance a transcript turns up in a second-hand bookseller's shop. It might have been that simple, but James adds an extra hurdle: the text is in the court reporter's shorthand, and not only that but a 17th century version of shorthand. The narrator has to find someone who can translate it so the narrator can have a copy typed out. It's a very neat touch that lends authenticity to the story, and doesn't take more than a sentence to describe.

The second piece is from Two Doctors, which first appears in A Thin Ghost And Others (1920).

It is a very common thing, in my experience, to find papers shut up in old books; but one of the rarest things to come across any such that are at all interesting. Still it does happen, and one should never destroy them unlooked at. Now it was a practice of mine before the war occasionally to buy old ledgers of which the paper was good, and which possessed a good many blank leaves, and to extract these and use them for my own notes and writings. One such I purchased for a small sum in 1911. It was tightly clasped, and its boards were warped by having for years been obliged to embrace a number of extraneous sheets. Three-quarters of this inserted matter had lost all vestige of importance for any living human being: one bundle had not. That it belonged to a lawyer is certain, for it is endorsed: The strangest case I have yet met, and bears initials, and an address in Gray's Inn. It is only materials for a case, and consists of statements by possible witnesses. The man who would have been the defendant or prisoner seems never to have appeared. The dossier is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what you can make of it.

Again, legal papers are the focus of the narrative, but look at how they're introduced. Not even as a manuscript; they're shoved into a ledger and forgotten about, until the narrator picks the ledger up for next to nothing. Three quarters of the inserted matter is useless, which is what's going to happen to the Hounds more often than not; all those bits and bobs they pick up in estate sales and so on, and most of it rubbish. Yet every so often there is something interesting 'and one should never destroy them unlooked at.'

So what can we extract from this?

1) Occult and by extension Mythos lore can appear anywhere.

2) Since Occult and Mythos lore is inextricably interwound with human history, it will appear everywhere, and that includes the most mundane of places. 

3) People publish all sorts of things, and while most of it is uninteresting rubbish you never know where you might find that next scrap of useful material.

4) In the 1930s and previous, people saved damn near everything. I couldn't tell you the last time I saw, never mind bought, a second-hand writing ledger in an antiquarian shop. Most of them barely had space for the books, never mind the not-quite-books. I doubt I'd find one at the Spreadeagle, and frankly if you can't find one there you can't find one anywhere.

With all that in mind:

A Peculiar Gazette

Back issues of old newspapers are often of interest to collectors; you never know when you'll find someone potty on the subject of , say, Huddersfield and desperate for new material. 

The Hounds find a bound collection of early 1800s publication The Star Gazette, best remembered for its series on the London Poor; they had a discount Mayhew on staff who liked writing social commentary but lacked academic rigor. The paper's been defunct since 1868, and the collection's a potential squiz.

There's a section towards the beginning of the collection that has some extra papers interspersed, and it becomes clear to anyone who examines the papers that they're about a scandal that was big in the 1830s: the Thevenot Abduction. 

A fortune-hunting 30-year-old bankrupt, Eustace Thevenot, wanted to marry into money, and did so by abducting 15-year-old textile heiress Devony Walker. He managed to spirit her away from her boarding school and then got her alone at the Thevenot family castle in Scotland, where he persuaded her that her father had consented to the marriage. The pair went from Scotland to Calais, but her outraged family tracked them down and prosecuted. Thevenot went to prison and died there. Devony, released from her marriage, had a short and unhappy life. She married again, and died in childbirth in her early 20s. 

Oral History, Occult or similar, 1 point spend: Devony's story has a peculiar postscript. She was never buried. There is no body in the family crypt; someone stole it. This was hushed up at the time, but became part of local ghost lore after her death. Nobody knows where Eustace Thevenot is buried. Presumably in an unmarked prison grave.

[Loosely based on the real-world Shrigley abduction.]

The Star Gazette has the bare-bones account of the abduction and trial. 

The interspersed papers are an unpublished statement from Devony Walker about her experiences at Thevenot Castle, on a tidal islet up in the Highlands. The statement was collected as part of trial prep, but never introduced at the actual trial. 

In game terms the Walker Papers have the following stats:

1 pool point Occult (skim) or +1 Occult (pore over), no Mythos, no spells. Effectively a short treatise on Geomancy, as understood by Walker who was the subject of various Geomantic rituals that Thevenot tried to cast on her while the two of them were alone at the Castle. 

To anyone without a Mythos pool these rituals seem nonsensical. Thevenot was trying to gain the attention of a water horse or kelpie, and get the creature to bless the marriage.

To anyone with a Mythos pool Thevenot was clearly trying to evoke the spirit of (or essence, or gain the approval of - it's not clear from the text) a sacred dragon, or Lloligor, that in times past had guided the Thevenot family.  

Whether the reader has a Mythos pool or not, it's clear from the papers that Thevenot had a library of occult texts at the Castle, some of which were scarce and valuable even at the time and will be much more valuable in the 1930s. 

Moreover a quick study of History, Library Use or similar (no point spend needed) soon realizes that Thevenot Castle's last occupant, Dacre Thevenot, died in 1916 at the Battle of Ginchy. There's no mention of an estate sale. Those books could be sitting all alone up there in Scotland, waiting to be pinched ...

So long as the Hounds are willing to risk the wrath of the kelpie, of course. But who believes in kelpies?

That's it for me this week. Enjoy!

Guilty! The Witchcraft Act (GUMSHOE Bookhounds, Dracula Dossier)

If you, as Keeper, want to throw a wrench in the players' ordered little lives in Bookhounds or a UK-based, pre-1950s Dracula Dossier mission, why not prosecute them under the Witchcraft Act of 1735?

The Act states that anyone claiming magical powers, or practicing witchcraft, could be imprisoned for a maximum of one year. It remained in force until the 1950s, when it was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which in turn was replaced by Consumer Protection under the 2008 Regulations. The 1735 act is the successor to a string of similar acts, all of which had one purpose: to seek out and punish witches, necromancers, and other frauds.

If you look up the Witchcraft Act 1735 you'll notice that the only politician to voice an objection to it was James Erskine, Lord Grange, who is remembered for two things: first, abducting his wife, claiming she died, and holding her prisoner on the Isle of Skye; and second, his opposition to the Act. He opposed the Act because he believed in God, and he, along with John Wesley and others, was reluctant to condemn witchcraft, as it was felt that giving up witchcraft was on par with giving up the Bible. After all, witches were proof of the spirit world, which in turn meant the religious world. Without proof of life after death, where is God? Nebulous claims of Scots political considerations that weighed heavily on Erskine have been floated, but this makes it sound like all of Scotland was witch-ridden, where in practice all of Scotland was merely God-fearing and wanted no truck with an Act that seemed to deny God.

Lest you think this is something that existed but was never enforced, rather like all those Elizabethan statutes that allegedly claim able bodied men have to turn up for archery practice of a Sunday, prosecutions were fairly common up to and after the First World War. This was a time when, if you could bring back the dead for a chat with their grieving relatives, you could make a fortune. During the war the authorities became increasingly concerned that fortune tellers and mystics were having a deleterious effect on morale, particularly since some of them were throwing caution to the wind and making prognostications about the war effort. Telling people who would win the war, or particular battles, was the Government's job, not Miss Millie's, and the authorities took a very dim view of Miss Millie's continued interference.

It got somewhat embarrassing for the plainclothes detectives and undercover agents sent to gather evidence when they discovered that soldiers, even officers, were also going to Miss Millie. Elizabeth Sixsmith, known professionally as 'Madame Betty' - and why she ignored God's gift of a surname I do not know, as Madame Sixsmith to my ears sounds much more impressive than Betty - claimed many soldiers among her clients. In 1918, when Detective Inspector Bedford burst in on medium Marie-Charles to deliver an arrest warrant, he found her in consultation with a Brigadier General.

This activity peaked during the War, when people were at their most vulnerable and desperate for any kind of news. It declined afterward, though the casualty lists ensured there would be a large number of people who wanted to talk to the dead in the 1920s. However as the decades wore on and people became less accustomed to going to fortunetellers and mystics, prosecutions became less common. There's a resurgence during the Second World War, but nothing on the scale of the mischief people were getting up to in the Great War, and once the conflict was over old habits began to die out. There were only a handful of prosecutions under the Fraudulent Mediums Act, and now the whole shebang is shoved in with dodgy tellies and fell-off-the-back-of-a-van stuff you find in the consumer protection regs.

What does this mean for your players?

To begin with, it's an excellent method of harassing them. Are they getting too big for their britches, and pursuing ghouls through Covent Garden without any thought for what might happen next? Time to pull them up and remind them that the outside world isn't something they can just ignore. Sooner or later blatant bullshittery comes back to bite you, and in this case it bites to the tune of one year in chokey. Or perhaps just bound over, if the Keeper's feeling generous. Don't forget that elements of this legislation are still in force in Israel and South Africa to this day, or that it was in force in Northern Ireland long after its repeal and replacement in England in the 1950s. Something for your agents to bear in mind, as they merrily skip across borders accumulating Heat.

Of course, if the government actually has some kind of supernatural or occult-interested research group - say, Edom - then a conviction under the Witchcraft Act could be synonymous with a quick trip to a secluded spot, there to be interrogated at leisure.

As an element of backstory, it can be very useful. Here's Miss Millie, dotty old dear, and here's her gang of hardened thugs. Where did she get hardened thugs? Oh, you can learn a great deal banged up in Holloway for a year. Plus you meet fascinating people like Norah Elam, suffragette and proto-fascist. This works for player characters as well as NPCs, bear in mind, so if you as player want to justify that point in Streetwise and some of your less savory contacts, this would be a good way to do it.

On top of all that, there's one other obvious direction to take: the prison scenario. This last is very much up to the Keeper, but consider: if you want a one-off in an unusual setting, and think a bit of hard time could be an interesting route to take the campaign, the Witchcraft Act will get you there in style. I recommend a good old-fashioned haunting, with the execution of Edith Thompson - and possibly also her unborn child - as a catalyst, but really, with a prison that's been there since the mid-nineteenth century, you could do anything.

Enjoy!
 

Ripped from the Headlines: The Iron Toothed Vampire (Night's Black Agents, Dracula Dossier, Esoterrorists)

Hundreds of Glasgow schoolchildren gather at the Necropolis each night. Two kids have been murdered, and eaten, by a vampire, and they're determined to bring the monster to justice. Their weapons may be feeble - a collection of sticks and knives - but their fervor is very real.

A cry goes up: "There's the vampire!" The schoolchildren scatter, screaming.

Thus a legend is born: the Iron Toothed Vampire of the Gorbals.

It gets its genesis from a comic book, Dark Mysteries. Comics like these were rarer than hen's teeth in Glasgow in the 1950s, and whoever had it must have enjoyed bragging rights. For whatever reason, that particular tale caught hold. It probably started small, with a couple kids chatting. Then more took up the tale, and more. Then the rumor goes round that, not only does it exist, it's killed.

It's one small step from that to patrolling the cemetery looking for the thing.

I can bear personal witness to this. Not that long ago, a tsunami swamped Bermuda. You won't have heard of it, but it's true. No, it didn't come from the Triangle. It came from Thailand.

In 2004 a terrible disaster took the lives of a quarter million people, most of them in Thailand. A year later, there was a documentary about the event. Bermudians watched it. Two of them sat outside, near Salt Rock Grill in Somerset, and idly commented that the gleam of water on the horizon looked just a little like what they thought a tsunami-created water wall might look like.

A few hours later our neighbors from Dockyard were deposited on our doorstep by the local police, convinced beyond reason that water would swamp everything at low level. Since we are on a hill, the police figured people would be safe.

Oddly enough, there was no ocean wave of death.

Nobody thought to ask how long it took a tsunami wave to hit, once it's sighted from shore. The police never called the weather service, or any other agency tasked with monitoring this kind of thing. They just scooped people up and dropped them somewhere that might be safe.

I suppose I should be grateful most of them aren't armed.

When the Esoterrorists talks about how the Membrane can be shattered by people spreading cryptorumors to create what amounts to a supernatural effect, the Iron Toothed Vampire is what it's talking about.

To add a little bit of gamification, with all the above in mind:

In 1954 Edom has a problem. It's self-inflicted: the Glasgow site at which it has been holding a biological test subject proves less secure than hoped, and the test subject escapes.

It's spotted by local children when it tries to hide in the Southern Necropolis, and then something interesting happens.

Edom still isn't sure of the proximate cause, but for whatever reason children by the dozens - the hundreds - join the hunt. At the same time the psychic listening posts set up to monitor activity - and by extension, Dracula - go off like klaxons. This causes an inordinate amount of public concern, outcry, and attention-grabbing media.

By the time the dust settles, the entity is contained, and the children given sound spankings and sent to bed, the Dukes are in conference. After all, it was just one minor outbreak, the sort of thing that has happened often enough before without this kind of reaction. What caused the psychic trauma? Will it happen again? Can it be created - can Dracula fake out the listening post system with false reports?

To begin with, the Glasgow operation is shut down. Clearly security is too lax; somewhere else shall be found for these experiments.

However the next few decades see an unprecedented interest in child psychology, as investigators from Edom monitor the children who participated in the Iron Toothed Vampire hunt. The initial theory is that one or more of them is, or was, a psychic sensitive, and the excitement caused by the vampire story caused a sudden burst of psychic energy, which in turn affected and influenced all the others.

In spite of this attractive theory the investigators are never able to narrow down the patient zero of this outbreak. Instead they have what come to be called the Gorbals Ten: children, now grandparents, who might or might not have had sufficient ability to create the effect. In some cases, whatever they may have had is thought to have dissipated with puberty. In others, the jury is still out. In any case those ten, and their offspring, are still monitored closely, just to be sure.

So when Ronald Morrison dies by his own hand in a very suggestive manner - he apparently stakes himself to death, using the remains of a wooden chair - Edom is quick to respond. The agents go up to Glasgow in sunny January - average rainfall 148.2 inches - to see what's what.

Did Morrison kill himself? If so, did he choose that particular method for a reason? What of the remaining Nine - are they at risk?

Are children gathering at the Southern Necropolis again, and if so, why?

Enjoy!