Drowned Kingdom (Night's Black Agents)

Beyond the Poseidon Adventure

This week’s post is inspired by the Jumbo Floating Restaurant of Hong Kong, AKA Jumbo Kingdom. First floated back in 1976, she’s capsized under what can best be described as uncertain circumstances near the Paracel Islands, while on her way to … actually, nobody seems to know. 

Jumbo Kingdom was launched by billionaire businessman Stanley Ho Hung-sun, AKA the King of Gambling, back when he was a sprightly 50-year-old in search of new worlds to conquer. Stanley Ho was a significant investor in real estate and casinos across the Pacific, but he’s best known for his enterprises in Hong Kong and Macau. Along with Hong Kong tycoon Henry Fok, Macau gambler Yip Hon and his brother-in-law Teddy Yip, Ho was one of the consortium that made Macau the gambling empire it is today. In 1976 he’d have been on top of the world having seen off all rivals to become the leading light of the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau which meant that in terms of financial pull and influence he was the de facto boss of Macau. 

Jumbo Kingdom was meant to be a floating Imperial Palace, and in its heyday it looked the part. Beautiful alfresco banquet hall up on the top deck, Dragon Court fine dining on the first deck, a culinary school where eager students learned from the best, exhibition halls, outdoor gardens – it had everything you could wish for, smack in the middle of Hong Kong’s famous Aberdeen harbor. You couldn’t dream up a more iconic Hong Kong landmark, floating in the middle of another iconic Hong Kong landmark. 

COVID definitely played its part in Jumbo Kingdom’s downfall but there’s probably another factor: the decline and death of Stanley Ho. By the end he did his best to distribute his assets among his family, but what with familial disputes, a stroke and other issues the Floating Kingdom’s boss wasn’t around to look after her. Ho died in 2020.  

By that point the Floating Kingdom was on a downward slide. It went through a renovation in 2003, sold off some of its assets, but by the end Jumbo Kingdom’s owners couldn’t even give her away for free. 

Nobody’s said why she was towed out to wherever it was she was being towed – a shipyard in Cambodia is the latest tidbit, which sounds awfully like ‘the knacker’s yard’ to me – but she capsized in deep water and while in theory she can be salvaged in practice it’s probably more than the Kingdom’s worth to refloat her.  

Presumably at least some of her fittings were still aboard as well as all of her fixtures, which means there’s a lot of cutlery, chairs and whatnot undergoing the Shakespearian full fathom five right about now. They’d have cleaned out most of the fittings and whatever was in the freezers, and no doubt the departing staff nicked a set of spoons or two, but a floating restaurant of that size – she could seat over 2,300 diners - would have had a ton of stuff aboard. It seems unlikely it was all offloaded before she was shipped off to Cambodia. 

However, one man’s disaster – gosh, I sure do hope she was insured – is another man’s interesting RPG location.  

There’s a lot of adventuring meat to be had in upending a ship, as The Poseidon Adventure (in its various incarnations) demonstrates all too well. You have all the glitter and glitz of, say, a luxurious superyacht, except it’s upside down and smashed to hell and gone. Anything could be aboard her.  

Absolutely anything.  

Kismet  

A super yacht known to belong to a Conspiracy asset has, through some mysterious set of circumstances, capsized somewhere in the Pacific. Details are sketchy. Location is uncertain. However, this is potentially the heist of the century if the agents can get there before anyone else does and make off with the prize. 

It doesn't have to be a super yacht, of course. It can as easily be a gigantic floating restaurant like Jumbo Kingdom, or a cruise liner. However, a super yacht has the advantage of being a contained location, which may be helpful to the Director. A floating restaurant gives the Director more rooms to play with but that might be more hindrance than help, depending on the story you want to tell.

This is, broadly, the plot of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, novelist Paul Gallico’s sequel to the original Poseidon Adventure. In the sequel seagoing bandits show up to loot the capsized ship. Gallico died before he could finish the novel. The book’s a turkey, and the film adaptation is also a turkey. Mind you, even a turkey has its merits, when properly roasted and served with mashed potatoes and gravy. 

A Thrilling Infiltration scene follows, complicated by the Kismet’s capsizing and deteriorating weather conditions. Can the agents make it before the Conspiracy’s rescue team arrives? What’s aboard the Kismet? 

• Option One: loot, glorious loot. Enough cash and art can be salvaged to make the agents very rich bandits. Of course, before they can loot the Kismet they’ll need to deal with the strange and hideous entities in the summoning pool. They weren’t expecting the Kismet to go belly-up, and they’re not happy about it. 
• Option Two: banes. The Kismet was collecting special (possibly antique) anti-vampire equipment for study and secure disposal. If your campaign has a particular anti-vampire McGuffin, then this is where it is. The crew and stews are all drowned and gone, but wouldn’t you know it, that zombie serum is kicking in …  
• Option Three: Coffins. The Kismet was transporting a Conspiracy bigwig, and that bigwig is particularly annoyed at this debacle. Also, hungry, Very hungry. There’s only so many survivors aboard, after all. Fortunately it looks as if someone ordered takeout … enter the agents, looking all tasty and full of vitamins.  

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

All Aboard The Saturnia! (Trail of Cthulhu)

I like cruise liners. They're especially useful locations for horror narratives. An enclosed space, often exotic or opulent, far from shore (and the authorities), populated by an ever-changing cast of characters. In the classic period of liner travel (broadly 1890s through to 1940s) these queens of the ocean serve two purposes: first, ambassadors for their nation. Second, transport for the vital, lucrative immigrant trade. The Titanic of legend, for all its gilt and glory, was practically an immigrant ship, earning its money off her 709 Third Class passengers, the vast majority of whom drowned - including most of the Third Class children.

This time out I want to draw your attention to MS Saturnia, launched 1927 by the Cosulich Line, later the Italian Line. Built in a Monfalcone shipyard, she's capable of carrying 2,196 passengers from Italy (Trieste, Venice) to New York, or 279 First Class, 257 Second Class, 310 Third Class, and 1,350 Fourth Class. That last are the ones going to New York permanently; the rest are probably only there to visit. She's capable of 19 knots on a good day with her twin screw engines, or a little over 20 miles per hour.

Inside, she's a Beaux-Arts wonderland, gaudy marble, stained glass, wood paneling and more Gods (Roman, naturally) than you can shake a stick at. Her indoor swimming pool is practically a Roman bath. Her pride and joy is a vast internal gallery locked off from the rest of the ship with wrought iron gates, which was probably intended for those passengers (First and Second Class, most likely - no Fourth Class plebeians here) who didn't enjoy ocean travel and wanted to be as far removed from shipboard life as possible. Here they could relax in an atmosphere that wouldn't shame a feudal banquet hall, never having to so much as smell the sea.

Naturally things did not go well for her during the War. She became the American hospital ship Frances Y. Slanger and most of her finery, including her bath and gallery, was torn out and not replaced. She went back to Italy after the war and continued to carry passengers until 1966, when she was scrapped. The Italians had a very slight advantage in the age of jet travel; their ships tended to be smaller, so they lost less money than did the larger Queens of the Sea. However, that advantage wasn't enough to save MS Saturnia. Nor was it really enough to save the Italian Line, which operated at a tremendous loss (on government subsidies) for many years and only saved itself by switching over to freight shipping. These days what's left of the Italian Line is part of Hapag-Lloyds, though in a Dracula Dossier game there's always a chance HGD Shipping bought her out instead.

Her glory years are the 1930s, which is the same period as most Trail games. She's also not a bad pick for some pre-War Night's Black Agents gaming. The Gestapo regularly used cruise liners as transport for its couriers; no doubt the Servizio Informazioni Militare did something similar. In an age before jet aircraft ocean liners are the only way from Europe to the New World, so if your Big Bad wants to get to New York then hi ho the ocean waves, and let's hope seasickness isn't a vampire Bane.

Or perhaps someone wants to get their occult item of choice from Europe to the Americas. Even an occult building of choice, since the 1920s-30s is also the time when eccentric American millionaires are buying up European monasteries, castles and churches, and dragging them across the ocean blue. William Randolph Hearst brought St. Bernard de Clairvaux from Spain to New York city in 1926, though it ended up in Florida. Gothic chapels, Renaissance chateaux, manor houses, practically anything with a patina of age on it could be uprooted, sailed across to New York, and planted somewhere scenic. The Depression put a bit of a gloom on the market for historic buildings, and by 1939 you couldn't unload a castle for anything like what you might have paid for it in 1929. That said, your basic antique masterpiece was still making the journey from the Old World to the New right up to the outbreak of war.

Image sourced from the Museum of the City of New York

For similar images please go to the Museum's website. There's a ton of useful resources there.

With all that in mind:

The Transporter

You and your companions have been hired to shepherd an Italian castle from Venice to New York, aboard MS Saturnia. You're a short-notice replacement for the original custodian, who fell critically ill at an unfortunate moment. You must make sure all the crates are safely stowed, shipped and delivered to its new owner, the architect Philip Lehmann, who hopes to sell it on to an American buyer. He's already had several offers. Hearst himself is said to be interested.

Castello della Fontana, built 1180 and allegedly a Templar stronghold once upon a time, has a nasty reputation. A ghostly nun and a headless knight, as well as two demonic children, are supposed to infest its gloomy corridors. It's said the Inquisition burnt the children at the stake, though the details of the trial are not known. However, Lehmann's only interested in the castle as an architectural and historic artefact, not as some kind of carnival spook-show. He's packed every least item, down to the candlesticks, each with a detailed description of where it was in the castle and where it should be put. He's gone ahead to New York to make arrangements for storage. It's the investigators' job to make sure nothing happens to his precious castle.

If the characters are an unprepossessing mix of unemployables and occultists, then Lehmann probably hired them because they speak English. He distrusts foreigners. This is especially likely if any of the investigators are American.

The initial load, on the docks of Trieste, is fraught with the usual brushes with catastrophe. Is a box missing? Was that box that landed with an almighty thump the one marked delicate that contained the antique, irreplaceable china and crystal goblets? Why is that customs official going crimson with rage?

However, during all this the investigators notice a family that is taking more than the usual interest in them. Papa, mama, two small children, all impeccably turned out, clearly upper class. Yet they never speak, and have no servants, which seems unusual for people of their social standing. Whenever the investigators pay close attention to them they are nowhere to be found, yet whenever something goes wrong with the load they are on the sidelines, watching closely.

Throughout the journey the investigators see them again and again. Never in the dining rooms, never eating or drinking - but they're always there, in the gallery, near the pool, in the music room, the reading room, on the first class stairwell, window shopping in one of the many fashionable stores on board. They seem to stand apart from the rest of the crowd, and they always stare at the investigators with unfathomable, dark, hypnotic eyes.

What's Going On:

The Knight, Nun and Demon Children: The castle ghosts are just as keen to get out of Italy as Lehmann is to get their castle to New York. However, the last thing they want is for something to go wrong with the journey, so they're paying extra attention to the investigators to make sure that doesn't happen. Of course, if the investigators do something that might imperil the shipment (or let that precious china crack) then they're fair game. Carelessness must be punished ...

Exorcists: The 'family' is a cover for a group of occultists determined to put an end to the castle's demons once and for all. The 'father' is an ex-Vatican exorcist, the 'mother' his devoted sister, and the children her children, brought along because there was no way she was leaving them with their deadbeat, atheist, Communist father. Trouble is, bringing children along gives the castle's demon kids opportunities for possession ...

The Autumn Moon is Bright: Did you know that when Lycaon sacrificed his son and turned him into a pie to serve to Zeus, who then punished Lycaon and his fifty sons by making them lycanthropes, that Lycaon's son Peucetius went to Puglia in Italy, bringing the family's werewolf curse with him? Well, now you do, and so will the investigators when they learn that the castle comes from Puglia, notorious werewolf haven. The family are the castle's true owners, who want to escape Italy and live in the New World, but they refuse to leave the family home behind. So they bullied Lehmann into buying their castle - 'do as we say or you will share our werewolf curse.' That's why he was so eager to get to New York, and leave the shipping to a bunch of nobodies who could, for all he cared, get eaten alive. Of course, it's a long journey from Italy to New York, and the children aren't used to fasting ...

Enjoy!

Ireland's Ghost Tanker (NBA, Esoterrorists)

This week's post is inspired by the recent discovery of derelict MV Alta, recently breached on the coast of Ireland.

MV Alta, a merchant vessel over 2000 tons and originally known as Tanager when she was launched in 1976, got into difficulties near Bermuda in September 2018. A power outage brought her to a halt, and Tropical Storm Leslie was bearing down on her. Her 10-man crew were recovered safely, and the ship towed to Guyana where it was subsequently stolen. It was next spotted in August 2019, abandoned and adrift in the mid-Atlantic. From that moment to this her exact whereabouts were unknown, until she washed ashore near Ballycotton, a fishing village in County Cork.

For those of you unfamiliar with Guyana, I present these unedited excerpts from the CIA World Factbook:

Trafficking In Persons

Current situation: Guyana is a source and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor – children are particularly vulnerable; women and girls from Guyana, Venezuela, Suriname, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic are forced into prostitution in Guyana’s interior mining communities and urban areas; forced labor is reported in mining, agriculture, forestry, domestic service, and shops; Guyanese nationals are also trafficked to Suriname, Jamaica, and other Caribbean countries for sexual exploitation and forced labor. 

Tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List – Guyana does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so; in 2014, Guyana was granted a waiver from an otherwise required downgrade to Tier 3 because its government has a written plan that, if implemented would constitute making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; the government released its anti-trafficking action plan in June 2014 but made uneven efforts to implement it; law enforcement was weak, investigating seven trafficking cases, prosecuting four alleged traffickers, and convicting one trafficker – a police officer – who was released on bail pending appeal; in 2014, as in previous years, Guyanese courts dismissed the majority of ongoing trafficking prosecutions; the government referred some victims to care services, which were provided by NGOs with little or no government support (2015).

Illicit Drugs

Transshipment point for narcotics from South America - primarily Venezuela - to Europe and the US; producer of cannabis; rising money laundering related to drug trafficking and human smuggling.

In short, whatever MV Alta was up to after she was stolen, it most likely involved people smuggling or drug smuggling. Or both.

Stealing ships from port for drug smuggling was, and to an extent still is, a problem in the Caribbean. It's the easiest thing in the world to take a ship while it's in port, or at anchor close to shore. Either you get one of your own put aboard her as crew - "I'm a student working my was across the Caribbean" - or sneak aboard at night, butcher anyone you find, and fill the yacht with whatever narcotic you're selling this week. Generally speaking a yacht might make one or two trips this way before becoming too well known to the US Coast Guard, at which point you scuttle her or set her adrift.

However, that was the 1980s. These days it's considered much easier to smuggle your narcotics in a merchant vessel; you can carry more, and are unlikely to be stopped or searched. Given the timeline it's likely MV Alta made at least one trip to the East Coast of the US, or possibly more than one trip to Venezuela. That she was abandoned suggests one of two things happened: she became too well known to the authorities, or she was never properly repaired after being stolen, and became too much of a liability for her hijackers.

I should note that some sources allege the ship was never towed anywhere, but left to drift after her crew was rescued in 2018. This seems odd. The US Coast Guard, which rescued the crew, isn't in the habit of letting abandoned ships drift where they please. The South China News alleges it was hijacked in Guyana not once, but twice. According to Fleetmon, someone alleging to be the owner claimed that in 2018 they hired salvagers to tow her who turned out to be smugglers, but that MV Alta was stolen from the smugglers when it reached Guyana.

Incidentally those of you wondering if this is going to involve bodies in the fridge unit, anything is possible but if that was going to happen I think we'd all know about it by now. The Irish have many fine qualities, but reticence is not among them.

Ballycotton sounds like one of those More Irish Than The Irish destinations, where you can comfortably expect all your clichés to come true. No doubt like many another tourist destination there's an underclass of locals who can't afford to live there any more, but who barely rate a mention in the council meetings. In fact it reminds me not a little of a film called Grabbers, which I highly recommend:

So with all that in mind, a one-shot:

The Movie Pilot

The characters are all teens and would-be YouTubers living in the Quaint-with-a-capital-Q village of [Insert Name Here], where, for the first time in living memory, something exciting has happened. A derelict merchant ship has run aground on one of the nearby beaches, thoroughly bolloxing the tourist trade with threat of oil leaks (or worse)! It'd make a real change from Fortnite live streaming if you could get aboard her and take some first-hand footage of the ghost ship. Of course, the Gardaí have put her off limits, with a few coppers on patrol, but they're all local lads and you're pretty confident you can get past them no problem.

In fact, you've a financial inducement for so doing (pick one):

• The ship's owners have contacted you by email and asked you to recover something from the captain's cabin. They've offered you a small fortune in Bitcoin for the work.  
• Your mate Mick who hangs round the pool tables at the Moby Dick's pub swears blind there's a small fortune in narcotics aboard, and is willing to shell out the readies if you can recover some of it for him to sell.
• A fella who says he's a biologist from Oxford wants samples of whatever's in the hold, and is prepared to pay big time if you'll fill his test tubes for him.

Naturally the cargo ship isn't completely abandoned. That would be far too easy. Pick one:

• Alien space vampires who drained the crew's blood and are now looking for somewhere quiet and dark to hide out.
• Ghosts of hijack victims who were left to suffocate in the refrigeration unit, and who possess anyone unwary enough to come aboard.
• Strange and exceptionally dangerous chemicals have brewed a quasi-Shoggoth which lives in the cargo hold and oozes out for victims whenever it gets a hankering for fresh protein.

Enjoy!

Dear Jessica (Night's Black Agents)

Some of the information in this post comes from LexisNexis.

The Lexis database lists the Jessica (aka HMYJ5, Grand Union, Lian Shun 9), as a prohibited General Cargo vessel from North Korea, banned from entering US waters under the Countering America's Enemies Act and North Korea Sanctions Act. Lexis doesn't go into specifics as to why Jessica made the list, but there could be all sorts of reasons. Over 59 vessels have been sanctioned by the US Treasury, usually because they're smuggling cargo into, or out of, the dictatorial regime of North Korea.

It's not difficult to change the appearance of a ship. Smugglers have been doing that since the age of sail, and it's just as easy now as it was then. A new paint job, a new name on the stern, change out the flag and some of the fittings, and you're done.

As the CNN article points out, modern means of tracking are easy to falsify - or, in the case of transponders, turn off as soon as you leave port. File your company in Hong Kong, so you have a neutral(ish) port of call and flag to fly. That company owns the ship, and if you have trouble, just transfer the ship to another company. And another. And another. None of this is any more sophisticated than it has to be. The people who run these operations know nobody's looking too hard at them, and when someone does, they can just vanish, to be replaced by another faceless entity.

When a ship's well and truly burnt, its shadowy owners cut ties, just as happens to spies now and again - something your agents know all about. With ships, it's a little different.

You may recall me mentioning Rats, Glorious Rats, and Derelicts before. Also the Seaman Guard Ohio incident, and the nasty cargo found aboard the Hai Sin, when it was broken up at Guangdong port.

When you no longer want a ship, the best course of action is to dump it. The CNN article above references the Hao Fan 6 and says that, in its final stages, the ship's transponder had it going in circles for weeks and weeks. The author suggests this is a tactic to throw off investigators; with no legit port to go to, it just stays at sea. It could also mean that the crew disembarked weeks ago, kept the engines running, and tied off the wheel. Whereas the Hai Sin was sold to a scrapyard, but that was back in the 1990s, when transponders were less common, and the West's media didn't pay anything like as much attention to things that happened in Chinese ports. [Not that it pays a great deal of attention now, mind.]

There are plenty of graveyards all over the world. The UK has a few, France has a few, but if you want to dump your unwanted illegal cargo ship somewhere unremarkable, Africa and Asia are still your best shots - though I note that the largest of them all, Nouadhibou, is being cleared up, with China's help.

If you don't want to ditch it, for whatever reason, and you can't afford to send it to a scrapyard, your next best bet is to scuttle it. Sounds easy, doesn't it? People have been sinking ships for centuries, usually unintentionally. However scuttling your vessel can prove difficult. Ships are built to float, and sometimes stubbornly remain afloat despite the best efforts of those aboard. That's how ghost ships like the Lyubov Orlova with its cannibal rats get their start.

So, to gamify:

Jessica's Cargo

The agents are hired, either by shadowy go-betweens or by an agency like Edom, and sent to Bangladesh to take possession of the Jessica, a ship on the prohibited list for various smuggling offenses. The Jessica is believed ultimately to belong to North Korea, but is legally owned by a Hong Kong holding company. The Hong Kong holding company and the American authorities, possibly with CIA backing, are battling for control of the Jessica, so the agents must expect competition. The Bangladesh authorities are proving less than helpful, so the agents will have uncooperative bureaucracy to deal with too.

The Jessica turned up in Bangladesh in the old-fashioned way: it beached itself during a storm. It was swiftly claimed by a local scrapyard, for salvage, and a claim was put in with the ship's owners. Unfortunately for the salvage yard, its claim is on hold, and likely to remain so, as the shipyard owner's eldest son has been kidnapped by local gangsters. Though the shipyard owner is very reluctant to say so, one of the conditions on his son's release is that he drop all claim on the Jessica or its cargo. He won't want to cooperate with anyone, whether it's the agents or one of their rivals.

Why all this fuss? Is it because:

• The Jessica wasn't supposed to beach, whether in Bangladesh or anywhere else. It was supposed to be delivering a very illegal cargo for North Korea's regime. North Korea wants to know why the Jessica ended up in Bangladesh - and the Conspiracy, which hitched a ride through contacts in North Korea, wants to cover up its involvement in the affair. What was that cargo? What Conspiracy asset was aboard the Jessica, and where is it now?  
• The Jessica's carrying cargo meant for delivery in Bangladesh, but for whatever reason the crew went missing and now the cargo's God knows where. Did someone steal it, or did it walk away? Is this an elaborate attempt by a Conspiracy asset to defect?
• The Jessica's part of a NSA operation designed to draw out Chinese assets working with North Korea. The NSA's been tracking the Jessica for months, and there was an op in place to recruit the ship's captain. Then the captain began relaying some very peculiar data, just before the Jessica went silent - two weeks before it ended up on Bangladesh's shoreline. The NSA wants to know what went wrong, and if the American vampire's in play, he may be assigned to find out.

Enjoy!

Needles: The Huiquing's Cargo

A short while back I promised that as part of the Needles Kickstarter I'd publish a short scenario here, if certain conditions were met.

So here we are!

The Needles rules stipulate a scenario must not go over 2,500 words. In this instance the word count is 2,495.

CoC 7e rules are used throughout.

**

The Huiquing is a 1980s build container ship, 42 meters long by 8 meters wide, allegedly constructed in Shanghai and nominally registered in China, though anyone following up on that registry will discover just how flimsy that record is. The Huiquing exists on the shipping registry of several different flag of convenience nations - Panama, North Korea, Lebanon - always under a different name and with a different paint job, but a dedicated investigator can track it down through the years, back to its actual port of origin, South Korea.

It was built there in 1986 and registered under the name Man Seong, and it had a ten year career carrying cargo to and from Australia before it was captured by pirates in winter 1996. Its captors, a criminal ring based in the Philippines, kept it for about two years before passing it on to another gang, and it's had just shy of half a dozen owners since 1996.

Each group used it as a cheap transport, ferrying off-the-books cargo and occasionally human traffic between countries in Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the West Coast of the United States. Whenever the authorities in a particular jurisdiction got to close it changed its name, paint job and often owner, and resumed trade as if nothing had happened.

In 2002 a Malaysia-based human trafficking group was using it - then called Bunga Kenek - to transport cargo with a sideline in soon-to-be sex workers, when it was taken by a gang based in China. The takeover was very informal; surviving crew and passengers were herded into the ship's refrigeration unit and left to suffocate. The Chinese group then repainted it, named it Huiquing, and used it to smuggle cut-rate Chinese goods to Long Beach, California.

After a while the Coast Guard, Homeland Security and Department of Transportation (Maritime Administration, MARAD) had enough information between them to make life difficult for the Triad that operated the Huiquing, so the ship suffered an unfortunate accident off the coast of California. Lost with all hands, the Huiquing sank leaving behind only an inflated insurance claim and lots of confusing paperwork.

That would have been the end of it, had not the Huiquing's carcass - stripped bare of its oh-so-valuable cargo - survived scuttling, and ended up aground not far from Cape Disappointment, Washington State. Now it's the center of a legal battle between various State and Federal authorities as to who has responsibility for removing it.

This battle became all the more contentious when the bodies were found in the refrigerated compartment, but tracing their deaths to the criminals responsible proved impossible and the corpses ended up in a Potter's Field.

Unfortunately that wasn't the end of it. One of the dead was a Daughter of the Old One Atlach-Nacha, the Great Spider, He Who Binds the World. These unfortunate women are 'chosen' to become the Old One's companions, and marked by the spider's bite. After a time they transform into a monstrous spider, dwelling for a brief while in the world of men before making the long journey into Dream, and Atlach-Nacha.

The Malaysian group that assisted in her creation was taking her to Los Angeles, where she would be worshipped as a God by cultists before being transformed into a God's companion. However her death changed all that, and now the Huiquing traps her soul, while her body rots.

This is causing many unusual side effects, but the most obvious, and the one that will attract the investigators, is a new breed of subsocial or cooperative spider, which has established a sizeable colony at the Potter's Field where the bodies are buried. This heretofore unknown species causes a scientific stir, but Cthulhu Mythos or Hard Occult links the markings on the spiders' bodies to the Old One. The spiders' unusual markings have been widely reported in the media, and can be found online without a check.

The spiders gather in large groups, creating enormous complex webs that cover the entire cemetery. They show no interest in people who invade their territory, and though they bite if disturbed their bite is harmless. However pushing through the colony is an eerie experience, and costs 0/1D2 SAN.

The center of this unusual outbreak can be traced to the grave where the trafficked woman from the Huiquing is buried.

Possible avenues of investigation include:

• Tracing the Huiquing's history.
• Investigating media reports concerning the Huiquing's wreck.
• Obtaining autopsy records or speaking with the people who work at the cemetery.
• Boarding the remains of the Huiquing.

Tracing the Huiquing requires Hard Law, several Languages and patience, and will take weeks. However at the end of that time the investigators will have a clear picture as to what happened to her, and will know that the Malaysian group which used her from 2000 to 2002 is known to work closely with Mythos related cults across the Pacific and on the West Coast. The investigators will also discover from notes taken by law enforcement surveillance that the group supposedly lost 'an idol of supreme value' in 2002, at about the time the Huiquing was captured. 

If the investigators make a Law check, but not Hard, then they get all the information as above but attract the attention of the cult, which sends its killers to deal with the investigators; see below.

Investigating media reports requires Library Use and Hard Computer Use. Library Use gets the information; the Hard Computer Use is to see whether or not the investigators realize that their internet searches have infected their computers with a very specialized virus. With a successful Computer Use check the investigators deal with the virus before it does harm; without it, the Malaysian cult tracks them down and sends killers to deal with them, as above.

Media reports show that the Huiquing was wrecked as part of an insurance fraud, and the Federal Government is pursuing the Huiquing's owners through the courts. However this is likely to take several years and may never be resolved, since there are complicated issues of international law at stake. Blogs and local feeds published at the same time indicate a disquieting pattern of nightmares and disturbances which began after the ship beached. People living near the spot where it beached suffer disturbing dreams, at least one person has gone insane, and a workplace shooting has been blamed in part on stress caused by lack of sleep, traceable to what's described in the blogs as the 'Doom Ship effect.'

Some of the blogs say that relief can be had through a treatment offered by 'Doctor' Michael Chin and his BioWellness device, a beam ray machine patterned on the pseudoscientific cancer cure offered by notorious quack Royal Rife back in the 1930s. The Doctor is anything but, and the whole thing's a scam. However Chin takes extensive notes concerning his patients, their sleep cycles, dreams, all of which can provide useful information to the investigators. Obtaining this data means dealing with Chin; a hefty bribe would do it, or breaking and entering.  Studying Chin's notes takes a week, costs 1D4 SAN, and confers +1/+2 Mythos, Mythos Rating 8, no spells.

Obtaining autopsy reports requires law enforcement contacts or possibly Hard Computer Use if the investigators decide to hack a database. The reports are very slender, and say only that the decedents died of suffocation, that an accurate date of death could not be determined but is tentatively put at late 2002, and that the remains indicate twelve people, eight males and four females, died in the refrigeration unit. There are notes on one file, Jane Doe 02.3, that indicate an 'unusual deformation of the skeletal structure,' but the notes are inconclusive.

The cemetery staff have all suffered disturbing dreams, repeatedly. Several are well on their way to permanent insanity, and all have a spider obsession. They will not willingly let the spider colony be harmed. Psychology indicates an outside influence, slowly dominating each individual; Cthulhu Mythos notes that each of them refers to Dreamlands imagery and creatures, particularly Leng Spiders, more than once. Leng Spiders, like the Daughters, have an extensive history with Atlach-Nacha.

Obtaining a legal exhumation will be impossible without some form of formal credentials and a court order. Illegal exhumation is relatively simple, as the cemetery hasn't got the strongest security. Stealth checks get a Bonus die. However if the infiltration fails then someone - cemetery staff or a passer-by - calls the State Police, who will throw the book at any captured and arrested investigator.

A Medicine check on the exhumed remains shows the decedent was undergoing some kind of mutation event when she died. Ultimately there isn't enough left to make an informed diagnosis, but her spine was beginning to warp and her limbs, particularly her legs, elongate at the time of death. The skull is also significantly deformed, which the autopsy passes off as normal aftereffect of blunt force trauma, but which Cthulhu Mythos indicates is the first sign of transformation into a spidery Daughter of Atlach-Nacha.

Investigators who stay in the area for a prolonged period - more than two or three days - begin suffering disturbed dreams, like many other people in the local area. This is especially likely if the investigator has high POW or has visited the Dreamlands before.

Images include:

• Wandering aboard a ship crewed by the decayed dead. The ship changes from moment to moment; at times it is a modern cargo vessel, while in the next moment it seems to be a ghostly sailing ship.
• A woman with a spider living in her head, that directs her every move.
• A vast and fathomless chasm, bridged by thin spider webs.
• A human skeleton with spider limbs crawls across the deck of an abandoned container ship.

Each dream costs 0/1D2 SAN. Fumbling a SAN check means the dreamer loses 1D6 SAN, but gains 1 point Cthulhu Mythos for every 2 SAN lost.

The dreams are growing in intensity, as Psychology on a sufferer can determine. This information, in combination with Cthulhu Mythos or Hard Occult, allows the investigator to work out that the increase in dream intensity coincides with what significant dates in the Dreamlands, and that the dreams are following what would ordinarily be considered a medical astrology or iatromathematical pattern.

Medical astrology states that various parts of the body and diseases are associated with astrological bodies, and that a disease can be treated or identified through astrological means. In the Dreamlands this is actually true, and when certain Dreamlands stars are in alignment physical effects result. In this case the Daughter is being stimulated by Dreamlands astrological events, and eventually this will result in what's left of her passing over from the Waking World to the Dreamlands.

Finally the investigators can board the Huiquing. The remains of the ship are still under Federal lockdown, but what this means in practice is the Coast Guard occasionally checks in to make sure it's still there. No Federal or local authority is tasked with looking after it. No Stealth rolls required to board, but if the investigators do this during the day a Coast Guard ship will turn up in a couple hours to turf them off the derelict.

The Huiquing is solidly wedged on shallow rocks within sight of Cape Disappointment State Park. It's been stripped of valuables and its fuel tanks have been drained, but it still poses a significant environmental risk, and when it first wrecked protest groups gathered to insist it be properly removed. However the state lacks the money, and the owners can't be traced, so for the moment it stays where it is. After a month or so of this the protesters got bored and moved on. Now it's mostly ignored, except by visitors to the park who complain about it and leave unpleasant comments on TripAdvisor.

The strange spiders seen at the cemetery are here in force. The refrigerated compartment in particular is infested with them, and judging by the rat carcasses that can be found dotted in their nests these spiders are more dangerous than the ones on shore. If provoked these creatures swarm over their target for 2D6 minutes, causing 1D4 damage per minute. 0/1D3SAN to witness the spider swarm.

Even without the swarm, spider bites are likely. LUCK check to avoid being bitten; those who are need to make a SAN check. Failing the SAN check incurs no SAN penalty; instead, the affected's consciousness slips between the Waking World and the Dreamlands, seeing the Huiquing one moment and a wrecked sailing vessel under alien skies the next. Those who are affected can also talk to the Daughter, whereas those who are not cannot.

The Daughter is still here aboard the Huiquing, but exists only as a shadow in the Waking World. In this form she can attack, but not communicate. In the Dreamlands she can communicate, which means she can be reasoned with. Investigators who talk her down - perhaps by Persuading her that she really is dead, and can go on to her father in darkness - can get her to retreat into the Dreamlands permanently, which ends the insect infestation and the nightmares. Otherwise she can only be dealt with in combat.

If the Daughter is not dealt with then eventually the Dreamlands astrological signs come into alignment, and she is forced to retreat to Atlach-Nacha. In the Waking World this is represented by a terrible storm that sweeps the wreckage of the Huiquing out to sea. It is accompanied by awful nightmares that plague all dreamers within 20 miles, inflicting SAN losses of 1/1D8. This drives several people indefinitely insane, and the cemetery workers, who suffer the worst effects, commit ritual suicide.

A complete win assumes the Daughter is permanently dealt with, and is worth 1D8 SAN. A loss assumes the storm occurs, people go insane, and the cemetery workers die. This incurs a 1D10 SAN penalty.  

Daughter of Atlach-Nacha (Shadow Form)

INT 75 POW 90

Attack: POW vs POW, where success means the Daughter drains 3D10 POW from the victim and failure means the Daughter loses 2D10 POW.

Armor: cannot be harmed by conventional or magical weapons, can only be defeated in POW vs POW combat.

Appearance: half-human, half-spider hybrid, only seen in shadow.

SAN loss: 1D8 

Daughter of Atlach-Nacha (Dreamlands Form)

STR 115 CON 95 SIZ 95 INT 75 POW 90 DEX 75 HP19

Attack: Bite 75%, damage 1D10 plus Poison, CON test or target is paralyzed for 1D6 hours, in which time the Daughter slowly devours the target's brains if given the opportunity.

Armor: 5 point shell.

Spells: Contact and Call Atlach-Nacha.

Cult Killers

Number: P+2, where P = number of investigators.

Nationality: A mix of Malay, Chinese and Filipino

STR 75            CON 55           SIZ 55              INT 60            POW 65          DEX 70          

APP 50            SAN 00            EDU 65           Luck 45           HP 11              Age: 19 to 25

Move: 8

Build: 1

Damage Bonus: ­+1d4

Education: High School and up.

Weapon:         Fighting (Brawling) 60%. Stiletto 1D6+DB

Firearms (Handgun) 55%, Silenced .32 pistol, 1D8.

Skills: Own Language  65%, Other Language (English) 40%, Credit Rating 10%, Dodge 45%, Listen 30%, Spot Hidden 30%, Stealth 30% 

Defenses: None above base

Spells: None

Note: Each of these has an extensive criminal record in his or her own country, and some appear on terrorist watch lists.  

Rats, Glorious Rats, and Derelicts: Trail of Cthulhu

If you've been paying attention to the internet this week, you probably came across this story about a ghost cruise liner crewed by cannibal rats that allegedly is about to disgorge its cargo on the coast of England. Alas for lovers of good stories, that version of events is slightly overblown. David Cameron's spokesman laughed off the idea, which means, if the PM's usual luck is in, it'll be crashing into Liverpool any day now.

With all that in mind, let's talk derelicts, and Trail of Cthulhu.

Derelicts used to be more 'in the news' than they are in the modern era. When the world's trade and transport depended entirely on shipping, people paid attention to shipping issues. Even now, the bulk of the planet's trade depends on ships, but when we want to travel from London to Australia, or wherever it may be, we don't hop aboard the next Orient Line packet and spend several weeks sailing the ocean blue. We fly, probably economy, and spend many hours regretting the lack of legroom.

But derelicts haven't gone away. The problem is, we don't know how many of them are out there, and indeed never did. We only know them when we see them - that's exactly the problem with the Lyubov Orlova - and if we don't see them, we tend to assume they're not there. Of course, that isn't so. If nobody's seen the Lyubov Orlova, that doesn't mean it sank. It merely means nobody's seen it. With nobody at the helm, it's at the disposal of the winds and tide, and often derelicts pursue a very erratic course, traveling thousands of miles through shipping lanes, with no-one the wiser.

 One study showed that, in 1887-93 a total of 1,628 derelict sightings were made, of which 200 ships were identified by name. These wrecks posed a significant hazard to navigation, and their predations became so severe that, in 1908, the United States commissioned a warship, the Seneca, whose purpose was to seek out and destroy these vessels. Unfortunately war intervened, and the Seneca was seconded to escort duty, never again to hunt a derelict.

The biggest worry with a derelict isn't that it won't be found. It is that, by the time someone sees it, it's probably too late. Even an iceberg gives some kind of warning, but a derelict carries no lights, and its course is unpredictable. At night, often the only warning you're ever going to get of a derelict is when it smacks into your hull. Imagine you're in a small craft, and something the size of the Lyubov Orlova comes out of the dark, veering across your bows. Maybe you'll get a chance to send off a distress signal, maybe not. Perhaps the last thing anyone will ever hear of you is a brief GPS signal when you sink; after that, nothing.

And of course, that's just the ships. I haven't even started talking about the other flotsam and jetsam, like the tens of thousands of containers that fall from cargo ships every year. Nor do I intend to, but if you want an interesting read, look up rubber ducks.

You see, the danger of a derelict is that you can't count on it sinking. There are plenty of examples of a crew abandoning ship, convinced it's about to go down, perhaps even seeing it 'sink' before their very eyes, only to discover later that it didn't founder at all. Perhaps it rolled over, perhaps enough air was trapped in the hull to keep it just at the surface of the water, floating almost unobserved. Not unlike an iceberg, in fact, where the vast majority of the thing is beneath the surface. Then it drifts, and drifts, perhaps for months.

In the age of sail, when ships were made of wood, sometimes a derelict would drift for years. In October 1913, according to Robert de la Croix, a sailing vessel off the coast of Tierra del Fuego encountered a three-master, apparently abandoned, with some of its sail still set. The three-master's sails were green, her rigging was green, her deck and superstructure were green. It was as though, by some miraculous transformation, she had taken on the color of the sea ... The whole vessel had turned green because she was covered with mould ... [The captain] boarded her. The deck-planks were rotted, yielding to the tread. Skeletons, still clothed, were found everywhere. One lay at the wheel, another near the hatchway to the hold, three more reclined on the poop, and there were another ten in the fo'c'sle and six in the wardroom. The ship was the Marlborough, of Glasgow. Her papers were missing, probably rotted away, so the cause of the mystery remained unknown. She had been missing since 1890, and had spent nearly a quarter-century at sea. When she left New Zealand for England she carried a number of sheep and several passengers, of whom one was a woman. The skipper, Hird, was a first-rate officer, and his crew were real sailors, not the riff-raff of the crimps. She was last seen off the Straits of Magellan, which means that an unmanned ship managed to spend twenty four years afloat in one of the most notoriously difficult and dangerous passages on Earth.

For those of you wondering, yes, it is perfectly possible for people to survive aboard a wrecked ship. It's been done many times, but of course, the problem isn't surviving the wreck, it's getting rescued afterward. More often than not, the first impulse on finding a derelict isn't to search it, but to avoid or sink it. Even though, under maritime law, a derelict vessel can be salvaged for a substantial sum, many ships don't bother. They carry cargoes of their own, and are under a strict schedule. It's very difficult to bring a derelict vessel to port, and requires resources that most ships won't have to spare.

With all that in mind, consider the derelict from a Trail of Cthulhu perspective. Let's give it a Great War twist:

City of Bradford, Grimsby registration, cargo steamer, 4,200 tons. Captain: H.A. Dawes

In early 1915 the City of Bradford was challenged off the coast of Scotland by U-17, Kapitanleutnant Hans Walther commanding. Captain Dawes, mindful of Admiralty orders, tried to run down U-17, but Walther, wary of this tactic, put a torpedo into the City of Bradford. Walther watched as the crew abandoned ship, then left the scene, recording the City of Bradford as sunk.

That didn't happen, nor did all the crew leave. Dawes, enraged at the loss of his livelihood - and his pension, as he had all of his money wrapped up in the City of Bradford - remained aboard, determined to go down with his ship. Yet she didn't sink, though she did settle, listing heavily to port. The crew were never rescued; nobody but Walther knew what had happened to the City of Bradford, and he thought she'd sunk. She drifted for several weeks.

At first Dawes survived on what was left of the ship's supplies. He couldn't understand how he hadn't been spotted by someone; he was in the shipping lanes, and ought to be within sight of land. Yet the City of Bradford continued to drift, and after a time Dawes, deprived of human contact and half-mad with hunger and thirst, began to hallucinate. In his visions he was offered a new captaincy: bring my cargo to land, said his employer, and you will be handsomely rewarded. 

Thus Mordiggian gained a new hell ship. The City of Bradford has been touched by the Charnel God, and drifts through the North Sea. Dawes is occupied with catching the ship's rats and tying their tails together, all to make a new rat king. His new crew crawled over the side the same day Dawes made his promise, and their waterlogged corpses will defend the rat king so long as the City of Bradford remains afloat. Ultimately the City of Bradford will make its way down the coast to a population center, perhaps encountering - and sinking - several ships along the way. It will beach itself close to a port, and let the rat king loose. After that, Mordiggian's plague will spread, first among the people at the harbor, then the ships that visit, then the harbors that those ships visit ...

Dawes
Athletics 4, Firearms 4, Health 6, Scuffling 5 
Hit Threshold 3
Alertness Modifier +1 
Stealth Modifier 0
Weapon: -2 (fist) +0 (handgun)
Stability Loss: 0
Special: Dawes is the still-living heart of the Hell Ship. Should Dawes be killed, the City of Bradford will sink, taking everything on board - including the Rat King - with it. This has no effect if the City of Bradford has already made landfall.

Drowned Crew
Athletics 6, Health 8, Scuffling 8
Hit Threshold: 2 (very slow)
Alertness Modifier: +0
Stealth Modifier: +0
Weapon: -1 (fist)
Armor: -2 (sodden flesh)
Stability Loss: +1

Rat King
Athletics 3, Health 5, Scuffling 3
Hit Threshold: 3
Weapon: none
Armor: none
Special: with each rat added, the King gains 1 Health. While the King has no attack, it can spread disease. Athletics difficulty 6, or lose 2 Health per day, with a new test every 3 days. Those sick with this plague who make an appeal to Mordiggian may transform into Ghouls. Symptoms: buboes in the groin and armpits that bleed pus when opened, fever and vomiting of blood.