Bitcoin or Cannabis? Smoke it and See (Night's Black Agents, Esoterrorists)

 

From Moment News

West Midlands police thought they were raiding a cannabis farm when they bust into an industrial storage unit in Great Bridge Industrial Estate, Sandwell, on 18 May this year. All the signs were there: a drone they'd sent for a fly-by spotted massive amounts of heat gain, almost certainly caused by the lamps needed to grow all those valuable plants, and surveillance noticed people coming and going at all times of day and night, again indicative of nogoodniks up to shenanigans. If all that wasn't enough the unit bristled with surplus wiring ducts and new vent systems, suggesting massive energy use and a need to throw off heat as efficiently and quickly as possible. 

So in they went, and found a bitcoin farm instead. One that was stealing power from the local grid to the tune of £16,000 a month. While mining isn't illegal, theft from the power grid definitely is. Birmingham Mail seems to think 'three English nerds' are the mastermind behind this scheme, which ... I mean, it probably was computer geeks, well spotted, glad to see we've got journalists of that calibre working in British media today.

The Mail also alleges that the value of the electricity stolen was twice that of the bitcoin mined. Which just goes to show that crime doesn't pay, or at least doesn't pay as much as the criminals thought it might. 

Whether or not you think bitcoin is a scam, bitcoin mining is a big operation. Gone are the days when your PC humming away in the corner could earn you retirement money. The Sandwell operation, though one of the largest in the area, was a few hundred units altogether, a mere drop in the ocean compared to the massive setups that exist elsewhere.

From Top 5

Which looks remarkably like a Night's Black Agents scenario in the making.

I've discussed Facilities before. The Sandwell operation looks like a Low Security, Medium Monitoring Manufacturing facility. The miners clearly had no idea how to keep their operation away from prying eyes, beyond 'stick it in a shed and hope for the best.' They needed to monitor it often, to make sure its systems were working properly. Overheating must have been a major concern. 

The bitcoin mines mentioned in the Top 5 are clearly Medium Security, High Monitoring Manufacturing facilities. They have their special needs, cooling being critical, along with access to uninterrupted electricity supplies, and a compliant political environment. If your facility mines, say, 20 bitcoin a day, then at current prices it's earning something like $780,000 each day, easily billions of dollars each month. Well worth going to all that effort, even if as manager of the facility all you get is a cut of the net. 

Of course, that assumes those units are actually mining bitcoin. In game worlds where pseudo-science rules apply, all that computing power could be going towards ... almost anything. Uncovering all the secret names of God to collapse the universe. Mapping Satan's DNA and tracing His Satanic Majesty's lineage on earth. Creating a virtual reality environment powerful enough to store human minds. Creating a race of obedient AIs capable of - you get the idea. 

Let's say this is Esoterrorists. That setting is all about weakening the Membrane so strange entities can creep through into the mundane world, and the Terrorists of the title are the ones who want that to happen. Then the so-called Bitcoin Mine is actually some kind of esoteric device that either is deliberately intended to weaken the membrane, or which does so accidentally while in pursuit of other goals. 

One potential side effect is that smaller, less important entities may creep through just by accident, perhaps as a symptom of a larger problem. Like roaches round a garbage spill, these entities aren't main-plot relevant but the fact that they're here at all is evidence that things are going badly wrong.

An interesting twist could be that the 'bitcoin miners' are actually trying to repair the membrane with their esoteric device. They see something wrong in the immediate area and, since they don't have a Commissioner Gordon-style phone to call in the ghostbusters of OV, they do their best with what they've got. So destroying or disabling the device could actually make things much worse. 

Or it's intended as a remote working device. There are some entities which, when they burst through the membrane, destroy everything in the immediate vicinity. The casters know this, so rather than do the dirty work themselves - and get killed - they set up the bitcoin mine to remotely activate the ritual. Perhaps when the cops burst in, so the summoned entity has something to munch on.

Let's say this is Night's Black Agents. In that setting, the 'bitcoin mine' is either the creation of a vampire Node, or someone who wants to get the Node's attention. So whatever it's intended to do will depend on the kind of setting you, as Director, are shooting for. 

Supernatural: vampires are the result of magical or other supernatural activities on Earth; spirits, ghosts, witchcraft and the like. The bitcoin mine is one part of a larger ritual. Just as standing stones once established nodes on a network of ley lines, channeling supernatural power, so too do these new 'standing stones' establish connective points on a new network of supernatural energy. Their calculations are but a part of a larger ritual mystery, perhaps intended to bring forward the date of the apocalypse.

Damned: Vampires are the work of Satan or other explicitly demonic creatures opposed to mankind and God. That isn't a bitcoin mine, it's a demon summoned forth from Hell to serve at its master's pleasure. Maybe it's some kind of footsoldier awaiting command, or maybe it's an independent contractor scheming to its own ends. It undoubtedly has control over the internet in some fashion, perhaps just in its local area - for now. Or maybe the bitcoin it creates are themselves Satanic in some way, a corruptive influence to bring more people under the sway of His Satanic Majesty. 

Alien: Vampires are alien beings, or earthly beings who nevertheless follow different laws of physics. The aliens either want to go home or to make Earth more like home. For that to happen requires significant mathematical calculations, of a sort that just weren't possible till now. Sure, a mathematician working with an abacus in a cave could manage it eventually, but eventually takes a really long time. Now the aliens are able to significantly advance their plans, with borrowed technology. Even the mines' affect on climate change - all that heat - could be part of the aliens' ultimate goal. After all, they need Earth to be just like home ... whatever that is.

Mutant: Vampires are earthly beings infected or changed by (or into) some freak of nature. Even freaks of nature need funding. Up till now the vampires have had to rely on conventional means to make a dollar, but now they can generate cash literally out of thin air. This was just an experiment, to see what they could get away with. The next stage in the project is an even bigger mine, and now they know what mistakes to avoid to reduce the chance of detection.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Hiding The Body (RPG all)

You may have noticed recent reports about a tech entrepreneur murdered in NYC, found part-dismembered in his apartment. The killing has been described as 'a hit' and it is alleged the killer was disposing of evidence when the victim's sister interrupted him.

Disposing of a corpse is remarkably difficult. It can reveal itself in surprising ways. Here in Bermuda we have the cautionary tale of Edward Skeeters and his wife Anna, a childless couple who lived by the sea. Anna went missing one Sunday afternoon, and after a time her neighbors and friends noticed a peculiar phenomenon out at Long Bay channel. The waters were remarkably calm no matter the weather, and when this persisted a search party rowed out to see what they could see.

Reaching the calm, these two men were deeply impressed with the sinister character of the spot. "It was more conspicuous," they said, "than any other calm we had ever seen before. The calm would rise and spread out and then go away with the wind and tide. And then, the calm would rise again."

Corpses decay. They give off fat and oil. Oil calms troubled waters, as Pliny pointed out. There wasn't much left of Anna by this point.

Up came the skeleton; it was not a complete skeleton; it seemed to have broken in two. The legs were there - they were out straight - but the feet were gone and the arms and the skull; there was no clothing; the flesh was soft ... it was slimy ... there was a great stench.

Edward Skeeters hanged July 1879.

A corpse goes through several stages before it becomes a skeleton. It starts as a relatively fresh piece of meat. This when it goes through rigor, muscles stiffening and then relaxing, a process that was very popular in early detective novels as it gave fiction's greatest detectives a presumed time of death.

Then comes bloat, about 3 to 5 days after death. The gut begins to liquefy and gases extend the abdomen and limbs. Foul-smelling liquid is forced out of the mouth and nose due to pressure in the intestine. For those acquainted with vampire literature this should all sound familiar. The flushed and livid appearance, the gore at the lips - classic signs of vampirism. The corpse can be volatile in this condition, which is why William the Conqueror exploded at his funeral. It is also why funeral homes took to lead-lining their coffins, before embalming became popular.

Even then there can be complications. "A well-designed mausoleum will have the crypts inclined very slightly to the rear," according to a Vice article, "to a drainage pipe so that the fluids that come out will be drained away discreetly. And it will be designed in such a way so that fresh air exchange is constantly coming through the crypts themselves facilitating dehydration out of a discreet vent in the back of the building."

Active decay comes next. The remains blacken and putrefy. It gives off liquids and chemicals. The stench reduces. This is when those famous maggots become helpful, tracking the rate of decay.

After Active comes Advanced, when there isn't much left to look at. After Advanced comes skeletonization.

There are facilities devoted to the study of decay. The US has several body farms, but the practice has not been widely adopted elsewhere. The UK, for instance, does not have a body farm, though there has been a TV series with that name.

What does this mean for your game?

To begin with, it enables creative set dressing for a scene. Trail, Bookhounds, and especially Night's Black Agents generate corpses on a regular basis, but rarely are they interesting. Suppose, for instance, your Bookhounds find a corpse in the course of their investigation.

Arthur's swollen body lies in his bed, limbs akimbo as if in his last moments he reached for the heavens in protest. Foul liquid smears across his face, gore expelled from his lips and nose. His stare is horrible to look upon, and your eyes dart here and there so as not to see it - but you can't help looking. [Stability loss is usually 3, in this case adjusted to 4 if Arthur pops. By this point he's three days dead.]

Arthur's blackened skin seems oily and somehow loose, an ill-fitting suit. Foul liquid sloughs off the bed and across the floorboards, a fatty pool of decay that you do your best not to step in. Flies buzz about, Beelzebub's children on grisly errands, many of them battering themselves on the closed window. You cannot believe it took the neighbors this long to notice the smell. [Arthur's been dead at least 6 days by this point. Stability loss definitely 4 now, though it might drop to 3 once skeletonization sets in.]

It also should alert the Keeper/Director to a rule of thumb that often gets ignored: corpses are very difficult to deal with. The longer it's left alone the more difficult it is to handle, as it becomes soft, oily and liquid. There's a reason why crime scene clean-up is now a thing people do for money. When the body's fresh and relatively intact it can be moved around without too much mess, but the longer you wait the nastier it becomes.

So for, say, vampires, corpses become a real problem. You generate corpses on a regular basis. Unusual corpses, ones that will make a forensic pathologist sit up and pay attention. Which is fine if you're on a battlefield or in a place where random killings are a regular event, but if you're in, say, London, you need to come up with a way of dealing with the problem. Otherwise slayers will take notice and pay you a visit. How the vampires in your game deal with that problem can become a scene, or several scenes, all on their own. Is that removals van part of a Level One Node? That crematorium? Construction company? What happens when someone finds your corpse store?

For that matter, what about zombies? Those poor unfortunate deadfellas condemned to wander - how come their decay process is so wacky? Those dead bodies seem to last for-freaking-ever, defying natural processes. Which, okay, they're basically magical creations at this point, so a certain amount of denying-natural-yadda-yadda is expected. Still, it seems unusual and arbitrary. Surely once they reach the skeleton stage, when muscles are a thing of the past, they're basically helpless? What about the ones in the bloat stage?

A so-so zombie series, Walking Dead.

A much, much better zombie series, Kingdom.

Finally, a story seed:

Waking Ned Devine (Night's Black Agents)

Tourists Shocked By Corpse In Garden A group of friends who rented a house in the Lake District got a nasty surprise when they found a corpse floating at the bottom of the garden. 

"The body was found caught in the weeds at the riverside, at the bottom of the garden," said the police. Foul play is suspected ...

Corpse Farm Discovered in Pastoral Fenby Bridge Following on events that took place two weeks ago the police have discovered a body disposal site at a Lake District farm. Estimates suggest at least twenty bodies in various stages of decay were discovered ... 

The agents are dispatched to Fenby Bridge ostensibly as MI5 liaison officers attached to the police investigation, but they have a particular reason to be there. They need to check whether the bodies found were vampire killings, and if so who was involved in the disposal operation. The locals are less than thrilled to be the focus of the investigation - it's ruining the tourist trade.

Options:

• The corpse farm is actually an offshoot of a larger operation. The owners of a cemetery in a larger town have been digging up corpses and selling their plots on to other buyers. Of course this creates a body disposal problem, which the cemetery owners have solved by offloading the bodies in a more rural, secluded location. The Fenby Bridge locals are genuinely upset, and have a right to be. However one of the corpses was less than dead, and less than thrilled to find itself carelessly tossed into the bushes. It spent the last however many years starved and trapped in a hole in the ground, only to find itself thrown out like garbage. This feral is the reason why the body ended up in the river; it was careless when it made its escape.
• The Fenby Bridge locals are protecting one of their own, a man turned into a vampire during the Second World War. Through Aberrant influence and some natural charm it's been able to keep things quiet for decades, but as the tourist trade picked up and more and more outsiders came to the Lake District the problem became worse. The vampire refuses to acknowledge the danger, which means its human protectors have to go to greater lengths to keep it safe.
• This is part of a larger Node operation gone wrong. Corpses from all over the country are sent to Fenby Bridge and places like it, scattered across the UK. The idea is to 'disappear' people, but the problem is the Conspiracy generates corpses faster than its crematoria can handle them. So the excess are delivered to places like Fenby Bridge until such time as they can be properly dealt with - except of course that never happens because the Conspiracy keeps generating more corpses and the old ones get forgotten about. The locals are genuinely terrified of what might happen next. At any moment someone in a far-off office may decide there are too many witnesses, and what kind of horror will be unleashed then?

Enjoy! 

Locked Room Mysteries (GUMSHOE Any)

I recently watched a film I'd really wanted to see and came away dissatisfied. I shan't say which one, as this post might constitute spoilers. I'll just say CSI KYC and leave it at that, on the supposition that if you get the joke you've already seen the film and so spoilers mean nothing to you.

Part of my dissatisfaction is because it sets up a locked room mystery and then betrays the trope. The classic locked room is the Mary Celeste of mysteries. It sets up a situation that ought to be impossible, and then shows you not just that it's possible but takes you through the working until you see all the clues you missed along the way. It's called locked room because the classic example is the corpse found sealed away in a locked room, whose death seems inexplicable. Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is the original version, but there have been countless others since.

There have been a few real-life examples. The 2010 death of MI6 operative Gareth Williams, found padlocked inside a bag in his London apartment, is one. Williams, who might have been investigating Russian financial crime at the time of his death, went on leave and never came back. Nobody noticed he'd gone missing until his employers thought to make a welfare check, which is when his corpse was discovered. It's thought he went into the bag alive and the Metropolitan Police concluded his death was probably an accident, a sex game gone wrong. As a means of disposing of a body locking it inside a sports bag and leaving it in the flat seems unnecessarily theatrical, almost amateurish, especially if a professional espionage agency was involved. You'd think it'd be simpler to dump the bag in the Thames with weights wrapped round it. It's that Mary Celeste touch again - cups of coffee found still warm in the wardroom, everything apparently normal except there's no crew aboard.

The thing about a locked room is, it's never impossible. It's a puzzle box, and there's always a way to solve a puzzle box. The key is to disbelieve what's in front of you. The minute someone says 'judging by blood splatter, the only way it could have happened is ...' you know for a fact that, whatever else happened, the so-called only way is precisely how it didn't happen. A locked room works on magician's rules, and a magician's favorite trick is misdirection.

So if a corpse turns up in a burnt-out garage, for example, and dental records show that the corpse is Mister Bob Bingo who owed everyone a ton of money, then your first job is to look at those dental records and see if they're fake. Trust nothing, check everything.

As it's a puzzle the emotional satisfaction comes from solving the puzzle, and if the thing's badly designed or if the author cheats their way to a solution then the fun's lost.

Example from CSI KYC: at one point a poison's described as being lethal inside ten minutes. The characters go to a great deal of trouble to establish this. Then in another scene the same dose takes two hours, and even then the victim isn't dead. Which is it? 

In game, how would this work?

Remember this: once you introduce magic, or super-powers, or whatever it may be, the puzzle stops being a puzzle. The audience - the players - will assume magic did it. The problem switches from 'how does the puzzle work' to 'how do I show the solution isn't magic?' At which point you've probably lost the most important battle: capturing the audience's attention. 

So set the puzzle up in such a way that magic isn't the first or obvious answer. Maybe this is a Mutant City Blues game in which the necessary mutant abilities don't fit well into the Quade Diagram, or perhaps this happened during the day when vampires are powerless. Something quick, simple and obvious, so you can get on with the plot. This is why abilities like Night's Black Agents Vampirology are so useful, because one point spend will tell the agents 'a vampire couldn't have done it, at least not the way it was done,' without the Director jumping through hoops to show it wasn't vampire magic.

The best way to design a puzzle like this is to start with the solution and work backward. If you know who did it and how they did it then you should be able to come up with clues that show as much. Always remember this is a puzzle, and puzzles can be about anything. It doesn't have to be murder. It can be 'how did a virus get onto the system when it's not connected to the internet?" Or 'how did that burglar get into this hidden safe?'

Let's play with an example. Assume the setting is Night's Black Agents, modern day, so we're talking every conceivable current technology. Let's further assume that the crime takes place in an area patrolled by security robots which ought to have detected the intruder but did not. It doesn't matter what the crime is. The puzzle is how whoever did it foozled the security robots so they weren't detected carrying out the crime.

The software that operates the robots and monitors their activity reports no anomalies at the time of the crime. The incident reports show only that there was a brief interruption in patrol when a human employee fell ill. The robot stopped to monitor the situation and summoned a security guard, who confirmed that the person suffered a bad reaction to allergy meds. The sick person was escorted away and treated. 

The hardware that runs the show is not connected to the internet or the outside world. It's a purely internal network whose sole purpose is to run the building. It does everything from monitor the security robots to adjust the HVAC and make sure the goldfish tank in the exec suite is operating smoothly. Employees are expressly forbidden from attaching their own devices to the network, or using company property like laptops outside the building. There's no indication (via internal monitoring) that anyone did connect an outside device to the network, whether on the day or at any time in the past. So there should be zero chance of a virus corrupting the system. The hardware is in a security room down on the ground floor that is constantly monitored by cameras, sensors and human security personnel. 

So how was it done?

A virus was introduced into the system that prevented the security robots from detecting the intruder, or anyone at all, after a certain point. The target room and the corridors immediately around that room became invisible zones; the security robots could not see humans while they were in those zones. The agents may become aware of this when they realize that the robots did not detect the CEO even when he was in an area where he ought to be detected. He was working late on a big project, which is why he was in the building. 

How was the virus introduced? By our old friend the fish tank. 

The thermostat was recently replaced on the CFO's authority. That thermostat was the Trojan Horse which introduced the virus to the system. The CFO is the employee who had the bad reaction to allergy meds, which coincidentally enough happened at about the same time as the incident. The CFO doesn't remember authorizing the thermostat switch.

The CFO didn't authorize the switch; her secretary did. Turns out the CFO was poisoned by her secretary to create a diversion so the secretary could carry out the crime. While security and the robots were diverted the secretary got into the invisible area. She used 'I'm going to get your meds' as an excuse to leave the CFO's side and carry out the crime. The whole thing took five minutes.

So how would you do it?

Enjoy!

Top Cop (Mutant City Blues)

I've always had a soft spot for Pelgrane's superpower cop setting Mutant City Blues, but I could never make it work.

In my head it sounds like a cross between Powers and The Wire. Particularly The Wire; there are actors in that show - Michael K Williams, Seth Gilliam, Lance Reddick - that I have seen elsewhere, but have never seen give finer performances than in HBO's crime epic. I'd like to think their characters would feel right at home in Mutant City.

So with that in mind let's talk a little bit about what makes this setting function, and to do that we're going to spend some time dwelling on film noir.

In this kind of campaign, the city is just as important a character as any of the players. More so, because the city was there before them and will be there long after they are dead and dust. In The Wire we see small parts of that bigger picture, when McNulty and Bubbles school Shakima Greggs about Omar's cousin No Heart Anthony, or Prop Joe talks about how the house he lives in is one of the first available to black families in that neighborhood. These stories go straight to the long term history of the setting, hinting at a bigger universe that the individual characters are often blind to, so focused are they on their own problems.

At the same time we can also see where the city is going. The whole of Season Two is dedicated to that idea. In that season we see how the docks which once made Baltimore a premier port city, and which fired up the blue collar union workers that kept the docks running, are being beaten to death by forces beyond their control. No matter how bitterly they fight, their defeat is almost inevitable - and in fact they guarantee it by making alliances with drug kingpin the Greek, taking his money to fund a docks revival, but only ensuring that when the deal comes to light the union, last defender of the docks, gets shut down.

Every city has these stories. It's like watching the march of advancing armies, or following the spread of trade across a map. Superficially things seem the same, yet over time the changes become more and more apparent until finally all you can see are the changes. Oddly enough it may be more useful to use a different system, like Microscope, to plot out this city history, particularly if you're not too keen on doing a lot of research. [for an actual play version of Microscope, look here.] But the point is that there is a larger story playing out around the characters, and that story takes decades - centuries - to complete.

To give just one example, consider MV Empire Windrush, the ship that gave its name to an entire generation's emigration to the UK in general and London in particular. This shifting migration pattern is an event whose consequences can have far-reaching effects for your campaign; you could base an entire story arc around something like this. Or consider the Syrian refugee crisis now, and ask yourself how much more challenging it would be if even a tenth of the people incarcerated in holding camps or swept from crisis to crisis had super powers.

Which brings me to my next point: that in film noir the world is ambivalent, and often thoughtlessly cruel.

People we think of as heroes or protagonists seldom win outright. They may prevail, but there are casualties. Moreover the alleged heroes often lack heroic characteristics, or are so deadened by their experiences that they no longer care.

My go-to film, the one I point at as the perfect example of film noir, is On Dangerous Ground with Robert Ryan. There's one scene in particular that gets me again and again: this one, where Ryan's cop corners a stool pigeon early on in the film and makes him talk. That look on Ryan's face - disgust, anger, despair - is distilled cruelty, but it's difficult to say whether that cruelty's inherent in his character or something that's been stamped into him over time.

If you want your Mutant City game to stand out, that's the standard to aim for. The city, and by extension the game world, does not reward kindness. Soft hearts and do-gooders get ground up in this city, and well-meaning projects meant to make a difference sputter into nothingness, leaving only a sense of futility behind.

Again, The Wire Season Two: there isn't a single person in union boss Sobotka's crew who doesn't want what's best for the docks and the people who work there, yet everything they do only hastens the destruction of everything they care about. Even the gangsters don't get what they want; in Season One the Barksdale Crew is set up as the one to beat, yet over time the Barksdales crumble not because the cops win but because the Barksdales lose.

Yet finally, there is hope. Again I turn to On Dangerous Ground. About a half hour in Ryan's character is cornered by a co-worker, after Ryan's beaten yet another suspect half to death. "How do you do it?" Ryan screams. "How do you live with yourself?" To which the other cop replies, "I don't. I live with other people. This is a job like any other. I do it the best I can. It's never enough, but I still do it."

That's the payoff. The city is a main character, yes. It will be there after the characters have come along, absolutely. But if the characters surrender, if they let circumstance and misery grind them down until nothing's left, then they've lost. The battle isn't to control the city. It's to control themselves, to find some satisfaction in the work and in life. Otherwise the only thing they have to look forward to is nothingness.

I've not spent any time talking about super powers, even though this is a super powers game. That's because it isn't the powers that make this setting work. It's a police procedural first, a supers game second. You shouldn't worry too much about the super side of things; that will take care of itself. What you need to concern yourself with is the police procedural, and I hope this post will help you do that.

Enough from me this week. Enjoy!

Person of Interest: Sir Bernard Spilsbury (Trail, Call, Bookhounds)

I thought I'd try something different and kick of what I hope will be a semi-regular column here: Person of Interest. I'll discuss the biography and gamification of important historical people, and to start us off let's have a look at the life and career of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the Scalpel of Scotland Yard.

Spilsbury was born 1877 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to a sold, middle class family. His father was a chemist, and Bernard spent his early years watching his father in his laboratory, experimenting. However his family was trade and his grandmother, a very determined woman, saw no future in medicine or chemicals, insisting that Bernard's father go into business. He did so reluctantly, but made sure his son would be a doctor if he had anything to say about it.

Bernard was a solitary soul who best liked long walks, skating and other hobbies that he could enjoy by himself, without distractions. He was amenable to his father's wish that he become a doctor, and resisted his grandmother's insistence that he go into trade instead, as a draper. He was an older graduate, entering St Mary's Hospital Medical School at 23, and his contemporaries found him amiable but ordinary, certainly not marked out for greatness. He seems to have been one of those people who just got on with things, without drawing attention to himself, and was a born workaholic.

At St Mary's he fell in with some of the best and brightest pathologists of their day, who took Spilsbury under their wing once they saw that, in spite of his seeming plodding unimpressive nature, he was a prodigious worker. Soon he became Student Demonstrator of Pathology, eschewing competitions, prizes and fame for hour after hour after hour in the lab. In fact his dedication to his craft meant that he did not take on the other courses needed for a medical degree, so he graduated much later than many of his classmates.

He did so at just the right time. In years gone by the police force and public prosecutions had been a piecemeal operation, with different standards and practices applying in every county. Now things were being reorganized; there would be a central authority in charge of the police, and a Director of Public Prosecutions, under the supervision of the Attorney General. Scotland Yard, meanwhile, was being forced to update itself. Paris, New York, Berlin, Prague, all these had police laboratories; even some of the provincial British police forces had established ad-hoc relationships with private medical labs. Yet Scotland Yard had no police laboratory of its own. All this was to change, and quickly.

Then along came Crippen.

The 1910 Crippen case gripped the nation. He had murdered his wife, a stage performer, and taken up with his lover, stealing his wife's money and even clothes. Then, when suspected, the pair fled across the ocean, leaving the police to find the wife's remains in the cellar of his house. Not all of the corpse was recovered; head, limbs and skeleton were missing, but a piece of flesh remained. That flesh bore an old abdominal scar, which helped identify the remains as those of Cora Crippen. Spilsbury also found traces of scopolamine in the remains, which suggested that Crippen, a doctor himself, had used the drug to pacify Cora and make her easier to kill. The doctor and his lover were caught and returned to Britain, where Crippen was eventually hanged.

Yet it wasn't Spilsbury's medical ability - excellent though it was - that really made his reputation. It was his demeanor, as an expert witness. Well dressed, handsome, with a carnation in his button hole, he projected solid competence, an impression that was only reinforced by his detached yet determined attitude. Spilsbury would not be rattled by the prosecution, nor yet by the judge. "Here is a coming man," said spectators, and they were right.

From there Spilsbury went from strength to strength. He became the pathologist of choice for the prosecution, travelling across the country from murder site to murder site, gathering and recording evidence. No absent-minded professor he; Spilsbury was an avid record keeper and fastidious note taker. His index card collection eventually sold for several thousand pounds and is now in the Wellcome collection in London.

Spilsbury loved nothing better than to experiment and solve problems. After the Mahon case, for example, Spilsbury determined to carry out Mahon's autopsy himself, though this would normally be the prison's responsibility. Mahon had been double-hanged; the murderer had, at the last moment, tried to save himself, but instead fell backward rather than down, breaking his spine on the trapdoor as he fell, and then his neck. In most instances the autopsy would be fairly perfunctory, but Spilsbury insisted on a complete autopsy including examination of the brain, a portion of which he took away with him. It was the first judicial autopsy Spilsbury conducted but by no means the last, and eventually as a result of his examinations a recommendation was made to increase the drop by two inches on humanitarian grounds, the better to ensure a clean break of the neck.

Spilsbury also developed the Murder Bag, or collection of standard equipment to use in murder cases, and the Mahon case is the cause. This is what Spilsbury and his colleagues found at the murder site, a bungalow at the Crumbles, Eastbourne:

'On a rusty tenon saw, grease and a piece of flesh. Articles of female clothing, greasy and bloodstained, some with soot or coal-dust on them. On the cauldron-shaped coal-scuttle, two minute specks of blood. In the saucer near it, solidified fat. The two-gallon saucepan in the same fireplace was half-full of a reddish fluid, with a thick layer of grease on the surface; this contained a piece of boiled human flesh, the skin adhering to it. The metal fender was splashed with grease. There was more grease deposited in the second saucepan, and smeared in the bath and basin. In the hat-box, among soiled articles of clothing, were thirty-seven pieces of flesh, cut or sawn. All were human, and all apparently had been boiled. The big fiber trunk held four large pieces of human body, sawn apart, but not boiled. On one of those pieces, a left chest and shoulder, there was a bruise over the shoulder blade, the result of a blow inflicted before death, if only a few minutes before; it had been, in Spilsbury's opinion, a heavy blow. There was also in the trunk a biscuit tin containing various organs.' From The Life of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, 1952, by Douglas G Browne and E V Tullett.

Spilbury started work on the murder bag, full of equipment needed to properly collect and store remains, when he saw a detective using his bare hands to scoop the victim's boiled flesh into a bucket.

Spilsbury became Sir Bernard in 1923, one year before the Mahon case. He spent his entire career dissecting, studying, analyzing, and giving evidence in case after case. It's become fashionable now to downplay Spilsbury, to claim that his dogmatic and unyielding attitude on the stand led to miscarriages of justice. Just as in his university years, when he eschewed competitive examinations and prizes for ordinary lab work, in his working career he refused to engage in peer review, or to train students. Spilsbury preferred his own counsel.

Yet it must be remembered that Spilsbury did not get where he was through anything other than effort. He was and remained the persistent, meticulous workaholic who graduated late because, thanks to his dedication to pathology, he could not be bothered with distractions. He lived for the job, and never lied or prevaricated. He thought before he acted but, once he made his mind up, that was that.

It did not end well for him. He had three sons. Peter, the one following in his footsteps, became a house surgeon at St Thomas' in London. On the 13th September, 1940, the Hospital was bombed and Peter died, but the news didn't get to Spilsbury right away. He went to work as usual the next morning, performing post-mortems and giving evidence at the Coroner's Court. After finishing one case and while waiting for the other to start he went through the morning's post, only to discover a letter from a friend with condolences on the death of his son. Except the letter didn't say which son; Spilsbury had seen Alan earlier that day, so it might have been either Peter or Richard.

Eventually Spilsbury learned the truth. He was back at work the next day, but he was never the same again.

Alan, the eldest son, was a sickly soul, and Spilsbury was devoted to him. The two would spend each day together, at the Gower Street laboratory where Spilsbury worked. In November 1945 young Alan died of consumption.

By this point Spilsbury was in decline. A micromanager to the end he could not bear to have other people write his reports or fill in forms for him, yet he became increasingly incapable of doing the job himself. He took longer and longer to make decisions now, his tiring mind unable to do the work of former years.

His death was characteristic of the man. During Christmas 1947 he took care of his affairs, gave his staff their accustomed Christmas boxes, and completed his paperwork for the year. On December 17th he sent out his last post-mortem report, in time to catch the 530 post. He dined at his club, afterwards handing the key to his private cupboard back to the club steward because, he said, he no longer needed it. He went back to the Gower Street laboratory at 730, which he had kept exactly as it was since the death of Alan two years prior. At 830, one of his colleagues passed by the laboratory, smelt gas, and investigated. By then, Spilsbury was dead.

With all that in mind, let's talk gamification.

As his career spans several decades all of which are core for Call and Trail of Cthulhu, Spilsbury could easily appear in either setting. Some of his most famous cases are in the 1930s - Trail's favorite decade - but Spilsbury was already the most celebrated pathologist of his day long before 1930. Moreover unlike many specialists, who prefer staid laboratory work, Spilsbury travels all over the country, which means he can be encountered almost anywhere from John O'Groats to Land's End. He might even be encountered elsewhere within the Commonwealth; he's known to have worked in the Channel Islands, and a small amount of fictionalization could have him turn up, say, in Canada or further afield.

In Trail or Call, Spilsbury's most likely role is the expert, assisting in investigations without taking part himself. If the investigators have a medical background or any official standing, they might meet the great man himself. From a rules perspective Spilsbury's bound to have expert-level ratings in any medical or forensic discipline and, though his finances were relatively modest, thanks to his professional reputation his Credit Rating is very high. His library and note card collection would be a boon to any researcher, giving boosts to related medical or forensic abilities.

For investigators more likely to commit crimes than investigate them, Spilsbury is a very dangerous enemy. No matter how careful, clever, or resourceful the characters think they are, it's nearly impossible to outwit the Scalpel of Scotland Yard.

In a Bookhounds game, Spilsbury best fits a Sordid London setting. No amount of crime novel romanticism can disguise Spilsbury's grim and grisly world. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers both based their crime fiction in part on Spilsbury's work, directly or indirectly. Yet their depictions are fairly bloodless, when compared to the gore, guts, and limbless torsos that made up Spilsbury's professional career. Spilsbury was no stranger to the variations of the human condition; suicide, accidental death, sexually motivated asphyxia, and a thousand other kinds of demise were his stock in trade.

If you wanted to go in an Esoterrorist direction, the obvious terror to link to Spilsbury is the Practice. This gestalt, described in The Book of Unremitting Horror, is a medical nightmare, a surgical team of the damned. If you were to link Spilsbury to it then one way would be to suggest that the Practice is haunting the site of Spilsbury's old lab at Gower Street. I'm guessing that the old lab is long gone, but it was probably part of what's now University Teaching Hospital. Maybe there's a cult of medical students seeking grim knowledge, or perhaps Spilsbury wants his index cards back from the Wellcome.

In any case, you've more than enough information now. I hope this was useful! Enjoy.

The Long Con: Gentleman Jack (Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London)

My scenario, The Long Con, won a Silver Ennie at GenCon this year. As I wasn't there and didn't have the chance to speechify or thank people, let me get a few things out of the way before passing on to the meat and potatoes:

Thanks to Simon, who originally let me develop this for YSDC and then took it under Pelgrane's wing.

Thanks to Paul, who helped me bring The Long Con to life at YSDC to begin with.

Thanks to the Pelgrane team, from editors (hi Cat!) to artists, who collaborated to put all this together.

Thanks again to the original playtest team, Chris, Jillian, Jym and Mary. Much fun was had!

Thanks to a certain Shoggee, who sent me a book about Yokai for Christmas and so inadvertently kicked all this off.

Thanks especially to all of you who voted for The Long Con!

I don't have a whole lot of time today, as it's tech rehearsal for the play I've been directing - opening night's this Thursday, hope you bought a ticket - so I'm going to spend a little time talking about some movies I find inspirational, and which helped me create the character of Gentleman Jack, one of the significant antagonists in the script.

One of the main inspirations for the character's style and personality is Sir Richard Attenborough's performance as Pinky, in the 1947 movie Brighton Rock. I'm amazed, frankly, that YouTube hasn't a decent clip of his performance. It's a smasher. Graham Green, the author who wrote the novel on which the screenplay is based, wasn't convinced Attenborough could pull it off. By the end of filming, he admitted he'd been entirely wrong. Pinky, the quiet, cunning razor-killer, is Gentleman Jack, at least as far as personality goes.

However for those Keepers out there looking for other period films to help them develop a Bookhounds game, I thoroughly recommend these two gems:

Night and the City, directed by Jules Dassin, starring Richard Widmark as the scheming Harry Fabian. Nothing conveys the seamy underbelly of the city more convincingly. Those opening scenes with Fabian on the run grab your attention, and it stays grabbed from that moment to the killer ending. Apart from Widmark, who's a smasher, Googie Williams and Francis L Sullivan, as a sleazy night club owner and his scheming wife, and Herbert Lom as a crooked wrestling promoter, give standout performances. But really there isn't a bad performer in the bunch. A must-see.

The Blue Lamp. 1950, with Jack Warner, in iconic character PC George Dixon's first appearance. Dixon would go on to be a mainstay of British television, but this first film outshines anything seen on the gogglebox. Both this and Night use London's street locations to stunning effect, but the standout here is Warner's Dixon. There's a reason why this copper became the face of British policing. Another must-see.

But enough of all that. Let's take a look at Gentleman Jack for a moment, and think about what might happen after the scenario.

Whatever happens, Jack is going away disappointed. I won't spoil why, but if you've read the Long Con you know he doesn't get anything he wants, and may end up arrested. What would someone like that do to get revenge?

Probably something very nasty, with razors. But first he'd like the protagonists to have a taste of the humiliation he endured, so to that end consider the following forgery:

The Book of Vampires, Monstrous Ghosts, Sorcery and the Seven Deadly Sins. First published 1802 by a German printer, this book discusses Demonology and Occult, is written mainly in German with some Latin, and is in good condition overall with some minor damage to the leather binding. To a collector, it might be worth as much as £25 (or close to £1000 in today's money). In Bookhounds terms, it's a Windfall.

Or it would if it were real, but it's not. Jack had one of his forger pals create it, and it's a pretty good facsimile. It takes 2 points of the appropriate Craft or Forgery abilities to work this out.

Jack's plan is this: he gets someone to pretend to be a rich buyer, possibly a ghoul confederate with appropriate body-warping magic. This rich buyer spreads the word that he's on the lookout for that book. Then Jack lets it slip to the protagonists that he knows where a copy can be found, for a price. Let bygones be bygones, says Jack; why let past troubles stand in the way of present success?

Jack steers to the protagonists to the copy, and lets them make the presentation to the client. Then, horror of horrors! The 'rich buyer' discovers it to be a forgery, and threatens to sue. This definitely counts as a Reversal in the shop's fortunes, if the protagonists let this go ahead.

Then Jack steps in again, and says he can make the problem go away, if the protagonists pay him. Sure enough, if the protagonists pay, the problem goes away - because there never was a problem in the first place. Jack may siphon a hundred pounds or more from the protagonists in this way, possibly even returning to blackmail the protagonists again if he thinks there's a chance.

Of course, if the protagonists show fight or don't pay, Jack steps up his game and starts using razors and menaces to get the money he feels is his rightful due.

That's enough for today. Many thanks again to all who voted! I'll treasure this.

Enquiring Minds

I've been reading a lot of Mutant City Blues recently. It's a fun RPG setting; I particularly like the concept of the Quade Diagram, in which various kinds of mutation can be linked to other kinds, creating a chain by which certain powers can be deduced, and weaknesses too, based on the observed powers of the mutant in question. Fun stuff!

If I'm disappointed at all - and I'm not even sure that disappointed is the right word - it's that, for a game in which crimes are solved, relatively little emphasis is placed on the crime scene. I suppose you could argue that this is the difference between, say, an Agatha Christie novel and a CSI scenario. The television series CSI, particularly in its more recent incarnations, sacrifices detail to tell a story, whereas a crime drama in its classic incarnation is all about the detail. The very first Hercule Poirot novel, for example, turns entirely on a point about a document that may, or may not, exist. The reader is able to deduce whether or not it exists and, as a consequence, what happened, next, by paying attention to details, chief among which is the discovery of the crime scene. Christie even goes so far as to draw a map of the house in which the scene takes place, so her readers can follow along and make their own deductions.

CSI follows a completely different path. Television is a visual medium; the viewer isn't supposed to supply intelligent input. Certainly the viewer isn't supposed to work out whodunit. The whole point of a crime story as presented in this light is to entertain, for an hour or so, and then present a result that the viewer finds satisfactory. Or at least that the network finds satisfactory, which is why so many follow the CSI path and so few the Wire. But that's a story for another day.

If you will write, then you must read. Write what you know is the popular credo, but as so few people know the intricacies of murder it follows that, if you are to write crime, you need to read a hell of a lot. All manner of odd, forgotten authors become grist to your mill, which is why I have a copy of Burt Rapp's Homicide Investigation: A Practical Handbook.  I'm not about to pretend that Rapp is an unsung genius. Apart from anything else, he's as dated as hell; that book was written back in the 1980s, when DNA analysis - never mind the computerized databases that are meat and drink to CSI - was very much in its infancy. Which, incidentally, makes books like Rapp's invaluable to anyone writing a story set before DNA and the current television cop; ie. anything set before 1989. Many of us can only imagine what that world was like; Rapp knew. But that's by the way. 

There's a section on canvassing for information that I want to cover here, and Rapp's text is as follows:

Canvassing isn't a casual task to assign to anyone who happens to be available. Canvassing requires dedication, intelligence, motivation, and skill in dealing with people. The officers assigned to canvassing should have a clear idea of the information they should try to elicit. Basic information is as follows:

• Name
• Address
• Telephone number
• Work address and telephone
• was person present during the crime?
• did the person see or hear anything?
• does the person know either the victim or the suspect?
• names of any others at this address
• names of any visitors during the period of the crime
• convenient time for another interview, if necessary
• witness' travel plans, for the foreseeable future 

I've been acting as Keeper in I don't care to guess for how many investigative games, for however long, and I can't recall any player asking any of those questions. Nor, for that matter, can I recall many of them taking notes.

It all seems so simple, when laid out as Rapp has it, in order. If you want to know what happened, then you ask who was there, you ask what they saw or heard, and you ask if there was anyone else on site who might have heard or seen anything. Hardly the stuff of revelation.

Or consider something from a different source:

Similarly, an Edinburgh surgeon in 1880 diagnosed a patient as a recently discharged sergeant from a regiment posted to Barbados; the man was respectful but forgetfully kept his hat on, as in the Army, he was Scottish with an air of authority, and he had elephantiasis, which you get in Barbados but not in the Highlands. Elementary, my dear Joseph Bell (1837-1911).  [The Alarming History of Medicine, Richard Gordon]

Investigation is, above all, the art of paying attention. In RPG terms, it starts in the very first scene, and does not stop until the scenario is over. Players should never take the information as presented entirely for granted; there is always something there to discover. Equally they should never neglect the basics. Who was there? What did they see, or hear? What is present at the scene, and what might account for it being there? Tunnel vision never does anyone any good, and to wed yourself to a theory of the crime without sufficient evidence is to invite disaster. It isn't all about progressing from scene to scene; sometimes it's about making sure you're on the right path, before making that deductive leap that transplants a Scot to the isle of the Bearded Ones. Just one or two questions can prevent a great deal of useless, even counter-productive effort.

But perhaps most importantly, have a clear idea of the information you're trying to get. In many ways, it's like an exam; understand the question, and then attempt to answer it. That way you have a better chance of getting the right answer down on paper ... or at least, having the satisfaction of knowing that you understood, just before the horrific minions of Cthulhu come knocking on your door.