The Collector (Trail)

Sourced from Wikipedia

This piece is loosely based on a project I'm working on.

A bit of background about toys circa 1900.

The best toymakers by far could be found in Nuremburg. The firms Marklin and Gerbruder Bing were renowned, and every boy wanted one of their magnificent liners. Other countries attempted to capture a portion of the market – Ives of Connecticut, Radiguet the French manufacturer, to name two – but the Germans reigned supreme. Of course, such workmanship cost money. Marklin’s 98 cm ocean liner for example, produced in 1900, with a choice of clockwork motor (twenty minutes propulsion), steam engine (one hour) or electric (six hour) with all the accessories, cost 200 gold francs.

Motivating power could be had in many ways. Bing favoured clockwork engines, but electric motors and steam engines were also available. The clockwork toys were wound with keys, which sometimes doubled as ‘clouds’, so the key appeared to be steam coming from the ship’s funnel.  The steam engines were delicate; if they overheated the engine could blow, perhaps damaging the model. Many models came with interchangeable parts; separate engines and accessories could be bought, as desired. In those models the superstructure could be lifted right off, to allow clear access to the working parts.

Founder of the company Theodor Friedrich Wilhelm Märklin released Märklin's first wind-up train with carriages that ran on standardised track in 1891, noting that railway toys had the potential to follow the common practice of doll's houses, in which the initial purchase would be enhanced and expanded with more accessories for years after the initial purchase. To this end, Märklin offered additional rolling stock and track with which to expand its boxed sets. 

With all that in mind:

The Collector

The investigators are asked to inventory the library of bibliophile and Golden Dawn affiliate Edward St. John Dandridge, Sinjun to his friends. The library contains many lesser (but valuable) occult tomes, and it's their expertise as occultists that got them the job.

The investigators may think they're working for relatives of Sinjun Dandridge, but his only surviving relative, a widowed sister who lives in Brighton, has no money and won't see any until the estate is settled, which is complicated as Sinjun had no will. Probate will take months, possibly more than a year. In fact (1 point Interpersonal spend) the investigators were hired by members of the Golden Dawn acting through the widow and providing her the cash. They think that Sinjun was hiding valuable stuff in his library and want first dibs.

Sinjun's house, not far from fashionable Chelsea Park, is remarkable for two things. First, the library, which doubled as Sinjun's ritual chamber. It is very well stocked but missing a few key texts. Sinjun's notebooks, where he kept records of all his purchases, show he bought [insert mythos text here] about six months before he died. His notes of his magical experiments also show he used that same book intensively right up to the day of his death. 

The other is Sinjun's collection of clockwork toys, particularly trains and ships. Almost every room in the house is occupied by cleverly designed model landscapes through which his trains and ships travel. One room is devoted to ships in particular and Sinjun built what amounts to an indoor pool in one of the extra bedrooms, complete with a little port and an island in the middle. Most of them are quality German make and the investigators can (0 point) tell that it must have cost him several fortunes to buy all this stuff, not counting the items Sinjun must have made himself. A further 1 point (Appraise or similar) sees that even some of the model ships and trains are self-built. 

Checking into Sinjun's death shows that (0 point) he died of a heart attack which (1 point) is very unusual in a man of his age and health. However, his heart was overtaxed by some kind of repetitive strain. Occult (1 point) or Mythos (0 point) shows that his magical experiments might have caused the strain. 

Options:

• The Secret Room. What Sinjun was trying to do was establish a little Utopia, a magical secret room. The island holds the key; the model house on the middle of the island is where Sinjun spent a lot of his time, miniaturized. He could play with his toys as if they were real-sized. That's where the missing books are. However, his magical alterations proved too much for his heart. If the investigators minaturize themselves following Sinjun's experiments they may discover what was chasing him, down there amongst the clockwork toys.
• The Model Catastrophe. Sinjun was following in the footsteps of Koschei the Deathless and wanted to hide his soul away in a model train. It exploded, and his heart exploded at the same time. Why? Because one of his magical rivals planned it that way. This same rival is bankrolling the investigators because the most valuable books aren't in the collection, and he wants to know where they are. He doesn't realize that Sinjun hid them away in a special bookshelf in his library, built into one of the overstuffed leather chairs.
• The Self-Built Assassin. Sinjun used some of his creations as killer toys. He'd build, say, a car or a train and use that model, together with other magical ingredients, to kill off his enemies. The model car served as a totem; the victim would die in a car crash. However, what Sinjun didn't realize was that each time he did that the essence of the dead person would become part of the model car. Do that enough times, and you have a collection of ghostly killers with one thought in mind: kill their creator. Except, with Sinjun dead, the killer toys are trapped in his house. Waiting for someone to play with them ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Dreams of the Drowned (Trail of Cthulhu)

 

Sourced from The Great War

Silent propaganda film 1918, sourced from Spreading Oak Tree

This is a Trail of Cthulhu scenario seed set in New England and loosely based on the deaths of Stewart Mason and his wife, Leslie. From: The Last Voyage of the Lusitania, 1957, A.A. and Mary Hoehling, published by Longmans of Toronto:

On board also were, inevitably, newlyweds. The Stewart Masons had been married in Boston on April 21. He'd come from Ipswich to wed his brunette Yankee bride, Leslie, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Lindsey. Her father was a man of many talents: writer, actor, patron of drama, and millionaire, whose huge stone mansion brooded over the Charles River in baronial splendor ...

Soon, he was sure, he must encounter Bill Lindsey's little girl, Leslie, or her husband, Stewart Mason. He never did. Yet Leslie was there. [American] Consul Wesley Frost found her, on an embalmer's slab in an improvised operating room in the rear of the Cunard office. "She lay like a statue typifying assassinated innocence." Stewart was washed ashore further up the [Irish] coast. The news was cabled to Lindsey in Boston. It 'hung' forever after like a cerement over the big stone house next to the Charles River. It made the great hall, and the oaken staircase flaring upward on either side, from which Leslie had thrown her bride's bouquet days before, seem to Lindsey like a mausoleum ... 

The seed is nominally set in Kingsport but can be relocated.

Hook

In 1915 the daughter of millionaire widower Charles F. Kinshaw died with her husband in the wreck of the Lusitania. That tragedy blighted his life, and all but ended his career as an early entrepreneur in silent cinema. From being a widely travelled angel investor he turned into a recluse, spending all his time at his Kingsport mansion by the sea. This former captain's mansion, built in the mid-1800s, was where young Sarah and her husband were married; ever since that day, it has had a funereal pall.

This hasn't changed, but recent activity at the mansion has Kinshaw's friends and family intrigued. Kinshaw, his artistic expertise undimmed, recently added a small film editing studio to the building. Nobody's sure what it means, exactly, and nobody knows what film he's been shooting if he's been shooting any film at all. However, some wealthy and influential people would pay good money to find out.

Enter the investigators.

Awful Truth

Kinshaw is under the influence of Deep Ones who have promised to return his daughter to him if he does as they ask.

They contacted him through dreams, pretending to be Sarah's husband William. William's body had never been recovered after the sinking, and the Deep Ones pretended that William was trapped in time and only able to communicate, imperfectly, though dreams. However, if Kinshaw were to build a special film camera to William's specifications he could improve the connection, and possibly establish a bridge between himself and his daughter strong enough to allow her to cross back over and rejoin the living.

Though nobody realizes it, Kinshaw has spent the last few months filming the sinking of the Lusitania from every possible angle, again and again. He now has enough film in the can to show every moment of the tragedy, from the perspective of every single person who died - 1,193 souls.

Though Kinshaw doesn't realize this, the Deep Ones are using subliminal stimuli. Each frame of his picture is underscored with Ry'leh and Cthulhu imagery; the Lusitania footage provides the impetus, the Mythos undertones are the punch. The overall intent is to create a kind of gate, using Kinshaw's emotional energy and the energy of anyone who happens to be in the room when he shows off his film footage, that directly connects that spot with Ry'leh. Not only will this cause a physical reaction (mostly involving several tons of transported icy ocean water) it will also spike a huge rush in hideous dream energy which in turn will blanket the East Coast with Cthulhu's message.

After putting the film together, Kinshaw intends to have a preliminary screening at a Kingsport cinema before taking it to New York. The Kingsport screening will be invited audience only. Some of the biggest names in American cinema will be there, as well as local dignitaries.

It's going to be one hell of a show, unless the investigators intervene.  

Nights Black Agents - Hauntings

It's that ghostly time of year, when the subconscious dwells uneasily in shadowy corners and obsesses over things which should not be.

I've discussed Hauntings before in connection with Bookhounds, and I've mentioned them in connection with NBA too. At that time I said:

I gave these guidelines for Bookhounds ghosts, or spirits of place:

• The truth of the haunting will probably never be known for certain, since most of the facts are unavailable.
• It cannot be dealt with in the same way as, say, an ordinary antagonist encounter. Ghouls, for example, can be shot, or bargained with. There is no way to communicate with a haunting of place, and probably no way to kill it.
• It has a great deal of power behind it, possibly magical power. That means other people besides the protagonists are going to be interested in it. That also means it could be very dangerous.

I'd modify them for Night's Black Agents, as follows:

• The truth of the haunting must be linked to the Vampire background. If vampires in your game are mutant creations of science, then ghosts should have a scientific background as well. A Satanic vampire game has Satanic ghosts, and so on.
• It cannot be dealt with in the same way as an ordinary antagonist encounter. Ghouls can be shot or bargained with, but ghosts don't have the same weaknesses. Bargaining may be possible, but difficult.
• It has power behind it, but that power is going to depend on the method of its creation. It ought never to be as powerful as, say, a Renfield, let alone a vampire. This isn't a major player; it's a mood piece, possibly even a booby trap.
• These ghosts can be defeated but probably not destroyed, in the same sense that vampires can be defeated, but can come back from the grave. 

In NBA vampires come in four delicious favors: mutant, supernatural, damned, alien. What kind of ghost stories can be told with the same premise?

So with all that in mind, let's talk about some concrete examples.

Before I do, I just want to briefly talk about a phenomenon that first appears in the 1900s: the techno ghost.

A techno ghost is something that mirrors or borrows technology but is not necessarily defined by it. A ghost that only exists when heard over the wireless or telephone. The ghost of a car, or plane, or train. A ghost that appears on television, or a film screen. 

When technology is first introduced and is unfamiliar to the general reading public, authors tend to borrow them for spooky background. So, for instance, when the telephone is first introduced but there isn't a telephone in every home, you'll find a few period authors sneaking in phone calls from beyond the grave. Even Stephen King uses a party line in one of his short stories, because he's old enough to remember the last surviving party line telephone systems way wayyy out in the piney woods. 

Similarly when moving pictures were new and most cinemas were basically large tents or village halls repurposed for the night, you'll find short story writers using cinemas as settings. These share the same advantage as that spooky little antique store where you bought that monkey's paw; you'll never find that mobile cinema again, no matter how hard you look. 

A similar mechanic plays out in Japanese horror The Ring.

Sourced from MotelX

I've often wondered just how common VCR tapes were in Japan in the late 1990s. I'm guessing not very; DVD must have taken over by then. It was a very clever move on someone's part. The ghost in that story is fairly traditional, but the method of delivery gives it that special edge. 

The key point being that, like the mobile cinema, you have to have the tape to make the thing work, and tapes are mobile things. You never know where they'll crop up next ...

Anyway, after that brief diversion, the meat of the matter:

Damned: Their markers are holy symbols and spiritualism, their emphasis is seduction.

Roadside Shrine. You probably drive past a few of these on any long car journey. Someone's last moment on earth before the smash, memorialized in fading flowers and drifting plastic. Whoever they are, someone loved them. Still, it's impossible to tell from that blurred photograph who they were or what they were like.

Aberrance 7, Health 8. Alertness +2. Stealth +3 in shadows, +1 in bright light. Free Powers: Unearthly Tread (+2 difficulty to evade), Reflection Only (can only be seen in a reflective surface, like a rear view mirror). Other Powers: Mesmerism (only works if makes eye contact), Drain Heat.

The Shrine spirit is a twisted remnant of a roadside fatality. It might only exist as some faded police tape and chalk marks, or it might be a collection of dying flowers and heartfelt remembrances. The vampires have taken the essence of this death and made it their own, creating a kind of spiritual IED that attaches itself either to the next person to see the shrine, or a specified target (say, via blood and fingernail parings). The spirit attaches itself to its victim at the earliest opportunity and tries to force them, through Mesmerism, into a fatal accident, preferably a road accident. The spirit appears to its victim in a reflective surface, perhaps a mirror or shop window, to make the eye connection. It has no intelligence and very little memory left, but can be persuaded to return to its shrine if fresh blood is spilt at that location.

Alien: Their markers are various uncanny effects; their emphasis is invasion.

Floating Lights. What's that up in the sky? Probably a satellite passing overhead - but those lights are remarkably bright for a satellite. A plane, maybe? Pretty quiet, if it is. A drone, that's it - has to be. 

Aberrance 10, Firearms (light ray) 8, Health 8. Alertness +1. Stealth +4. Free Powers: Infravision, Regeneration (2 points per round). Other Powers: Cloud Men's Minds, Vampiric Speed, Tracking.

Though these can be mistaken for UFOs in fact they are unexpected byproducts of alien infestation. They only appear in places where the vampires have been, and then only for a brief time - perhaps a week, never longer than a month and then only in cases where the vampires have lingered for some time or gathered in great numbers. The jury's out as to whether they're intelligent, parasites or some kind of mobile portal to other dimensions. One thing's for certain: Renfields hate and fear these things. Only Renfields know why, and they're not talking.

Supernatural: Their markers are strange superstitions, their emphasis hunger. 

Mr. Smiles. Doomscroll through your social media feed, and you'll find him. Those peculiar private messages and videos from someone you don't know or recognize. Funny how they only seem to come after an encounter with ... those things. Don't look at the images. Don't listen to the messages. That's how Mr. Smiles gets in.

Aberrance 7, Hand to Hand 10, Health 10. Alertness +3, Stealth +2. Free Powers: Strength, Unfeeling, Spider Climb. Other Powers: Heat Drain, Vampiric Speed.

Mr. Smiles is something the vampires cooked up. It takes a death to summon it, preferably the death of a friend or Network contact. Then those peculiar messages and images start showing up in the target's social media feed. Threatening messages, unpleasant pictures, and even if you scrub your feed obsessively somehow Mr. Smiles, all teeth and gore like a modern-day Raw Head and Bloody Bones, follows you, tracks you down. If he finds you, he'll crawl out from whichever device he's tracked you down on and kill you - dragging whatever's left back into the device. Then Mr. Smiles will make you just like him, and set you after your friends.

Mutant: Their markers are medical symptoms; their emphasis is infection.

Green Oil. Be careful what you step in. Don't let it get on you. If even the slightest drop gets on you it sticks there, propagates, eating away at your shoes, your clothes, turning whatever it can into more of itself. It doesn't like fire, but it's preternaturally clever; it might let you think it's burnt away, and then it slips into your bed at night. 

Aberrance 7, Hand to Hand 10, Health 4. Alertness +2, Stealth +4. Free Powers: Regeneration (2/round), Track by Smell (+2 difficulty evade). Other Powers: Heat Drain (gains points drained as health, effectively creating more of it from whatever it eats)

The oil is a byproduct of vampire kills. A little of it is left behind wherever a vampire feeds, and usually it dies off within a day or two. However if someone picks it up, even the tiniest speck on the sole of someone's shoe, it can use the heat from whatever it's attached to as a food source. That lets it create more of itself, and more, and more. It can grow too large; if it manages to eat a person it generally can't keep its form together and dissipates, but not before infecting the room it dissipates in. This doesn't create more oil, but does create a very unpleasant atmosphere - effectively a 3-point Stability loss for anyone who spends time (longer than 10 minutes) in that area.

That's it for me. Enjoy!

Montague James and the Hounds (Bookhounds of London)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, let's talk about this.

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

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

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

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

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

So what can we extract from this?

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

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

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

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

With all that in mind:

A Peculiar Gazette

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In game terms the Walker Papers have the following stats:

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's it for me this week. Enjoy!

For The Sound of His Horn (Ravenloft)

British Movietone Newsreel (1937)

D'Ye Ken John Peel

I don't often self-promote here, but as I'm getting close to completion on one of the two Ravenloft titles I'm working on I thought I'd tell you a bit about it.

The people of Oaksey, a small village in Mordent, once were part of the Huntingtower estate, now defunct. Oaksey’s alderman, Sanders Murdoch, suffered a near-fatal hunting accident in pursuit of his favorite prey, the fox. Sanders suspects foul play and promises to severely punish whoever is behind the attacks. Some say what happened to Sanders isn’t natural, and they’re right. The hunter’s horn has wakened something best left sleeping ...

Fox hunting's a major story element. I've never been on a hunt but I've known several who did, and I've spent a fair amount of time out in the countryside where fox hunts were common, back in the day. 

The English have a peculiar attachment to fox hunting. Despite the 2005 ban the issue comes up again and again, a kind of political totem for the traditionalist right-wing. The last time it came to a vote, in 2015, the Conservatives under David Cameron were soundly whipped by Nicola Sturgeon's SNP. The Scots didn't give much of a damn about fox hunting, and in fact the hunt is still legal in Scotland. The SNP just wanted to give the Tories a bloody nose, and they succeeded.

Mind you, two anemic girl scouts and a Luigi cosplayer could have whipped David Cameron, but all power to the SNP. 

Some activists claim fox hunting persists in England despite the ban. So-called trail-hunts, sending hounds after a pre-laid scent, are allegedly just cover for the old sniff-it-out-and-kill-it fox hunts. Or that illegal hunts carry on despite the ban, since enforcement is next to nil.

Labour traditionally claims to be the anti-hunt party, probably because Tony Blair's government banned it the first time round and Labour feels obliged to stick to its past, but there's never been any enthusiasm for it on Labour's side beyond some dedicated animal rights campaigners and ancient holdovers from the 1980s. Tony Blair himself said he regretted passing the bill. 

Meanwhile the Tories come back to it every once in a while, but beyond using it as a stick to beat Labour and the lefties with there's not a whole lot of enthusiasm there either. Possibly because wrapping yourself in the Union Jack and blootering on about traditional values is best left to ardent Brexiteers and other gammons. 

As a hobby, it stopped being a countryside pursuit long ago. Reading old manuals and memorials published in the 1920s and 1930s it's easy to see why. Even then they complained that stockbrokers from London and day trippers were ruining the hobby. Now it's an excuse for tourists to come on a gallop, an excellent moneymaker but hardly a community event. Siegfried Sassoon wouldn't recognize it.

I'm mildly surprised there hasn't been a murder mystery with the John Peel title or theme. I understand there's a 1935 film with that title - never seen it, and don't know anything about it other than the IMDB plot synopsis which suggests it has nothing to do with fox hunting. I vaguely remember a Rumpole of the Bailey short about fox hunting, and no doubt there are other UK cop dramas that have dipped into it now and again. Most likely in the 1980s and 90s, when the ban was still a political issue. Google tells me there's an American detective series about fox hunting in the Virginia mountains but to my knowledge there's not an English equivalent.

Which is perhaps a little odd. If fox hunting was integral to the English character you'd think it'd have had a Carry On film by now. Or some not-quite-Belgian with little grey cells a-quiver would have made the theme his own, rather than stick to nursery rhymes about clocks and mice. 

Not even comedians will touch it. Oscar Wilde made the oft-repeated observation that fox hunting is the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable, but Wilde's been dead and dust for years. I don't see Dara O'Briain sketching any side-splitters on this topic any time soon. Tweets, yes, but those aren't going to make their way into his act.

Anyway, I came to this to talk about the scenario and I suppose I ought to be getting on with my self-appointed task.

The story is set in Mordent, which is Ravenloft's answer to M.R. James and E.G. Swain. Ghosts-a-plenty, in a countryside designed to feel a little like Dartmoor and a little like Cornwall. In Mordent, nobody ever dies - not entirely. They return, whether to plague the living, beg forgiveness or for some other purpose. There are those who claim the mysterious Apparatus, built for reasons unknown, is the cause of it all. 

In my own little corner of Ravenloft the Huntingtower family, dead and gone, is the ultimate cause of the problem the PCs face. The last Huntingtower, Gelbert, committed an unspeakable crime and now Oaksey is cursed to repeat his follies. Desire a thing too much, and what starts as longing becomes obsession. Obsession is a dangerous thing ...

The scenario's intended for PCs from level 1 to 3, and could be an introductory scenario either to the setting or the game itself. Like many other D&D writers I've found Challenge Ratings a bit tricky to handle, but don't worry - I'm sure some of the PCs will survive.

Unlike Cthulhu there isn't a Sanity mechanic but there is a Fear and Stress mechanic, which I'm finding very useful. Mind you, fail too many Stress tests and that old bugbear Challenge Rating will become even more difficult to manage. Still, I'm sure those resourceful PCs will solve that problem - or die trying.

Its climactic moment takes place at the Meet, when Oaksey sets off in pursuit of the fox once more. If the PCs haven't got a solution to the problem by then, things are likely to get very messy ...

The other scenario, The Three Crows, is still in production so I shan't say much about it, except to hint that if you like slasher films set in vampire country, have I got the scenario for you!

Anyway, that's it for this week. Next week, back to the usual weirdness! 

Ripped from the Headlines: Ghost Boat Cocaine

Inspired by this Guardian article about an 18-foot fiberglass boat that washed up on the Marshall Islands, stuffed to the gunwales with cocaine, an $80 million haul. The Maritime Executive has a slightly longer version, with photographs.

Sourced from CNN via jonastur68

I've talked about ghost ships before. From North Korea's fishing boats to the Mary Celeste, pausing briefly to admire cruise ships stuffed with cannibal rats, derelicts infest the ocean blue. This one's a bit of a head-scratcher. You just don't take an 18-foot putt-putt far from shore. Not if you value your life and cargo, and someone must have valued this cargo if not the life of whichever shmuck was paid to pilot. Presumably it wasn't piracy, or the cargo would have vanished. 

So it was probably a coastal storm of some description, bad enough to wash the pilot overboard but not bad enough to sink the boat. Fiberglass is difficult to sink, but every other year here in Bermuda hurricanes prove that difficult is not the same thing as impossible. You regularly see boats sunk at their anchorage, perhaps a bit of the bimini sticking above the surface. The pilot almost certainly drowned, and if he didn't he must have wished he had. Explaining that sort of thing to the bosses is not an easy task.

The bit I like is at the end of the Guardian article:

University of Hawaii researchers conducted 16 computer simulations of drift patterns from the Mexico coast and found nearly all eventually arrived in the Marshall Islands.

The Maritime Executive has an interesting addition:

Some of these lost-and-found narcotics re-enter the supply chain: earlier this year, a resident of  remote Ailuk was caught and arrested after trying to board an airplane with three kilos of cocaine in his possession. The source, he told investigators, was from a different batch of lost "bricks." 

The Marshalls have been independent since 1986; before that it was part of the American-administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and before that it bounced from pillar to post in the usual that-colony's-mine-until-I-don't-want-it way that was so popular from the 1500s onwards. Before that it was one of the many islands settled by Micronesians, well before the birth of Christ. These days it's a parliamentary republic with an interest in fishing, selling flags of convenience to shipping companies, and bitcoin, not necessarily in that order. There's not a lot of ways to make money if you're the Marshall Islands. 

A little under 78,000 people live there, the vast majority being Marshallese. The islanders have their own language, but English is widely spoken. Median age is (roughly) 23, and the population mostly lives on the atolls of Majuro and Ebeye. The US takes care of defense and the Marshallese police take care of internal issues.

Past nuclear tests nearby have left a toxic legacy. While compensation has been granted it has not been paid, and some of the atolls are completely uninhabitable due to radiation poisoning. 

According to the CIA, no TV broadcast station; a cable network is available on Majuro with programming via videotape replay and satellite relays; 4 radio broadcast stations; American Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) provides satellite radio and television service to Kwajalein Atoll (2019). 

Roughly 40% of the island has internet access.

With all that in mind:

Lost and Gone (Fear Itself, Esoterrorists)

It ought to have been simple. When the boat drifted ashore with its load of cocaine at Ailuk, a remote and lightly-inhabited coral atoll about 200 nautical miles to the north of Majuro, the plan was to burn most of it and turn over a few bricks for the DEA to analyze. A couple agents were given the onerous task of flying over to collect - never let a chance for a visit to a semi-tropical paradise pass you by, must be the company motto. The bricks were supposed to be kept secure at the air base at Bucholtz, on  Kwajalein Island. 

Nobody knows where those bricks are. As for the ones that were supposed to be destroyed ... rumor has it that not all of those found their way into the incinerator. Each one's practically a pension for whoever has them. Bucholtz is being torn apart in the search for the two that were supposed to be there, and the cops who had possession of the rest are under intense scrutiny.

Meanwhile rumors are flying, strange lights are seen out at sea, and some fishermen say a new boat's been seen out on the water at night - one without a pilot, yet it seems to be getting about just fine.

• Free Meal. The original pilot was attacked by a Skitch (Unremitting Horror) and killed, but that left the insect-like meat eater with a problem. Once the boat was out at sea, there were no ways to spread its eggs. The Skitch was at the very end of its life cycle when the boat drifted up to Ailuk, its carcass smeared across the deck. Some of it was snatched up by birds, some by rats and crabs, before the boat was discovered. These have slowly found their way back into the human food chain, through cats (who eat the rats and birds) or other means. The bit about the missing cocaine is a red herring; the real problem is the skitch eggs which are now spreading rapidly through the local population. 
• Bad Trip. That wasn't cocaine. Perhaps it was Liao, perhaps something else, but whatever occult substance is in those bricks someone at Bucholtz knows what it really is. That person isn't a cultist nor yet trained in mystic arts but they know just enough to know how insanely valuable the stuff is. Far too valuable to go up in an incinerator. So this person arranged for the cops to hand over their supply and made sure the two bricks kept for the DEA went missing. Meanwhile they sent out feelers to people they knew in Hong Kong and Macau: does anyone want to take this stuff off my hands? Now the problem is how to keep everyone bribed and compliant long enough for someone who actually knows how to handle the drug to show up and take it away.
• Bright Lights. The boat was targeted off the coast of Mexico by Something - say, Greys from Delta Green. Those same Greys tracked the boat all the way across the ocean, wanting to carry out an ocean drift patterns experiment of their own. Where would it end up? Now the Greys know, but evidently that wasn't the end of the experiment. Whatever it is, it's still hanging around in the skies above the Marshalls, dogging whoever came into contact with the boat or its cargo. The cops who stole a pension, the army guys who 'lost' a couple bricks of cocaine, they're all being tracked, abducted, experimented on, and returned to their ordinary lives - perhaps a little traumatized, otherwise fine. The question is, what do the Greys really want - and what will it take to persuade them to go away?

Enjoy, and Happy Holidays! I'm going to take a break for one week, so no Ephemera next Sunday. After that, we'll kick off the New Year - and may it be better than 2020! 

All-Hallows (Edom Files)

 Today is All-Hallows, also known as All Saints, a Christian replacement of an ancient tradition. That is, it's November 1st - October 31st being the day before the festival day. 

Originally this would have been celebrated in March, which means technically Halloween is a March tradition. Pope Boniface moved it to November in the way back when, and in the Catholic calendar All Saints is followed by All Souls on November 2nd. The idea being that one day is dedicated to the saints and martyrs, another to everyone else, and the everyone else in this instance are those still suffering in Purgatory rather than the blessed in Heaven. 

There's a very old tradition that says should you give clothes or shoes to a poor man you shall receive the same when you die, to ease your passage. It's part of a general injunction to do right by the poor, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife - but if you don't, expect torment and fire when you pass over.

There's a further tradition which says you shouldn't wear new shoes to a funeral, in case the dead see them and get jealous. They may try to steal them, and your luck will surely turn bad.

All Hallows is also a very popular name for a church. A quick Google will show you how popular. One in particular, All-Hallows-The-Great of London, was ancient when it was destroyed in the Great Fire. Christopher Wren rebuilt it, and it lasted until the later 1800s when the neighborhood became far too commercial. The space was needed for development, so the Church sold the land and used the money to build a new church elsewhere. It was the London Brewery for a while before Hitler put a stop to that, and eventually became Mondial House, the great telephone exchange. It was a massive white elephant even when it was being built; construction started in 1978 and although the building itself was finished it still needed equipment. By the time BT finished installing all its kit, in the 1980s, the equipment it had installed back in 1978 was already woefully obsolete. Mondial was demolished in the 2000s; an office block stands there now.  

In the Edom Field Manual there's a contact, Maggie Canter, of Canter Antiques & Salvage, "a large junk shop in East London. Over the years, the business has come to specialize in architecture and furniture salvaged from churches and other religious institutions. If you want to outfit your hipster bar with a few pews from a demolished church, or are looking to buy a load of old-fashioned bedsheets and tablecloths from a nunnery that ran out of nuns, Canter’s is the place to go. She jokes that she’s just finishing up what Henry the Eighth started with the destruction of the monasteries ..."

With all that in mind:

Maggie's Back Room

Even Maggie Canter comes across items she can't sell. She got a job lot of office furniture and other bits and bobs when they broke up Mondial House, the sort of thing she'd be able to turn over in a heartbeat under normal circumstances. There's always some dodgy little startup looking for cheap office furniture, and while it's not strictly in Canter Antiques' usual line a quick clearance like this is bread-and-butter.

If only she could sell it.  

She knew there was something off when she took possession. It was just a feeling, and she ignored it. More fool her. As it happened the day after she brought back the goods was All Hallows, and that very day she heard someone walking around in the warehouse after hours. Couldn't catch him, mind. Funny thing; her warehouse foreman, Larry, lost a pair of shoes that day. Christ knew where those got to.

When they didn't sell straight off she shoved the kit in the back of the warehouse, making a mental note to take it to the dump tomorrow. Except tomorrow never comes, does it? So it was all still in the back next All Hallows, and once again she heard someone stomping around in there. Once again, someone's shoes went missing. Hers, in fact.

It's been years, and every year on All Hallows someone marches about in the warehouse like some kind of night watchman. Every year someone's shoes go missing. She's started buying cheap trainers and boots to leave behind for whoever it is; better than letting the good stuff go.

If Edom's finest want to get on Maggie's good side, they could tell her what's going on and how to put a stop to it. 

• The Corpse Watchman. Back when the Church had to worry about bodysnatchers, All-Hallows-The-Great built a watch house and put a permanent watchman on staff. Except the Church put its faith in the wrong man, and several corpses ended up on the dissection table before the ring was put out of business. The Watchman barely escaped with his life; the mob wanted to tear him to shreds. Legend has it for years afterward you could hear the Watchman on patrol, forced to look after the dead he betrayed while he was alive.
• Weird Science. Edom had its fingers in Mondial House. Specifically the Boffin, (Dracula Dossier), who was forever experimenting to see if he could come up with a more efficient, scientific way to deal with the vampire problem. Mondial House already had a bit of a reputation among the frivolous; after all, it had been built on All-Hallows' churchyard, even if all the bodies had been moved before they built Mondial. The Boffin thought he'd create a vampire trap, but all he ended up doing was losing a perfectly good assistant. Nobody knows where Norman ended up. Rumor had it he never left Mondial ...
• Footsteps of the Damned. It's got nothing to do with the office furniture. Once upon a time Dracula's Node in London (the Satanic Cult, for instance, though it's up to the Director as to exactly what form the Node takes), found out about Maggie's links to Edom and decided to assign one of its more disposable assets to watch her. Trouble is, nobody rescinded the order, and when the Node got bored and forgot about Canter's, the asset kept coming back. Again. And Again. Almost as if it was compelled ...

  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!

North Korea's Ghost Ships (NBA)

Once again North Korea hit the news this week, but not because of any Christmas Gift it's supposed to be dropping on … well, whoever North Korea doesn't like this week. No, this time it's because one of its Ghost Ships washed up on Sado Island, Japanese territory. All aboard were dead, two so badly decomposed that the authorities were unable to easily determine whether they were male or female.

This happens every so often, and sometimes hits the news. North Korea needs fish. Sometimes this is interpreted as 'North Korea is starving,' but whether it is or is not, fish is not to be had in quantity off the coast of North Korea. Though North Korea's fishing fleet isn't anything like robust enough for deep-sea fishing, in desperation its boats are forced further and further away from the coast. Often this means they can't get back again, and one more small tragedy is found, weeks or months later, by the Japanese. In 2019 alone at least 156 fishing boats were found adrift, or wrecked on the Japanese coast.

Sado is a remote, populated island, part of Niigata Prefecture, but far from Japan. In days gone by, it was a convenient place to send people nobody ever wanted to see again. Emperor Juntoku was one such; he was effectively puppeted by his predecessor, Emperor Go-Toba, who was forced to 'abdicate' by his shogun. Go-Toba spent the next few decades operating behind the scenes. Juntoku was one of three puppeted Emperors acting for Go-Toba, and when Juntoku failed to bring victory in war, Juntoku vanished.  The unfortunate puppet Emperor lived on Sado for twenty years after his disgrace, and is buried there, at Mano Goryo.

The island itself is two steep mountain ranges, north and south, clustered around a valley. Most of its 55,000-odd people live in that valley, Kuninaka. The island has been steadily depopulating; like much of Japan, it suffers from a lack of young people, as those with any ambition prefer to live in the big cities. The majority of Sado's grey-haired population hover around the 60+ mark. These days the island survives on tourism, attracting people with its geographic beauty, festivals, and historic shrines, memorials and landmarks.

It has a notorious connection with North Korea. US deserter Charles Jenkins lived there with his wife and daughters, after Jenkins was released by North Korea. His wife, Hitomi, was a 21-year-old abductee, one of several that North Korea snatched and kept imprisoned. The North Korean government 'gave' Hitomi to Jenkins, and they were later married. Her job was to teach North Korean agents Japanese language and customs, and Jenkins was meant to teach her English.

Hitomi was snatched from her home in Sado by North Korean agents, and Japan has always worried that the Ghost Ships are being used to transport spies to Japan, In 1999 there was an armed clash with one such 'fishing boat,' which resisted capture and fired on a Japanese coast guard ship with machine guns and rocket launchers. After it sank, it was recovered by the Japanese, and inspection showed it to be double-hulled with secret compartments capable of launching small speedboats. Presumably this was how it intended to deliver North Korean agents to Japan. The North Korean ship is now a star exhibit at the Coast Guard Museum, Yokohama.

So, to gamify:

The Cat Returns

In 1981, Japanese Vampirology expert Hotaka is taken by North Korean agents, and is never seen again. Most of his notes and research vanished with him, leaving only a few scraps behind for dedicated occultists and vampire hunters to fight over. However there have been persistent rumors since then that Hotaka-san was being forced to lead some kind of North Korean vampire program on a shoestring budget. There have also been rumors that he married, and had children - or possibly was forced to have children, depending on which version of the story you believe.

The agents have heard, through Network contacts, Tradecraft whispers, Traffic Analysis of Japanese SigInt, or similar, that Japanese authorities are particularly concerned North Korean agents of very uncertain, if not supernatural, provenance, may have infiltrated Sado. The Coast Guard recently intercepted a derelict fishing boat just off Sado's northern coast. The crew are dead, but what the Japenese government isn't saying is that the ghost ship wasn't an ordinary fishing smack. It was an armed spy ship, rigged in such a way that Vampirology experts can tell it was intended to transport blood-drinking cargo.

This coincides with an unusual radio broadcast from North Korea, evidently from a pirate station, unencrypted. It repeated the same Buson Haiku  three times, then went silent. The Haiku, Lighting One Candle, is known to be one of Hotaka-san's favorites. The broadcast went out the same day the ghost ship was recovered by the Japanese Coast Guard.

Has the 74-year-old famed Vampirology expert escaped, perhaps with the aid of one of the vampire program's experimental subjects? Or is this a defection by one of his children - and is that child human, or something else? If the agents want to find out, they'll have to evade Japanese and North Korean agents, who also want the same prize. Plus, there is that Haiku. If it was a secret message or signal, who was supposed to receive and understand it? The CIA? The Vatican? Someone else?

Bonus points to the Director if this race to uncover the defector - assuming it is a defector - takes place during one of Sado's many festivals. The Noh festivals in June, for example … imagine tracking a vampire through bonfire-lit Noh performances! Extra bonus points if the final scenes take place, at night, at Mano Goryo.

Enjoy!

Laying Ghosts (Night's Black Agents)

I've discussed ghosts before, in relation to Trail of Cthulhu and, to a lesser extent, Bookhounds. What about Night's Black Agents?

There's a long tradition of combating, even defeating, ghosts. Sometimes the combat can be brutal and spectacular; it took twelve ecclesiastics to beat Black Vaughan down, for instance. Generally in these tales the objective is not to force the spirit to move on to a different place. The idea is to imprison it here, on earth. As a spirit, it can't be killed, and as it's malevolent, it can't be sent to heaven. The only option, short of somehow sending it down below, is to keep it here, but in such a way as to render it harmless. Shove it into a grandfather clock, throw it down a well, put it in a room and seal the room - however you care to do it, do it, and then forget about it.

Much like vampires, really. Except that vampires have a specific list of banes where ghosts have only one recorded weakness: prayer, especially when delivered by sanctified holy men.

Night's Black Agents is a more active setting than Bookhounds. The agents are expected to be capable, combative people. It's less about arcane knowledge and more about how many rounds you can put downrange.

I gave these guidelines for Bookhounds ghosts, or spirits of place:

1. The truth of the haunting will probably never be known for certain, since most of the facts are unavailable.
2. It cannot be dealt with in the same way as, say, an ordinary antagonist encounter. Ghouls, for example, can be shot, or bargained with. There is no way to communicate with a haunting of place, and probably no way to kill it.
3. It has a great deal of power behind it, possibly magical power. That means other people besides the protagonists are going to be interested in it. That also means it could be very dangerous.

I'd modify them for Night's Black Agents, as follows:

1. The truth of the haunting must be linked to the Vampire background. If vampires in your game are mutant creations of science, then ghosts should have a scientific background as well. A Satanic vampire game has Satanic ghosts, and so on.
2. It cannot be dealt with in the same way as an ordinary antagonist encounter. Ghouls can be shot or bargained with, but ghosts don't have the same weaknesses. Bargaining may be possible, but difficult.
3. It has power behind it, but that power is going to depend on the method of its creation. It ought never to be as powerful as, say, a Renfield, let alone a vampire. This isn't a major player; it's a mood piece, possibly even a booby trap.
4. These ghosts can be defeated but probably not destroyed, in the same sense that vampires can be defeated, but can come back from the grave. 

In NBA vampires come in four delicious favors: mutant, supernatural, damned, alien. What kind of ghost stories can be told with the same premise?

Mutant: Their markers are medical symptoms; their emphasis is infection. The ghost is a vampiric remnant, something that lingers in those areas where vampiric infection has occurred. Say the vampire attacks and kills someone; the ghost is what's left behind, and can be dealt with by cleansing the area in the same way crime scene cleaners deal with the aftermath of a bloody murder. It might be inhaled, or infects through contact with unprotected skin. It might be some fragment of memory from the victim - their daughter's first birthday party, say, which causes anyone infected by it to relive that day again, and again, and again. It might be something left behind by the killer, an eye infection that causes the victim to see, say, blood, whenever they look at, or are in the presence of, certain things. Say the murder victim was a blonde female teen. Now, every time the agent sees a blonde of about the same age and gender, the agent hallucinates blood. Dealt with by medicines, or injecting liquified Banes.

Supernatural: Their markers are strange superstitions, their emphasis hunger. This best fits the traditional ghost story, and is the best candidate for magical manipulation. If, through magic, an unruly ghost can be imprisoned in, say, a grandfather clock, then it can be used as a supernatural bomb. Send it to the target, and sit back and watch the fun. Casting the Runes is the prototype. It's never clear, in stories like these, whether the ghost is a human spirit or some kind of older, pagan thing. A semi or demi God, perhaps. Some remnant of, say, the Great God Pan. A ghost of this sort probably has limited intelligence and free will, and the older ones can be very dangerous. You don't survive several hundred, or thousand, years, without learning a trick or two. Dealt with through arcane rituals found in worm-eaten texts.

Damned: Their markers are holy symbols and spiritualism, their emphasis is seduction. These ghosts are the bargainers, the promise-makers, the succubi and incubi. They are likely to be demons in their own right, capable of possession. They have a great deal of power when they're linked with a mortal soul, much less so without a suitable host. The Exorcist is the best example. Hungry Ghosts work well in this paradigm too. Of course, exorcists come with their own baggage, and rising demand for their services probably indicates widespread despair; the world is burning, and it must be the Devil's fault. Dealt with through spiritual intervention.

Alien: Their markers are various uncanny effects; their emphasis is invasion. In this version ghosts might be the aftereffect of alien tech, or just the presence of aliens. Quatermass and the Pit is the best example. Deep beneath the earth the last Martians lie entombed, and wait for the day when they can take over, piggybacking on our minds to recreate Mars. Until their rocket is uncovered, they can only throw out psychic shocks and disturbances - which is why Hobbs Lane, the London street that is being dug up, has such a shocking reputation. The Devil lives there, they say. Sure enough, there have been strange sightings, eyewitness reports, and horrible scenes there since the beginning of recorded history. In this instance ghosts are almost a warning, the canary in the coal mine - for if you see them, you know this is a tainted place. Dealt with through avoidance, or some kind of prophylactic treatment. Tin foil hat, anyone? 

The big takeaway, and the difference between these and the Bookhounds ghosts, is that they can be understood, challenged and defeated. It may require magic, or some kind of chemical cleansing, rather than a Glock, but the end result is the same. 

Ghosts of this type should generally not be very powerful; that spot is reserved for the vampires. Their main function is to squick or mislead, not defeat or kill. Aberrance rating, except for particularly powerful entities like the Great God Pan, ought to be low; somewhere around 5. No Free powers, and some will be more common than others. Possession seems one of the most likely for Damned ghosts, for example. 

The other thing to remember is, these ghosts can't be killed easily, but they can be diverted, imprisoned. Which means the agents can also weaponize them, if they can work out how to do that without getting caught in the blast radius. That's a story in and of itself. Figuring out how to do it is one thing; pulling it off in the heat of the moment, quite another.

Enjoy!

E.F. Benson and Ken's Mind Control (Trail of Cthulhu)

I'm a huge ghost story fan, and some of the best - the classics of the genre - were created by a relatively small group of Victorian and Edwardian era spookwriters.  M.R. James, E.G. Swain, Violent Hunt - her Tiger Skin is one of my favorites - Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Lafcaido Hearn, and a host of other cobwebbed creators. At about this time of year, when the weather gets colder, I like to reread some of the stories in my collection, and sometimes I get inspired by them.

Which brings me to E.F. Benson, and The Room In The Tower. Have a read of that - it's free. I recommend his short story collection - my copy's The Collected Ghost Stories edited by Richard Dalby - and while I can't say every one's a winner, I can say that when they win, they win big. Particular favorites include And the Dead Spake, The Shootings Of Achnaleish, The Bus Conductor, and The Outcast, the last of which is very similar in tone to The Room In The Tower.

E.F. Benson is the fifth child born to a family determined to win awards for Most Gothic as well as Overachiever. The father, headmaster of Wellington College when E.F. was born, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, was by all accounts a terrifying man. Among other things, he founded the Ghost Society at Trinity College, Cambridge, dedicated to psychical research. His wife Mary, or Minnie, was one of the cleverest women in Europe, according to British Prime Minister Gladstone. After her husband's death in 1896, she moved in with close friend Lucy Tait. Judging by some of E.F.'s stories, it's tempting to cast Minnie as a bit of a bloodsucker herself; so many of his stories feature predatory women, particularly mothers and wives.

Of the six Benson children, two died young, and none of the survivors had children of their own. E.F.'s sister Margaret, a ferocious intellect, was one of the first women admitted at Oxford and the first to be granted the opportunity to conduct archaeological expeditions in Egypt. Like her mother, she preferred the company of women. She died in the Priory after suffering a mental breakdown. Brother Alfred Christopher is best known for writing Land of Hope and Glory, but also wrote ghost stories, and suffered from manic depression. Brother Robert Hugh, appointed a Church of England priest, recanted, and eventually became a Catholic priest, while at the same time writing ghost stories and ground-breaking dystopian science fiction about the Antichrist in a world on the brink of war between the forces of Marxism, the Japanese Empire, and the American Republic. He died at the relatively young age of 42, in 1914, just as the Great War was about to start.

E.F. Benson meanwhile survived into his 70s, and died of throat cancer in the opening years of the Second World War. He very nearly wrote one novel for each year of his life, not including short stories or short story collections, or his non-fiction - over thirty published - or his autobiographical pieces. Best known for comic Mapp and Lucia these days, in his lifetime he was known as a superlative spook-story author. H.P. Lovecraft admired his stories, saying his work had "singular power" and was "lethally potent in its relentless atmosphere of doom."

Having read The Room In The Tower, what pointers does it have for vampire design?

First, the vampire is unquestionably evil, with a strong suggestion of Satanic influence. That whole business about being buried in an unmarked suicide's grave is a Christian trope of long standing, as is the postscript about a corpse that will not lie quiet in sanctified ground. But there's more to it than that; after all, here is a vampire who knows, while she still lives, that she'll become a vampire.

This suggests either that becoming a vampire is a matter of will, or that someone can deliberately damn themselves with the intent of becoming a vampire. I lean towards the former, because the narrator of the story says he's been having the vampire dream since he was sixteen years old. She's been grooming him all that while, and at the time the dreams began she was still alive. So she must have become aware of him at some point when he was sixteen - when he and her son were at school together - and decided he was her meat.

Ferocious personality she must have had.

Blood is a significant part of the narrative, but it appears in unusual places. The portrait leaves bloodstains on the hands of whoever touches it, the vampire's coffin is filled with blood, there's a bloody mark on the victim's shoulder - but there's no suggestion of an actual wound. It's as if whatever the vampire touches, or the vampire uses, leaves a gory trail, and implies heavily that, when the vampire isn't wandering abroad, it literally bathes in blood, like Countess Bathory..

Though the vampire has a physical presence, it's an insubstantial, almost psychic substance. It leaves behind a part of its shroud, when it vanishes into nothingness. There is an awful smell where it has been, but no footmarks, no evidence of tampering with the window or door. Moreover unlike many other vampire tales - including those by Benson himself - there is no moment of catharsis, with the destruction of the vampire. It is tempting to assume that Julia Stone is dealt with when her coffin is exhumed, but there's no reason in the narrative to think this was her undoing. For all the reader knows, she still may be wandering abroad, seeking prey. Certainly nobody ever finds her corpse.

However there is a strong presumption of a sense of place: that room in the Tower where she committed suicide, that patch of unconsecrated ground just outside the house where Julia Stone of evil memory is buried. Perhaps Julia Stone's powers grow weaker the further she is from her place of power. Perhaps whatever part of her still exists in the physical world is somewhere in that house - or perhaps she left many tokens, like that portrait, behind, as a kind of marker.

I rather like this as a kind of vampire template, but when designing something along these lines I'd lean heavily on Ken Hite's Zoom: Mind Control, since that seems to best model this creature's style of attack. This is a psychic or spiritual battle rather than a physical one; the scenario mechanics should reflect that.

This assumes a conventional scenario with more than one player character. In fact, a story like this seems better suited for Cthulhu One-to-One - but that's a subject I want to return to later.

The great thing about the Mind Control option is that it allows the scenario to play out over several scenes, possibly spread over several years. This is, after all, a battle for the soul, not a fight for territory. Moreover unlike the conventional, stakeable vampire, this time out the opponent can't easily be destroyed by applying garlic, sunlight or some other bane. The only way you win this time is by beating it on its own terms - which means overcoming its ferocious will.

Without going into tremendous detail - after all, that's in the Zoom - the Shadow Plays section of the Zoom seem best suited for this kind of scenario. In that, the struggle between the dominating force and the subject is played out over some form of mental battleground, with defenders or defenses made up of parts of the subject's psyche. The zone's defenders are constructed by using the subject's total Stability rating as Health statistics, and the subject's total General pool to work out statistics. So if the General pool is 60 and the Stability pool is 6, then in theory the subject could create 10 different defenders, each with an 6-point rating in a useful General ability, but could only assign 6 Health total between all of those defenders.

In the Zoom, the Shadow Play section assumes that the defenders are mooks of some sort - gunmen, thugs, whatever. In this kind of scenario I'd suggest that the defenders could be anything. A strong door, a meaningful symbol of some sort - particularly one related to a Source of Stability - all of these things could be assigned defensive roles and given a Health rating based on the subject's Stability.

The Zoom also states that the mental battleground is divided into three zones, the Superego, Ego, and Id, and that the Health budget will increase for the Ego and Id. The budget is multiplied by 2 for Ego targets, and 4 for Id, so in the 6 Stability example the Health budget would be 12 and 24, respectively.

So in this instance the vampire spends its time reducing the subject's defenses to zero in a series of nightmares, targeting the Superego, Ego, and Id. Once those defenses are destroyed, the subject dies, and becomes a vampire in turn. During the day the investigators may find signs of the vampire's presence - blood stains, clumps of grave dirt or scraps of shroud, awful charnel smells, perhaps claw marks on the windowsill or footmarks on the floor.

However these physical marks also point to a weakness - the vampire depends on certain physical anchors in order to survive. That coffin filled with  blood, the portrait on the wall, perhaps a particular room in a house or a grimoire in the library; the vampire needs all of these things, and if they are destroyed then its offensive capability is damaged.

Its offensive capability is determined by adding up the total of its General abilities, with Health as its Health stat. So using the Vampire example in Trail as a baseline, its offensive pool is 28, and its Health is 7, with its offensive pool refreshing in every scene. An offensive attack doesn't have to be a straight fang-to-the-throat; it can as easily be a sense of overwhelming dread, or a particular phrase - 'Jack will show you to your room. I have given you the room in the tower.' In a mental or nightmare attack, these blows to the psyche are just as crippling as a physical punch to the throat.

That said, these nightmare attacks might also reveal more than the vampire intended. After all, the narrator of the story knows what is coming because he has been here before; he has experienced the same nightmare for many years, and is very familiar with the room in the tower. Thus when he encounters it in the real world for the first time, he knows what to expect next - and that proves to be the vampire's undoing. So too can the Keeper drop clues in the nightmare realm as to the importance of certain things to the vampire - its place of rest, that grimoire in the library, the portrait. If those things are destroyed, then its offensive pool dwindles; exactly how important this is depends on the vampire, and its particular weaknesses.

When designing this kind of vampire the Keeper ought to be as creative as possible. Sure, a coffin filled with blood is an evocative image, but when dealing with vampires the players expect to find coffins, blood-filled or otherwise. What about a doll's house, designed exactly like the vampire's own place of power? Or a greasy deck of playing cards that the vampire used in life? A horse-and-carriage, or a railway carriage? An apple orchard? The possibilities are limitless.

Anyway, as I've now got to cook a turkey I shall leave it at this point - but Cthulhu One-to-One is the next stop.

Halloween (RPG All)

Tis the season, so let's talk about ghosts - or at least, about the day on which ghosts are celebrated. What exactly is Halloween?

It's a holiday now remembered for its place in the Christian calendar. Formerly celebrated in May, Halloween is the day before All Saints, also known as All-Hallows or All-Hallowmas. All Saints is celebrated each November 1st, and is, as you might expect, dedicated to all saints and martyrs known and unknown - which conveniently covers those gallant souls who perished somewhere forsaken and alone, as well as those more spectacularly martyred where everyone could see it happen. The festival was introduced by Pope Boniface IV in the 7th Century, probably to supplant a pagan ritual dedicated to the dead. Boniface's saint day is in May, which, when he first invented the festival, was also when All Saints was celebrated - May 13th, to be exact.

The date was changed by Gregory III to November 1st and has remained so to this day. It's not clear why Gregory felt the need to change the date. Gregory's time in the Papal seat is only a century after Boniface's. He was a great opponent of iconoclasm - the destruction of religious relics, on the grounds that idolizing relics is anathema - and was an enthusiastic builder, or rebuilder, of churches, shrines, and holy places. His changing the date may have had something to do with the changing emphasis of the church; up till now, its focus had been on the East, and the former Empire, but in Gregory's day the focus shifts to Northern Europe, Germany, and really anywhere Gregory could get support to help him against rampaging Muslims and Lombards. Since All Saints is ultimately an end-of-year festival, it may be that this shift in Papal focus, and climates, meant a shift in dates was prudent.

All Saints is followed by All Souls, on November 2nd. All Souls is when everyone who isn't a saint gets a place at the table. Many cultures have a similar point in their spiritual calendar, a day, or perhaps a festival, set aside for remembering the dead. For the Japanese, it is the Feast of Lanterns. China's fifteenth day in the seventh month of its lunar calendar is its Ghost Day, when the gates of Hell open and the living offer sacrifices to the wandering dead. In each case the day of remembrance is usually towards the end of the year, when crops have been harvested, new fields sown, and there is nothing to do but wait.

So technically Halloween, which in the West is celebrated on October 31st, is only the start of a three-day festival of the dead, and probably the least important of the three, but it's the one that's been drummed into us by commercial interests as being the only day worth remembering. However if you're worried about ghosts returning, the day you want to pay attention to is November 2nd, All Souls. For those Keepers setting their games in the 1920s and 30s, this is also when Catholic traditionalists will set out food and presents for the returned dead; I doubt it's something many Catholics in the United States do nowadays, though south of the border on the Dia de Muertos the ritual is still remembered.

Incidentally, Dia de Muertos was originally a summertime ritual - but as often happened, when Catholic Christianity took over, the date was changed to better reflect Catholic tradition. On the 31st children build altars to persuade dead children to return; on the 1st, the adult dead come back; and on the 2nd the living visit the dead in their tombs.

The trick-or-treat part of the celebration is a 1920s invention. There's always been a tradition of mummery or going about in fancy dress - ceremonial dress, really -  but sending kids out in costume to get candy by threatening the neighbors isn't really a thing until the later 1920s, and then only in big cities. The idea caught on, and it should hardly be a surprise that it did - just then. We think of the 1920s as the Roaring Twenties, the Bootlegger Era, and tend to forget that it was also the decade of the booster, the advertiser, and the Boom. If it could be sold, you could bet your bottom dollar they'd sell it. For them, Halloween was a gift from Heaven. Postcards, costumes, decorations, accessories, and best of all, candy, candy, candy, all yours at never-to-be-beaten prices. Rather like Christmas, Halloween was heavily kid-oriented, the purpose being to get children on board so they would nag their parents to buy things for them.

Give me a child until he is seven and I shall show you the man, Aristotle is supposed to have said. If only Aristotle knew what he was letting the rest of us in for. Soon trick-or-treat becomes part of accepted tradition, accepted because adults who remember it fondly support their children's habit, who then grow up to do the same.

So what does all this mean from a gaming perspective?

Well, among other things it strongly suggests that if your game is set in the Victorian period or earlier, there really isn't a Halloween as you know it today. There may be an extra service on the 31st, but that's about it. On the other hand, come the 1st, or better yet the 2nd, sparks begin to fly. The Keeper may choose to use this as set dressing - food for the dead laid out on the table, that sort of thing - or may decide to dig a little deeper.

This is the point at which I turn to some very good advice in Trail's book Rough Magicks, where Ken Hite says the Keeper should decide ahead of time what Magic really is. It might be spare energy left over from the creation of the Universe, or genetic inheritance from the Old Ones, or any of a dozen other things. Whichever Magic it may be, will determine to a great extent what ghosts are, which in turn affects Halloween and its attendant rituals.

Let's say that magic requires blood sacrifice as a means of providing your 'public key' to the cosmos. delivering DNA to Yog-Sothoth, and that sacrificing something other than yourself - babies, cattle - is like hacking the universe using someone else's account. So it's all about blood - the ritual's less important than the claret.

In this instance, a ghost is created by blood. It may even crave it, in vampiric fashion, but probably lacks the intelligence to set traps for it or otherwise get it directly. An excess of blood spilt - like a battlefield, or a gruesome murder - creates excess energy, by hacking the building blocks of the universe and then not doing anything with the power that results. A ghost is spoilt magic. It has no real human characteristics, but since it was created by humans it mimics them to an extent - borrowing human form, creating sounds, and so on.

In this version of events, the All Souls rituals - the feasts, candles, and such - are humanity's response to this spoilt magic. In order to give ghosts something to do, other than cause mischief in their relentless search for blood, humanity creates a magical ritual, which varies from place to place but always has the same intent: pacify or get rid of the dangerous dead.

Of course, as time goes by people become less observant. All Souls stops being the important date in the calendar; now it's Halloween, the 31st and not the 2nd, and now it's not about the dead at all, but about the living. Which would be fine if people stopped shedding blood, but instead they gush gore more enthusiastically than ever. Moreover they do it just at a moment, after the Great War, when a massive excess of bloodletting creates more specters than has been seen before. Humanity hacked reality, and then left reality's doors wide open. The 20th Century becomes the Century of Ghosts, as blood-hungry creatures roam the earth seeking just that little bit more, that drop, that gusher, which will slake their thirst - for a while.

Say you're running a different game, Night's Black Agents perhaps, or anything with a modern setting. In this kind of game ritual is often de-emphasized; it's less about Latin and incense, and more about doing cool things and looking cool while doing them.

At that point Halloween becomes more set dressing than ceremony. It really is about the parties, the costumes, the laughter and the free-flowing bacchanal. Depending on where you are - Italy, say - there may not be a Halloween at all, and All Souls is still the important date. Some locations may really play up the ghosts and goblins side of things. Whitby, for instance, has a Goth Weekend in the final days of October, and that's all thanks to Stoker and his charming fiend. If you're playing Dracula Dossier, and your agents want to visit Whitby, you'd be nuts not to take advantage of the local color.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.