Flying Dead Man (Bookhounds of London)

First, some housekeeping. 

I'm going to be in the UK for two weeks as of Mon 24 July. Among other things this means I shall be as quiet as a mouse for those two weeks (squeek) so don't get alarmed if I go silent.

Lots of train travel in my future, so let's have a train piece. 

The 1930s are Britain's Golden Age of trains. Cars exist and are clearly the way of the future, but there aren't yet the roads to accommodate them. If you're going anywhere for any kind of distance, odds are you're doing it by train. Or alternatively, if you're being murdered in a picturesque way, you're doing it by train. 

Agatha Christie's a premier exponent of death by choo choo. You've got the Mystery of the Blue Train, originally set aboard the Plymouth Express; the 4:50 From Paddington; and, of course, the Orient Express. 

Why so train-happy? Well, it's an interesting way of setting the same old locked door problem outside the country estate, or the library.  The plot might be exactly the same, but the location is exotic, interesting, and just familiar enough to be relatable without being so familiar as to be overdone. 

Plus, trains have the same attraction as cruise liners: they have that element of luxury, cheek-by-jowl with the third-class passengers. The Flying Scotsman is probably the most famous steam train in the world and in its heyday was without peer. Luxury? Its first-class accommodation is as good as anything you'd find on the Orient Express. Plus, you can't beat the views all the way up to Edinburgh, non-stop from London. Eight and a half hours. That's about how long I'll spend flying to London, but I'm sure the accommodations on the Scotsman would be more comfortable.

All that said:

Flying Dead Man

Rumors circulate that a very special auction is to be held aboard the Flying Scotsman on the return leg from Edinburgh to London. The prize is [insert useful Mythos text here] but the catch is that the auctioneer is a dead man.

The deceased is Alan Laughty, a well-known bookseller from Edinburgh who, it's said, was on his way to London to negotiate the sale of his prize when he died of a heart attack while having a shave in the luxurious barbershop aboard the Scotsman. Nobody was able to find the text among his possessions, and many looked. 

According to the story the auction is to be held precisely one year to the day from the date of Laughty's demise, aboard the Scotsman, in the barbershop, which will be closed off to the public for the duration of the exercise. A prominent member of [Mythos Cult] is making the arrangements and paying the bribes to make this happen. All moneys go to the widow and orphans, naturally. Presumably, if this works as intended, the book will appear at the barbershop.

First, the investigators have to score an invitation to this ghoulish little auction. Then they have to beat out the competition ...

Option One:    Dead Man's Prize. Hounds who do a little digging find out that Laughty was, when he                             was alive, a prominent member of [Mythos Cult]. However, he was in bad odor with the                         Cult's hierarchy; they felt he was holding out on them, keeping some of the best items -                             including [Mythos text] - for himself. The prominent member of [Cult] arranged for                                 Laughty's death but didn't realize he'd have the last laugh from beyond the grave.

Option Two:    House Cleaning. [Cult] has a problem. It knows that one of its own killed Laughty. It                                 doesn't know who, and there are three prime suspects. [Cult] arranged this little charade                         to flush out the killer. What [Cult] doesn't realize is the actual killer has hired the Hounds                         to act as their go-between. After all, reasons the killer, why risk your neck when you can                         risk someone else's?

Option Three:    Tell No Tales. Laughty was poisoned by one of the train's staff, who wanted him dead                             for unrelated reasons. Now, it seems, Laughty is about to return. What to do? Good job                             there's still plenty of poison ... after all, the best witnesses are dead witnesses.

Cuban Mysteries & Ladies Vanish

Once upon a time when the world was slightly saner than it is today, I mentioned a Cuban drama in which diplomats claimed to have fallen foul of a sonic superweapon. Incredibly, that story still has legs. Only this week the Guardian claimed a freedom of information victory, and got its hands on diplomatic cables and other official communications that, the paper claimed, shed light on the mystery.

Except … it kinda didn't. For all the fanfare, the released documents shed as much light as a snuffed-out candle. Nobody knows what happened. The Americans aren't in a hurry to find out. The Cubans, mightily pissed, are confident the whole thing's nonsense from beginning to end. There's some madcap Canadians who think the diplomats might have been unintentionally poisoned by insect spray.

The big, and probably unintentional, result is that diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US broke down, and frankly, given that the Jackass is currently disgracing the Presidency with his presence, those diplomatic relations were dead in the water. If it wasn't this, some other crisis would have come along and the GOP would have found an excuse to pull the plug. After all, the diplomatic rapprochement was an Obama administration policy, and the GOP's done its damndest to kill off every other Obama policy.

However the sonic superweapon got me thinking: what exactly do you need to design a spy thriller? High stakes? International locales? Femme fatales, or high-speed action sequences? Sinister superweapons? Diplomatic intrigue?

The answer to this question comes from Hitchcock, as you might expect.

Hitchcock made spy thrillers where ladies vanish on trains. Saboteurs send young children across London, with bombs hidden in film cans. Secrets that could change the course of world politics are whispered by dying men to total strangers. An ad executive meeting his mother for lunch is mistaken for a superspy. An American physicist defects to Moscow to steal rocketry secrets. Hitchcock knew the spy genre inside and out - and his spy thrillers were the simplest possible.

You need a McGuffin, one important enough to get people worked up. You need an interesting situation. You need tension. That's it.

Consider The Lady Vanishes (1938).

In that film, as is so often the case with Hitchcock, the McGuffin is never revealed, or even described. We know it's important, because everyone treats it as if it is important. Miss Froy, the elderly Englishwoman who has the McGuffin, vanishes - and it's as if she was never there. Miss Froy's chance companion, Iris Henderson, at first is puzzled, then horrified, as person after person says there is not, and never was, a Miss Froy - and it's her horror that propels her over the threshold and into the spy thriller. Who can she trust? Who's in the enemy camp? What happened to that dear old lady?

Hitchcock was a past master at building tension with very little, cinematic bricks without straw. A modern director uses flashy car chases and impossible parkour sequences; Hitchcock got the same result with two buses, one after the other, slowly traversing the countryside (Torn Curtain). This is where the interesting situation comes in, and Hitchcock was smart enough to realize that any situation can be interesting, under the right conditions.

With The Lady Vanishes, the interesting situation is the train journey. A few score strangers jammed together for hours, days at a time. A definite time limit - that train will eventually arrive at its destination, and once that happens, all chance of saving Miss Froy is gone. Mile after mile of unforgiving countryside, with nowhere to go, nowhere to turn for help.

Imagine for a moment a Night's Black Agents sequence where the agents are on the London Underground. They know there's an enemy agent on the train who wants to kill them, but they don't know who that agent is. It could be any one of the twenty-odd people in the carriage. So they wait. At Westbourne Park three people get off, two get on. The agents wait. Several more leave at Latimer Road. They wait. More get off at Shepherd's Bush, and now there are only half a dozen suspects left from the twenty-odd who were on board at Paddington. Of course, the agents could provoke a confrontation, but if they get it wrong then their cover's blown to no purpose. In the worst case, they might get a civilian killed. Hammersmith's coming up, the end of the line. If they wait till then, they may have a much better chance of telling the assassin from the commuters - but Hammersmith could be what the assassin's waiting for. They could get off the train before Hammersmith - but what if the assassin follows, mingling with the other passengers?

All this aboard an ordinary Hammersmith underground train. The Hammersmith and City runs hundreds of times a day, pretty much every day God sends. It takes about an hour. Imagine running a full hour of a game session where the agents have nothing to do but wonder - is it that kid? The old man? The woman with the baby carriage? Or, since it's vampires we're talking about, is the bastard hanging onto the roof waiting for me to get off?

A McGuffin. A situation. All that's wanted is tension, and we're off to the races. That tension, those thrills, don't have to come from gunfights or explosions. They can come from something as simple as a boy walking across London with a film cannister under his arm. What matters is, there are stakes - the explosion - and a definite timetable. If X doesn't happen by Y, then ...

Enjoy!

Ghost Train (Night's Black Agents, Dracula Dossier)

If you live in the UK and find yourself aboard an empty train, travelling from nowhere to nowhere at all, there's a good chance you're aboard one of its infamous ghost trains.

They run from station to station, almost unacknowledged by National Rail. Often there are no ticket machines, or ticket sellers that recognize the line. "You must be mistaken," say the people behind the service desk. "There's no such route." Except there is.

These trains exist because, in modern Britain, it's much more sensible to keep a train line active than to close it altogether, even if in order to do so you run only one train, every so often, without passengers. Nobody knows how many of these trains there are, not even the people paid to run the railways. "The department doesn’t hold a definitive list of these low-frequency routes," says Andrew Scott, one of the Department of Transport’s press officers. "We don’t use the terminology of ghost train – there’s no formally agreed definition of what would constitute one."

Sometimes called Parliamentary Trains, these passenger trains exist because it's far too expensive and cumbersome to shut the line down. First there'd have to be a transport appraisal, then a notice in the press, then a consultation period in which any member of the public can object, public meetings, more submissions … Much simpler, really, just to run a train down the line every so often and call it quits. Particularly if there's even a remote chance you might want to use the line again.

It used to be much easier to cut networks, and in the 1960s an axe went through National Rail, under the direction of Richard Beeching. However as objections grew to this drastic slimming of the lines, more and more roadblocks were put on the process, and by the 1970s it became prohibitively difficult to close a rail line. Which leads to the situation we have now, where trains run to no useful purpose. It's sometimes called closure by stealth, where the railway runs a line into the ground and then uses its lack of use as a reason for closing it permanently.

The term Parliamentary Train is Victorian, and originally referred to cheap trains that ran on less popular routes. The idea was, train travel benefited everyone, but not everyone could afford it, and some routes were useful but uneconomical to run. By Act of Parliament it was decreed that cheap trains between less popular destinations be built, allowing everyone no matter their bank balance to ride the rails. These were among the first to go when Beeching swung his axe, since these lines were uneconomical to run from the moment they were built - which was the whole reason for building them in the first place.

If you want to know more, head over here. The folks at Parliamentary Ghost Stations have tracked down these remnants of former glory so you don't have to.

Now we've talked about the real thing, let's talk scenarios.

What we've got: trains that run from station to station without any people on board, bar a few enthusiasts. They run at peculiar times of day and usually aren't announced, or even recognized, at the stations they service. So far as I can determine they don't run at night, though it would be fun if they did. There are some that run fairly late in the day - at 4pm, say - but not after dark. They appear all over the country, some even servicing London stations, where you'd think there'd be demand for almost any increase in public transportation.

Now for the Dracula Dossier:

Satan's Journey

Human Terrain/High Society: There's an unexpectedly high volume of chatter in the Department for Transport about the summary sacking of several Network Rail personnel. Normally this would get the unions in an uproar, but for once they're being quiet as mice. There's talk of improper use of government funds, but that's just a smokescreen. There was supposed to be a DfT inquiry, but the person meant to lead it got kicked upstairs and the inquiry's on what looks like permanent hold. The MP of the constituency affected was interested, but she died suddenly and her district's embroiled in a messy by-election. Whatever went wrong, the talk is all about something called a Black Train -whatever that may be.

Bureaucracy: The sacking of three Network Rail personnel has caused headaches for the stations affected. It was the manager of one of those stations that raised the initial complaint - something about homeless living on board one of the trains. However since the original complaint escalated rather messily, the station manager's fighting for his job, and by all accounts he's losing.

Occult: There's long been talk of some kind of Black Train, delivering victims to their final destination, and it's rumored that the whole thing is part of a Conspiracy scheme to keep vampires well supplied with victims. Nobody knows how it's supposed to work, or who's involved, but Dracula's Satanic Cult is meant to be behind it.

The Awful Truth
Back in the 1960s the defunct connection that became the Black Train was a rural line running from a major station out into the countryside, built originally in the 1870s at the request - whim, really - of a landed aristocrat who wanted a train line running close to his estate. That aristocrat's family later fell in with the Satanic Cult, and was enthusiastically involved in human sacrifice and hideous ritual magic. The train became their means of delivering necessary supplies, cult members and ritual sacrifices to the estate. However this all came to an end shortly after Dracula's departure from England, when the embryonic Edom rolled-up some of Dracula's weaker allies. Edom was helped by a suspicious fire that gutted the aristocrat's estate, killing the immediate family and leaving the remaining assets in the hands of distant cousins. What happens next depends on whether the line was left alone, run by Edom, or is still part of the Conspiracy.

Left alone: the scandalized cousins did their best to avoid public humiliation, and largely succeeded. Apart from some very unpleasant stories finding their way into local folklore and history books, the whole thing was hushed up. Most of the land was sold, except for the portion with the burnt-out ruins of the manor house. Nobody's ever tried to do anything with it, but it has become a magnet for some very peculiar people. The Madman (p121, DD) is one such, who keeps riding the rails regularly and howling at the manor when the train passes by. That was what got the station manager involved, but what he, and the DfT, didn't know is that there's a cobwebbed Edom directive which specifies anyone showing interest in that train line be forcibly discouraged. Edom being a traditionalist institution, nobody thought to ask why several people's lives had to be ruined to keep a train line out of the news.

Edom Involvement: As above, except the land was bought from the cousins by Edom. At the time it was just to keep it out of the hands of the remnants of the Cult, but thanks to its ritual associations the ride past the manor does very peculiar things to Renfields, and the effect seems to vary from subject to subject. So rather than shut it down, Edom decided to use it as a mobile enhanced interrogation suite. The 1960s Beeching Axe was a tremendous benefit for Edom, who got exclusive access to a now empty train. It got a lot of use in the 1970s, less in the 1980s, and by the 1990s the Black Line was pretty much obsolete. However it recently saw use again, and the rather messy result got the attention of the station manager. Now Edom's fighting a rearguard action to keep their dirty laundry out of the public eye.

Conspiracy Involvement: As above, except the land was bought by Conspiracy cutouts. Nothing was done with it until the 1970s, when the manor house and grounds were opened up to ritual use again. It saw off-again, on-again use through the 1980s, and in the 1990s a senior figure within the Satanic Cult adopted it as her favored ritual site. However a recent scandal involving [insert useful character here, perhaps the Madman or the Silent Servants] got more attention than the Satanic Cult likes, and now it's trying to cover its tracks.

Enjoy!

Playing with Real Toys: Abandoned Orient Express Trains, Belgium (GUMSHOE Modern)

There was a time when Orient Express meant luxury, mystery, and romance. Those days aren't quite gone, but the train in these pictures has seen better days. Abandoned somewhere in a Belgian train yard, these old carriages and locomotive have been quietly rusting away for many years. Lost and forgotten things have many stories to tell - so what can we do with this one?

A quick note on ownership: the photos shown here were obtained via Urban Ghosts and the blog Rebecca Bathory. I understand Urban Ghosts obtained at least some of its images from another user, blogging at PreciousDecay. To my knowledge, those are the original sources of the images.

For those who aren't familiar with Georges Nagelmackers' pride and joy, a brief history.

The state of train travel in Europe during the Victorian era was lamentable. Functional, yes, but where was the style? The panache? Meanwhile, across the water, American George Mortimer Pullman was showing how it could be done: luxury travel, in a carriage fit for a king, not the knock-crack-smash in a wooden box that everyone had become used to. 

This inspired many innovators, including Belgian Georges Nagelmackers, who founded the Wagons-Lits Company in 1867. His dream was to create a train empire, luxury that traveled across the continent, and he was successful. You could start in London, end in Constantinople, and never lack for anything, whether it be fine dining, comfortable sleeping compartments, or congenial companionship. Each carriage had its own name, its own personality, decorated and fitted to the highest standards of the day. Every need was anticipated, and catered for, down to the least detail.

Image taken from Wikipedia, Plan de vaisselle CIWL

If you had any pretense to importance, you wanted to be seen on that train, and that went for fictional characters as well as the more mundane sort. Dracula's hunters went by Orient Express from Paris to Varna, beating their quarry to the punch. English hero Harry Flashman went with his journalist friend Blowitz on the train's maiden voyage. James Bond nearly lost his life on that train, and Agatha Christie uses it twice, once in a short story, and again in her novel Murder on the Orient Express - probably the most famous novel about the Orient Express.

Image taken from Wikipedia.

The Great War knocked back the Express, and for the first time in its history it was unable to traverse its entire route. At war's end, armistice papers were signed aboard one of the train's luxury carriages; when Hitler kicked off World War Two, he made sure that the French surrender documents were signed aboard that same carriage, and later, when defeat seemed imminent, he blew it up. After World War Two the train revived again, but with a dramatically altered route; some of its traditional stops were now behind the Iron Curtain. However in the end it wasn't history but technology that killed it off; in the jet set age, there was no demand for train travel, however luxurious. For a brief time there was no train at all. Then in 1982 enthusiasts revived the brand, restoring some of the old carriages and building others. Now the London to Venice luxury run is purely for well-heeled sightseers, not for travelers on their own mysterious passage from wherever to whenever.

The train and carriages seen in the photographs are 1930s vintage, probably left there in the 1970s. If the 1980s enthusiasts looked at them at all, presumably they believed what was left wasn't economically viable - they may have been too far gone to be restored.

With all that in mind, some scenario seeds for Night's Black Agents, Fear Itself, and Esoterrorists.

Night's Black Agents: the opposition proposes a midnight meeting at the train yards; whether to exchange hostages or for some other reason is immaterial to the seed. The exchange is to take place aboard one of the abandoned Orient Express cars. As might be expected, it's a trap: two snipers have the train carriage covered, and there's a bomb inside.

Thrilling Elements: 

• A chilled bottle of champagne and an appropriate number of glasses rest on one of the abandoned carriage's seats. [the bomb, on remote detonation, is under the seat.]
• A goods train comes to an unexpected stop some distance away, and the screech can be heard throughout the yards.
• The faint glow of cigarettes can be seen, perhaps some fifty yards away - train staff on a crafty break, or something else?
• Train cars loom ominously in the darkness; every shadow could hide a potential threat.
• A tapped-out, blood-starved Renfield [the Conspiracy think she's a traitor, and this is as good a way as any of dealing with her], captured ally or other defenseless, twitching body is tied up on the carriage floor.
• A train unexpectedly switches to the track the agents are on.

Fear Itself: Urban Explorers say the Orient Express cars have a completely different personality at night, and the latest dare is to go there after midnight and leave some sign that you've been there - a card, a mark, anything. However some of those who do never return, and some who do return say they hear odd noises, a voice speaking in German. In fact, one is the train car Hitler ordered destroyed, but not because he thought it would be used as a war trophy. The demon inside Hitler transferred its consciousness to a special phylactery shortly before war's end, and arranged for it to be hidden inside the train car, for later retrieval by dedicated followers. The dazed and reeling Fuhrer, free of its influence, tried to have the car destroyed, but the demon's followers prevented this. However the last few months of the war saw all the Nazi occultists killed or captured, which meant nobody was able to retrieve the phylactery. There it sits to this day, waiting to be rediscovered - and in the meantime causing all kinds of mayhem to those unwise enough to disturb it without using the proper ritual.

Esoterrorists:  Several Esoterror cells across Europe have united with a singular purpose: to place copies of the abandoned Orient Express cars in every train stop that the original Express visited, before the Great War. Urban explorers from Paris to Istanbul report seeing these train cars, apparently copied to the last detail from the Belgian originals, left in depots and apparently forgotten. Are the Esoterrorists trying to create some kind of spirit copy of the original Orient Express, and if so, is this to weaken the Membrane, or have the Esoterrorists some other purpose in mind? Could this be an attempt to resurrect someone, or something, that rode aboard the Orient Express? Does this have anything to do with a string of murders, also from Paris to Istanbul, with one thing in common: an antique train ticket from 1892 found in the pockets of the dead?

That's it for this week. Enjoy!  

The Lure of Travel (Night's Black Agents)

Let's say you're plotting out a scene in Night's Black Agents, or another Gumshoe setting, and you're looking for ideas. Inspiration can be found in the unlikeliest of places, and in this case it comes to you courtesy of the Guardian's Food section, and its Top Ten list of train station restaurants.

Right away there are intriguing possibilities. At least four of the choices have been around since the early 1900s, which means from a Gumshoe point of view that they're just as suitable for Bookhounds of London, Dreamhounds of Paris, or Trail of Cthulhu in the default 1930s setting, as well as anything current, for example Mutant City Blues. But these are train station scenes, and that means they have Spy Thriller written all over them right from the get-go, probably using a special pen supplied by Q. Let's hope it doesn't explode.

Any of them could make for an interesting scene, but I decided to go with the To Treno Sto Rouf, in Athens.

Rouf is a little to the west of the center of Athens. Rouf Station isn't the main station in Athens; that honor goes to Larissa. Rouf is a suburban substation, through which you may have to pass to get to Larissa. The Piraeus-Athens line, for example, passes through Rouf.

Rouf was built in order to ease congestion at the main terminal, but it has a secondary function: urban regeneration. The hope was that a new station would encourage investment in the down-at-heel suburb. It's built on an artificial hill, with excellent views of the Acropolis.

Tro Treno Sto Rouf is, by all accounts, a brilliant innovation. Five carriages, plus an open air bar, make up the restaurant proper. One carriage is dedicated to theatrical performances, another to music, the so-called new wagon holds art fairs, and the rest is the main bar/restaurant area. The wagons are train carriages re purposed. One comes from the Simplon Orient Express, the other is a World War Two troop carriage, and so on.

Already you can get a sense for the kind of scenes you could put here. It's a mix of ancient and modern, set in a location that's rough around the edges but not drowning in crime, with a bird's eye view of the most majestic and classic landmark in Athens, the Acropolis. With the regular music and art shows, there's a sense that the crowd is probably young, bohemian, with enough money to have a good time. But with all those carriages, there's probably also plenty of quiet corners, places where someone could hold a quick meeting without being disturbed, or dose someone with sedatives prior to a swift abduction. Plus, it's a train station, so if need be the characters can relocate somewhere else relatively easily.

In the strictly metaphorical sense, train stations are symbolic of lover's meetings, or lovers parted; the start of a great journey, or a great tragedy. But you can also have wild gunfights, if you want. It might be a beginning, an ending, or possibly a way station, probably in a long chase scene of some kind. Rarely is it an objective in and of itself; it's something you end up in, not something you strive to get to.

With all that in mind, let's brainstorm a possible series of scenes to be set at To Treno.

The scenes will assume that the protagonists are in Athens for some reason of their own, and some of the details will be deliberately obscure. If this were part of a larger project, a campaign say, then there would be more detail. However since the intention here is to create something you can use in your own game, which presumably has its own plot and important characters that you can slot into this scene, I'm not going to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel; not when you have perfectly good wheels of your own to use.

The cast includes: Important NPC (Neutral), or INN. This character has vital skills, or vital information. The INN may be someone in the characters' Network, who has already been established. Otherwise the INN is a technical support type, possibly a hacker or someone who might get illicit access to classified information. Neutral in this instance means the INN isn't affiliated with the Conspiracy. The INN knows who the characters are.

Mafia Bruiser, in this case a small-time Godfather of the Night, Nikitas, whose crew specializes in kidnapping for ransom. He's been hired by a Conspiracy asset to kidnap the INN. The reasons for this are going to vary depending on the nature of your game, but the short version is that the INN has data which the Conspiracy wants for itself. Nikitas has a ten-strong team, including two attractive people who act as bait for the trap (good at Infiltration, Filch, would have pools in Flirting and Flattery if had access to Investigative abilities), a medic/Dr Feelgood who provides the chemical distraction as well as general patch-up skills, a skilled wheel artist, and a half dozen dudes with guns/knives/halitosis. Nikitas is probably the best hand to hand fighter in the group, but one of the others can be better than him with a gun.

Minor Conspiracy Asset, detailed to watch over the operation and make sure everything goes according to plan. The MCA isn't supposed to interfere, but it isn't supposed to get caught either. The MCA may or may not be a supernatural entity. The MB doesn't know about the MCA.

The Fly in the Soup: an Adzeh smuggled itself out of Ghana, piggybacking on a drug cartel's smuggling operation in order to get its host out of the country and into Greece. It has the Body Jumping ability, which is lucky for it, as its current host is a stick-thin vagrant hanging around outside To Treno. As its current body is about to expire, it's time to find a new one. Luckily it has all kinds of choices available, but as Fate would have it, the Adzeh is going to pick on one of the following: one of the MB's crew, the INN, or possibly one of the protagonists. This last option could be a lot of fun, but you might want to prepare the player beforehand; nobody likes having control of their character taken away. Once possessed, the Adzeh will want to assess the situation before doing anything rash. Alternatively its sudden intervention might cause real problems in a chase scene, or other dramatic moment. The Adzeh's nominally a free agent, but is easily dominated by a stronger personality; the MCA, for instance.

The action opens at To Treno. The INN has asked to meet the protagonists at the New Wagon. The exact reason for this will vary depending on the nature of the game, but the most likely option is that the INN wants to sell or pass on the valuable intel that the MB has been hired to protect.

The protagonists arrive at the New Wagon and see the INN chatting with the MB's two attractive lures. The INN is clearly smitten, but the lures are not at all happy to see the characters show up. The INN suggests moving on to the Wagon Bar, but before that happens he hides a small data stick in one of the exhibits (behind a picture frame, say). Notice may spot this, especially if it's considered a Core clue. The INN thinks he's being clever, making sure that nobody can Filch the data out of his pocket. The data's encrypted, and the INN knows the password. The INN isn't suspicious of the lures, but the INN doesn't want them around when talking business.

As the group passes from one carriage to the other, they may Notice a small commotion outside, below To Treno. A vagrant has collapsed in the street. Some good Samaritans are trying to provide aid, but if anyone's so altruistic as to go to help, they find that not only is the vagrant dead, he's been dead for days. The Fly is now free and looking for targets.

Up in the Wagon Bar, the INN is trying to negotiate with the protagonists. The lures have followed them in, as unobtrusively as possible, and one of them tries to slip one of Dr Feelgood's concoctions into the INN's drink. Ordinarily they wouldn't try anything so brazen with people like the protagonists standing around, but they're under orders from MB to get this done quick. If one of the protagonists Noticed the data stick trick, then so did one of the lures, so perhaps one lure is still in the New Wagon trying to get the stick while the other is in the Bar.

If all goes according to plan, the INN collapses under the influence of Dr Feelgood's prescription. Or possibly the INN collapses because the Adzeh struck, but whichever it is, the INN goes down. There's a commotion in the bar. Dr Feelgood approaches, identifies himself as a physician, and tries to render aid. He has a few of the MB's goons with him too, in case things go south. The idea is to hustle the INN outside, get him to a nearby car, and drive off. If that doesn't work, Plan B is to get the INN to the train and take him to Larissa, from where they get a car as before.

From this point things develop into a Chase scene, and probably move out of To Treno. What happens next is up to you and your players.

I hope you find this useful! Enjoy.

Polish Nazi Ghost Trains: The Walbrzych Sanction (Night's Black Agents)

If you've been paying any sort of attention to things that go bump in the news, you've probably heard of the Mysterious Nazi Ghost Train buried somewhere near Walbrzych, Poland. Treasure hunters, historians, and other crazy people have been flocking to this tale like flies to honey, and it occasionally resurfaces in Western media.

Briefly, at some point late war the Nazis are supposed to have hidden a train packed full of goodies in an underground railway embankment, and then sealed off the embankment. As to what the goodies are supposed to be, it could be almost anything, but naturally everyone's hoping it's looted artwork, gold, and other valuables. Not, say, mothballs, dust, and rubble, which is possibly the more likely, if less romantic, scenario. Is the burial site sealed off with deadly, explosive traps? Will Israel lay claim to the booty on behalf of the Holocaust dead? Are the treasure seekers who claim to have found the train telling the truth, or perpetuating a grand hoax?

Buried treasure always gets people salivating. Rumors of lost pirate gold, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be, have kept idiots digging at Oak Island for time out of mind, and repeated, ignominious failure hasn't dissuaded any of them yet. So too with Nazi trains, lost Armada galleons, lost cities, and far too many other tropes to count. It doesn't matter if there's no proof. So long as somebody's granny remembers somebody's granny telling the tale of the Dread Pirate Salty Drawers' treasure, or whatever it may be, there will be a buffoon out there somewhere with a shovel and a dream, ready to dig it up.

However the fun thing about this particular ghost train is that it draws on old tales of Project Riese, which is worth discussing.

Project Giant, to give it its translated name, began in 1943, and was still in progress at war's end. It was meant as an air raid shelter for important, strategic targets, and consisted of seven separate installations in the Owl Mountains of Lower Silesia, now part of Poland. The project, though ambitious, never really got off the ground, because the Germans insisted on using forced labor, POWs and concentration camp workers. Kept in insanitary conditions and worked to death, these poor souls proved less than efficient, particularly since typhus was rife among them. This meant that the projects never really went anywhere, and by 1945 the Red Army was on the doorstep. All seven projects were left unfinished, as the Nazis withdrew.

The ghost train story is part of the Walbrzych network, centered on what was then known as Schloss Fürstenstein, or to give it its current name, Książ Castle, part of the Książ landscape park and nature reserve. The castle was taken over by the Nazis in 1941, and later made part of the Giant network in 1943. What wasn't destroyed or taken by the Nazis was looted by the Reds, so the castle was pretty much stripped bare during the war. It is currently a tourist attraction, and the upper levels of the tunnel network are open to tourists. The lower levels are used by the Polish Academy of Sciences, for seismological research, among other things. The remains of the old concentration camp, AL Fürstenstein, may or may not be there yet; I've been unable to confirm one way or the other.

Dracula Dossier Directors may already be making the leap to telluric vampires - I mean, there's an Academy of Sciences right there just begging to be taken advantage of - and that's certainly one way to go. But what about:

• The Nazi connection. An elder vampire, seeing the Reds on the doorstep, decided to pack a train full of snacks and push it into an abandoned railway siding, thinking to wait it out for, say, six months or a year. Then the vampire would escape after the Red Army had pushed though. Except that things didn't go according to plan, and the vampire ended up trapped down there for many decades. Now it's on the verge of release, which may or may not please the Conspiracy. After all, there's no real vacancy in the Cospyramid for it to fill, but at the same time the Conspiracy can't afford to be unwelcoming. For that matter, what kind of mental shape is this elder likely to be in, after several decades with nothing but dust-dry corpses for company?
• The Edom connection. One of the Hochberg dynasty that owned the castle before it was seized by the Nazis joined Edom, and after the war the information about the castle that he provided was very useful in defusing Soviet attempts to reactivate the Nazi vampire program that Project Giant was the cover for. After Poland joined the EU, Edom quickly established itself at Książ Castle, hoping to discover secrets buried in the lost tunnels. However Edom was to be disappointed; any such secrets had, apparently, been relocated back to Russia shortly before Solidarity brought Poland out from under the Soviet umbrella. Continued efforts occasionally uncover tempting prospects, but so far Edom considers Project Fürstenstein a bust. But is it? This train discovery could change everything, and nobody's more anxious than Edom to find out what's really down there. 
• The Conspiracy Connection. The vampires established themselves at Książ soon after Project Giant began, using Nazi cut-outs to cover for their own fiendish experiments. However the advancing Red Army forced them to withdraw, burying whatever they couldn't carry away. For a time their secrets remained safe, deep beneath the earth. When Poland regained its independence, the Conspiracy moved back in, suborning the Academy of Sciences to ensure that its secret installations would remain secret. Now the tunnels beneath Książ are its private preserve, and its plans are well advanced. If only those blasted treasure hunters would stop looking for Nazi ghost trains laden with loot, all would be well!

 Of course, that's just a sampling. No doubt you can come up with a few twists of your own, to plague your players. Just remember, secrets that have been buried for decades can still kill you. Or at least give your tourist trade a welcome bump. Nazi Ghost Train T-Shirts, anyone?

Enjoy!

Edit added 21 Dec 2015: According to that same Academy of Sciences mentioned above, the whole thing is a massive hoax. Or possibly an understandable mistake, depending on how you look at it.  The difference in the amateur train hunters' readings may be down to overhead power lines messing with their cheap equipment. Alas! No glittering hoard of gold and Nazi knickknacks. However the Discovery Channel is sniffing around, so it's likely we'll see the whole sorry story on one of those Godawful reality history shows before long.