Rewards (RPG All)

OK, it’s end-of-session. The characters have triumphed. Or at least they aren’t dead, which is a triumph in and of itself. The time has come to divvy up the good stuff – or whatever passes for good stuff in your campaign. 

What does that look like? 

Dungeons and Dragons and similar fantasy games have a definite advantage here. Everyone knows what the good stuff looks like. It’s shiny and spendable, glows with magic power, or increases your character’s level and therefore prowess. It’s all easily quantifiable. A +1 sword is a +1 sword, which by default is better than that nasty old ordinary sword you were using five minutes ago. Gaining 500 experience points is an undeniable rush, particularly when you can look at your current totals and think ‘I’m only a few hundred more points from the next level!’  

Call of Cthulhu has a similar reward system, where at the end of the scenario your characters get Sanity rewards depending on what they did and how well they did it. Sanity, for those not in the know, measures the characters’ mental state and can be reduced to 0, through various shocks and trauma. 100 is the theoretical human maximum. 0 = time to book you into a long-term-stay at Casa de Soft Walls, from which you shall not be returning. Nobody’s ever explained what 100 =; I presume you leave your physical body and ascend to the heavens on a cloud of sunshine and rose petals, at which point something quite nice happens beyond the ken & barbie of mortal folk. 

Point being that, in theory at least, if you gain enough rewards you can exceed your original Sanity total. Which in a game like this, where Sanity is the oil that keeps the engine going, is a reward prized above rubies and titles. 

However, there aren’t any other rewards. That’s pretty standard for horror games. You’re not meant to be the dashing hero; you’re meant to be the weedy academic, or similar. Victory for you means survival, not advancement. Sometimes you get to save someone’s life, which is great; saving lives is a good thing. However, it doesn’t fatten your wallet. 

Nor does it have the same impact as that +1 sword or those 500 experience points. It’s not easily quantifiable. The gold you swiped from that dragon all adds up to a total which can then be spent on goods and services. The fuzzy warm feels you got from saving little Suzy from the shoggoth cannot be spent on goods and services. Not unless your in-game economy is radically different from the norm.  

So, to the question: in games where the reward isn’t easily quantifiable, what will make those rewards fun? 

Sometimes the game makes it easy for you. Bookhounds of London is a little like that. You have a shop, which your players are constantly trying to improve. That shop has stock, which your players are constantly trying to get. The obvious reward there is more stuff for the shop, more stock to sell. Replace that dingy little cash box with a shiny new cash register. Design custom book covers for your collection. Thanks to your efforts the shop now has a valuable collection of grimoires on vampire lore (effective increase 2 points Occult). That sort of thing.  

However, as a rule rewards can be characterized as one of three things: 

Reputation 

Resources 

Shiny Things 

Reputation is a bit like pornography. Nobody really knows what it is, but they know it when they see it. There’s a really good reputation tracker in 13th Age which has since been ported over to Night’s Black Agents and other GUMSHOE systems: the Icon system. There are a number of Icons – powerful entities or organizations – whose favor brings a range of powerful rewards, and whose enmity can bring terrible destruction. Your reputation with that Icon helps determine whether or not that Icon will lend aid.  

Point being that reputation is useless without someone to acknowledge it; if, however, the CIA knows you and respects you that could mean you can rely on the local station chief for aid, or get a cache of weapons at just the right time, or transport, or whatever it may be. Reputation = tangible reward.  

This can apply to pretty much every gaming world. Cyberpunk has its corporations, gangs and medias; City of Mist has its avatars and proto-demigods; Troubleshooters has world governments and sinister organizations. Any and all of these can become Icons, which in turn reward gains in Reputation.  

But! It follows that a gain in reputation for one Icon results in a loss for another. If you gain reputation with Scotland Yard because your actions helped foil a cult conspiracy, those cultists are going to have an unfavorable view of you. That can lead to future plot – conflict often does. But it’s something worth bearing in mind. 

Resources are those things that the characters can use either in the current adventure or in future adventures. GUMSHOE has a habit of reducing these things to pool points rather than specific items, which is useful. Pool points can be anything; a gun can only ever be a gun.  

Night’s Black Agents has a fun idea which could probably be ported over to other systems: excess funds. For whatever reason your characters have money to burn. Maybe they had a good run at the local casino; maybe they stole it from some luckless villain. However they got it, they have it and more.  

In fantasy this is often the reward that a swords and sorcery campaign gives. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were always rolling in excess funds after a job, and by the start of the next story they were broke again. Easy come, easy go. 

The great thing about this kind of reward is first, it can be abstracted, but second, you can make it more concrete by asking the players how they want to represent this resource. It’s one thing to say you have excess funds; something else to say you have a bag full of cash. That bag can be stolen. It can break open mid-chase, scattering bills all over the street. It can be given to someone else. It can be gambled at the casino. 

Alternatively, it’s one thing to say you have transport; something else to say you have a cherry Ford Mustang with custom detailing. One is an abstract. The other is style.  

Bullitt

Let the player choose the physical representation. They’ll have more investment in something they chose as a resource reward. You can abstract it initially if you like, or need, but they give it form.  

Finally the Shiny Things. 

Those are a little bit like Resources in that they have value, but really, they’re trophies. Let’s say that the characters come away from an alchemist’s lab with a half dozen jars that contain God Knows What, but it’s glowing and has little eyes. Fine. It probably has value to someone. But really, it’s the in-game equivalent of a lava lamp. Pretty, meaningless, and there’s a non-zero chance it might explode showering hot wax everywhere.  

It’s often the case that characters choose their own trophies, but it can be fun to design a few as rewards. The hat made entirely of shadows. The golden spider pendant. The illustrated scroll with alchemical writing on it that nobody living can read. The crystal skull that glows in the dark. The mirror that shows your reflection as it appears in an alternate dimension. The framed Nosferatu poster signed by Bram Stoker. These are the meaningless in-game things that players find attractive; they make excellent rewards.  

I started by asking: in games where the reward isn’t easily quantifiable, what will make those rewards fun? 

The answer, ultimately, is by giving those rewards weight and attraction. Reputation has weight: it confers easily understood in-game benefit. Resources also have an in-game benefit. Shiny Things are a bit different but can be equally useful, because they have attraction. The cool tchotchke that they put in their office, to impress visitors. Nobody asks why the hell Batman wants a giant Lincoln penny in his cave; but all eyes go to it whenever they walk in the room.  

It’s just too fun to ignore.  

Things To Steal From D&D (GUMSHOE)

Honor Among Thieves trailer

D&D was my first system but it's not my favorite for a number of reasons, probably the biggest of which is that no matter the iteration the system still drags around the carcass of its first incarnation - the skirmish combat wargame. Everything goes back to that 10x10 room with an Orc and a chest. Or an Orc with a chest. In a chest. Juggling two chests and a gnome. However you care to word it.

Its more recent incarnation as 5.0 has a lot to recommend it (and I'm glad it brought back Ravenloft) but it occurred to me that there are two things a GUMSHOE game could steal from D&D:

• Background
• Treasure

Backgrounds are detailed in the PHB and can be summed up as Personality, Ideals, Bonds, Flaws. Treasure is detailed in the DMG and in particular the Other Rewards section from p.227 on.

I'm not suggesting the players use Backgrounds, though they can. You as Director have more use for them, and you also have more use for Treasure.

As Director you often have to come up with NPCs more or less on the fly, which is why Cameos (p92, Double Tap) are so useful. Still, it's nice to have some NPCs in your pocket for those moments when, say, having a Nemesis walk into the room with a gun fits the narrative, or at least gets the action flowing. Each Cameo has an In Play section which does sketch out a thin personality but it is useful, for those NPCs who might have more plot function, to have something more than the In Play. 

This is where the Background section comes in handy. A Nemesis who's a former cop is going to be different from one who's a former special forces vet, and so on. How to make them feel different, though, is where the Background shines.

When I first read that section it reminded me of the Tarot, specifically the Celtic spread, which in its most basic form can be read as:

1. The Present
2. The Challenge/Problem
3. The Past 
4. The Future 

It's not an exact match but it performs the same function. It tells you where you are, where you have been, where you are going, and where you might end up. Backgrounds does this with a series of "I" statements, as in "I have been an acolyte, I idolize a particular hero or saint, I believe in tradition, I seek to preserve an ancient text, I am suspicious of strangers."

In Night's Black Agents much is said about Bad Guys (Resource Guide, p23 on) but it's mostly mechanical. Trail doesn't really cover this at all, except to say that to change up the OPFOR you can change up their appearance or stats, so a Deep One, say, might have a hammerhead as opposed to an ordinary fish head. 

Suppose instead you tackle it this way:

Connor Rowe is a Deep One hybrid proselytizer who has left his coastal area to spread the word. He:

1. Is an acolyte of Cthulhu who believes in the critical mass theory (p 91, ToC)
2. Believes he is a predestined agent of change.
3. Thinks his mission is to spread the seed of Cthulhu wherever he goes so that more join the critical mass.
4. Is prone to obsessive behavior and will not change his plans once they are set.

You don't have to change the stats to make this work. You're changing the personality instead. 

Here you have a roaming preacher who moves from place to place spreading the word. This week he might be in a flophouse in San Francisco. Next week, Chicago. Wherever he goes he spreads the word, starts cults, so that flophouse in Chicago might become an epicenter of Cthulhu worship spreading the word, increasing the critical mass. It might just be preaching, or he may have other means - narcotics, shared dreams, amulets and crystals, whatever best fits. Given that Deep Ones live long lives, as a hybrid he might last longer than the usual human lifespan permits, meaning he could first be encountered as a young firebrand in 1890s San Francisco and still be around as an aged grand master in the 1960s.

The players might not even encounter Connor, at first. They can encounter the cults he leaves behind him instead. That only builds up his reputation, so that when they finally encounter Connor himself the players have an expectation, even a dread, of what this preacher might do.

That's Backgrounds. What about Treasure?

The DMG has this to say:  As much as adventurers desire treasure, they often appreciate other forms of reward. 

Why? Because in D&D, treasure usually boils down to X number of gold pieces plus a scattering of magic items. Rarely is it something interesting, or memorable.

What if it were?

Let's say this is Bookhounds of London. The obvious reward for player success in that game is a mythos grimoire, or possibly even a Windfall for the shop. It's what the central concept is about, after all. 

But let's take a step back. Those are the gold pieces of the campaign. What other rewards can there be?

D&D explains it in terms of 

• supernatural gifts (a special reward granted by a being or force of great magical power).
• prestige (fame & power, medals, favors).
• epic boons (special gifts given to high-level characters).

Let's say this is a Lovejoy or John Constantine situation, two archetypes that work very well in a Bookhounds universe. Lovejoy is a near-supernaturally gifted antiques dealer. Constantine is an occultist who gathers favors; in his original incarnation he acts as a kind of middleman to the heroes and villains of the DC universe, and everyone owes him for one reason or other. His best mate, Chas Chandler, becomes his go-to taxi driver for exactly this reason: Chas owes John big time.

In a Bookhounds world, what kind of supernatural gifts are there?

Straight-up Magic, of course, and Mythos pools, but there are other options. For the cost of 1 point Stability:

• Healing Hands: once per session you have the ability to heal as if you had 2 pool First Aid, by the power of touch alone.
• The Lovejoy Touch: you can tell the difference between a genuine Mythos artefact and a fake, and if you don't know where in the room the Mythos artefact is, you can find it by this sense alone.
• Bane: you create an artefact from whatever happens to be lying around that, for one combat scene only, can prevent a Mythos combatant from attacking you for 2 rounds.
• Ghost Talker: you can communicate with the recently deceased, once per session.
• Card Shark: you can win the equivalent of 2 points Credit Rating, once per session only. Any Credit Rating not spent by the end of the session is lost. Easy come, easy go.

How did they get these abilities? That's up to you as Keeper, but they probably had to sweat blood for them.

Prestige is a bit different and usually translates into better opportunities and increased Auction pools. Because your character is an influential person the auctioneer will let them look at the merchandise in a private session before the auction. Because your character is a member of the local Ring they get 2 points Intimidation free, to use during this auction only. That sort of thing. Again, it's up to you as Keeper how they got that prestige, but it probably involves a Windfall of some kind, or a very successful adventure.

Epic boons are a little out-of-scope and may not fit your playstyle, particularly if you go Purist. However, it could be very interesting to have a Mythos entity take an interest in your Bookhound. Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that a group of Ghouls take a liking to one of the Bookhounds. They may even consider the Hound for membership of their little supper club. As a token of their affection they give the Hound a silver ring. That ring has no power in and of itself, but all the other cults currently active in London know what that ring stands for and who gave it to the Hound. It's a kind of bargaining chip for future negotiations: I can't hurt you, but you know who my friends are ...  

Alternatively, let's say a Hound has a nasty experience with a Cthulhu cult, and as a consequence gains heightened Dreaming powers. Not only can they lucidly dream, they gain the ability to invade other people's dreams and interact with them. That may seem great, but there's a problem. Every person whose dream they invade loses 1 Sanity because the Hound isn't just invading their dream, they're spreading the critical mass of Cthulhu believers needed to make the Old One return. That is cumulative Sanity damage; it's possible to drive an ordinary person permanently insane. Which some Hounds might embrace as a tactic against their enemies ... 

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Treasure Maps (Bookhounds of London)

I've been re-reading Dorothy Sayers, particularly her short stories where she occasionally gets experimental and decided that her detective Lord Peter Wimsey will, this episode, look for buried treasure rather than unburied corpses. Usually the beak-nosed sleuth is asked to do so by some reluctant socialist (Uncle Meleager's Will) or similar hanger-on who wants the loot to do good with; sometimes Lord Peter stumbles onto it while rooting about in an antiquarian book store (The Dragon's Head), though even in those instances there's some helpless do-gooder in the background waiting to turn the loot into a cure for cancer. Heaven forfend people get the money so they can spend it and have fun. However it happens, soon Lord Peter is off solving crossword puzzles or doing something similarly useful in search of a fortune in ... whatever it may be.

Sayers isn't alone in this. M.R. James often had his protagonist out looking for buried treasure of one kind or another (Abbot Thomas) and E.G. Swain had his priestly Mr. Batchel out looking for Stoneground loot about one episode in three, more or less, often to be thwarted by his ghosts. 

Sayers is possibly a little unique in that Lord Peter regularly finds important clues in antiquarian books, or libraries. In The Bone of Contention, which features not one but two ghosts, the all-important will of Dead Rich Man is found in an edition of The Nuremberg Chronicle kept in the dead man's library, sadly neglected. It's because the book is stained with damp, but the will is not, that Lord Peter smells a rat. In The Dragon's Head, Lord Peter and his nephew Gherkins find clues to the location of pirate treasure in Munster's Cosmographica Universalis.  

M.R. James also hid wills or other important clues to cash in antiquarian volumes (Tractate Middoth) but tended to be less obscure; a biblical quote or two, certainly, but actual treasure maps, no. 

Consider: most people go looking for Mythos texts because they contain knowledge . Things Man Was Not Meant To Know (Or Spell. Or Smell, For That Matter). Which is all well and good, but what happens when someone who couldn't care less about occult knowledge happens to pick a Mythos text in which to hide the clues to the loot?  What if that book is a treasure map?

Sayers had one advantage over the rest of us. Her audience was keen to solve mysteries, which is why she could devote chunks of her narrative to, say, solving an actual crossword puzzle. I suspect if you, the Keeper, were to present the players with an actual crossword puzzle to solve before they could advance the narrative, there'd be a revolt. It might be perfectly in keeping to present the characters with a Latin Squares puzzle to solve - first invented in 1783, apparently - but you'd be unwise to present one unless you'd like the game to come to a crashing halt. 

Dungeons and Dragons is particularly fond of presenting players with abstruse trap-puzzles to solve lest the player-characters be perforated by pitchforks. Some DMs seem to find great pleasure in designing peculiar puzzle palaces. I often wonder how happy their players are to find these encounters.

No, while the average player likes putting together clues to advance plot nobody wants some kind of quasi-Resident-Evil hunt for the Rooster Key before they can go through the Rooster Door to find the Oyster which contains the Pearl which when combined with the Ruby and the Emerald will ... and so on. Besides, while the character might be an analytical genius capable of solving sixteen impossible challenges before breakfast there's no guarantee the player is. 

Hence the Clue system in Gumshoe, both Core and Optional.

Figuring out the puzzle is hard enough for a group of armchair detectives, without someone withholding half the pieces from them. GUMSHOE, therefore, makes the finding of clues all but automatic, as long as you get to the right place in the story and have the right ability. That’s when the fun part begins, when the players try to put the components of the puzzle together. 

Gathering clues is simple. All you have to do is:

1. Get your Investigator into a scene where relevant information can be gathered,

2.Have the right ability to discover the clue, and

3.Tell the Keeper that you’re using it. [Trail, p.51]

To expand on this, I'm going to rely on point 1., Get your Investigator into a scene where relevant information can be gathered, and suggest to you that the Core Clue scene can be layered with other scenes to create a treasure map.

Example: in Sayers' Dragon's Head Lord Peter, through the innocent purchase of an antiquarian book by his nephew Gherkins, discovers that the book contains information that will lead to loot. However, he cannot understand it. He knows the information's there, but doesn't know what it is. 

To completely understand what's going on, Lord Peter has to do two things. First, he has to learn more about the book's previous owner. He can do this anywhere; he doesn't need to be in a particular location or scene. Second, he has to go to the place where the loot is hidden and use the book in a particular way. In case you hadn't guessed, I'm trying to avoid story spoilers as much as possible; hopefully this doesn't make my point obscure. 

In short, he has the Clue and knows it is a Clue, but needs more information before he can completely appreciate the Clue. It is a layered Clue. It has multiple meanings leading to a final result, and that final result can only be obtained by going to a scene where relevant information can be gathered.

In game, Keepers sometimes express this layered Clue in terms of Pool Points. Reading this text, for instance, gives the player 2 pool points in Uncovering The Treasure. However, in order to use those pool points the character has to get to the scene where those pool points become relevant.

A Keeper in this situation is free to rule that spending one of those points allows the investigator to work out where (ie. in what scene) the Clue can be used. It saves time, is a viable use of the pool, and allows the investigator spotlight time. 

It's what I like to think of as a By Jove! moment. The Great Detective, thanks to an info revelation, suddenly knows who did it or what really happened. Often it's the Detective's Watson saying something apparently trivial that sparks this intuitive leap, but it can as easily be the Detective poring over some text or other looking for inconsistences. 

In this case By Jove! basically means the character works out, from the information in front of them, where they have to go next. It does not necessarily tell the character how to get there, or what's in the way. There may be sinister cultists waiting in ambush, or lethal traps at the story location. There may be logistic reasons why the characters can't just easily transition from one place to another; perhaps the place they need to get to is in the middle of a civil war, for example. All it does is tell them where, not how, or whether there will be problems along the way.

Let's put all this into practice. For the sake of example this is going to be a Bookhounds seed, but a Treasure Map could be used to fit many different situations and settings.

For this example I'm going to use one of the Ripley Scrolls as my Treasure Map. Alchemist George Ripley (c. 1415–1490) is alleged to be the creator of these scrolls, which are transcriptions or variations on a lost 15th century original text. Nobody knows whether this is so, but occasionally some of Ripley's poetry is found in the text so the scrolls became known as Ripley scrolls. These are examples of emblematic symbolism, less physical chemistry and more esoteric philosophy, perfect for my purposes.

Of course, it's a scroll, not a book. That doesn't have to be a problem but I'd prefer it was a book, since that muddies the waters even further by obscuring the true nature of the original text. 

I'm going to say that in this example the scroll has actually been cut up and tipped into a larger alchemical work compiled by an unknown academic at some point in the 17th century. Using the Shelfware and Foxing section of Bookhounds I shall also say that:

• At some point in the 19th century the cheap paper wrapper collection was rebound in morocco leather;
• That it is infested with alien insects (of which more later);
• That part of it is in code, a variant of Alphabetum Kaldeorum ("alphabet of the Chaldeans") 
• That it has no name or title, but is known as ex libris August Strindberg, after its most famous owner.

So here we have a text of dubious origin allegedly owned by a famous playwright and occultist, which has clearly gone through several hands since its creation in the 15th century. Always assuming it wasn't a fake to begin with.  

To add that Mythos tinge, let's go one step further and say that the Scrolls were created by someone - Ripley, or another - under the domination of the Great Race. That's why it is always infested with those strange insects; it is a point in space/time permanently linked with Pnakotus, and while not quite a functioning Gate it is just enough of a portal to allow small things through. This works both ways, so on the other side of the connection is a small pile of mouse bones, roaches, and other oddments from Earth. Nothing larger than a signet ring can pass, in either direction. 

This also means that destroying the book causes the portal to explosively decompress, allowing whoever destroyed it a close-up look at Pnakotus. Mythos shock, stability Loss +3, Sanity Loss +2, damage as pipe bomb (p 67 main text) which means everyone within 30 to 40 yards is in danger, and anyone who dies as a result is sucked into Pnakotus. In theory, if the Keeper is feeling particularly unkind, something from Pnakotus could be sucked through. Perhaps one of the Great Race, dazed and bleeding from transit, could spend a few rounds being unpleasant to everything nearby until it works out how to return to Pnakotus.

Skimming gets the reader 2 pool points Uncovering The Treasure. Poring over it gets +2 Mythos, no spells, and +1 Occult.

The Treasure is something completely unrelated to the Mythos text. It has to do with Strindberg, when he was going through his Inferno (1869 – 92) period.

Strindberg allegedly suffered temporary insanity, at least according to his contemporaries. A self-proclaimed  "socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is anti-reactionary!... I want to turn everything upside down to see what lies beneath," he switched completely and became a mystic Catholic. He claimed an outside force, The Powers, had forced this on him, causing physical and mental suffering as part of their revenge on humankind for their wrongdoings. 

One of the results of this period was his semi-autobiographical work, Inferno. The other, allegedly, was the Golden Fleece, which Strindberg accidentally discovered during his Parisian sojourn. Experts are divided as to whether this is a philosophical construct (as hinted at in Strindberg's letters to Nietzsche) or a physical artefact which, for whatever reason, Strindberg couldn't bring himself to sell to solve his money problems.   

Those who say the Fleece is a physical object claim that Strindberg hid the location of the Fleece in ex libris Strindberg. Wild-eyed literary wackos and get-rich-quick chancers from all over the world would give anything to obtain it, though whether they could understand its literary allusions is another matter. 

So there are plenty of people who want this book who have no idea what the Mythos is, and could care less. Given the treasure's alleged location, Paris, it could be interesting to mix this with Dreamhounds and say that some of those trying to understand ex libris Strindberg are surrealists who want ex libris for its philosophical underpinnings, not the Fleece. However, surrealists are poor as dirt and couldn't afford to be in the same room as ex libris, much less purchase it, so they're quite likely to want to 'liberate' (steal) it.

OK, we have a book, a treasure, and a potential locale, Paris. What next?

Divide up the sequence into the appropriate scenes.

The Opening Scene is the acquisition of the book. Maybe in a house clearance, an auction, or however, but the Hounds get ex libris. As a result of that acquisition they get their first Core Clue: The Map. They understand that the information leads to treasure, and they may even know what the treasure is, but they don't know how to interpret it.

Optional lines of investigation include translating the Chaldean code, finding out more about Strindberg, finding out more about the source of the book (who sold it and why), finding out more about the provenance of the book (is it what it claims to be?) Meanwhile there are other things going on. The alien insects make their presence felt. Maybe someone picks up on all that Mythos knowledge and makes some bad assumptions about the nature of the problem.

Play it all out, but remember the key point: while they have the information, they are not in the right scene to make full use of it. The Hounds are in London. To make full use of the Clue, they need to be in Paris.

The easiest kind of transition is geographic. To be in the right scene, the Hounds need to change location. It's not the only way to handle the problem. The Hobbit did exactly the same thing with hidden lettering on Thorin's map, making it so the map's secrets could only be read at a particular time of year, under certain conditions. So in that situation the transition is time, not location. In a related Hobbit scene, the transition is expertise. Only one person, Elrond, could translate and understand the map. Finally, the information the map provided could only be acted on at a specific time of year, in a particular location. 

Transition in time, in geography, in expertise - all in one map.

But for our purposes in ex libris, the transition is purely geographic. The Hounds have to get to Paris. this allows the Keeper a chance for transit shenanigans Orient Express style, with mysterious strangers on the train perambulating around like little red herrings - until one of them makes a play for ex libris. Whether for its Mythos importance or its value as a map. After all, the Great Race might be very interested in this little travelling portal to their time/space dimension and yet have no interest  in the Golden Fleece. Whereas your average treasure nut has little interest in the Mythos but really wants the Fleece.

Once in Paris the Hounds can use the Core Clues to their fullest, working out precisely where the Golden Fleece is from the information in ex libris. What they do with this information is up to them. As an artifact the Golden Fleece is incredibly valuable, but surely there's a reason why Strindberg didn't try to sell it. Is there some curse? Does it have magical properties? Is there a guardian - ghouls, perhaps, or a serpent?

All that's for you and your players to determine. 

That's a Layered Clue. Obtained in one scene, but can only be properly understood in another, the two scenes being divided by geography. 

This is a relatively simple example with only two layers; it's easy to imagine a Layered Clue with multiple layers, divided not just by geography but also time, and possibly other factors as well. A Layered Clue that can only be properly understood by someone with the In The Blood drive. Or someone with 1 or more Magic pool, That only gives its secret up when the right stars shine overhead, or when the moon is full. A complicated Layered Clue could be the centerpiece of an entire campaign, depending on just how complicated the Keeper wants to make it.

That's it for this week. 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.

Buried Treasure (Trail of Cthulhu)

... one day this Indian named Glode was out in his canoe. He had his little girl with him and when they got to a place where there is a point of land, he saw a ship sailing towards them. They were scared of strangers in those days, so he paddled to a cove and hid his canoe away in the woods. Then he climbed a tree. From there he could see everything that went on, and he watched that ship. It stopped, and the pirates on board took down the sails, lowered a rowboat, and four or five of them came ashore. They came straight to that point, chose a spot, and started digging. The captain gave the orders. After they got a trench dug deep enough, he sent two of them men to the boat for a big chest. After they had brought it up and put it down beside the hole he lined them all up and said, 'Have you got everything ready? Who's going to keep this money?' One of them says, 'Well, the other fellers don't say much. I'll look after it.'

'All right,' says the captain. 'You're to guard it for a hundred and fifty years,' and before the man realized what he had gotten himself into, the others grabbed him. They cut off his head then and put him in the hole with the chest. After that they drew a map, covered up the hole, and went away.

From Bluenose Ghosts, by Helen Creighton.  

Last time I talked about Captain Kidd, and touched briefly on the subject of buried treasure. Kidd is the only pirate known to have buried treasure, on Gardiner's Island, only to have it stolen out from under him by his so-called friend the Earl of Bellomont. Which neatly illustrates the central problem with buried treasure: once buried, any idiot can dig it up and claim it for his own. In the movies, this might inspire a pirate to design some really over-elaborate traps, but as can be seen from the Creighton extract, a real pirate hasn't got the time or patience for Oak Island-style miraculous engineering. Just put your basic corpse in your basic hole, and you're good to go.

Now, it's unlikely that many, if any, pirates actually did kill a victim and bury him, or her, with the loot, if only because it's unlikely that many pirates buried loot. Loot is for spending, not sticking in the ground. That said, it's probable that someone tried that trick. Superstition has followed in humanity's footsteps since we learned how to walk, and no matter how bad an idea might be, you can always find someone who thinks it's a genius scheme. Besides, in an RPG world, the rules are as you make them. Why shouldn't a pirate kill a sacrificial victim to create a guardian for his treasure?

The great thing about a story like this is that you can play it out almost anywhere along the East Coast of the United States as well as on any of the islands in the Caribbean. With a bit of tweaking you could probably also put it somewhere along the English or French coast, changing the pirates to smugglers. Or somewhere off the coast of Africa, or anywhere along the old Pirate Round. Or ... but you take the point. That said, in Trail of Cthulhu and Cthulhu games in general, one of the favorite settings is Lovecraftian New England, with its legend-haunted small towns like Dunwich and Arkham, quiet and forbidding. A pirate tale of buried gold and ghostly guardians is a natural fit, and could be an interesting beginning to a campaign, as well as a brilliant reason for the characters to get together in the first place. A group of treasure hunters who get too close to Innsmouth for comfort? Sold!

But what do you get when you cut off someone's head and bury them with the loot? Legend is cagy on the subject. The ghost is supposed to haunt the spot, with or without a head. It has significant power to defend its loot, but can only use that power against someone trying to steal it. Someone just walking by, without the slightest idea that Thomas Tew, or whoever it might have been, left a fortune there, won't be disturbed. Well, probably not, anyway; Creighton reports that several ghosts, tired of standing watch, started pestering passers-by to take the loot from them, and let them rest.

The tale is very similar to the barrow-dweller or hagbui of Norse folklore, and the story probably found its way to Canada via Scotland, which has an old history of conflict with Viking raiders. These creatures are often created from the corpse of a warrior, and left behind to guard loot. A draugr has incredible strength, but it can also move through solid rock, in mist form, and increase its size to that of a giant. Its stench is awful, far beyond the usual pungent decomposition stink, and its presence can sometimes be detected by the foxfire that glows at its burial place at night. Iron is potent against them; to prevent the dead returning, people sometimes pierced the corpses' feet with iron nails.

Buried treasure can't just be unearthed. There's rules to this sort of thing. Even if the ghost wants you to dig up the loot, it's bound by geas to defend it, so you might get attacked. Each treasure can be uncovered without risk so long as its ritual is carried out, and that ritual can vary from spilling the blood of a newborn, spilling the blood of twins, getting a hen and rooster to plough and seed the ground - no, really - and so on, and on. Each method is detailed by the pirates as they bury the loot, so if you want to know how to do it, better find a ouija board; or maybe someone helpfully wrote the ritual down somewhere. It's likely that a user of Goetic magic can think of ways past this barrier, or perhaps someone who knows the Saaamaaa Ritual can defuse the ghost's defenses.

When digging for treasure, you must go at night, and you must never, ever speak. Speaking gives the ghost power over you; until you speak, its abilities are limited, but once you speak, it can do as it pleases. Because of this, ghosts will usually try to trick you into speaking, using powers of illusion or suggestion to get you to say something. If you absolutely have to address a ghost, always invoke the power of God, as in 'In God's name, speak.' So long as you do that, its power is reduced.

If the ghost attains its full power, it can do a great deal. It has supernatural strength, and is capable of lifting or throwing great weights, far beyond the capacity of a normal human. It can summon other supernatural entities to help it. It can remove the treasure instantly, to another location, or deep underground where it can't be reached by digging. It will not hesitate to kill, but will not pursue a victim, so if the treasure hunters run away they won't suffer its further wrath. It's often armed, perhaps with sword, pistol or musket. Being a ghost, it probably can't be killed, and certainly not with conventional weapons.  

Of course, that all assumes that a ghost really is a ghost, and follows Occult rules. It could as easily be the Devil, or one of the many Black Dogs. In a Mythos tale, it could also be something from beyond the stars, or a vampirish mist, or a Deep One compelled to return to the spot each night by a magic-using pirate, or ... again, you get the point. Such creatures don't need to follow the usual ghostly rules.

With all that in mind, here's a treasure for you:

Rooster Island's Gold

You've dreamed three nights running, a sure sign that the dream is a true one, that there's treasure buried out on Rooster Island, one of the tiny, rocky outcrops between Plum Island and the mainland, perhaps an hour by boat from Innsmouth. According to the dream, there's a large, flat rock, the size of a dinner table, not far from an immense elm tree. Under that rock is the treasure, but in your dream you've seen a coal-black kitten playing on that rock, and you believe that kitten has some significance, though you aren't sure precisely what. You're convinced a fortune lies out there for the taking, but aren't sure of the specifics.

Library Use, Oral History or similar discovers that Rooster Island was thought to be where Billy 'Black Dog' Seavy hid the loot from his piratical adventures during and after the war of 1812. Seavy, a Massachusetts-born filibuster, captured twelve ships in all, before being run aground and shot off the coast of Cuba, in 1816. His most notorious exploit is the capture of the merchantman Belle, when he's supposed to have locked the crew and passengers below decks and set the ship on fire. Seavy's mentioned in several books on witchcraft, as a pirate captain who supposedly could command the wind and waves, drawing victims in by stealing the wind from their sails and putting it in his own, or using storms to drive them towards him. Seavy's supposed to have boasted, before being filled full of grapeshot in the summer of 1816, that only the Devil knew where his loot was hid, and the Devil was obliged to keep it for a hundred years, or until an angel came knocking on the Devil's door.

Occult, in combination with information gained from the dream, can work out that the best time to get the treasure is an hour after midnight, when certain constellations are overhead, since that's the time the dreamer thinks the dream takes place. The kitten, probably a kind of guardian, needs to be pacified in some way, before the dig can take place.

Cthulhu Mythos knows that the stones on Rooster Island have strange, malign symbols carved on them, that cultists sometimes use in their dreadful rituals of appeasement and summoning. Lights have been seen on Rooster Island at night, and it's thought that necromancers come to that spot to summon up dreadful creatures, as messengers to their dark gods. Some Innsmouth families regularly make pilgrimage to Rooster Island and other places like it, dotted up and down the coast, always returning to the same spot year after year, as if called there.

As I Sailed: Captain Kidd's Treasure

My name was Captain Kidd, as I sailed
My name was Captain Kidd, as I sailed
My name was Captain Kidd, and much wickedness I did, 
And God's laws I did forbid, as I sailed.

Some of you may have noticed that a silver bar, allegedly part of Captain Kidd's lost treasure, has been found in Madagascar. Several reports have it as 'buried treasure,' which isn't entirely accurate, since the silver has been recovered from a sunken ship. The 55kg bar was recovered from the wreck of what is thought to be Kidd's ship, the Adventure Galley, a 34-gun square rigger bought fresh from its Deptford launching in 1695 by Kidd, in order to track down pirates in the far-off Indies. The silver is currently in the possession of the Madagascar government; no doubt it will find its way into a museum at some point.

Kidd is a product of the tail end of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, and was one of its unluckiest specimens. He started his career in the Caribbean as an ordinary seaman, part of a pirate crew that mutinied, took control of the ship, and set sail for Nevis, where the governor promptly enlisted Kidd and his friends as protectors of the colony. As the colony had no money, Kidd got his wages by sacking the French colony at Marie-Galante, capturing French ships, and generally being a nuisance to enemies of the English crown. He was successful enough to earn a reputation as an adventurer in the Americas, and eventually married a wealthy New York widow; this marriage and his associations with New York are the reasons why so many American painters chose him as a subject of their craft. If he'd only stayed there, nobody would remember his name now, and he would have led a far happier life.

But Kidd was enlisted by the Governor of New York to track down pirates who were beginning to make a nuisance of themselves by sacking East Indiamen rather than enemies of the Crown. He purchased the Adventure Galley and made his way to what he must have thought was guaranteed success and fortune, only to find that there were no suitable targets in the Red Sea at all. Plagued by mishap - everything from cholera to mutiny - and desperate to avoid any appearance of piracy by attacking ships from nations not at war with England, Kidd tried at first to stick to the letter of the law. That didn't sit well with his crew, who were looking forward to a share of loot that, they soon realized, they were never going to see. Pushed to breaking point, Kidd tried to keep everyone happy by dabbling in piracy, hoping his investors back in London would protect him legally so long as he brought home the bacon. Even then Kidd had no luck, possibly because he was too timid a pirate, refusing easy, but illegal captures out of fear he'd swing at Tyburn.

His most successful venture was the capture of the Quedagh Merchant, an Armenian-owned vessel that technically was a legitimate prize, since its safe passage had been authorized by the French East India Company. However it was a very slim technicality, and Kidd worried that his explanations wouldn't hold water when he returned to London. It didn't help that, unbeknownst to Kidd, one of the major investors in the Merchant was a man who was on very good terms with the Grand Mogul, who could, and would, make things very hot for Kidd. 

Kidd took the Merchant as a prize, and together with that, another captured ship, and his Adventure Galley, made his way to St Mary's Island, where by chance he met with a much more successful pirate, Culliford, an old frenemy of Kidd who had robbed Kidd of his ship years before, when the two were privateers in the Caribbean. There's some dispute as to whether Kidd and Culliford discussed possible joint ventures, or whether Kidd wanted to capture Culliford but lacked the nerve to try it. Whichever way it went, the outcome is not in dispute: most of Kidd's crew mutinied, went over to Culliford, and left Kidd in the lurch with only two ships, the Galley and the Merchant.

Kidd, by this time thoroughly disheartened and pursued by an angry Mogul and his allies, decided to return to New York and discuss things with his friends there. He left the Galley behind, after stripping it of anything that might be useful to him, right down to the hinges. Then he burnt it.

For these reasons it seems unlikely that the silver bar found off Madagascar is actually Kidd's loot. He had plenty of time to search the Galley before he sank it, and it's not as if a 55kg bar is that easy to overlook. Accidents do happen - there's a recorded instance of a pirate crew throwing bar after bar of 'worthless tin' overboard not realizing it was actually silver, until someone who kept a bar as a souvenir found himself the luckiest man aboard  - but even someone with Kidd's luck oughtn't to have been quite as unfortunate as that.

His New York friends, while not precisely turning their backs on him, were less than welcoming. Not only was Kidd a fugitive from justice, he was poor; all the pirate gold he'd promised to bring back with him had turned out to be a fantasy. That kind of thing never goes down well in New York.  His most powerful ally, Governor Coote, Earl of Bellomont, an investor in the voyage, had every reason to betray Kidd; Bellomont was suspected of being involved in Kidd's turn to piracy, and could have faced a trial himself unless he found a scapegoat. That goat was the perennially unfortunate Kidd, who Bellomont arrested. Kidd's trial in London went about as well as could be expected, particularly since Kidd made one last attempt to prove his loyalty to his investors by not testifying against them at trial. His investors did not intercede on his behalf, and Kidd swung at Execution Dock as a pirate and murderer.

Kidd's lost treasure is one of those tales that grows in the telling. He's known to have left a cache of loot on Gardiner's Island, intended to be used as bribes to keep him clear of the hangman, but which Bellomont used as evidence against Kidd at trial. However this relatively modest pile is nothing compared to the vast sums he's supposed to have buried, here there and everywhere, across the wide, wide sea. Kidd's also the inspiration for at least two ghost stories, both fundamentally the same, in which a ragged seaman, soaked in salt water, wanders the roads, either in New England or old England, trying to make his way to his friends. He's spotted at roadside inns, where he pays his way in antique gold coins.

Whether or not you believe in ghosts, you'd have to be simple to believe in Kidd's treasure. Leaving aside that he is, almost without question, the unluckiest brigand in the history of piracy, and never had the chance to amass a fortune, the vast majority of his loot from the Quedagh Merchant must have been taken from him when his crew mutinied and joined Culliford. He would have had very little left of the eight thousand pounds he's supposed to have taken from the Armenian merchant ship, and what little there was probably ended up in his Gardiner's Island cache, which Bellomont stole. However logic has little say in the matter when pirate gold is at stake, which is why fools have been digging holes at Oak Island for time out of mind.

From a Keeper's perspective, what can be done with the tragic tale of Captain Kidd?

As a Trail scenario he could make an excellent ghost, whether wandering the old roads of New England or standing guard over some forgotten cache of gold and silver. In a Bookhounds game he could be found at Execution Dock, whose location is now uncertain, but one possible spot is the Underground Station on the High Street. That could make for an interesting mix of modern and ancient, Kidd's lonely phantom looking on as the trains rush past. Or possibly Kidd decided to make one last confession before he swung, and that confession's found amongst a pile of worm-eaten papers, perhaps with a handy treasure map attached.

Buried treasure is a lure that's sucked in many an otherwise intelligent soul, who ought to have known better. Kidd's loot has a luster that defies description; people have ruined themselves looking for that chimera, digging up dirt from Canada to the Caribbean and beyond, looking for something that was never there to begin with. An interesting scenario could begin in much the same way, with the characters searching for Kidd's lost loot, only to find something more horrible and outre. The great thing about a scenario of this type is that it can take place almost anywhere; you could even make a case for some of it being hidden in New York City by Bellomont. Gardiner's Island is another fun spot for a scenario, particularly given its associations with piracy, the Revolution, and wealth. But you could also take a Kidd story to Madagascar, which as a location is filled with opportunity for sinister doings, violence, and other fun things.

Not having read Timewatch I can't be certain where a sad sack like Kidd would fit in, but it's tempting to think that his awful, awful luck was artificially produced. Or that the spectral figure seen wandering the roads of old New England is actually a manifestation of someone caught out of time.

That's it for me for now. Enjoy!