Trail of Cthulhu Disasters: It's All Gone A Bit Pete Tong

I've written at least one published scenario about a well-known disaster and there may be more on the way - he says, teasingly - so I thought I'd talk about how mass death and destruction can be incredibly useful to a Keeper.

There are all kinds of potential disasters: train wrecks, ship wrecks, plane wrecks, burning buildings, avalanches, earthquakes, volcanoes, plagues, as many as you can think of right now and more besides. Yet we don't pay the kind of attention to this sort of event that we used to. Many of us have forgotten just how close we are to disaster at all times, a fact I was reminded of the other day when re-reading Monty Egg detective stories.

There's a moment in one train-set tale when Monty tells the detective that he sat in the middle of the carriage, because that's where it's safest. That's true enough, but it's an old story: when trains crashed, the wooden carriages used to fold up like accordions, pressed on both ends by unbelievable force. If you were sat at the end of the accordion, you'd be mashed into paste. Monty Egg was a 1930s detective, and he knew enough about train wrecks to know what to do; but we've come a long way since then. Carriages aren't made of wood, and train wrecks are much less frequent than they would have been in the Victorian period, which gave rise to the lore that Monty's drawing on.

From a Keeper's perspective, there are many obvious advantages to a disaster story, among them the following:

1. The crisis provides an immediate impetus for action. Players sat aboard a train might spend hours guessing and second-guessing the plot. Players sat aboard a train that is just about to crash know exactly what's going on.
2. The crisis provides an immediate opportunity for heroism. Yes, the Titanic's sinking, but what do you do about it? Do you give up your lifebelt, or your seat in the rowboat? Do you help the third class passengers past the locked gate that is keeping them trapped below decks? Alternatively, do you as a male passenger put on a dress and try to escape drowning disguised as a woman?
3. The setting is immediately established, and understandable. This last is particularly important: in a globe-trotting situation where the plotline is elaborate, peppered with double and triple-crosses, players can easily lose track of what's going on, or even where they are in the story. Not everyone knows what a thoroughly modern office building looks like, or what the difference is between a Japanese thoroughly modern building and a similar one in Los Angeles or Moscow. Yet if you set that building on fire and put the characters right in the middle of the mess, all becomes clear. Nobody's going to wonder about the security system, or even the building's layout. Their only concern is, where's the fire? And how can we get away from it?
4. The crisis can be immediate, or it can be prolonged, or both. A plague is different from a train wreck; its effects last longer, and there is a lack of immediate action. Yet suppose a train wreck should occur in the middle of the wilderness. There is the immediate crash-bang of the event itself, but that is followed by some time - days, even weeks - with lack of food, medical supplies, or outside help. That sets up an escalating scale of challenges, all of which the protagonists will have to deal with.
1. As an aside, remember the Orient Express, the byword in luxury train travel, caught in a snow drift for 10 days in 1929. As it happened, that event ended without incident - though it did inspire at least one novel - but it could have ended very differently. There are many different ways to plot a disaster; crashes and bangs are only one option.
5. It provides the perfect opportunity and setting for a spectacular confrontation with the main antagonist, whoever that may be. It's one thing to chase down a mummy in the tombs of ancient Egypt; quite another to deal with the mummy and a sinking luxury liner at the same time. 
1. The novel The Beetle features a spectacular train crash at its conclusion. Imagine for a moment a different-but-related scenario: say the protagonists are chasing a vampiric entity, and have cornered it - or so they believe - aboard the train. There is an unexpected wreck, and in the devastation it seems as if the main enemy is destroyed. But it has been spreading its contagion among the passengers, and now rather than deal with one 'adult' vampire the group has to contest with several fledgelings, all of whom want only to escape. Or perhaps they're too hungry to care about escape ...
6.  It has a natural and understandable plot arc, with achievable goals. The initial goal is blindingly obvious - escape with your life - but that leads to other goals, all of which spring from the first. Saving innocent lives, finding out how the disaster occurred, preventing further disasters, surviving the aftermath of the disaster, all of these goals flow from the first incident and don't require a great deal of player buy-in to make sense. There's no meeting-mysterious-strangers-in-taverns here; it's all perfectly straightforward. Consider narratives like the Swiss Family Robinson, or Robinson Crusoe. The initial disaster isn't the whole of the story; it's only the prelude to a series of adventures based on the set-up that the disaster provided. Jules Verne's Mysterious Island takes a very similar idea and turns it almost otherworldly, by adding his techno-pirate Captain Nemo into the mix.

That's enough from me for now! Talk again soon.

 

Not Quite Book Review Corner: The Strain Hogan/Del Toro

This time out I'm going to be talking about the Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan vampire collaboration, The Strain, first of a trilogy. It's also going to become a TV series, allegedly, though since this is in development and it is Fox behind it, the deal may collapse under its own weight before it hits the small screen. Del Toro I assume you've heard of by now, if you've any interest in horror at all. Hogan is less well known, though if you're a fan of crime then you may have come across his novel-turned-movie The Town. I'm not sure how the two of them got together, though if I had to bet money I'd say it was thanks to a kindly publisher.

The novel is set in current day New York. A Boeing 777 has just landed at JFK and everything, right up to the landing itself, seems normal. Except soon after its last transmission everything goes dark, and when the authorities finally board they discover all the passengers and crew are - seemingly - dead. The CDC's Dr. Ephraim "Eph" Goodweather discovers a small number of survivors, including a rock star, a kid, a co-pilot and a tort attorney, all of whom are whisked off to safety while the dead are packed off to several nearby hospital morgues. Except those corpses don't stay there very long, and the survivors start exhibiting some very peculiar symptoms. Before you know it the dead are walking, and a wizened survivor of Nazi concentration camps appears telling anyone who'll listen that Vampires are invading the Big Apple.

So far, so very cinematic, and there are plenty of touches here that scream Del Toro. I'm not as familiar with Hogan's work as to be able to pick out his contributions from the rest of the text, but I'll go out on a limb and say he did the majority of the writing while Del Toro was the ideas man. There are moments that would look magnificent on screen, but have little or no narrative use, like the once-in-a-lifetime eclipse event that has no purpose other than to let people use the word Occult very knowledgeably. There's also an early cut-away to the International Space Station that exists for no other reason than to let the action be pictured from above by characters who will never be plot-relevant again. You can almost picture Del Toro looking down his nose at a production company's accountant and saying 'it is vital to my vision! Without it, there is no film!'

The central idea is almost too large for comfort. When Stephen King does the same thing with Salem's Lot about two thousand people are wiped out; an unimaginable tragedy, but a small one in the grand scheme of things. About as many died when the Titanic sank. The small scale also allows King to set up several main-character-development vignettes, and establish backgrounds for the dozens of minor players who are about to get caught up in events. You can't do the same thing when 8.4 million people potentially are at risk, and the City itself lacks life thanks in part to the impossibility of conveying the identity of all the different locations the novel touches on. It all becomes very blurred. You don't get the same sense of place, and as a writer there's a risk - which I suspect the creative team fell foul of - that you'll end up broad-brushing a few iconic scenes in the hope that the reader's seen enough TV shows to fill in the blanks. 

The motivation of the central antagonists is also a little shaky. We're told there are several elders operating behind the scenes, and that the one who's causing all the trouble is a rogue who doesn't play by the rules. We're also introduced to an elderly financier whose willingness to cheat death no matter the cost is the spark that sets off the fireworks display. Yet the financier lacks any kind of motivation or characterization, and I can't help wondering if we're not supposed to dislike him because Duh, Money Men Are Teh Evilz, and not because he's willing to get everyone killed so he can live forever. You have to wonder why he wants eternal life if, as seems entirely plausible, civilization will come crashing down soon afterwards and the piles of cash in his money bin are about to become worthless. Who wants to live forever as a pauper?

Why, for that matter, is the rogue master buying in? If the novel's central conceit is to be believed, it never needs the financier. The money man's sole purpose is to buy the rogue master a plane ticket and make sure his coffin gets on board the Boeing. But if that's so then anyone could have done what the financier does; not as efficiently, true, but who cares about efficiency when you can slaughter every one of the Boeing's passengers and crew in five seconds flat? And how did it pull off that trick? There's nothing in the novel that suggests it has that kind of power, apart from the inciting event, and you'd think that if it could just knock everyone out and kill them within seconds then the rest of Manhattan ought to be about ten minute's work. Yet clearly that isn't so. Again, I see the hand of Del Toro in that magnificent, cinematic moment when the CDC team boards the aircraft and finds everyone dead, lying there as if asleep; but although the scene looks good, it'd seem that neither Del Toro nor Hogan really knew what to do with the idea after it germinated.

Where this novel kicks off is in the initial investigative scenes, where Dr Goodweather and his team start putting the pieces together. Many of the subsequent action scenes are also very fun to read, and the vampire physiology - which I won't spoil here - is an intriguing mix of folklore and biological fantasy. This is also one of the novel's less solid conceits, since it means reconciling ideas like 'they can't cross water' with 'holy water and crucifixes are just superstitions, and it's all working like a disease, really.' The two philosophies don't work well together, and eventually the wizened concentration camp survivor has to fling up his hands and say, 'look, I don't know why it's so, I just know that it's so, okay?'

I'd recommend this novel to anyone looking for Night's Black Agents inspiration, particularly for those trying to get away from the usual vampire tropes. There's a lot of inspirational stuff here, and though in the end Del Toro seems not to be wearing any clothes, he does naked very well. There's an artistic brilliance in the idea, even if it does fall apart on closer inspection. Without knowing Hogan's style better than I do, I don't want to say that one thing or another is his fault or his idea, but were I Hogan I suspect I'd be closing my eyes to the problem and cashing a well-deserved paycheck. It is, at times, an excellent vampire novel and any horror fan will find things to like about it. Whether they like the finished product in its totality is something else again, but it's well worth a look at even so.

Faces in the Crowd: Monty Egg & Inspector Japp (Trail of Cthulhu)

From time to time it occurs to me that campaigns can benefit from borrowing fictional characters. Not the famous ones, necessarily; there's a danger of overkill if the protagonists suddenly realize they're dealing with Sherlock Holmes, for example. The non player character shouldn't overshadow the player characters, and someone of Holmes' reputation is bound to take up center stage. In my own scenarios I've borrowed real people, like Holmes' creator, but I've tried to keep them as advisers or background color. Anything else risks derailing the plot.

Yet there are times when a more obscure fiction could come in handy, and for this post I'm going to talk about two detectives: Dorothy Sayers' Monty Egg, and Agatha Christie's Inspector Japp.

Montague Egg is a commercial traveler, operating on behalf of wine merchants Plummet & Rose, Piccadilly. He's a young man, well mannered, and usually well - if not expensively - dressed. He served in the War, though there's no mention of any distinctions, and is unmarried. There's no suggestion of a romantic life; the closest Egg gets to that is in Maher-shalal-hasbaz, in which he comes to the rescue of a young woman. Like most fictional detectives, his personal life isn't nearly as important as his deductive ability, and Monty scores here by being both observant and, in his own field, very clever. In once case, Sleuths on the Scent, he picks out which, of all the people currently in the same pub as he, is the chemist suspect the police are looking for, because he knows how chemists will pour out small samples from a bottle. In The Poisoned Dow '08, he suspects the killer - a servant - from the start because the last time Egg called at the house the servant was rude to him, whereas on this occasion he's startlingly polite. He's the sort of person who knows a lot of little things, and is willing to put the work in. His characteristic habit is to quote from his favorite reading material, The Salesman's Handbook, which contains such gems as:

To serve the public is the aim of every salesman worth the name.

Don't trust to luck but be exact, and certify the smallest fact.

The salesman who will use his brains will spare himself a world of pains.

The salesman with the open eye sees commissions mount up high.

A commercial traveler, for those not familiar with the term, is a traveling salesman. He might own his own car, or travel by train; Egg has a car. He goes from place to place persuading customers to order his company's spirits, in an age long before the internet, and in Egg's case he usually targets individual buyers rather than trade orders. A commercial traveler, by necessity, knows everything there is to know about the roads, rails and pubs on his beat; he relies on them for his food and lodging.

In a Trail of Cthulhu game someone like Monty is both antagonist and potential ally. The characters are often up to no good, even if their intentions are noble; Monty, in his role as amateur sleuth, might work out what they've been up to. As an ally Monty has a wealth of information to offer, both about his clients and about his beat. He also knows a great many police officers, which might come in handy if the protagonists find themselves in need of official help.

Montague Egg

Abilities: Athletics 4, Conceal 4, Driving 5, Firearms 4, First Aid 3, Fleeing 5, Health 6, Scuffling 4, Weapons 5 [note: his combat scores reflect his Great War service; Egg never got into scuffles in any of his stories.]

Alertness: +1

Stealth: +0

Special: If he becomes an ally, he acts as a free 1 point pool Cop Talk, or Evidence Collection.

Inspector Japp is slightly more famous than Egg, but that's thanks to his association with world-famous detective Hercule Poirot. Japp has a career of his own, and the Keeper may find it useful to have a Scotland Yard policeman on call who everyone will recognize. Japp is a competent investigator in his own right, but Poirot deplores "his general lack of method," and Poirot's friend Hasting thinks Japp's "highest talent lay in the gentle art of seeking favors in the guise of conferring them!"

His television appearances are much more frequent than his fictional history would suggest. He appears in seven novels and a handful of short stories, whereas in Suchet's television series he's pretty much the only policeman Poirot knows. Christie spends very little time describing Japp - she spends very little time on any of her characters, really - but if we take Philip Jackson's Japp as a model then he's an older man, probably in his mid-to-late 30s or early 40s, in good physical condition. He doesn't often get into fights in the stories, but it's reasonable to think he can hold his own in a brawl. In the television series he's more of an action hero, and is often seen taking down a suspect or chasing after one. As an investigator he is thorough and has good instincts, though he will sometimes come to the wrong conclusion because, as Poirot would describe it, he accepts what he sees without question, when he ought to see with "the eyes of the mind" and work out what must have happened from the available facts.  He rises to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector, which means he ought to have significant authority, but it may be more sensible - from a game perspective - to keep him at lower rank, at least to start with.

As a policeman Japp's obvious use, to the Keeper, is as a potential antagonist. In The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby, Detective Inspector Howard is a Japp-alike, capable of causing the protagonists a lot of trouble. But if they manage to win Howard over, he can be a tremendous help to them. At the same time, Japp isn't going to overshadow the protagonists. He's no deductive genius, nothing like as clever as Poirot. He's very energetic and determined, but if the protagonists try, they can out-think him. 

Detective Inspector James Harold Japp

Abilities: Athletics 6, Conceal 2, Disguise 2, Firearms 5, Fleeing 6, Health 8, Scuffling 8, Weapons 4

Alertness: +0

Stealth: +1


Special: If he becomes an ally, he acts as a free 1 point pool Cop Talk, or Forensics.

Trail of Cthulhu: Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby

I trust you'll indulge me if I mention this again.

This scenario's now out at YSDC, and can also be had via DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. There's a review up at both DriveThru and RPGNow, by Megan R. She's very complimentary - thank goodness! - and I'm going to give you the first couple lines here:

"A most remarkable and strange adventure. Now, someone turning up on the investigators' doorstep and asking for help is quite normal. Even the poor fellow dropping dead before he manages to explain his problem is not completely out of the ordinary... but when what appear to be duplicate corpses start turning up all over town, then you KNOW something weird is going on!

Oh. All of the corpses have the party's address in their pocket. Just the thing to send nosy police officers round to visit ..."

As a reminder, the price is £2.99 or $6.95 US, and this is a .pdf only download. There are movements afoot to release a limited print edition of 100 copies. Details to follow, but this is something that UK folks are much more likely to be able to get hold of. Please note, this will be a signed limited edition, so if you've ever wondered just how illegible my signature is, now's your chance to find out!

This will not be the only YSDC scenario I release. Allow me to tease you with a snippet from a potential future release:


Sidney Pryce wants their help to set up a Big Store, to sucker a rich American into thinking he’s buying into a Burnt Auction. The rewards, Pryce promises, are incalculable; but soon after Pryce enlists their help, strange bird-creatures haunt the protagonists. How, they wonder, does Japanese folklore figure into it?

Bookhounds of London: The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby

This is for the benefit of those of you who don't read YSDC regularly.

I've written a scenario which will be published via Innsmouth House, on February 25th. It's compatible with Bookhounds of London, and is full of pulp horror goodness! It's a .pdf only product, and I have no intention of issuing a hardcopy edition. The intent is to benefit YSDC, so all cash raised through sales goes straight to Innsmouth House. Price is £2.99.

If you buy it and play it, let me know how your session went!

My thanks to Simon Rogers of Pelgrane, without whom this couldn't have happened. 

Spies vs Anonymous and Lulzec: Night's Black Agents

Recently an NBC news report, based on the Snowden expose, revealed that British spies have been waging war on Anonymous and LulzSec. According to the report, Britain's GCHQ, through its attack arm the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, used DDoS attacks to shut down servers that the two groups were using as communication hubs. The British are, in essence, using the same tactics as the hackers to shut down the hackers.

For those of you frantically reaching for Wikipedia right now, let me elucidate:

• GCHQ: Government Communications Headquarters. Originally established after the Great War, these are the government's codebreakers du jour, the same Bletchley Park boffins that cracked Germany's Enigma. Their main focus is to provide SIGINT and information protection to the British government.
• Anonymous is a group name for an unaffiliated band of hacktivists, who use their talents for political ends. It began life as a 4chan experiment back in 2003, and has been growing in notoriety ever since. It has attacked government, religious and corporate websites with DDoS tactics many times. 
• LulzSec is a group often associated with Anonymous, which uses similar tactics but often has less lofty goals in mind. It's thought to be less effective these days, since one of its founders - Sabu, aka Hector Monsegur - turned informer after capture. 
• DDoS aka Denial of Service, or Distributed Denial of Service, means exactly that. It denies service - blindsides the computer server - by clogging the system with thousands upon thousands of traffic requests.
• Edward Snowden, in case you've been living under a rock this past while, is a former NSA contractor who came into possession of a great deal of embarrassing data, which he revealed to the world. He's currently dodging prosecution. Speaking personally, I find it fascinating that so much of Snowden's data seems to come from power point presentations of one kind or another, which government agencies used to brief officials and staff. Anyone who believed that data was going to stay hidden - especially when given to third parties - is, at best, hopelessly naive, and probably oughtn't to be left in charge of a baby carriage, never mind an intelligence agency. 

On a side note, it's interesting to me that the news comes from NBC after the Guardian newspaper publicly smashed the hard drives in its possession that contained Snowden's data. The Guardian may have felt constrained against reporting on GCHQ activities by the threat of a D Notice gag order, but as an American news outlet, NBC has no such qualms. Glenn Greenwald, one of the NBC contributors, used to work for Guardian US.

One of the biggest worries about this kind of reveal is that it shows just how quickly a government will resort to activities it publicly condemns in order to achieve its ends. Not that this is any kind of great secret; similar scandals are breaking all the time. But it is troubling to think that, at the drop of a hat, a Western government is willing to shut down chunks of the internet on the off-chance it contains something it doesn't like.

What does this suggest for Night's Black Agents?   

To begin with, it suggests that the agent's own communications could be disrupted at any time. When GCHQ went after Anonymous, it didn't worry about whether or not the server it targeted also carried other traffic. It just shut the whole thing down. Imagine what that could mean to agents currently stranded in 'bandit country', relying on the net to communicate with allies. 

It also suggests that, even with security measures in place, a government agency can obtain significant user data. The NBC article uses the example of a conversation between a JTRIG agent and a hacker named p0ke, in which the agent obtained p0ke's personal data - name, address, the lot - despite p0ke having a Virtual Private Network in place that, theoretically, should have kept its data safe. It's not clear whether this means JTRIG hacked the network, or used official contacts in the network's host country to break it.

From a game mechanic point of view, it's up to the Director whether or not identifying the source of a DDoS attack is Data Recovery or Military Science. I can see a case for either, or possibly even Human Terrain. Digital Intrusion is, of course, the ability you'd use to mount a DDoS attack. The difficulty with running that kind of test in-game isn't that it can't be done; it's that the skill itself is fairly abstruse. CyberPunk 2020 did its level best to make hacking fun, but even with all the ice-cool street samurai action, watching it unfold - if you're not involved yourself - is like watching particularly dull paint dry. Say what you like about the movie Hackers, but it at least knew how to make this stuff look good. Plus it had Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller in a cameo, which is worth at least two stars on anyone's rating. 

Consider the following possible story seeds:

• What the hell? Every time I go online I gain Heat. It's almost as if someone has their hooks in my data, and is either tracking me themselves or passing on my information to people intent on hunting me down. The protagonist has been identified - falsely or not - as a member of Anonymous, LulzSec or a similar group. GCHQ, or a similar official organization, is cooperating with other agencies - possibly including the conspyramid, though whether GCHQ realizes who it's dealing with is a different matter - to expose the hacktivist, and arrange his or her capture.
• Oh sweet mother of mercy. Someone's bombarding me with tweets and chat messages. 'We know who you are'? Bullshit you do, but how did you get my data? The protagonist's personal information, or at least the information attached to his or her current identity, has been revealed by the VPN, acting under pressure from local authorities. But the real question is, are those messages coming from clueless government spooks, or someone else?
• Okay, who sent me that file? It's got a lot of juicy data in it, but can I trust it? In the course of carrying out an investigation, JTRIG - or the equivalent - came up with a lot of information on a hacker group that it thought was linked to Anonymous. It was ordered to back down and destroy all the files, but one of the JTRIG people, out of a misguided sense of outrage, decided to pass on the data to someone who might have a use for it. But things like that never stay secret, and now the higher authority that ordered JTRIG to back down is very interested in the protagonists.
• What!? What is this data doing up on the internet for everyone to see? LulzSec, or a similar group, picked up a lot of interesting stuff when it hacked a government site, and decided to publish. Among the data is a lot of very compromising stuff about the protagonists. Have they been cutting clandestine deals, dabbling in things they weren't supposed to touch? Whoops. Now the cat's out of the bag, and here comes the cat-catchers; GCHQ is very keen to find out who these people are and what they're up to. This can also work as part of a Snowden-inspired plotline.

Guns for Hire: Night's Black Agents

The Guardian recently published an article about academic investigations into the murky world of hitmen, which I highly recommend. Though it naturally has a British focus, it's not unreasonable to extrapolate a similar situation across Europe. In brief, the study divides hitmen into four distinct groups:

• The Dilettante. This killer is a complete novice, who until this point never had any criminal record. Circumstances - usually financial pressure - have forced this person to kill for cash. Like any novice, the dilettante is prone to mistakes, and may lose the will to carry through with the deed. Paul Cyrne, holder of the Guinness World Record for longest 24 hour underwater swimming, is one such. Penury persuaded him to fall in with Graham Birchwood's scheme to murder Birchwood's wife Sharon and collect the insurance payout. 
• The Novice. This killer knows about as much as the dilettante when it comes to murder, but does have a criminal record. The novice has almost certainly participated in some kind of violent crime before taking up killing, but has never killed for cash before. The novice is very likely to leave some evidence behind at the scene of the crime.
• The Journeyman. This is an experienced assassin with several kills to his credit. The journeyman knows enough to clean up after himself, but may make mistakes. When gangster David King aka Rolex Dave was gunned down outside a gym in 2003, his killers were of the journeymen type. Though the operation was meticulously planned and executed, the killers were traced because one of them left a plastic glove behind in the getaway vehicle. The palm print inside the glove led the police to one of the shooters, and after that tracing their movements before and after the attack was straightforward.
• The Master. This is an experienced killer with an unknown number of kills to his credit. The master is identified as such because of the care taken in carrying out the attack, and the lack of evidence left behind. Glagow gang boss Frank McPhee's killer is identified as a master. McPhee was sniped at a distance by someone using a .22 rifle, and his killer has never been identified. 

It's remarkable how little cash is involved. A novice can be had for just £200, while a more experienced hand might cost as much as £15,000. As a point of comparison, you can buy a decent used car for something like £5,000, more or less.  

What does this say about the world of Night's Black Agents?

Well, for one thing, if gunmen can be had so easily, it's probably fair to say that assets of any sort can be classified in a similar system, and at a comparable price tag.  The dilettante/novice/journeyman/master model could as easily apply to hackers, for example, as to killers. Or thieves, or spies, or any other variation on the human asset theme.

That includes the kind of occult assets a conspyramid might do business with, as well as the sort the protagonists are going to be hiring. For there will be times when the players say 'this job doesn't need our direct involvement; we can contract it out. But to who, and how much?'

The conspyramid will be interested in disposable assets for all sorts of reasons, both organized and disorganized. By that I mean that there are times when the conspiracy deliberately sets out to hire outside help for a definite purpose - organized - and there are also times when elements inside the conspiracy hires outsiders for reasons of its own. This is most likely when, as per Double Tap, the conspiracy is breaking down and it's everyone for themselves. At that point a node under threat may well pay off a few contract killers to take out its immediate rivals. It's reasonable to assume that an organized effort is disinterested in anything less that Journeyman class, while a disorganized effort takes what it can get.

With all that in mind, consider the same classification, applied to occult assets:

• Dilettante. This asset has no real knowledge of the nature of the conspiracy or horror in general, except for what it has seen in the movies. From a stats perspective, it's comparable with the Civilian in the main book, with Hand to Hand 4, Shooting 2 and slightly higher Health, also 4. This kind of asset it most often used by level 1 or 2 Nodes, and then only as fire-and-forget drones. However the advantage of the dilettante is twofold: first, it is usually desperate and thus willing to do anything. Second, it can turn up anywhere. The police and military stand out, but a civilian doesn't; often, a civilian with the right connections, or just the right key card, can get into any building, bypassing security. Can usually be bought for peanuts.
• Novice. This asset has very limited knowledge of the conspiracy. It may or may not appreciate the true horror behind the mask; perhaps it accepts the conspiracy at face value, as a drug smuggling organization or whatever the conspiracy's selling itself as today. This asset has carried out operations in the past, and is eager to qualify for the inner circle. From a stats perspective it is comparable to Militia, though often with a specialty - like Driving - at 6. Unlike dilettante, the novice usually stands out, and lacks the dilettante's go-anywhere-do-anything quality. The novice makes up for this with slightly better skills. It can be bought cheaply, perhaps for a few thousand.
• Journeyman. At this point and up, the asset is less and less likely to be human. The asset is aware of the conspiracy, and its true nature. It may be a feral, ghoul or Renfield that works outside of the conspiracy, either for cash or other rewards. It is careful not to get too close to the conspiracy, for fear of losing its independence, but at the same time it needs whatever the conspiracy is offering. This level of asset may, or may not, have had special training, perhaps as a government operative. It can be bought at a fairly high price.
• Master. These independent operatives are almost certainly vampires, or possess equivalent power. They are aware of the nature of the conspiracy, and don't much care. Their primary concern is prolonging their own existence at a comfort level that they find soothing. The value of these assets is their experience and power, but the risk to the conspiracy is that, if the asset is not loyal, it might betray the conspiracy. This is especially likely if the asset's safety is in any way threatened, and at that point it might decide to forward that dossier of special information it's been gathering to whoever might be interested. For that reason the conspiracy prefers to keep Masters at arm's length, or further. The characters might not be so picky, but Masters have no loyalty to anyone, and can prove fickle allies. Masters can be hired at an exceptionally high price.