The Cracked & Crook'd Manse

For the last couple years some friends of mine and I gather together at Halloween to play games. Two of the faithful, Max and Tacha, are probably going to leave us soon for the wintry wild lands of Canada - pity them, do not judge them - so this is the last of these sessions we'll have as a group. I thought I'd share the result with you all.

The game is Cracked and Crook'd Manse, from Call of Cthulhu's Mansion of Madness collection, though I use Trail rules as the group's more familiar with that system. I created pregens, leaving only the name of the character up to the players, to speed up the session. We only had until 1am to finish, and I didn't want to spend half an hour on character design.

In my innocence I thought I could record the session and upload it here. Well, recording wasn't a problem. In fact, given the extremely primitive nature of my recording set-up, I think I did quite well. Uploading it is a completely different kettle of fish, and 3+ hours of audio just won't be doable on this system. Which is a terrible shame, I'm sure. I could probably work out how to post it via some other means, but I'm not up for learning how to podcast this late on a Sunday.

You'll just have to settle for the précis.

Cast of characters:

Scruffy, the Hobo - Max.
Stormageddon, the Wonder Dog, aka Sassy - Tacha
Hank the Bootlegger - Reuben
Kent, the Journalist - Jym
Annabelle, the Dilettante and Arthur Cornthwaite's sister - Mary

Spoilers for the scenario are inevitable, so be warned.

All of them arrive in the town of Gamwell, Mass., to find out what happened to Arthur Cornthwaite, missing millionare & archaeologist. Nobody knows where he's gone or how long he'll be away. His lawyers think there's nothing very wrong; his sister is deeply concerned. Hank and Sassy are there to look for Moses, Hank's business partner, who was last seen headed to the Cornthwaite estate. Scruffy. who knows nothing of any of this, is looking for a warm place to spend the night.

Hank and Sassy soon work out that the lawyer's office is the place to go. There they meet Annabelle, and thanks to some confusion on the lawyer's part, the lawyers think Hank and Annabelle know each other, which makes life easier for Hank. Annabelle soon leaves in search of her brother, and her beloved horse. Hank spends a little longer at the lawyer's office, and finds out that one of the last things Arthur Cornthwaite did before vanishing was buy a remarkable amount of salt, for reasons unknown. Hank and Sassy steal the keys to the estate, thanks to a quick distraction from Sassy, and they follow after Annabelle.

Meanwhile Scruffy takes his chance, and climbs over the fence to get to the estate, badly damaging his pants in the process. Now almost naked from the waist down, Scruffy needs new pants, and once he realizes nobody's home he breaks into the mansion. He finds the place decayed and abandoned, but after some searching finds the master bedroom, and Arthur's pants. Decent once more, he's surprised when Annabelle and Hank arrive, with Kent the journalist soon after.

Annabelle is shocked and appalled to discover her beloved horse has been eaten, and her family home is in near-ruin. For a moment it looks as if Scruffy might be to blame, but after a rocky start they join forces with the hobo to find out why the house is in such a state,

Much exploring now takes place, from top to bottom. In the attic they find evidence which suggests Arthur brought something awful back from his latest expedition. In the cellar, which is practically a swamp, they find further evidence that Arthur's last expedition did not go well at all, and they also find enough to suggest that Moses met his end here too. In every room, every corridor, there's further evidence of extensive damp and decay. Annabelle is distraught - her family's beautiful house, ruined!

They soon realize that the water's off, for reasons unknown, and putting two and two together they decide that the lack of water in the pipes, and the extensive water damage everywhere else, means something. That's why they go to the cellar, which means the creature, which was hiding in the cellar, needs to retreat. Sense Trouble tells Sassy that something large is in the walls, but the wonder dog doesn't realize just how bad the situation is.

Scruffy separates from the group, so the aggrieved creature has a chance to strike. Scruffy, in the parlor, is grabbed and swiftly hauled out through the window and up. In the process he suffers extensive Stability and Sanity losses. Fortunately for him the group comes to his rescue, with Sassy the wonder dog dragging him back from the brink.

Now they know something's up. They want to leave, but when they go to Annabelle's two seater they see a suspicious pool of 'water' around her car. When the journalist goes for his bicycle, which is outside the fenceline, the water flows ahead of him. They're trapped - or are they? Annabelle remembers that, as a good citizen of Massachusetts, she has a large bag of salt in the back of her car. If only they could get to it!

Unfortunately in the attempt Sassy gets that little bit too close to the horror, and her doggy mind goes spiraling off into the void. They retreat back into the mansion, for now, in search of other salt. They find Arthur's shotgun, and the shells he was filling with salt when he was snatched away. With the small amount of salt they've been able to salvage, they make one usable salt shell. Now's the time to strike.

They're able to escape the mansion again, and get to the salt in the back of the car. However Kent the journalist is snatched away, and dragged to the cellar, where the thing's vast bulk has relocated.

Annabelle grabs the bag of salt from her car and dashes back into the house to save Kent, scattering salt like a maddened flower girl at a salt wedding. She runs down into the cellar, not realizing that in doing so she'll become the world's first, and last, salt suicide bomber. The creature is just as surprised as she is, when Annabelle dives headlong into its mass carrying a lethal bag.

Everyone else was close behind her at the time of the unpleasantness. They needed to make a Fleeing Difficulty 6, since they were so very close to the center of what amounts to an erupting volcano. Only Scruffy, the crazed hobo, makes the roll. Annabelle and Kent were already half-dissolved and swimming in goo, so they weren't in the running, but Sassy and Hank go out in a blaze of glory.

Scruffy, sole survivor and character most likely to be blamed for the whole mess, resolves to get out of town before the Sherriff can catch up with him. "Scruffy lives to see another day!" Max crows.

Thus ends the tale of ... the Cracked and Crook'd Manse.

EDITS SO MANY EDITS WELL ACTUALLY JUST ONE EDIT - FOR NOW:

Thanks to a suggestion, I uploaded the file to Archive.org. It doesn't seem to have worked exactly as I'd like, and download doesn't function the way I thought it would. So changes will need to be made.

However it is there, and seems to be streamable, so the link is here.

Note: spoilers! Also the occasional naughty word.

Halloween (RPG All)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does all this mean from a gaming perspective?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Wire Rat - the Mulholland Option (Night's Black Agents)

Only a brief post this time. I spent a chunk of the day helping the local Gilbert & Sullivan society clear set from their latest production. There was a bad accident. Flesh torn off palms kind of accident, many stitches kind of accident. We're lucky it wasn't much worse.

Anyway, this week I want to talk about the Wire Rat archetype, which I suspect gets short shrift in many people's campaigns.

Technical experts, says the rulebook, As distinct from hackers, are almost always nuts and bolts electronic specialists, with a side of metal shop. Building bugs into innocuous objects is another wire rat specialty, as is general gadgeteering.

Which is fine, but doesn't really scream 'hero of the story.' More the sidekick, the comedy relief character. The backroom boffin with all the toys at their disposal, but none of the kick-ass. Not a very fair portrait, perhaps, but I've often thought it's one of the big reasons why I've never had a player willingly choose this archetype in any game I've run. The other big reason probably being that few people know much about the nuts and bolts of electronic surveillance, and may feel a bit intimidated by the archetype that seemingly does nothing but.

I'm struggling to think of many media versions of this kind of character, as the lead and not a companion or minor role. There's the Wizard. The FX movies. Lester Freamon off the Wire, though I'm not sure he counts as a lead as this is an ensemble show; really, everyone's a lead. But that's when the well runs dry. There are plenty of lead roles which use gadgetry in some form or other - Michael Westen off Burn Notice springs to mind - but usually it's an adjunct to their role, not the defining part of it, and when they need something complex done they turn to the expert rather than do it themselves. Whereas there are hundreds upon hundreds of Qs out there, or David Niven's character Cpl. Miller from Guns of Navarone; support roles who supply the hero with the tools they need, but who rarely appear on screen for longer than a few minutes at a time, and who never get the girl. Or, like Argo, do all the hard work in the first half of the film and then sit on the sidelines while the action man gets the job done.

Which brings me to John Mulholland, the CIA's favorite magician.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here, as I'm writing a long article about him for Genii and don't feel the need to drop spoilers, but briefly: Mulholland was a renowned stage magician asked to contribute his talents to a little project called MKULTRA. He wrote two training manuals for the CIA intended to teach their people stage magic techniques and tricks of the mentalist trade.

So what does this mean? Well, stage magicians are the premier gadgeteers of this or any other era. Their whole shtick is to make something seem as innocuous as it is possible to be, and yet create wonder. Maybe nobody wants to be the sidekick, but I guarantee everybody wants to be Penn and Teller. Moreover with Mulholland as an archetype you have the perfect excuse for stage magic in espionage; the man who builds, designs, stage manages, plans, and executes every conceivable trick in the book, all to fool the hardest audience in the world - the one that'll kill you if you get it wrong.

You'll notice that this reduces the role of electronic surveillance a little. It doesn't have to; bugs and those who are bugged is still a huge part of the archetype. But if that's all the player thinks the character can do, the player may not be in a hurry to play that role. Ultimately it's very passive. You plant the bug, and then you sit and wait, and wait, and wait. It's not something you do if you crave adrenaline-pumping action.

But a Houdini that can seemingly walk through walls? A charmer whose words lull you into a false sense of security? A specialist adept with the hold-out camera, or pistol, and whose pockets are full of trick coins? A technical genius who can make you think everything's normal, right up to the point when it's very clearly not? Now that's magic.

With all that in mind:

Darci
One sentence: A Parisian street artist whose deft hands and charming smile have fooled half the continent.

Investigative: Architecture 1, Bullshit Detector 2, Chemistry 1, Data Recovery 2, Electronic Surveillance 2, Flattery 1, Human Terrain 2, Languages 2, Notice 1, Negotiation 1, Reassurance 2, Research 1,  Tradecraft 1, Urban Survival 2

General: Athletics 8, Conceal 10, Cover 10, Digital Intrusion 2,  Disguise 3, Filch 8, Hand to Hand 10, Infiltration 8, Mechanics 12, Network 15, Preparedness 8, Sense Trouble 6, Surveillance 6

MOS: Conceal, for those moments when she really needs to make something disappear. Plus, what with Swiss Army Prep (Mechanics Cherry) and ordinary Preparedness, she's ready for just about any eventuality; after all, any performance can go wrong, and when it does, it's great to have a backup plan.

Finally, a scenario seed:

The same street artist has been sighted, either by witnesses or by security cameras, outside three different venues, all of which suffered mysterious break-ins. Twice the intrusion was so skillfully done that, had the perp not left a calling card - a print of The Surrealist, by Victor Brauner - on display at each scene. The victims are baffled; what was taken? Was this some kind of scam? Have their networks been infected with malware? Should the directors worry about blackmail material?

Person of Interest: Institution M (Night's Black Agents)

Earlier this week the story of Werner Mauss' tax evasion conviction, and two hundred thousand euro fine, broke, and brought the shadowy Institution M back into the international spotlight again. Since he's exactly the sort of person your Night's Black Agents players are going to want to meet, he's this week's Person of Interest.

Mauss, born in Essen in 1940, became a private investigator in the 1960s, and soon started working with the German police and intelligence services exclusively. It's not clear how this happened. His website claims he was trained by a former member of the intelligence services, and that may have given him the contacts he needed to start working with the authorities. Otherwise it's difficult to fathom how an otherwise undistinguished former agronomist and vacuum cleaner salesman in his twenties got the attention of the powers that be. He'd enjoyed success working for insurance companies, but presumably he wasn't the only private investigator in Germany with a decent success record. Reading the site gives the impression that here is a man who is neither shy nor lacking in self-promotion skills, so a certain amount of bluff may have been involved.

He began as a police spy, infiltrating criminal gangs and filtering their secrets back to the police. He claims over 2,000 arrests all told thanks to his evidence, over a forty year career, everything from diamond thieves and tracking down barrels of stolen toxic waste, to the arrest of Red Army Faction fugitives and alleged police murderer Alfred Lecki, in Spain. However from the 1980s he began his South American work, and it is at this point that things get murky.

He started by helping Mannesmann AG in Columbia with troubles it was having over an oil pipeline, but Mann soon found himself negotiating the return of hostages from the ELN. The National Liberation Army -  Ejército de Liberación Nacional - has been fighting the Columbian government since 1964. Its more famous fraternal organization FARC gets all the attention, but the ELN is also a Communist group - Marxist, as distinct from FARC's brand of Marxist-Leninism - and the ELN is no laughing matter. It engages in attacks on infrastructure, like the pipeline, as well as extortion and kidnapping. At this moment it is estimated to have over two hundred people in captivity. The ELN calls it war taxes and retentions; the retentions - kidnappings - are used to encourage payment of the war taxes, or extortion.

Mauss successfully recovered retentions, which got the attention of the German government, at that time Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat/Liberal coalition. Kohl needed a way to get German civilians back from the ELN, and Mauss was perfectly positioned to play intermediary. Soon Mauss became involved in a more ambitious project, aimed at brokering peace between the ELN and the government. From Germany's perspective this could be nothing but good news; finally the kidnappings and damage to German businesses would end.

The negotiations went reasonably well, but didn't prove as successful as everyone hoped. Moreover the Columbian government was becoming suspicious; was Mauss actually collaborating with the ELN to drive up ransoms, collecting his cut from the kidnappers for this service? He was arrested and jailed for nine months, before being cleared of all charges in 1998.

If he was being paid by the ELN, it was just one of a long list of clients. Mauss' personal fortune grew. His 40,000 acre estate, bought in the 1960s when land was probably a lot cheaper, has been built up into a fenced-off Disney World castle according to the German papers, complete with its own zoo, exotic animals, and the largest private riding hall in Germany. All of which seems reminiscent of a certain film, or possibly more than one.

The Panama Papers leak threw a little more light onto Mauss' world. He had been a busy man, helping the rich and powerful in their business dealings, and in the process built up substantial accounts in Luxembourg and the Bahamas, for which he paid no tax. Mauss claims this is because the funds were actually given him by Western intelligence agencies to help his fight against terrorism and organized crime, even Isis. He also promised a string of star witnesses at his trial, none of whom showed up - and one of whom had died five years prior. Even had all of them materialized, it would have been difficult to explain a slush fund in excess of $50 million whose stated purpose was to fund a Werner Mauss memorial museum after Institution M's demise.

Mauss claims his defense was hampered because so much of his work has to remain secret, covered in a blizzard of non disclosure agreements. All this may be so, but NDAs can also be used to cover up a mountain of bullshit, and in Mauss' case it's difficult to separate the man from the legend. Given the amounts discussed at his trial, his two year suspended sentence and fine seem remarkably lenient. The trial judge said Mauss' lifetime achievement was the reason why his sentence was so light. Clearly the judge couldn't tell the difference between Mauss, the man with $50 million in unexplained funds, and Institution M, the tireless crusader against crime.

So from a gamification perspective, what do we have?

A Night's Black Agents character, clearly. Possibly a mentor; Institution M seems an unlikely Solace. There's a certain murkiness about his whole career that just screams plant - but whose? After all, he buys that 40,000 acre estate in the 1960s, when he's just starting his private investigative career. Even in the 1960s, it's difficult to believe land was quite that cheap. A fictionalized version would have Institution M backed by some shadowy force - but whether it's Dracula or the KGB is an open question. It's easy to see why the Soviets, for example, might want an independent private investigator deeply embedded in the German intelligence apparat, particularly in the 1960s when the Cold War might get hot at any minute. Or the Americans. Or any number of foreign governments, but the Soviets or the Americans are the two most likely to have the funds and the hutzpah.

As a Node he's clearly at the National level at the very least. All those government contacts, in several different jurisdictions; all that foreign travel. He's not what you'd call a bruiser - his legend claims he's only ever fired a gun once in his entire career - but as an information gatherer he's unsurpassed. He's spent his entire career persuading people he can be trusted; someone like that can be more dangerous than an entire tank battalion, in the right circumstances. A Grima Wormtongue with significantly more panache.

It's tempting to write him into any number of stories. For example, Helmut Kohl's legacy has been tainted by the CDU donations scandal, in which cash donations to the party were swept under the rug. It's never been shown that Kohl actually took bribes or benefitted financially in any way, but it paved the way for Angela Merkel's rise. Someone had to be the go-between in the whole unsavory affair; it's not as if Kohl could attend to the matter himself. Suppose for a moment it was Mauss, a man who Kohl had come to know well at least by reputation, and perhaps personally. Or suppose that Mauss was a go-between for Karlheinz Schreiber, the arms dealer at the heart of the scandal, and that Mauss leaked the whole thing for reasons of his own, possibly to avoid prosecution, or to settle some kind of grudge. He could be fictionalized in all sorts of ways, is the point; the man who knows everybody's secrets, but who ensures nobody knows his. Did he use his go-between status to act as Kingmaker, and is now the man behind Merkel - or better yet, the Renfield behind Merkel? Did Germany's pre-war vampire project information find its way into his hands? What awful secrets does his German estate conceal? After all, 40,000 acres is a lot of ground - plenty of space to bury bodies if need be ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Guilty! The Witchcraft Act (GUMSHOE Bookhounds, Dracula Dossier)

If you, as Keeper, want to throw a wrench in the players' ordered little lives in Bookhounds or a UK-based, pre-1950s Dracula Dossier mission, why not prosecute them under the Witchcraft Act of 1735?

The Act states that anyone claiming magical powers, or practicing witchcraft, could be imprisoned for a maximum of one year. It remained in force until the 1950s, when it was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which in turn was replaced by Consumer Protection under the 2008 Regulations. The 1735 act is the successor to a string of similar acts, all of which had one purpose: to seek out and punish witches, necromancers, and other frauds.

If you look up the Witchcraft Act 1735 you'll notice that the only politician to voice an objection to it was James Erskine, Lord Grange, who is remembered for two things: first, abducting his wife, claiming she died, and holding her prisoner on the Isle of Skye; and second, his opposition to the Act. He opposed the Act because he believed in God, and he, along with John Wesley and others, was reluctant to condemn witchcraft, as it was felt that giving up witchcraft was on par with giving up the Bible. After all, witches were proof of the spirit world, which in turn meant the religious world. Without proof of life after death, where is God? Nebulous claims of Scots political considerations that weighed heavily on Erskine have been floated, but this makes it sound like all of Scotland was witch-ridden, where in practice all of Scotland was merely God-fearing and wanted no truck with an Act that seemed to deny God.

Lest you think this is something that existed but was never enforced, rather like all those Elizabethan statutes that allegedly claim able bodied men have to turn up for archery practice of a Sunday, prosecutions were fairly common up to and after the First World War. This was a time when, if you could bring back the dead for a chat with their grieving relatives, you could make a fortune. During the war the authorities became increasingly concerned that fortune tellers and mystics were having a deleterious effect on morale, particularly since some of them were throwing caution to the wind and making prognostications about the war effort. Telling people who would win the war, or particular battles, was the Government's job, not Miss Millie's, and the authorities took a very dim view of Miss Millie's continued interference.

It got somewhat embarrassing for the plainclothes detectives and undercover agents sent to gather evidence when they discovered that soldiers, even officers, were also going to Miss Millie. Elizabeth Sixsmith, known professionally as 'Madame Betty' - and why she ignored God's gift of a surname I do not know, as Madame Sixsmith to my ears sounds much more impressive than Betty - claimed many soldiers among her clients. In 1918, when Detective Inspector Bedford burst in on medium Marie-Charles to deliver an arrest warrant, he found her in consultation with a Brigadier General.

This activity peaked during the War, when people were at their most vulnerable and desperate for any kind of news. It declined afterward, though the casualty lists ensured there would be a large number of people who wanted to talk to the dead in the 1920s. However as the decades wore on and people became less accustomed to going to fortunetellers and mystics, prosecutions became less common. There's a resurgence during the Second World War, but nothing on the scale of the mischief people were getting up to in the Great War, and once the conflict was over old habits began to die out. There were only a handful of prosecutions under the Fraudulent Mediums Act, and now the whole shebang is shoved in with dodgy tellies and fell-off-the-back-of-a-van stuff you find in the consumer protection regs.

What does this mean for your players?

To begin with, it's an excellent method of harassing them. Are they getting too big for their britches, and pursuing ghouls through Covent Garden without any thought for what might happen next? Time to pull them up and remind them that the outside world isn't something they can just ignore. Sooner or later blatant bullshittery comes back to bite you, and in this case it bites to the tune of one year in chokey. Or perhaps just bound over, if the Keeper's feeling generous. Don't forget that elements of this legislation are still in force in Israel and South Africa to this day, or that it was in force in Northern Ireland long after its repeal and replacement in England in the 1950s. Something for your agents to bear in mind, as they merrily skip across borders accumulating Heat.

Of course, if the government actually has some kind of supernatural or occult-interested research group - say, Edom - then a conviction under the Witchcraft Act could be synonymous with a quick trip to a secluded spot, there to be interrogated at leisure.

As an element of backstory, it can be very useful. Here's Miss Millie, dotty old dear, and here's her gang of hardened thugs. Where did she get hardened thugs? Oh, you can learn a great deal banged up in Holloway for a year. Plus you meet fascinating people like Norah Elam, suffragette and proto-fascist. This works for player characters as well as NPCs, bear in mind, so if you as player want to justify that point in Streetwise and some of your less savory contacts, this would be a good way to do it.

On top of all that, there's one other obvious direction to take: the prison scenario. This last is very much up to the Keeper, but consider: if you want a one-off in an unusual setting, and think a bit of hard time could be an interesting route to take the campaign, the Witchcraft Act will get you there in style. I recommend a good old-fashioned haunting, with the execution of Edith Thompson - and possibly also her unborn child - as a catalyst, but really, with a prison that's been there since the mid-nineteenth century, you could do anything.

Enjoy!
 

Self Promotion & Deadly Women

For those of you who don't already know, I've written a couple articles for Genii Online, home of magic and deception. One of them's about Mandrake the Magician and his failed 1954 TV debut, filmed here in sunny Bermuda. The other's about J.N. Maskelyne, and his encounter with the spiritualist Davenport Brothers. There's a third one due soon about the CIA's favorite magician, and there may be more coming - I certainly hope there is! If you enjoy magic, trickery, jiggery and pokery, hie thee to Genii. If you like my work there, please give it a Share.

I also want to recommend something that isn't mine, but which I'm thoroughly enjoying: Lady Killers, by Tori Telfer. This history of deadly women covers the gamut, from the Queen of Poisoners and the Blood Countess, to the Giggling Grandma and Iceberg Anna. If you don't know who any of these people are, then you should buy the book, shouldn't you? Mine's an Advance Reader Copy, and I'm mentioning this to you now because this true crime novel is due out October 2017 - which means basically right this minute, more or less. Or more accurately on the 10th of October, which is when Harper Collins will launch this blood-soaked narrative.

If you enjoy true crime, or serial killers, that's one good reason to seek this out, but Dracula Dossier Directors have another: it covers Erzabet Bathory's gory career in considerable detail. If you want a bit of meat to add to this NPC's back story, this is an excellent source.

Ghost Town (RPG All)

I've been re-reading Salem's Lot, Stephen King's take on Dracula in a small New England town. It starts with two survivors on the run, who read about the ghost town that Salem's Lot has become. It is not the first town in American history to just dry up and blow away, and will probably not be the last, but it is the strangest ... The article goes on to reference the fictional town of Momson, Vermont, which also dried up and blew away back in 1923. I suspect King was drawing on the Bennington Triangle when he wrote that, particularly Glastenbury.

It got me thinking about ghost towns, and how useful they can be in fiction, and RPGs.

Ghost towns exist in every nation, in all parts of the world. More often than not they're unknown outside a relatively small area. To give you an example, I have on my shelf a coffee-table book about Abandoned New England - Its Hidden Ruins and Where To Find Them. I doubt anyone's gone looking for any of these places in years. The book was published in 1978 but more than thirty years have passed since then; what was a ruin in the 1970s is most likely a nondescript pile of rocks now. Point being that unless you own a book like this, or live in New England not far from one of these locations, you wouldn't have the slightest idea these places existed at all.

What is a ghost town, really? There are legal terms, of course; a town only exists as a town because it's been incorporated, and as such it can be unincorporated. In that sense the legalities aren't much different from the days when the Crown would issue a charter, or the Church establish a Cathedral. The forms have changed, but the basic principle remains the same: you can't call yourself anything unless you have the documents to prove it, and those documents can be nullified at any time by the powers that be.

However a ghost town is more than just a few forms. I think of it in these terms: first a town loses its ability, then its vitality, and shortly after that it becomes a ghost.

Its ability can be defined as the power, financial or legal, by which the incorporated entity serves its citizens. Once it loses that power, the town no longer serves its people. This can mean many things, some of which may not be immediately obvious. If a town can no longer provide or maintain drainage, the problem may not really be a problem until the first serious storm, at which point the town floods. That might not happen for years. On the other hand, if the town stops being able to collect and dispose of garbage, everyone knows all about it pretty quickly.

Its vitality is more nebulous, and refers to the interest its citizens take in the town's continued survival. Do they sit passively to one side, refusing to participate in town meetings, not bothering to support local initiatives? Do they volunteer when the town needs help? If there's a fire, do people show up to put it out? If someone goes missing, do they help search? If the answer to all these questions is negative, then the town lacks vitality and will most likely collapse at the first sign of trouble - say, when the garbage trucks stop showing up.

Without ability and vitality a town is dead - even if there are still some people living there. Many ghost towns have a scattering of people hanging on, like bats clinging to the exposed rafters of a burnt-out house. From a gaming perspective, having a few shell-shocked survivors dropping clues and adding atmosphere can be a very good thing.

Sometimes the event that causes a ghost town is immediate and devastating. Centralia, Pennsylvania is all but destroyed thanks to a coal fire that's been burning under the town since 1962. There are any number of small townships that went under thanks to fire or flood. Varosha in Cyprus was a functioning, thriving place until the Turks invaded, and since then it's lain derelict. Chernobyl in the Ukraine is probably the most famous example of a ghost town caused by a nuclear disaster. France's Red Zone is one of the most recent examples in the West of a populated area reduced to nothingness by war, though there are plenty of examples of this outside the West. We tend to think of war damage in terms of explosions and shrapnel, or of massacres like Oradour-sur-Glane that kill people but leave the town intact, but recent tests in the Red Zone showed dangerously high levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, zinc - the soil is basically poisoned, as is the water and the animals who live there. The same will apply to modern battlefields, if not more so; they didn't have depleted uranium in 1914, after all.

However a town can also die slowly, often due to economic failure. We tend to think of the gold, copper and silver rush towns of the Old West and British Columbia when we think of economic failure, but really as a phenomenon it's all around us. Dying industries, the increasing use of automation, the transfer of factories from one state to another - as an economy shrinks, so do the townships that service that economy, until one day there's nothing left. Monotowns are particularly vulnerable to economic fluctuation, even in planned economies where the state has every incentive to keep the town afloat.

Sometimes a ghost town revives as a semblance of its former self. This most often happens when the town is revived as a tourist site or nature reserve, but it's difficult to really call a town a town if it no longer has an independent function. As a tourist site or reserve the former town loses all its impetus, becoming a parasite without any reason to develop further or to change in any way. In fact, change - and with it, growth - is the last thing these places can afford to indulge in.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Alexandria, in Egypt, was all but dead in the 1800s, boasting a mere 5,000 people when Napoleon took over. Yet under Muhammed Ali Egypt reinvented itself, and Alexandria grew; today it has over 4 million inhabitants.

Alexandria's example is particularly relevant to Keepers running a sword-and-sorcery or fantasy RPG. In fantasy campaigns cities are often portrayed either as fully functioning, or completely abandoned, but historically there is usually a long intermediary period when most of the city is abandoned, and yet it is still alive. There isn't a major city in Europe that hasn't endured shrinkage at some point in its career; London famously lost a third of its population during the Black Death, for example, and many cities lost closer to 60%. Imagine what that would have looked like: empty dwelling after empty dwelling, roads meant for heavy traffic now almost deserted, wild animals roaming the streets. And yet people still eke out a living there. The city still has ability, but has lost vitality. Dunwall in the Dishonored series is one of the few videogame examples of this kind of city: basically functional, but with the guts ripped out of it.

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

I think of ghost towns in small sandbox terms. There may or may not be a convenient central hub - a general store, an inn, a church - but the town's story is scattered roundabout, which means there will be different kinds of experiences to be had. Go one way, and find out what happened to the silver miners when the mine collapsed. Go another way, and find out what lurks in the old coach house. Go a third way, and see what's left of the miller's granaries. A fourth way to find out where the children who attended the schoolhouse ended up - and so on, and on.

It's a small sandbox because ultimately this is a small scale tragedy, in a game which can span continents or even dimensions. If your secret agents need to be in Istanbul next week, they can't spend a lot of time digging into the life story of a bar worker in Germany.

From a Keeper's perspective, I would take a series of notes either on index cards or on one of the many apps that mimic the index card format. None of this has to be very complex. A few lines per location is all that's needed. The key thing to bear in mind is all the minor stories that took place here need to be linked in some way to the major story.

So as an example, let's consider a ghost town in modern Eastern Europe, or a fictional non-Earth equivalent, abandoned after a massacre during a civil war or military incursion from a neighboring state.

The massacre is the major story. That's what robbed the town of its ability and vitality. All the town's leadership was rounded up and shot, and the few survivors of the massacre fled to neighboring towns and never returned.

All the minor stories reflect this and link back to it. The event was sudden, catastrophic and irreversible. There will be some battle damage wherever the characters look, but if it's an overwhelming event then there may not be a truly significant amount of property damage. This isn't like Guernica, where waves of bombers strike a sitting target again and again; this is more along the lines of the SS lining up villagers against a wall and executing them.

Let's further assume that the game mechanic includes something like Ars Magica's Regio system, or Ravenloft's Sinkholes of Terror, where reality can bend or change altogether depending on which level of reality you happen to be standing on at the time. So at its worst it can be a hellscape, and at its best a blasted and lonely place.

Therefore at its worst point - probably the town hall where the people were herded inside the building and murdered, or the mass grave where many of them ended up - the Keeper needs to do the most preparation. Two or three cards worth of notes at least, one of which is devoted exclusively to the supernatural entities certain to be found there. There will be several layers to the main hub, each more awful than the last.

However there are going to be other stories scattered about the town which are related to, but not part of, the main event. The farmhouse where a young mother was raped, her baby's brains beaten against a tree. The garage where frightened survivors hid. The fire station that was set aflame with the stationhouse dog still inside, soldiers standing around taking bets on how long it would survive. Each of these stories needs a brief description, one card's worth at least, which should include the location story, any debilitating effects - SAN or Stability loss - and perhaps a color point or two, like the red flowers that constantly bloom around the tree where the baby died, no matter what the weather. There may only be one or two layers to each of these minor points, just enough to hint at what happened here without going full Night on Bald Mountain.

If you, as Keeper, do that, then I'm willing to guarantee the players will remember this ghost town long after other, perhaps more action-packed, scenes. Horror isn't in the eye, but in the mind, Play with their minds, and who knows what you'll accomplish?

Enjoy!