Gaming

The Outcast Dead – #nightsblackagents

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The agents in my Night’s Black Agents campaign are following a number of leads in London, and one of the cases involved the discovery of (and subsequent disappearance of) a victim’s body in a street in Southwark.   I chose Southwark because it’s an area with a history of poverty and people on the fringes, such as mudlarks and toshers dating back a couple of hundred years.    I was also aware that it was the home to a large number of prostitutes in the past, licensed by the Bishop of Winchester and hence known as Winchester Geese.   When I googled the term to add some colour to this quaint bit of background I discovered that Southwark was also home to the Cross Bones unconsecrated graveyard, the site of which now bears this delightful notice.
The Outcast Dead.

This stuff writes itself.
Gaming

Red Shift: London – #nightsblackagents – Clue Summary

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Just a short update this week – our valiant agents made it to London and made a brief and paranoid contact with a Scotland Yard detective named Templeton.   Templeton stumbled onto the shadowy world of vampires a few months ago with the (brief) discovery of the body of a young runaway… which body then vanished along with a quarter of an hour of memory.

In that brief interview with Rowan, Templeton provided a number of leads… as summarised below:

So far Rowan and Hans have just scratched the surface as shown above… I’m looking forward to seeing which direction they go in and how deep they can get.

Gaming

Five Lights – An Adventure for Barbarians of Lemuria

Finn Cullen2 Comments

I’ve recently become enchanted by the simplicity and clarity of Barbarians of Lemuria – a role playing game in the Sword & Sorcery genre.

To that end I present “Five Lights” an adventure in which our heroes are called upon to rescue a fair maiden, probably against her will, from a new religious movement.   All things are, as you would expect, not what they seem.

Image (c) Finn Cullen 2016

Edited to remove outdated link:  Now available free (or pay what you want HERE)

Gaming

Red Shift – Episode Six – Calais and Paris – #nightsblackagents Play Report

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After Sunday’s action packed episode, last night’s visit to the bloody world of Night’s Black Agents was one of evasion and consolidation.   Having had to flee from a murder scene, Hans and Rowan dug in at their safe house and ran through what they’d learned.   The word “vampire” was used for the first time with the comment that “it’s crazy but it’s the best fitting theory so far”.
Rowan contacted their Control at RedShift via a text message to their handler GAUNTLET to let them know what had happened.
This was shortly followed by a protocol breaching phone-call in return:
“This is Gauntlet, this is Gauntlet.   You’re burned.   Don’t report in.  Don’t come in.  Go dark.”
Hot on the heels of that disquieting message came a text from RedShift from an unfamiliar codename, Firebird.
6676 Firebird.
Message Received. Fall back to rendezvous Alpha Six for debriefing. See you soon
After a moment’s silence the pair decided simultaneously.   No way were they going to report in now.   They moved out of their safehouse at once, stole a new car, invoked a pair of previously unused identities and headed out of town.  Once in Paris, Hans visited a storage unit he’d set up previously (thank you Preparedness/Cache rules) and emerged with a suitably improved vehicle and some helpful if as yet unspecified equipment in the trunk.   Rowan then set them up with a nice apartment overlooking the Opera.
Here they went through the papers they managed to remove from Masson’s house before they fled, and went through the unsent draft email folder in his email account.    The papers consisted of pages torn from a Bible with certain verses highlighted.    The blood is the life… over and over again…  references from Genesis to living forever if Adam and Eve had stretched out their hand to the fruit of the tree of life…  All very unsettling but nothing conclusive.    

But in the draft message in his gmail account there was a reference to a Scotland Yard detective named Templeton who appeared to know something of Masson’s obsessions.   Routing a call through several cut-outs, Rowan called through to Templeton who was shocked to hear of Masson’s death.   He wanted to arrange a meeting there and then opposite the Salvation Army headquarters in Oxford Street but Rowan had to tell him they weren’t in the country yet…

Next stop, back to Calais and a night time trip through the channel tunnel.   As their car was being loaded into place on Le Shuttle they recalled a comment from Masson’s email about running water stopping Them… but what about beneath?
And a few cars ahead a familiar white transit van with Star Logistics livery was being loaded onto the same train… the same van that had chilled the air around it earlier that day, and that probably contained the sinister Hungarian visitor they had seen at the trafficking drop-off.

Roll Credits. 
Gaming

Red Shift Episode 5 – Calais – #nightsblackagents Play Highlights

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Last night started nice and easy with a quiet interview in Star Logistics with the secretary, a bored woman named Jeanne who was happy to chat with the potential client – Rowan with a fake identity – and let slip about the infrequent all-night shifts that the boss and his drivers pulled.   Rowan also got a chance to sneak a closer look at the transit van parked up with its rear doors against the building wall… and noticed just how cold the air was as she passed close to it, and found herself flashing back to the hallucinatory shower of blood she experienced in Casablanca.

After that they tracked the gangster Danglars to an abandoned construction site and exercised some bad ass infiltration skills to move through that place like ghosts.   In the climactic scene of the evening Rowan located some of the trafficking victims and began escorting them out while Hans confronted their captors.     The captors, as it turned out, were not what they seemed to be.

The first, Janos, when covered by Hans’ pistol just smiled, leaped to the wall and then to the ceiling and raced on all fours across the ceiling to drop down on Hans.   Hans pulled off some incredible rolls here, first for Stability and then for Shooting and Janos ended up face up on the floor, seemingly dead, with half a dozen bullets in him.   Shortly afterward though he was found on his belly, several feet away, as though he’d been crawling from the place where he fell.

The second guard, Istvan, proved a tougher opponent and he and Hans tussled to say the least.   A couple of bare handed blows from the Hungarian left Hans reeling and battered, while a few bullets and then Hans’ hold out knife into Istvan’s neck finally dropped Istvan to his knees.  In game terms Istvan was way negative on Health but not by any significant source…   at least until Danglars and his mooks burst into the building to help out their allies, and flooded the corridor with sunlight.

Istvan’s last word “Fu..” came a second before his body burst into flames heralding the first Vampire destruction of the campaign.

The last twist came later as the pair returned to their patron, Professor Masson, in his home.  It became clear that the aged academic knew more about what he was sending them into than he’d let on.    This wasn’t just some concerned citizen with money to burn and a dislike of crime…   But before they could probe much further their world turned upside down.    The next moment they opened their eyes and found Masson dead, the room on fire, Hans pressing his gun into his own head and empty shell cases on the floor.  Masson had been shot and slashed with some cutting weapon.   Sirens were blaring, and a glance at the clock showed that an hour had passed.

The pair fled, not wanting to have to deal with official entanglement and as they made it to safety Rowan found a handwritten note on her, giving an email address and a password.

That’s where the session officially ended, but my players knowing the way I work actually decided to log on in real life to the gmail address they’d just been given.   Nothing in the inbox… nothing in the sent items… but in the Drafts section they found this:

I will never send this email.   I fear that any mail sent can be intercepted, can be monitored, can be changed or eliminated.   But I hope that I have had time to pass the details for this account to you, whoever you are.   


If I have done so then I know my time is short, and I am likely to be already dead.  I regret much and no doubt have cause to.

I have discovered that there are few people I can trust.   The enemy is ancient and cunning and inhuman and they have ways to bring under their control any man or woman they choose. They are everywhere and they are always scheming against the living.

Here I will record my notes in brief, the greater part of them are safely hidden with a friend.


Mirrors 
Wild roses
Allium sativum
The light of the sun scorches them

Blanchard is a link for them I think.  Unknowing?  Why would they trust him?   His vehicles are useful. Haulage company accounts – very profitable – front.

Schwartz?



L. reported dreaming of a great cat searching prowling round house unable to get in.

Of the sources encountered only Donald Templeton of Scotland Yard seems credible.  Advice useful.   Warns of their presence in London.  Hawkins Theatre.

“Old Firm”??  Chapel boys.   European gangs cutting into old territory, drugs, extortion. – Templeton suspects They are assisting.

Violence in Paris, manhunts.  Cover up?   Was government looking for Them?   Paranoia.  Am seeing Them everywhere now.

Running water – cannot be crossed except at certain times.   Oceans?  Link to tides?   How about beneath?

King in Yellow – a conceit of Chambers, mere fiction.  Why would T ask?

More than one strain of them?   Templeton reports vary from those of Zagreb and own observations.   Bloodlines?   Degenerates?

Now they have directly encountered Vampires and can’t really lie to themselves any more about what they are up against.    They are on the run for a number of reasons including probably being implicated in the death of Professor Masson, but at least they now have some cryptic leads in the form of Masson’s last message.
I guess the prologue is over.   Time for the hunt to start.
Gaming

Night’s Black Answers – a player’s response to my questions for #NightsBlackAgents

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In my last post I shared a short list of questions I’d asked the players in my Night’s Black Agents campaign in the hope of generating some backstory details I could plunder for drama and complications.

Tonight Rowan’s player replied – and instead of just answering the questions she copied me into a folder containing documents… a briefing document, an after action interview, and others with more game-related stuff.

I was blown away at the response anyway and then she pointed out that the group her character infiltrated was  real one, and the dates given corresponded to a real event of the type she described.  She did ask me to redact the name of the group just in case…     So I have.   But here is the response I got tonight.  I feel a very lucky GM indeed to be receiving campaign handouts from my players.

PDF Version

Gaming

Night’s Black Questions – quick backstory for #nightsblackagents characters

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I’m a handful of adventures into my Night’s Black Agents campaign and we’re all getting a feel for the characters.    Having refreshed my exposure to the spy/thriller genre I’ve noticed that most protagonists have something lurking in their pasts that made a big impact on them.  

“He’d never been the same since Kiev”
“Look, about that time in Madrid… ” / “Never mention that again.”
“Miller dropped his hand, numb, this was too much like the failed extraction in Tokyo”
Her thoughts drifted back to the moonless night camped near Petra, and the whispers that became roars.

So, following on from my recent use of directed questions in my Fate campaign I’ve just forwarded the following mini questionnaire to my NBA players.   Knowing them I’m sure they’ll provide some interesting backstory and plot-hooks from their previous lives…

The One That Ended Badly
Where was the mission?
What was the objective?
Was the objective accomplished?
Want went wrong?
Who died that shouldn’t have?
Why is it hard for you to talk about?
Describe/name one other character from that mission – ally, enemy, bystander that might crop up again in the future

Gaming

Red Shift episode 4: Calais – Night’s Black Agents play report

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Rowan and Hans regrouped after a few days of downtime during which Hans reminisced with an old special forces buddy back in Sweden and Rowan enjoyed an illicit few days of romance and hot funky adulterous action with her (married) lover, a former colleague of hers.   He floated the idea of her coming back to the group, telling her how her expertise at making and running networks of agents would be useful in the increasingly fragmented Middle East.  She declined.

The new job in Calais sounded straightforward enough.   There were rumours of a human trafficking operation there, and a local resident named Bernard Masson had enough money and sense of civic duty to want it stopped.  He was willing to pay good money, very good money, for evidence of what was going on and could point the team  toward a couple of good leads – a haulage company and a local gangster, both of whom were likely to be involved.

Rowan and Hans set watch on the haulage company and saw the local gangster, Danglars, make contact with the manager there.   Rowan checked out inside the building using unsecured security cameras and Digital Intrusion but couldn’t pick up any audio.   They followed Danglars back to the Indigo Nightclub in the centre of Calais.   Realising the place was a “cabaret bar” with lap-dancing, and that this might be a firm connection to the human trafficking they decided to return to the club that evening and make some sordid enquiries while posing as a couple looking to celebrate their anniversary in sleazy style.

Something special?  You need to speak to Maria, they were told.   Maria’s a German woman and in charge of the other dancers.  She was unshockable and was happy to arrange for a number of girls to be provided for the couple a few nights hence.  Money changed hands, and Hans schmoozed club owner Blanchard who was slyly ogling Rowan on the dance floor.    A call from someone named Karolus interrupted Blanchard who despatched the lurking Danglars at once.

The team had planted a tracker on Danglars car… they decided… and a suitable Preparedness spend made it so.   They were not surprised to see the hoodlum return to Star Logistics, the haulage firm.  Parking up some distance away Rowan used her backdoor into the security cameras to see what was happening in the forecourt.   What was happening was the arrival of a truck from Hungary (according to the plates) which quickly disgorged a dozen frightened young women and a couple of men.   The watchers saw intimidation and violence used to get the new arrivals to stop complaining.    Then someone else got out of the truck, someone that the trafficking victims clearly didn’t know had been in there.

Then the cameras went crazy.  Just as they had in Casablanca.   Cursing whatever damned jammers somebody was clearly selling these days Rowan left Hans watching the screens and went to take a look in person.  What she saw was a tall, patrician man with white hair and a neat beard receiving bows of respect from the locals.   She took a picture of him with her phone (she thinks) and then watched as the bearded man selected one of the women and took her inside.

Hans saw the external cameras suddenly clear up… but the internal one now went on the blink.  In between the static though he saw the woman… and only the woman… in the corridor inside the building.   Then something unseen slammed her against the wall and a curtain of blood flowed downward suddenly from her throat.    Hans made a Stability spend here to keep things together.

The session ended with the trafficked victims being shipped away in a new van, with Danglars the gangster driving somewhere that (according to the tracker) was in an industrial area to the west of the city, and with the bearded newcomer somewhere still on the premises at the haulage firm.   The cameras stopped screaming as something was placed within the rear of another of the firm’s trucks.