In the next session my players have suggested their characters are following up a lead they got from a crumpled programme in the pocket of a dead man, and they’re going to the theatre that the programme was advertising.

What could possibly go wrong?

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.

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…

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.