Tag: pelgrane

Gaming

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

Finn CullenLeave a comment

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.

Gaming

The Saint’s Hair?

Finn CullenLeave a comment

Ethelflaeda was a pious woman, so they said.  Devoted to God and to his service.  And in those long ago days before the first millennium had come and emptily gone who was to say that the unorthodox methods of her worship were to be condemned?  They say she used to stand naked in the river in the heart of the night, in the coldest heart of the coldest night, and chant prayers to the Almighty.

She was a strong leader of the sisters under her rule and the abbey in the marshes, at Rum’s Eg, flourished.   And she continued her private devotions in the heart of the night, in the river, in the only garments her God had given her.

History does not record what happened to her after her death, but the Church declared her a saint for her devotions and her leadership.

Eight hundred years later, a blink of the eye to some, a gravedigger named Mr Major was digging in the grounds of the abbey and discovered a coffin whose presence was previously unknown and unmarked.    What happened next is given in his own words (and spellings)

“Wee began the work with the pickax and shovell, witch is the proper tools for excavation. Wee came on a led coffin. I acquainted the Vicar of the discovery. I was to find if thare was any bones in it. If so, it was not to be removed. I tried by making a hole on the top. I thrusted my hand to the head of the coffin to find the scull. I found no bones but a scalp of feamial [female] hair as bright as any living ladies hair I have ever seen. There was 1 finger bone. It became dust immediately the air came to it. This is a Trew History of the hair and the coffin.”

There was no body there, no bones, nor remains except for one finger bone which turned to dust as soon as the air (or sunlight) touched it.   But the occupant’s hair remained, bizarrely (miraculously) preserved.   Traces of the scalp remain.

The scalp and hair are displayed now, a museum curiousity, and while tests have been carried out on the artefact they have revealed only an estimated date of around the first millennium for the person whose hair this was, and traces of pine resin in the hair (not native to the area) and evidence that her diet included fish.

Story Seeds
Ethelflaeda was a real person and I’m not going to slander her memory with bizarre and dark speculations.    However in the spirit of fiction and appropriating writhing grubs of history for cultivation into winged stories here are some ways this strange find at Romsey Abbey may be used in a Trail of Cthulhu setting.

Who was Ethelflaeda worshipping in her extreme and private devotions?   Naked river praying was not orthodox behaviour even in the early Saxon church (I wouldn’t put anything past the more inventive Celts of the period, or any period really) so who was the recipient of her prayers?     The abbey was on the very edge of the marshes too which adds a fetid air to the whole proceedings.   My inclinations would be toward making her a devotee of Shub Niggurath, that writhing goddess of fertile and over-fertile life in all its forms, accepting the priestess as her servant and perhaps the prayers of Ethelflaeda’s sisters, unknowingly offered in the wrong direction.   Fish came to the abbey and the area in abundance, and there were strange oils and resins in the preserved scalp that did not come from local vegetation.     Since no great harm seems to have been done to the area or its people then it is unlikely the goddess herself paid too close attention to the rites being undertaken, or perhaps too little time had passed by the time of Ethelflaeda’s death for Shub Niggurath to stir herself and take notice.

But there were effects of course and as we know the the life force of the devotees of the unknowable gods hastes not from their charnel clay and in this case though the body itself decayed and departed without leaving a trace that mysteriously preserved grisly scalp still seethes with the earthbound soul of the priestess.     If it were to be taken from its museum case, what then?

Suppose a student of ancient lore looked deeply into the history of the area and saw past the official church interpretation of the matters.    The Romans had put down barbaric revels in the area around Rum’s Eg long before the Saxons had come.    They had smashed votive stones and put worshippers to the sword in a way that the usually pragmatic legions avoided.   After the Romans withdrew the old ways resurfaced for a short time, old songs were song in the dank marshlands and when the strange lights moved on the damp trackways all other folk kept far away from them.   No wonder King Edgar wanted to build an abbey there, a counterpoint to the horrors beyond the fringe of civilisation.    But the old songs keep on being heard and voices answer.     The scholar of such things would read of Ethelflaeda’s devotions and begin to wonder… and they would find the scalp so lovingly and reverently displayed,,, and they would wonder about that too.

It would be a matter of a few moments of daring to break the glass and take the rank thing, to squirrel it away in answer to a growing obsession or need.   And then that scholar would brood over it and keep on wondering.,, his dreams filled with images of burgeoning plant life and luxuriant rich vegetation.   Plants can be grafted onto living stems…     He would begin to hear the old songs raised at night time, in his dreams, in the voice of a woman calling across the centuries.   Plants can be grafted onto living stems…

Stealing a living stem would be harder than stealing the hair and scalp ever was.  A  living stem would struggle and scream as it was prepared, as the living… sap… flowed from the newly cleared graft site.

Oh but if the graft was to take.   What glorious new growth might there be?

Carved Corbel at Romsey Abbey depicting a female figure giving birth

Gaming

Red Shift – Episode 3 – Night’s Black Agents play report

Finn CullenLeave a comment
Episode Three of RedShift was played out on Sunday evening, and while lighter on the action than the opening two episodes was still pretty intense and we got to see the Heat mechanics close up.
Mysterious Arab fellow
Valiant freelance agents Rowan and Hans ended last session in a private room just off the ER of Casablanca’s main hospital.   Hans’ face and neck had been badly torn up by the mysterious Arab man who had punched through the windshield of his car and tried to break Hans’ neck during a high speed chase… until Rowan had blown the attacker’s brains all over the car with a point blank shot to the head.    The stability loss from seeing the man rise to his feet in the rear view mirror was the first big use of the Stability rules in the campaign but perfectly justified I think.
Hans had a contact at the hospital who he’d worked with before and agreed to fix him up off the books.   While Hans was recovering the doctor, Jean, brought some bad news.   The shoot-out they’d had against the operatives with the obscure Templar insignia at the railway station had made the news and blurry CCTV images of Rowan and Hans were all over the television.    Jean was glad to help an old friend… but perhaps now they’d been patched up they could go and recover somewhere else?
No slouch at disguise…
Rowan, who’s no slouch at disguise, spent a few points toward reducing the Heat and they ventured out into early-morning Casablanca to find somewhere to hole up.   They had a meeting to arrange with their mysterious patron in the early afternoon.  Finding a McDonalds (for that authentic North African ambience of course) they sat and planned the meet.   At this point they discovered that Casablanca was home to a vast high tech luxury shopping mall.   With an IMAX cinema (“We can go see Deadpool” suggested Rowan, and because they had time to kill, they did just that!) and the largest conical aquarium in the world – Aqua Dream.
That detail clinched it for them and they mailed their handler to pass on the details to their patron.   The mysterious MORDRED121 would meet them at 1pm at Aqua Dream.
This gave me a GM dilemma.   A huge high tech mall with all those lovely features, balconies, multi-level goodness, expensive shops and glazed frontages AND A WORLD RECORD HOLDING AQUARIUM… and there was no logical way I could introduce an action scene at this point.   They’d covered their tracks pretty well and – in my defense – neither were actually in any shape right now for any dangerous confrontations.    I filed away the venue for potential later use and squirmed at the missed opportunity.
When MORDRED121 turned up he was an arrogant English academic in appearance.  He wanted assurance that the team had recovered the stolen documents in their entirety and the team retired to an upper floor of the nearest large chain bookshop.   They decided that there would be an unused reading table in one of the less popular sections and I decided to throw them a bone… while MORDRED121 began poring over the 18th century manuscript of hand written Latin arcana Rowan spotted their patron’s picture on the spine of a book nearby.     MORDRED121 was, according to the author bio on the book, a Professor William Helm of Magdalen College, Oxford.  A medievalist.    Two questions got added to the team’s agenda here:

How does a university professor, even one at Oxford, afford to hire two deniable mercenaries to recover a stolen manuscript?
Why would a medievalist be so interested in this much later document?

Helm saw them looking at his bio in the book and was not best pleased.   He also wanted assurance that Rowan had not made any digital copy of the document she’d helped recover for him.
Of course not, she lied.   She’d photographed every page individually as soon as the document was in her hands.   Helm let slip the name of the package too – the Sangretti Collection.   Suspicious but mollified Professor Helm let that issue go and decided he’d want to engage the pair for a supplementary task – escorting him and the Collection safely to Paris where he apparently had a convention to attend.    The details were provided to RedShift, the agency that handled client/operative relationships and the appropriate funds were transferred and tickets obtained.
On the way out of the bookstore though the Heat roll I’d made earlier came into play.    There were local cops all over the mall, more than you’d expect, and one of them approached Hans directly asking for ID.   Hans bluffed his way past but the cops were not convinced and Hans spotted others moving to cut off his exit from the mall.   Rowan and Helm peeled off to avoid the trouble as Hans took the initiative and approached the cops.
They were looking for the man who’d been involved at the railroad station shootout.  His description matched that of someone at the scene.   He was to consider himself under arrest…
“Of course I work for Interpol you jackass”
Until Hans’ player decided to use his first Cover spend of the campaign.   He had the cops reach into his inside pocket and locate his Interpol warrant card.   Using a combination of Cover and Cop Talk he managed to bluster the locals into believing he was working a case here (albeit slightly out of his jurisdiction) and they were endangering it.    They weren’t completely convinced until one rang control to get the Interpol identity checked out… one very tense die roll later and they let Hans go with some harsh words about authority.
Things went pretty smoothly from then on.  The team arrived at the Mohammed V International airport.   Rowan saw Helm having a quiet word with security and flashing some sort of pass… she caught the word “EISENBRUCKE” on the card and the three of them were whisked through to board the plane with no questions asked about their carry on weapons.   Rowan recognised that name – the courier with the stolen documents that they’d abducted in Marrakech had asked them in terrified tones if they were working for the Eisenbrucke Foundation.    It turned out that maybe they were…
From there a flight north to Paris.   Rowan felt mysteriously relieved – and regained a point of Stability – after crossing the North African coastline and heading over the ocean (the magical connection forged by the mysterious Arab attacker having been cut off at the water’s edge, not that they know that yet) to safely deliver Helm to his destination.

Now for a week’s downtime while Rowan has a sordid liaison with her married lover (and Source of Stability) and Hans recuperates… and then a new assignment already mailed to them by RedShift to deal with a patron in Calais.   And to ponder the questions raised from the last job.
Gaming

Thoughts in the Depths

Finn CullenLeave a comment

A creature for Trail of Cthulhu.

The shunned tribal elders called it Giaouchatnhon when they discovered it’s lair deep within the caves in what is now Vietnam. They saw the effects it had on the first unfortunates to be exposed to it, infected by it, and they studied the results.

The victims grew ill, pale and weak. They began to suffer delusions and terrifying visions of worlds and lives utterly beyond their comprehension. The elders recorded the babbling of the victims, restrained them when they tried in their delirium to seek out dark hiding places of their own, and after the inevitable final moment when the doomed man or woman collapsed into greasy grey dust they sifted through the powdery remains and they found the slug-like larva and roasted it over a flame. 

The charred thing, ingested, would grant visions to the elder who consumed it and grant them knowledge and magical gifts that helped the elders cement their rule over the tribe. But power is never enough power. The elders sent more and more victims into the caves to expose them to the spores of Giaouchatnhon, to sicken them with alien flesh growing within them, to record their delirious cries and then to consume the thing that had slain them. The elders became priests of a sort, and they consumed the larvae more frequently, becoming themselves other than human. And inevitably their untainted neighbours eventually decided enough was enough. The elders and their followers were executed and the sacred caves became the forbidden caves, and the entrances were blocked with rocks and earth.


 Alhazred encountered it in his dream-wanderings beneath a brittle sky, a vast coiled worm or grub with an oil-black membrane and hardened roots at its extremities burrowed into the rocky wasteland beneath it. He wrote of plunging his hands through that crusty skin into the gelid interior and he touched its mind… its minds… its mind conscious at every moment of every place, every world, every age in which it grew and festered. One being, one consciousness, a thousand thousand dark places. He licked his dream-fingers clean and tasted each one of those worlds and he wrote down what he tasted. He tasted of darkness and the desire to spread itself wide across every world that was, of the desire to be carried to every speck of dust that made up the cosmos until it was everywhere and everywhen. He knew from the slime trickling down his throat in that dream that the creature lurked within the deepness of his own world too and he wrote down cryptic warnings about digging too deeply.

 The Mi-Go recognise the signs of infestation in their own kind and in the bodies of other species they encounter as they surge from world to world. They burn the worlds that are too badly infested. They vivisect the victims, even among themselves, to study the growing infection and then they destroy the larvae with strong acid. Their symbol for the creature placed upon a boundary place will dissuade them from entering, as a red plague-cross on the doorway of a house deters visitors.

Behind The Scenes –

Giaouchatnhon is the name it was given on Earth by the tribal elders who first discovered it. It exists in only one location on Earth – for now – but it is the same entity that lives in and on countless other worlds across the cosmos. Every instance of it shares the same consciousness and it perceives at once every sensory experience of every one of its manifestations.

Its thoughts, you can be sure, are not human thoughts.

The life cycle of the creature is one of contagion and dispersal. The adult form resembles a vast slug, several metres long, with a hardened carapace and rigid talon-like roots at either end with which it anchors itself into whatever surface it has chosen for its home. While capable of uprooting itself and moving it does so very rarely, and it is clumsy and slow. It prefers to remain stationary since once it has put down its roots it begins to spread trails of filaments through the surfaces it is in contact with, thin lines of mold that can permeate through almost any material, forming a nearly invisible web around it and extending from it over increasing distances.

The filaments spread only slowly in daylight, faster in total darkness. The creature perceives the world around it through this web and the longer it remains in place the wider the net grows. When the creature perceives a potential host moving within the compass of that web it will begin to form tiny nut-like cysts on the filaments. These will detach from the web when they are ripe, and about the size of acorns. Movement triggers them to burst releasing a small cloud of sharp spores which can be breathed in (causing irritation of the throat and lungs) or absorbed through any damp or broken skin. 

The victim is now a host and the spores will invade the host’s cells like a virus and replicate themselves. The host will become ill over the next week to ten days. At first a fever, tremors and night-sweats, then delirium. Their dreams will become disturbing with disjointed images and sensations, and inexplicable alien landscapes and appetites. After a few days those dreams will become waking hallucinations and the host will become helpless to resist the touch of the creature’s consciousness.

When the creature within him has multiplied enough the host will be compelled to seek out a dark place to lie down and rest. At this point the host’s body dissolves into greasy ash or dust and within that dessicated mass there will be the larva of the creature. No larger than a long thick finger, resembling a slug or black grub, it will wriggle to a place of safety and there begin to grow, and attach itself to the environment around it.

After a month it will be several feet long and will have developed enough to anchor itself in place and start to extend its filaments of perception around it. It will reach its full size after after six months and then it will be able to create its own cysts and spores.

In Play
Giaouchatnhon is a source of stories rather than a direct actor in them itself.   Its earthly form is largely immobile, brooding within a deep sealed cavern beneath the hills of Vietnam, thinking the same thoughts as all its other manifestations across the cosmos, perceiving everything they perceive and waiting for a chance to spread.

Sooner or later those caves will be opened, perhaps to spelunkers, perhaps to tourists.   Perhaps some reference in Alhazred’s allusive text will drive someone foolhardy to explore in just the right place.   They will become infected with the spores of the creature and carry them outside for the first time in countless centuries and Giaouchatnhon will have an opportunity to propogate itself.

Player characters may be part of that foolhardy expedition and companions of theirs may be the first to fall prey to the mysterious illness from the caves, growing sickly, their minds starting to crumble as they ramble about alien landscapes and secrets undreamed of by sane minds.   Or perhaps the victim may be a friend of theirs returning from some foreign trip and falling ill… or perhaps by the time the investigators touch this story things have already advanced, and Giaouchatnhon is also growing in some damp basement in Chicago, or the store room of some night-club in New Orleans or London… growing and spreading its filaments and forming spore-rich cysts ready for the next host.

It may be that some modern savant has realised what they are dealing with and, like the hated priests of ancient times is deliberately cultivating the infection of others in order to use them as oracles in their delirium, or as growing mediums for the vile larvae which, roasted and consumed, grant magical power and inhuman insights to the ingestor.    Cults may grow up around such creatures as in older days, offering up the helpless and hapless to deliberate infection simply to obtain the larvae whose foul bodies transform the human monsters who devour them.

If the cult fails to allow some of the larvae to grow though, if the cult prevents Giaouchatnhon from spreading, then it may become aware.   It is ancient and it is wise and its patience is not infinite.   With effort it can retard the illness of the hosts who carry the spores and reach out with its vast mind to take direct physical control over them as their own grip on sanity weakens.    Investigators may not only have the cultists of Giaouchatnhon to deal with but controlled hosts who seek to spread the contagion further even at the expense of the cultists who seek to control the creature and use it for their own ends.   And as mentioned above the Mi-Go are well aware of the threat posed by Giaouchatnhon to worlds they have a use for.   If the fungi from Yuggoth become aware of an infestation on Earth then the investigators may find themselves in the middle of a massive conflict between inhuman interests… or possibly in a strange alliance with the Mi-Go as the slightly lesser of two evils.

Gaming

Red Shift – the story so far

Finn CullenLeave a comment


(I’m copying a couple of posts I made at Google+ for the sake of completeness and to avoid the Empty Blog syndrome that conjures the demons Blokk and Lackspiration)

First session of Red Shift my new Night’s Black Agents campaign has just finished and I have to hand it to +Pelgrane Press Ltd and +Kenneth Hite – the system worked so well we had a blast. Highlights included an inventive use of Reassurance (after first providing an imaginary threat that the subject needed Reassurance against… “Fucking Liam Neeson bullshit” as he commented afterward), a Thriler car chase through the crowded Medina streets of Marrakech, and a brief encounter with a mysterious Arabic gentleman who for some reason didn’t show up on the hidden cameras our surveillance expert had planted around the Saadian Tombs.

The Roll20 Incident board idea I implemented worked well… and is now looking a whole lot busier.

The second episode of Red Shift took place yesterday evening and I have to say that Night’s Black Agents is proving to be one of the most enjoyable role-playing systems I’ve used in many years of trying lots of different ones. The mechanics of the game just get out of the way and let the players make appropriate genre-appropriate decisions and actions and everything conveys the right thriller atmosphere.

In last night’s episode our intrepid freelancers fled from the mysterious Arab gentleman in the Saadian tombs who luckily seemed strangely reluctant to follow them into the sunlit streets of Marrakech. Still in the possession of the mysterious package they’d recovered from a low-life English art-thief they retreated to their safe house and discovered the package contained a sheaf of several centuries-old documents in Latin. Realising there were at least two other parties interested in this package, both of whom had shown a willingness to take extreme measures to get hold of them, they decided to drive out overnight toward Casablanca to go to ground.

Alas for tracking devices and rival teams that also have Electronic Surveillance… a car chase on the A7 highway ensued which ended with our heroes out distancing their pursuers and branching off into the railway station at Skhour Rehamna and picking up a couple of tickets for the first train northward.

Did I mention the tracking device? The pursuing team turned up minutes later and the first real gunfight of the campaign ensued on the northbound platform that left the two pursuers dead, the team’s Heat rating climbing through the roof, and our heroes deciding not to wait around the station for the cops to show up but to steal their pursuer’s car and complete the journey to Casablanca without delay.

Availing themselves of a decent hotel room (using money stolen from the rival team) Intrusion Expert Rowan hacked the hotel’s security camera system and set her laptop to cycle through the cameras for advance warning. After a gory hallucination in the shower (she put it down to stress) she let Hans take the first watch while she got some sleep.

But not much… the lobby camera kept fritzing out… dissolving into static just like the camera she’s set up in the Saadian tombs. When the image cleared the receptionist appeared to be talking to someone, but there was nobody else in view.

Suspecting trouble the pair exited quickly via the balcony and a quick clamber down a drainpipe to ground level, or at least Rowan did. Hans was still on the balcony when someone they recognised from the tomb kicked the hotel door entirely off its frame, burst into the room and slammed Hans so hard he made it to the ground the hard way, badly injured and barely able to stand. He was able to use his Driving cherry to boost a nearby Volkswagen Beetle though (expressing a certain distaste at the lack of choice) and the pair fled. The Arab gentleman who just stepped off the balcony and instantly broke into a run to purse the car managed to leap atop it and smashed the windshield, trying to throttle Hans with those perfectly manicured hands… Rowan put her gun to the side of the man’s head and fired, blowing a large chunk of it away and sending the assailant rolling off the car and into the gutter… where he was visible in the rear view mirror struggling to his feet and clutching at the bloodless wound in his head.

Stability losses ensued and we had the first Network spend of the campaign as Hans remembered an old acquaintance of his, a French doctor, working in Casablanca who didn’t mind doing off the books work for a friend.

TL/DR: Lots of fun was had, the rules support the action perfectly, and the plot thickens.