Weekend at Dracula’s

At Gaelcon, I ran five sessions of the Dracula Dossier campaign in the longcon format. I’m not the first to try cramming the monster into a weekend: Steve Ellis blazed the trail there. This article is half convention report, and half general advice for those brave souls who want to try following us down the path of sleepless madness…

(It’s likely that I’ve misremembered the order of some events or elided over a few minor side treks. I beg the forgiveness of my players.)

I’d hoped to have a full table of players for the whole con, but circumstances conspired against me, so I ended up with three brave players signed up for the long haul. The agents initially contacted by Hopkins were:

• BAPTISTE, still technically an MI6 officer, but on the run after he inadvertently witnessed an Edom-run vampiric assassination of a Russian intelligence officer in Syria. The Beirut station chief warned him to run; shortly after he left Beirut, a ‘gas leak’ blew up his apartment.
• MCALLISTER, ex-British Army, who left the British Army after being captured and then rescued in Afghanistan. Mysteriously, he had no memory of ordering the patrol route into enemy-held territory that got him captured. Now, he’s retired to Romania, married a local girl, and splits his time between security consultancy and hiking.
• ELGIN, a gentleman thief and conman of no fixed nationality, who was hired to retrieve a black brooch from a vault attached to the Pinakothek museum in Munich. On his way to deliver the item to his client in Romania, he had a vision: the car became a horse-drawn calenche, and the autobahn became a winding mountain road, and then a “man made of thunderclouds” reached down to smite him – and he smeared his stolen sports car all over the road when he swerved. Waking up in hospital, he dodged assassins sent by his client and escaped, having stashed the brooch in a safe place before fleeing to England.

All three agents were contacted by a mysterious source who passed on enough intelligence to convince them that she knew something of their individual situations. She asks them to meet her in Whitby…

Creating the Pregens: Two of the players got in touch with me in advance, and got to design their own characters; the third was given a choice of “cleric/fighter/thief” on the day, as I wrote up a bunch of extra full characters. Each pregen had a pressing reason to talk to Hopkins, an inkling of the supernatural threat, and at least two links into the Dossier. For example, Baptiste had seen an Edom assassination, but he didn’t know that his late aunt was the Sculptor (DH, p. 100). McAllsiter’s extended Romanian family could have been agents of Dracula or partisans who aided the 1940s commando team; Elgin was hired by the Art Forecaster (DH, p. 103), and had a variant of the Westenra Brooch (DH, p. 284).

In addition, I wrote up a bunch of generic NBA agents and listed them by specialty – Asset Runners, Analysts, Black Baggers etc. I told the convention organisers that if anyone wanted to play Dracula Dossier for a single session, they could take one of these temporary PCs, who would be brought ‘onscreen’ by one of the three full-timers. (In play, this was something of a GMing high-wire act – I wanted to end each session on a cliffhanger, but also potentially had to introduce another 1-3 player characters into the game at the start of the next session, and allow time for a 20-30-minute intro/briefing scene. It worked, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Fill your table with full-timers if you can!)

The generic pregens were built with less Cover, Network and Preparedness than usual; in my experience, it’s overkill to give a one-shot PC all that Networking.

Session 1: Doing The Reading

Session 2: There Was An Explosion Adjacent To A Helicopter

Session 3: Street Theatre

Session 4: The Prime of Ms. Ellen Mowbray

Session 5: The Land Beyond The Forest