Doing the Reading
The three Agents meet in an inn. Well, a country pub – the Suicide’s Rest, just outside Whitby, where Hopkins has arranged to meet them. As soon as they arrive in town, they can tell something’s wrong. There’s a bad energy in the air (Streetwise); too many spooky figures lurking in alleyways, too many cars with tinted windows.
While they’re in the pub, two black cars zoom past, speeding down narrow winding country roads at high speed. Moments later, they get a text from Hopkins, reading “HEATHER C”. Baptiste heads out to watch the black cars through a telephoto lens; Elgin and McAllister discover that Heather C likely refers to Heather Cottage, a nearby holiday home for rent. They go there; it’s empty, with one car parked outside and signs that another recently left. Inside, they find clues that two people were staying there, although it could sleep as many as eight. A man and a woman. Oddly, there are three cups on the draining board – two coffee, one tea.
Also, there’s a suitcase full of weapons-shaped Preparedness.
Also, a mysterious folder.
Inside, they find
- A map of London (Hawkins Papers 03)
- Sundry other mysterious documents that attested to the validity of UNREDACTED
- A battered iphone. Cracking the lock, they discovered it contained some photographs of documents (including Hawkins Papers 28) and old photos, as well as emails between Hopkins and someone who called himself JACKMAN
- a copy of DRACULA UNREDACTED, covered in post-its. On the cover is a post-it reading “IF WE’RE NOT BACK BY DUSK, TAKE THIS AND RUN”.
Meanwhile, from his vantage point on the clifftop, Baptiste sees a man being chased across the rocks below, pursued by two figures that he guesses are special forces types (Proserpine ratings). A mist descends across the cove, and when it vanishes, the first man’s lying in the water, dead. He’s dropped a bundle of documents, which are now bobbing in the tide.
More people arrive, notably a pair who seem to be in charge: an older man and a younger woman (OAKES and HOUND, Dukes of Edom). Local police cordon off the scene, and Hound points the two special forces types in the direction of Heather Cottage. Baptiste warns the other two to exit hastily.
Attempts to phone Hopkins back on the number she texted them from fail; they guess that her phone got snapped in two and dumped in the ocean. Time to run.
The team drive to Durham via back roads and hide in a cheap hotel where they can discuss their options. Going through the documents, they find map co-ordinates pointing at three locations in London (Coldfall House, Hillingham, and Carfax). McTavish also spends a point of Occult Studies (he’s been spending a bunch of time looking into Romanian mythology) to guess that a British occultist and former tv presenter named Osmond Singleton is the author of one of the documents on the phone (Hawkins Papers 28, the “Goetic Org Chart).
Switching cars to avoid pursuit, they decide to head back to Whitby to watch the cleanup, and maybe pick up some of the documents off the rocks. There, they see a fishing trawler being towed to dock; apparently, the whole crew were asphyxiated by a carbon monoxide leak from the engine. It had four crew members, but five shrouded bodies are removed, and they spot one of them being put in a different vehicle from the rest. They also learn that Edom have planted a cover story that “Hopkins” murdered “Jackman” by pushing him off the cliff in a lover’s quarrel.
Hound and Oakes and some of the Edom crew head west; the police, news crews and other “official” elements head to the Middlesborough (the nearest city), and the vehicle containing the fifth ‘body’ (who the Agents correctly suspect to be Hopkins, alive or dead), drives north towards Edinburgh. The team plant a tracking device and follow…
Preparing the Dossier: The Dossier is barely digestible in a long-running campaign; here, although two players had read part of it, I still wanted to give them a little more focus and structure. Pre-chew it a little, maybe, although that metaphor got very weird there. Hence, the invention of a fourth annotator, Jackman (we’re out of good Van Helsing actors), whose bright post-its pointed the investigators towards key clues like Hillingham.
Other clues in the folder were there mostly for flavour; I was confident that I could improvise around any unexpected lines of inquiry, but doubted they’d, say, start digging into Bram Stoker’s biography while on the run from Edom. Throughout the campaign, I kept the Heat up on the players; they started out hiding from the state, and never had much of a chance to rest. A longer campaign has time for respites and side treks, but a longcon game needs to be a five or six-act thriller.
The phone was a nicely flavourful way of presenting some extra handouts. I just used an old iphone that was lying in a junk drawer, wiped it, photographed some more Hawkins papers, and stuffed some notes in to look like copied emails. (I also changed the time zone to Bucharest.) The cracked screen lent added verisimilitude.
Preparing the Campaign: I planned the opening set-piece (players find the cottage while Jackman dies on the beach), and I knew I wanted Hopkins to get captured and whisked off to HMS Proserpine (DH, p. XX). I also knew that Hopkins was working with Oakes, and that Edom had been compromised in the ’77 mole hunt and were now trying to bring Dracula back to England. I knew that Edom’s primary vampire was the Feral Child Vampire (DH, p. 191), now codenamed CALIBAN.
I had an idea for a different take on vampires, and especially on Lucy Westenra and the telluric elements of the story, but I wasn’t completely sure if they’d play into the game. I was determined to trust the system and improvise!
For each subsequent session, I sketched out two or three likely incidents in the hour break between games, so I’d have something to throw in if the players were stuck.
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