The Dramatis Personae:

• S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running, and then pressured by EUROPOL to act as a courier to provide gear and funds to informants and similar shady characters
• N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back. Mostly a desk jockey who acts as the ‘guy in the chair’.
• An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. Former Marine, pulled into the CIA as a wetworker. Easily the most trigger-happy of the group, mostly because he is the only one in the group who can really shoot.
• Al, playing Petros - ‘Ambiguously Balkan’, openly works for the dog/horse racing rings that the various Balkan mafias are involved with. Currently sick with food poisoning because he ate a dodgy gyro (player unable to make it this session).

Recap

9 - 11 April 2011

The last session ended with the agents rushing off to try and pull Olivia out of a suspected snatch-and-grab. They took just long enough to tie up the local goons that they knocked out, grabbed what they could see in terms of useful intel in the room (including an address across town that one of the goons had in a pocket, in Olivia’s handwriting). They hoofed it across town, it now being late afternoon, drifting towards evening.

They quickly spotted her at a different café, in addition to a handful of watchers. The watchers seemed to be non-local, too pale for folks living in the Mediterranean. Quick recce also showed a guard watching the back door of the café, through the kitchens. The watchers were in a box, one on each end of the street, one at the back, and one in a souvenir shop across the road. Coop and Petros headed round the back and took out the watcher there by surprise, stealing his comms afterwards. Yannis stayed to watch the front with Padraig.

Padraig decided to act before anything happened, and walked up to Olivia and started warning her that she was being tracked and was in danger. I believe that ‘come with me if you want to live’ was uttered verbatim (I have players of taste and culture). This led to a certain amount of scrambling from the watchers (identified as British on the comms), which Padraig took advantage of and hustled Olivia through the back door. Then commenced a bit of a chase around town, with the agents getting away after a time, as night fell proper.

That night, they sneaked onto the late ferry to Limnos, Padraig using his acting experience to help everyone blend in a bit better. From there, they were able to get to to Thessaloniki and then catch a flight back to Athens. In Athens, they helped Olivia make contact with the US Embassy, who were able to get her onto a flight. They kept some of her notes and similar, since she was definitely willing to work on something less likely to get her killed and hand this over to someone else.

The last thing that the agents decided to do with her notes was to get in touch with the contact that she was due to meet next, here in Athens: Aristides Daudolos, Greek mafioso and smuggler. Padraig met him under the guise of a journalist, with Coop as a bodyguard and was told about a Lt-Gen Malcolm Lennart, in Naples, who had proof of unauthorised NATO strikes in the Balkans. Arastides offered to get them into Italy unseen, in exchange for revealing this truth. He also offered to pay for a copy of the data that Lennart has (hoping that it contains something that will give him a competitive advantage given that Lennart is attached to the logistics side of the combined NATO navies in the eastern Med). The agents took advantage of this and also managed to wrangle a sniper rifle for Coop.

GM Thoughts and Notes

Sensible planning by the players, so no major shootouts here. They did well to get away from the black bag team, but I am not happy with how I ran the chase itself, since it felt a little arbitrary. I will have to find something else to do with that.

Once they saved Olivia from the black bag team and got off Agios Efstratios, I decided that the team was probably at least a little blind-sided with these unknown actors shoehorning in, and with the use of some disguises to get to Limnos it was unlikely that they would be immediately followed. Once back in Athens, they had more leads to follow up on, and have been pointed towards Naples for something, so that is where they are headed for the next session. This has been pretty linear, but the campaign will open up considerably once they get the titular Dracula Dossier, so I am not worried about that for now.

NPCs of Note

• Olivia Yu - US journalist, working on a story in Balkans - some sort of NATO attacks and noise about vampires from locals
• Aristides Daudolos - Greek Mafioso and smuggler - contact of Olivia’s
• Lt-Gen Malcolm Lennart - Canadian Air Force officer stationed at Joint Force Command Naples