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 setting up a safehouse in the London area while the others investigate (player unable to make it this session).

Recap

17 - 19 April 2011

On the way back to Napoli, there was a brief stop to ask a few questions of Costas and Andras. The main thing that they wanted to know was whether Costas was working under orders or if he was going it solo. They did not get much out of Costas, but Andras mentioned that Costas claimed that he was going to live forever. Coop disabused them both of that notion and they left the bodies hidden in some bushes. Yannis took a dump of the contact list and call history from Costas’ phone.

During their time in Naples, they had been talking to the Source in London and arranged to meet, generally with a message or so a day. They made plans to fly into the UK, and once down they would get a location to meet and hand back the stuff that Olivia was working on. Coop stashed the two sniper rifles somewhere safe in the Naples area.

On landing in the UK, they got an address to meet at: a church in Plaistow, East London. Petros went off on his own to arrange a safe place for everyone to meet later, while the other three went to the meet. On arrival, they saw a dilapidated church built in the 1950s or so, not fancy, just a hall with a bell outside. The streets were quiet, and there was a burnt out car in the road. It was not evening, but it was getting towards late afternoon.

The three (Yannis, Coop, Padraig) headed inside the church cautiously. Looking around, it was relatively dark, with no large lights on. Moving towards the altar, they saw someone spread-eagled on the floor, lying on their back, throat torn - apparently not by a knife. There was no sign of a struggle. A door led into a neighbouring room - the church hall. This was mostly empty, chairs and table stacked neatly to the sides. After checking the toilets, they moved towards the voice they could hear in the church’s office. They saw a woman in her late 20s, black hair, muttering to herself, a briefcase at her feet. The mutterings were disconnected and strange, but talked about ’the man himself’ and ‘he is coming’.

At about this time, the agents noticed that there was a fog creeping under the door from the office to the exterior. They grabbed the woman and the briefcase and hightailed it out of the church, as a pair of black SUVs pulled up outside, disgorging a four-man team each. These men were well-armed, especially for the UK: stab vests, automatic weapons, gas masks, &c. Despite the calls from the armed men to stop, the three agents grabbed the woman and ran for it. They got very lucky and escaped without further incident via the London Underground.

Once clear of the immediate pursuit, they went to ground at a small house that Petros had arranged and asked their person some questions. She introduced herself as Cassandra Irving, working for GCHQ. A colleague of hers asked her to meet ‘some contacts’ and deliver the briefcase to them, as a quick and simple favour. She claimed not to remember anything about the events at the church and not to have opened the briefcase.

In addition to the dossier, they have some redacted notes from Lennart’s laptop talking about deploying ‘SBAs’ in attack on Albanian terrorist camp in late 2010, which Olivia’s notes also had, along with reports of something weird from the locals about it. This is what Aristides wanted to get exposed in the media in hope of causing a shake-up in NATO command that he could take advantage of.

GM Thoughts and Notes

This was a fun session. Still nothing that is explicitly vampiric, which is nice for the slow burn.

The burnt out car, by the way, is actually there outside St Mary the Virgin Church on Google Streetview, so why not use that? The published adventure specifies St Mary the Virgin Church in London, and there are at least a couple of those. So of course I am going for the one with a burnt out car outside, even if the other one at Wanstead Park looks more like a stereotypical church. Neither match the published description of ‘an unsightly mess of spires and gargoyles’ anyway, so I went for rundown and struggling instead.

The escape was much better this time than in Session 1. I used diregrizzlybear’s ‘Action Prioritization’ approach: list a few things that might go wrong, get the players to decide what order they care about these things, and then roll that many skill checks to avoid them, with the lowest priority happening on each failure and working up. In this case, they wanted to, in order of priority:

1. Escape the blackbag team cleanly (or at least do so as cleanly as possible)
2. Not lose the woman (Cassandra) that they found (whether shot, lost, grabbed)
3. Not get into an actual shoot-out with the blackbag team

Each player then got a chance to do something in the escape (defaulting to Athletics to just keep running). They got very lucky here, with three successes and got away cinematically clean, hopping onto a tube train at a hub just ahead of their pursuers. One failure would have lead to an actual shootout (maybe by the opposition panicking, maybe by getting too far from civilians and making themselves an easy target). Two failures would have lead to Cassandra getting separated from them. All three failures would possibly have lead to getting taken down and needing a gaolbreak next session, or less drastically for player agency, getting flagged on all the no-travel watchlists and similar to make life more difficult for a while.

I like this approach to things in general, and am likely to keep using it: if you can not think of two or three things that could go wrong, then you probably do not want to be doing a chase or similar sort of scene and should just let things happen. Just make sure that the priorities are things that you can live with happening as well: if the highest priority is ‘do not die’ and they do fail? Better be able to follow through on that bad thing actually happening.

The big thing after this session is also that the agents now have the Dracula Dossier in their grubby, deniable paws! Now the campaign is really over to them. Until this point, they have been on a semi-constrained path (albeit with some choices as to exactly how to approach things and with some side trips, but largely being reactive to what various NPCs want them to do or suggest they do). Now? Now they get to start attacking, and I am excited for it. We have had a fairly long break, but hopefully we will be back to it soon, and we shall see how things go when they have all of the annotations in Dracula Unredacted to start poking at.

NPCs of Note

• Costas - now a corpse, formerly working for Aristides Daudolos, Greek mafioso and smuggler
• Andras - now a corpse, formerly working under Costas in the Greek mafia
• Cassandra Irving - GCHQ Desk Jockey, found acting strangely in a Plaistow church
• The Source - Still in London, but remaining faceless for now? Actually Cassandra?