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. Babysitting their GCHQ desk jockey. (Player not present this session.)
• 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.

Recap

20 - 22 April 2011

The group decided that the best approach for them, after a quick review of the various annotations in the Dracula Dossier and seeing what looked promising. At the same time, Cassandra said that she needed to head back into work, and keep her head down. Coop volunteered to be close-by in order to try and cover any problems that came up as a result of her heading back into work.

The main things that looked promising were:

• (former?) Dracula residence in Plaistow
• Dracula safehouses in Newcastle, Durham, Dover and Harwich. (Checking with Axel Logistics and HGD Shipping for more infos)
• Former Dracula associate(?) in Whitby, named Samuel F. Billington

Doing a quick search of the above, they found that there was a still-extant law firm in Whitby named Billington & Sons in Whitby, specialising in property and estates (wills and such). Considering that since Plaistow was probably still a little warm (given the previous day’s chase there), so they decided to skip London and take the five-hour trip north to check it out. They arrived in a lovely seaside town with some early tourists wandering around and generally being picturesque and peaceful. The law firm was in an old terrace, now mostly offices and similar. Keeping an eye on it for the afternoon, they saw an elderly looking man, from the website identified as William Billington, the head partner.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, the agents decided to break in that evening. They went for the back door, picking the lock and using a broad spectrum jammer to avoid the assumed alarm from phoning home. They got in easily enough, guessing the code on the alarm panel (1875, the year the company was founded, of course). This pretty much gave them the run of the place, including the archives, which were locked behind a fire door. Dusty boxes and narrow shelves beckoned. Yannis took a look at the boxes from around WW2, but nothing caught his eye. Petros and Padraig had more luck: some of the very old boxes had a letter from Peter Hawkins requesting assistance for a foreign gentleman coming to England. They also found letters between Billington to a couple of estate agents and similar for addresses in London and a warehouse in Newcastle. No name on these, they were just on behalf of ‘our esteemed client, who wishes to remain anonymous’ and similar. The agents took note of the addresses discussed to look up later.

Searching the offices proper, they found a couple of wills that are being done recently. One seemed to be a younger woman (just going on what the estate held: a few bits of jewellery, no major assets), the others had more established (houses, cars, more extensive jewellery lists and so on). A printed e-mail makes a note to follow up with the coroner. Nothing else in the office stood out as very interesting, and Yannis was unable to get into the computers with the time available without making it too obvious. After a couple of hours, the agents left, taking nothing but photos.

The next day, they talked their way into the morgue as independent verifiers on behalf of the family to see what was up with Isabell Hartley. The coroner’s report mentioned that she fell after a series of dizzy spells. No mention of any drugs and similar on the tox screen, but Petros was able to bully the medical assistant into signing over a blood sample to test more fully back in London. They did a bit of Facebook stalking of both Isabel and her brother Kenneth (listed on the will as next-of-kin). Nothing too much standing out, both grew up in Whitby but are not currently living there. There were some photos of them both at a murder mystery party a couple of years ago, in Victorian/Edwardian garb: him in a suit, her in a pale cream dress with a shawl and an antique-looking black and silver brooch. The agents want to check out the brother more closely.

Following up on the London addresses in the letter, they found one was located in the middle of Ripper territory, one was located close to multiple transport links and one was in the fancy part of high-society London. The warehouse was in Newcastle, which in the late 1800s was a major port. They were not really sure what to do with this, so they reached out to their Source to see what they can get from them, but that will take a bit of time.

Follow-ups

The information on Costa’s phone (call logs and messages) would be very interesting to the Italian police’s organised crime unit, or if the agents needed some gangsters to run some errands around the heel of Italy. The latter option is probably only good for a week or two at the most before Costas is properly missed and the numbers are changed, but might be valuable to the police for a bit longer.

GM Thoughts and Notes

Cassandra going back was an out-of-session die roll. This is a pretty ballsy move, but at least immediately there was nothing on the news and the relatively open feeds that reported a good description of the agents and her, so whomever came after them was not working officially. This suggests that going back in is pretty safe, at least right now, but we will see how it falls out. Cassandra also has a contact number for the agents if she comes across anything that might be of interest.

Moving off the railroads, so this felt a lot more like tap-dancing on the catastrophe curve than previous sessuibs. This was also much lower action: the agents are going out and looking for trouble, which they have not found yet, but they should soon.

The Director’s Handbook has good support for doing just that: almost all the annotations have enough to build something off. Whitby has less than most, just because it is a small seaside town a few hours from London, for all its importance to the novel. Still, it dropped a couple of juicy hooks for the agents to go and check out.

My players also enjoyed looking at the town of Whitby on StreetView and such, all but planning a holiday to what looks like a very nice little town. This is one of the nice things about running a contemporary game! Not many StreetView images of Neverwinter and Cormyr out there….

The break and entry was very smooth, largely because the first roll went well and I decided that nothing was really changing in the office, so they could pretty mcuh look at anything that they wanted to: letting the agents get more information to use to make plans was better than making them work for what is honestly not hugely important information yet. Getting access to the computer was a different roll, since that security was quite different. The morgue was similar, and worked because of my ‘would it work in a Jason Bourne movie principle’, which I have made explicit to the players as well. I doubt that it would work in reality, but that is boring!

The addresses are unlikely to still be directly useful, since they were apparently cleared in the novel, but they might provide some suggestions as to what sort of places Dracula might be using in the modern day. The Source might have some ideas.

NPCs of Note

• Cassandra Irving - GCHQ Desk Jockey, found acting strangely in a Plaistow church
• Isabel Hartley - Recently deceased young woman. Survived by her brother, Kenneth. Will is being handled by Billington & Son.