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.
• Al, playing Petros - ‘Ambiguously Balkan’, openly works for the dog/horse racing rings that the various Balkan mafias are involved with. The Dogfather.

Recap

23 - 24 April 2011

Following a successful visit to Whitby, Padraig, Yannis and Petros headed back to London to join Coop. Their priority was to get the blood sample checked out before that went off. Luckily, Padraig knew a doctor who would not ask too many questions, even for some weird tests that the agents came up with. They wanted to know about the following:

• Presence of scopolamine
• What the blood did when exposed to:
  • Rowan wood
  • Other blood
  • UV light
  • Silver

The results would take a couple of days, although funnily enough, the weird tests are easier to do. The scopolamine would take longer than looking at the response of the blood to the other materials under a microscope for which they would likely get something the next day.

In the meantime, Yannis and Coop went to a couple of libraries looking for information about where Carfax House was. The goal was to see if there were any basements or similar left from after Carfax was burned in 1894. After a long morning, some old plans of the neighbourhood were found which gave a rough idea of what houses used to be present, although no indication of which one was Carfax. Still, this narrowed down a few streets in the nicer part of Plaistow as the ones to check.

Yannis, ‘assisted’ by Coop, grabbed some high-vis vests and clipboards and started setting up a few small cameras on some of the power poles in the area to potentially watch these areas for a while. At the same time, Petros, defaulting to ‘can I solve this problem with dogs’ as a general approach, was able to get a couple of dogs and printed some flyers for his dog-walking service, with the idea of trying to quiz the neighbourhood about any strange happenings. He was able to get a range of dog-related gossip for the area as well as checking out some of the flats for anything suspicious. The main thing that he was able to pick up was a house that apparently had a fair number of rats around. In a coincidence, that property also had a basement flat to let, with a phone number.

Yannis decided to try the number, but no one answered. That evening, around 18:00, he headed back to the house and knocked on the door above. The lady who answered the door was unremarkable and in her 40s. She said that she had not ever seen anyone coming and going downstairs in the couple of years that she was there. She was willing to give a number for whom she was renting from, but did not know much else, aside from occasional rats and such, but nothing that was really concerning.

Given the current dead-end, the agents started working on a plan to head inside regardless, acting as pest control workers, while Yannis followed up with the owner. The call that evening did not get an immediate response, but they were promised an answer the next day.

The next day, they got two calls: one was that the UV light was the only one of the weird tests that seemed to have had any reaction with Isabel’s blood sample. The other was that there was no property on the building owner’s records currently available for rent in that street. Everything the agents were finding was that there was nothing there. That flat was a bureaucratic black hole. dramatic sting

Given this, they decided to go for the pest control approach and pulled up that evening following some good rolls for preparedness. They found an abandoned flat, dirty and with some mouldy furniture. A proper look around found a trapdoor in the floor, under the stained carpet. Opening it, they found a steep staircase leading down. They pulled out their torches and headed into what proved to be an abandoned facility of some kind. The stonework looked old, but there were some brackets bolted into the walls with old-looking cables and largely empty old-fashioned light fixtures. They also found a few old offices (and grabbed a couple of scraps of paper from the late 1970s from the desks) and rusted beds, as well as a place that probably had a generator (judging by the oil stains and railway sleepers). One branch took them to a pond in what looked like a Victorian-era sewer/stormwater catchment: slimy steps leading into dark water. There was an exit in the opposite corner, and Petros took a chance and swam across to check it out.

He found an old crypt, and most of the others headed across to join him. Yannis was concerned about his shoes and hung back. The crypt had three sarcophagi, and had been extended under what was an old crossroads. Burial under a crossroads is often used for suicides, vampires and murderers. The walls were covered in red residue, which closer inspection revealed to be paint. Some samples of this were taken, and attention turned to the sarcophagi, which were mediaeval by the looks of it. Despite mounting tension, these proved to be empty, and belonged to the de Playz family. Since this seemed to be a largely dead-end, the agents headed back out into the sunlight.

GM Thoughts and Notes

The agents got quite a lot done this session. The main things were that UV light might do something to vampires, if they exist (which not all are convinced about yet). They also found that the old Dracula house was used more recently than 1893 (when it was burnt down) but not for a while. They still have a couple of other avenues, and have generally not been making too many waves in their investigation yet, but we will see what fallout there is from this.

The general approach here was solid, and I think that the players are getting comfortable with the way thigns are working, so it is probably time to raise the stakes some. So far they have not had any overt evidence of supernatural activity, and whoever was chasing them at the church is a mystery (apart from being well-trained and equipped). I did ask if they thought that the pace was a little too slow, but they were happy with the more tense but safe exploration of Carfax.

Something that I really appreciate about the Director’s Handbook here is that most places have either warm or cool modes. The cool mode for Carfax is the above, although there could be a couple more things happening. The warm version has a lot more going on, and is much more dangerous to try and investigate, and other places will definitely start getting warmer as the campaign goes on.