July 14, 2016
Agenda: 1940 Dracula Dossier Session #4
Before the session, I told Dex's player that when Dexter had returned to his castle, Castle Iulia Hasdeu, he'd found the staff trying to deny entry to one Father Andrei and several children, Roma and Jewish, that the man had rescued from Fort Jilava. Naturally, Dexter made it clear that the priest and the children would be staying for as long as necessary.
The player emailed me:
Oh, has Father Andrei told Dex...
A) Who these kids are
B) Where their parents are now?
Because Dex would have asked.
-- -- --
As we started, I said that Father Andrei had freed the children from some secret part of Fort Jilava and claimed that they were being used for unspeakable experiments, and that all their parents were dead. The children weren't sure about that last, and at least some of the children were quite sure that at least some of the parents were still alive.
There was some debate about whether to leave Romania at once for somewhere safer, whether to go immediately to Fort Jilava to rescue as many people as possible (as Father Andrei said there were more children there), or whether to go to the ceremonial reburial of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and his 13 fellow martyrs.
Vito thought that the funeral sounded like the perfect opportunity to cut loose with weaponry.
Joyce: Vito, we are not blowing up a state funeral. Unless there's like a million billion Nazis there. (pause) Wait, this is starting to sound like a better plan.
And Vito spotted Dexter.
Vito's Player: Mwa-mwa.
Dexter's Player: Dex mwa-mwas him back.
(This was essentially someone kissing his older uncle in greeting.)
And I'm fairly sure Vito learned that Dexter had been bitten by Carmilla and was not pleased about that.
We reviewed folks' Cover from last time:
- Joyce is Joshua Lincoln, American guide (5 points)
- Hedy is Ada, Joshua's arm candy (2 points)
- Quimby is Franz Mueller, German engineer, planning to extract and discover oil and minerals by the train tracks and in the Carpathians (5 points)
- Vito is Professor Wilhelm Wunst, Austrian specialist in "Orientalism", especially Rumi, determined not to let that Crowley fellow crow about his mountaineering (4 points)
- Isabella is Elsa von Hildenbrandt, German woman keeping an eye on this "ill-fated expedition of my uncle's, as he is unable to do so" (5 points)
I noted that, while I was fine with or without folks doing the funeral, it might look odd if their Covers didn't go. And, Dexter, we realized, needed no Cover. He was there openly as an American who had somehow inherited Castle Iulia Hasdeu, and it made sense for him to gawk at the funeral.
Joyce needed to talk to Hedy while Hedy was helping her with her disguise.
[ I THINK IT WAS A DISGUISE THING -- JOYCE WASN'T ACTUALLY WOUNDED OR ANYTHING, RIGHT? ALSO, FEEL FREE TO CORRECT OR COMPLETE THE MONOLOGUE. ]
As best I can remember:
Joyce: I don't fight _for_ anything. I fight _against_ things. So I try not to care -- even about that knucklehead. [I. e., Vito.] I just want you to know -- I may not fight _for_ a lot of things, but I will get you are of here if I can. It's not right such beauty --
That's all I was able to get in my notes, but the sentence did not trail off. I just don't remember how it finished.
ANYONE REMEMBER?
Joyce's and Hedy's players spent nothing, while Vito's and Isabella's players spent 2 from their Cover. Everyone passed. Dexter didn't have to roll, while I was playing Quimby as an information conduit, so fiated his Cover holding.
The funeral and reburial were closed casket, 8 hours long, with lots of ceremony, and a long route. Joyce and Isabella bickered in character.
"Joshua": I don't take orders from a woman
Vito got cornered by Count Stephan, delighted to spot a fellow Austrian. Vito and Joyce spotted someone who looked a lot like a young version of Vito's dead mistress. This turned out to be Sarah, his mistress's daughter by her actual husband. Vito found this a bit awkward, as he's the one who killed her parents. She may not know this, as she was raised by her aunt, she and Vito had never met, and anyway, Vito wasn't being Vito here.
Sarah had a companion, Alraune. Both seem to be about 16, and Joyce recognized that they were a couple. Well, Sarah thought of it that way. Alraune had no compunction about flirting with Joyce / Josh Lincoln.
Alraune was there hunting for her cousin, one Frank Braun. Folks remembered that Frank Braun had been a 16 year old kid in the 1894 section, the one who had brought Immanuel to Britain and Liesl, at Dracula's command, and who was likely in MINA.
Quimby got buttonholed by a Major Doering, a man who had been a specialist in Romanian Railways Communication during WWI. Major Doering was happy to talk to "Franz Mueller", engineer, and Franz / Quimby noticed that the major seemed to be hinting at things like telluric energy. The major was also planning to head towards Fort Jilava after the funeral, in the company of a young man he referred to as Baron Vordenberg.
The baron of that name in the novel Carmilla supposedly helped kill Carmilla, but given that Carmilla was clearly still around and had subborned another vampire hunter, turning him into a vampire, folks wondered if perhaps Carmilla had also turned Baron Vordenberg into a vampire. It was hard to tell, since vampires can walk about in the daylight. The baron had no problem with all of the religious ceremony and paraphenalia, but folks already knew that any problems Dracula had with these were either psychosomatic or due to things like meteor dust being mixed into the Host or both.
(Basically, a young James MacAvoy -- I've some photos. I also have a young Tilda Swinton for Sarah)
Dexter overheard that Lupescu, the mistress of King Carol II, and living in exile with him, though born Jewish, owned a lot of Christian icons. Her home was still on display, so he snuck in (his MOS is Infiltration), grabbed a bunch of icons, and found Lupescu's hidden journal.
This journal describes a secret war between herself and the King's wife (Queen Helen / Elena) and mother (Queen Marie), whom Lupescu feared would bring supernatural evil to Romania, and she was quite relieved when Codreanu et alia were killed, as she feared they would become something terrible and inhuman. She also feared that the heart of Queen Marie of Romania (which was buried in a castle in Bessarabia) was not the woman's heart, but some dark stone of evil power.
I forgot to put this in during the session, but I also decided that Lupescu is part of Liesl's group, Ahnachnu Zochrim. So, retroactively, that's in her journal as well.
Also, if I didn't remember before, so is this: The Sibiu Mountains are a place of pilgrimage for the Iron Guards. While Lupescu's journal may not add the following, this is the general area where the Scholomance is said to be.
Dexter caught up with the others after the funeral and brought them up to date. Alraune later contacted Josh / Joyce to say she'd heard her cousin Frank had been taken by the Iron Guard, and she made it clear that she'd be _extremely_ grateful for any help anyone could give her to free him. Joyce burned her contact to learn that he'd been taken to Fort Jilava. (Or at least, some German guy of about the right age seems to have been taken there by other Germans, against his will.)
Another thing I utterly forgot that Joyce might well know: "Alraune" is German for "Mandrake". This is important because, in the 1894 leg of the game, Sir John Dee explained that the whole wife swapping incident was done to create Theodorus Trebonius Dee, a process involving a mandragora. Frank Braun had been present during this explanation.
Folks returned to Dex's castle, where Father Andrei made everyone walk through a Specially Prepared room of mirrors and Vanderpool garlic. He also noted that Dex had been bitten, and that there were two women appearing in the castle (Iulia and Carmilla) from time to time who shouldn't be there.
Isabella studied Father Andrei, looking to see if he had cropped ears. He did. Yes, Father Andrei = Van Helsing = Edward Kelly, but no one's let on that they know this. He plans to go back to Fort Jilava to rescue more children. He says they're held in a secret part of the fort, and that there are only children there, no adult prisoners. The rescued kids disagree with that last, but agree with the rest of his story.
Dexter: How did you get into Fort Jilava?
Father Andrei: I broke out -- not in.
He had been held prisoner there, and when he broke out, he took as many children as he could with him. (He may or may not have used a hyperspace gate. That is, Joyce thinks he might have and can't determine from what he and the kids say.)
Folks prepared to set out for Fort Jilava where there will no doubt be much killing of Fascists and Monsters.
Hedy: If monsters are killing Fascists, there's a priority order here. We kill the Fascists first.
Folks agreed with that, and no one disagreed with Dex saying that they weren't killing children, whether or not the children are fascists.
Vito, the only one present with Art History, sorted the crucifixes and icons taken from Lupescu into the ones that would work on Dracula, as they were at least as old as he was, and the ones that wouldn't.
I had not anticipated this, but it was wonderful. As the player pointed out, this was not just Vito having learned how to sketch and getting pointers from a young artist with whom he had a... complicated... relationship with. Vito had also learned a fair bit about Christian art from a man on Malta who had earned the mobster's respect and who was likely now fighting Fascists and / or Nazis in a lone man guerilla campaign from the shadows.
At this point, we did something which I later learned stemmed from a misreading of the rules. I know how I'm going to untangle it, but it may be worth explaining it here.
Shortly after the session, I wrote:
We created either TFFBs or TTTBs -- I'm not sure which. Everyone picks an investigation skill that sets up a pool of points for later. My notes say:
Isabella is using Pharmacy to set folks up as Red Cross, getting a pool in Disguise.
Dexter is using Reassurance (and, no doubt, mamaliga and other good food) for the guards, setting up a pool of Infiltration.
Vito is using Military Science to look at the patterns of patrols and the like, setting up a pool of Preparedness.
Hedy is monitoring radio communication with Electronic Surveillance, setting up a pool of Sense Trouble.
Joyce is using Tradecraft, setting up a General 3 point pool.
And we'll figure out when next session is, where I hope there will be action and carnage.
-- -- --
I figured that each of these pools would be 3 point pools. My notes also indicate that Isabella was an actual doctor and that Joyce's pool was "Quarterbacking" and "spends to show up", which I think meant that the player could retroactively declare that Joyce was present when it would have been extremely useful for her to have been present.
And we ended with deciding that it was Difficulty 6 to enter Fort Jilava, and that it might be possible to use the Reassurance pool to lower that Difficulty.
However, after reading the rules and asking on the Facebook GUMSHOE Roleplaying Games Community page, I soon learned my sense of TTTBs and TFFBs was wrong. Cf. https://www.facebook.com/groups/726671594133437/permalink/931685193632075/
In other words, to do the thing that actually nets a pool of points, one needs to have set up in advance which specific pair of skills two specific agents can use for this, and this needs to be paid for either by build points or experience points.
Well, I've not given out experience points for this leg, and am not likely to do so. Essentially, I'm running a series of multi-session one shots and letting everyone recreate their old character or create a new one for each of these.
We didn't know the situation, so no one set any of this up at the beginning of the game. And, folks seemed to find the numbers pretty tight as it was, so I don't think it would have helped to realize how it was done at the start.
Also... I am not comfortable second guessing rules I've not used in play, and I'm not comfortable second guessing good game designers, and Kenneth Hite is an excellent game designer. Nevertheless, it feels off to me that the two person 1-for-3 pool needs to be set up at cost and in advance. This kills on the spot over the top action sequences that require this kind of set up. I don't think I've ever seen a convention scenario with TTTBs set up, and I see why. Given how much of the game seems to be encouraging pulling justification out of one's *ss, this seems an oddly sudden shift to a more realistic model.
But, this shouldn't be a huge issue. I'll start the next session with a refresh, as folks have gone four full sessions without one. I'll do as Ken Hite suggested and just turn everything into TFFBs, and otherwise improvise.
I don't think I shall invent new rules for this, as we're mid-adventure, but one of my players has come up with good house rules before, such as the fixed stability chart. If she creates something that looks workable, I may try that in the 1977 leg or in one of the Edom adventures that come before it.
