June 8, 2016
Agenda: 1940 Dracula Dossier Session #2
I transcribed the annotations to the novel from the 1894 leg, and one player's already added a 1940 annotation.
The missing player missed another session, but this time, due to job possibility, which is a much, much happier reason than last time. This was the session in Castle Dracula, and ended with everyone returning to Borgo Pass, where the Roma told the count about disappearances among their people. So, if the player makes next session, well, when the plane he was on crashed, the Roma pulled him out of the wreckage, and there he is. All good.
Quimby's player raised the question of why Sebastian Wimsey, from the 1894 leg, sent Quimby into the 1940 Romania mission to recruit Dracula when Quimby did not believe in the supernatural. We agreed that Sebastian sent him for precisely that reason: he wanted someone who would not automatically believe in or look for a supernatural explanation.
Between sessions, I figured out that the group had a Heat of 2. As per NBA, the group started with Heat 1. And this made sense, given who folks were. I said in email:
-- -- --
To this I am adding another, because of being "basically high profile" -- this is largely Dexter being the standing out American with the castle, but also includes stuff like Joyce punching out an Iron Guard, and any brief sightings of Hedy Lamarr. (There's no scene cap on Heat per se, but a guideline of "if they've crashed the burning tank into the general's HQ, don't bother to raise the heat for the lone guard they killed earlier in the scene." I'm not adding an extra point for each bit of standing out the PCs have done, just the one point for all of it.)
So, total Heat is currently 2.
-- -- --
Joyce: He started it! By being a Fascist!
Last session, Dracula brought folks to his home which might as well be called Castle Dracula, or, as Joyce's Player dubbed it, Interdimensional Space Dracula, aka IDSD.
Castle Dracula isn't in normal space, precisely. The whole blue flame business described in the novel is actually Dracula opening a gate.
Dracula warned them, as he warned Immanuel Hildescheim / Jonathan Harker, not to open any locked doors. They did not, so they didn't run into invisible hungry tittering blood drinking monsters. Folks did search through the areas that were not sealed off, of course, and Hedy Lamarr decided to bug the rooms.
GM: You're going to try to bug Castle Dracula. That is awesome.
(See, I have learned from John Adamus.)
I set the difficulty at 8 (and did not reveal this at that time), and the player got a 10. The bugs were successfully planted, and they even worked. It didn't hurt that Dracula has no familiarity with this espionage technology.
Joyce's Player: Joyce wants a battle of wills, killer to killer.
Isabella's Player: Isabella wants to be around Dracula as much as possible -- given he's a monster killer.
I have no idea who said this: It's "more noble to eat that which you kill".
Dracula found opportunity to talk with everyone individually, and he tried to hypnotize everyone. I followed the default rule of "spend 2 points from the pool" for this. Amusingly, both men were hypnotized -- and both had a history that accounted for this being less difficult than normal -- while I think none of the women were hypnotized -- and their history accounted for this being more difficult than normal. That said, I am likely either to have Dracula spend more in the future or to roll a d6 (or d6+1) and randomize what he spends. One of the characteristics of my interpretation of Dracula for this campaign is that he is very curious and always eager to learn new things and to adapt to changing times, so it feels appropriate for him to get better at hypnotizing people as the campaign goes on. This also fits with the Director's Handbook and NBA's default of having vampires get stronger and more capable as they get older, and with Liesl's analysis from the first leg of the campaign, which seems to me to predict a growing inhumanity and lack of empathy.
I don't remember a lot of the conversations, so I have no idea if I was able to make the Joyce-Dracula conversation the battle of wills the player wanted. I suspect not.
Joyce may or may not have realized that Dracula was trying to hypnotize her, but he was unable to. She wanted to demonstrate her capability with her rifle, so she set up a shooting range in an appropriate space in the castle, possibly with Dracula's help. I don't know if I even called for a roll for that demonstration; I rather hope I didn't.
She tried to convince Dracula to go back to sleep and sit out this war. She also made it crystal clear that Dracula is on her enemies list. He's not at the top at the moment, as she is currently dealing with Nazis and Fascists, and I'm not sure he's even at the top of her list of mythos threats. But, when he tried to suggest to her that, as she is an American and he is unlikely to want to cross the ocean to America, he is no threat to her territory, she made it clear that she was having none of that. The world is her territory when it comes to protecting humanity.
After the conversation ended, Joyce gave her companions a one sentence summary.
Joyce: What a jerk.
This was amusing as, while it makes sense Joyce would see it that way, she was being fairly provoking. Also, it seemed to me that she held a little too closely to the precise opinions of the player's previous character, Liesl, with whom Joyce had never interacted. Logically, all she should have known was that this was Dracula and that the novel fictionalized a lot.
But, hey, one doesn't expect a horror survivalist to have any sympathy for a vampire, particularly when it's THE vampire, as far as most folks are concerned. And, _someone_ needed to think that the entire mission was ill advised!
I remember even less about Hedy's and Isabella's conversations with Dracula. He did remember Liesl, Isabella's great aunt who is still alive and is now living in Palestine. I suspect he never quite stopped arguing with her in his mind, but I am not sure if should go so far as to have him annotate the Dracula Dossier himself.
Dexter was easily hypnotized, and Dracula learned what I think only Isabella knew in character up to that point: Dexter had been bitten by the vampire Carmilla. He broke the news to the private eye.
Dexter: Why are you helping me? You're Dracula!
Dracula: Because someone put that mark on you without my permission.
Dexter tried to find out whether the territorial objection had to do with this having happened in Romania or with Dracula feeling that all vampires owed him fealty or something else. I think that it's a combination of it happening in Romania and it happening to someone who was essentially placing his life in Dracula's hands of his own free will.
Quimby had not been idle. I believe he was the one who found some notes that Dracula had taken from Sigismund Freud.
After Liesl had concluded her analysis of Dracula, he decided that he wanted more information, but that he wanted to handle matters differently. He already knew who Freud was and had begun reading the man's works. I think he probably approached him pretending to be an ordinary man who just happened to have an irrational phobia of Christian holy symbols and paraphernalia. When he felt he had gotten all he could out of Freud, Dracula hypnotized the man and erased his memories.
Dracula is now only affected by Christian holy items from his own era or earlier. Imaginary Liesl is sighing with disappointment in Freud. Actual Liesl probably has no idea about the whole thing. Sure, she mentioned her unusual patient to Freud, but not in great detail, and she never said that this patient was a 300+ year old vampire.
When he hypnotized Quimby, Dracula discovered that Quimby had been turned into a vessel for possession. I am not sure whether Dracula knew who possessed Quimby; I suspect he did not. But, Quimby decided to find out. (The players all knew, as I'd run the idea past folks.)
Quimby wondered if there might be a Ouija board in Castle Dracula, then asked Hedy if she might be able to create a device so that he could communicate with whatever force occasionally possessed him. Between that and the bugs which allowed her to play back the conversations folks had with Dracula (technically, his voice probably can't be recorded, but Hedy is a genius and knew about the telluric fields, so she no doubt compensated for this), someone said, "Radio Lamarr!"
Joyce (to Hedy): We can ride off into the sunset in a totally platonic way.
Joyce was not present when Hedy made the device, which I think we pictured as involving a typewriter and a pair of antennae with lightning sparking between them.
Quimby learned that he was occasionally possessed by none other than John Dee.
Dee: _Sir_ John Dee. I was knighted, you know.
Where Gabriel immediately classified Dee as a jerk in 1894, Quimby was utterly respectful. He had faith in Edom, and Dee was the head of Edom, after all. He asked Dee about a matter Dracula had raised: Dracula had claimed that Edom has stolen some black rock from him.
Dee explained that Dracula had stolen it in the first place, hypnotizing the Munshi to take it from Queen Victoria and bring it to him. (The Munshi was otherwise a perfectly ordinary man, perhaps a bit venal, certainly interested in looking out for himself, his relatives, and his employer, and hated not for that but for being an Indian man to whom Queen Victoria forced others to show what she considered appropriate respect.)
Dee was not sure what this rock was, but it was clear to him that one of Dracula's reasons for agreeing to come to England in 1894 was to acquire that rock. So, Gertrude Bell, an Edom agent, was dispatched to retrieve the item. She succeeded, but died via suicide or accidental overdose in 1926, or so history says, and no one knows what happened to the rock.
Somewhere around here, Dracula and Joyce walked into the room where Hedy and Quimby and the device channeling Dee were. Dracula had no idea what the device was for, but he gestured toward it, disrupting it in a shower of sparks, thus revealing that vampires can disrupt unshielded electrical devices. Joyce found herself in rare agreement with Dracula about the device and was relieved that he'd destroyed it.
Dracula prepared to leave his castle and escort his guests back to the Borgo Pass. Hedy collected her bugs, but decided that she wanted to plant a beacon in the castle so that she could find it again.
The player had, I think, already used her Mechanics MOS this session. But I said that if Joyce were to help Hedy out by, say, spending a point of Cthulhu Mythos to explain the hyperdimensional maths, that would work.
Hedy's Player: Will you help Hedy with Cthulhu Mythos?
Joyce's Player: If I can flirt with her!
As I understand it, Hedy was not only fine with that; she was flattered.
And so, Dracula's castle now has a beacon planted in it. At the moment, Dracula has no clue that this has been done.
The obvious thing to do is have it get destroyed as the 1940 arc ends. The second most obvious thing to do is to let it stay around. Right now, I don't have to choose between these two.
Meanwhile, my notes have the following:
Joyce: I kill sorcerers. I do not get _hired_ by sorcerers -- except that one time, and that was an accident!
I don't recall the context, alas.
Dracula brought folks back to the Borgo Pass where several Roma met them and told Dracula that some of their people were disappearing. They want him to do something about that.
This is where we broke, with me making two tentative assumptions:
1. The Roma and Dracula would make it easier for folks to talk their way past whoever was guarding the Borgo Pass. The group had talked its way in by pretending Dex was a gullible American who wanted to meet Dracula and the others were his companions or native guides. Clearly, the native guides found someone to pretend to be Dracula and hired the Roma to add to the atmosphere.
2. The missing agent did not wind up in Castle Dracula after all. Instead, he was picked up by the Roma after the crash of the plane he was in, which meant that he could join the group at the start of the next session.
