THE DRACULA DOSSIER: DAYS OF DISHONORABLE PEACE, SESSION 5

The records of sessions 1-3 are here.

The record of session 4 is here.

If you are totally new here, read the review first.

WITH THE POLICE CLOSING IN on the shooting, Reid and Richter attempt to flee the scene, wary of London's ubiquitous CCTV cameras.  No sooner do they begin to escape than they realize the assassins had back-up.  After a brief running gun fight, the pair lose their pursuers and looking like nothing more than a grandfather and granddaughter, slip on to a bus.

When the pair fails to check in, McPherson follows protocol and begins breaking everything down to change safe houses.  He is almost through when he gets confirmation from Reid that things went south.  Lacey is still stunned from her ordeal in the Faraday cage and the severing of her connection to Dracula (?), but he pushes her to revive herself so they can clear out and meet the others at a new location.  In mid-transit, he receives another message from Hopkins; "That didn't go so well."  Whoever Hopkins is, he is tracking their every move.

The gunfight is all over the news, and while the police are seeking a man and a little girl for questioning, it doesn't seem the CCTVs got a good shot of their faces.  The team regroups at a new safe house in Slough, where McPherson rebuilds his Faraday cage, in case Lacey falls under the influence again.  In case anyone else is under the influence, they decide to each take turns in it.

When Luna Richter goes inside, there is a flash of electrical discharge and the powerful smell of ozone.  The little girl collapses, and when she comes to, all the memories and abilities of her sister Saskia are gone.  Whatever the girl's psychic abilities are, they seem to operate along the same lines as the opposition.  Stranger still, as she comes out of the cage, Saskia's memories and abilities come flooding back.  This raises a shocking suspicion...Luna didn't receive her sister's memories, she is receiving them.  Saskia Richter may not be dead, despite what they saw in Berlin.

They decide to take a page from the dossier and hypnotize Luna just before dawn.  She is able to contact Saskia...who is being held in a makeshift clinic in a warehouse somewhere.  She is in a hospital bed with an IV drip in her arm.  The doctors speak English and German.  Once every few months, though, a woman comes to see her.  A pretty woman who smells of lilacs and speaks German in a soft, musical voice, the phrasing from a century ago.  Luna pushes for more and the connection begins to change...

...suddenly she is pulling memories from Douglas, who is the one hypnotizing her.  Painfully memories of he and his wife.  She starts taking his abilities, speaking Greek, when he attempts to sever the connection.  She comes out of the trance.  For a moment there, she seemed to lose control of her talents.

McPherson and Lacey go into research mode...anything they can track down on mythology and telluric iron.  They find a book by a Rosicrucian eccentric alleging that telluric iron is the only thing that can kill dragons, or as he terms them, the "wyrms of the earth."  He suggests that the nails used to fix Jesus Christ to the cross were telluric iron, as was Excalibur and the lance St. George used to kill the dragon.  He also claims that the Catholic Church hordes telluric iron as a precious resource.

They begin to wonder about the dossier.  Was Quincey's knife "meteor" iron as the text suggests, or was that a blind for "telluric?"  And what of the khukri knife Harder cut the Count's head off with?  Is telluric iron what Vambrey and the Church was providing Van Helsing with?  It makes sense given the traces they found in Lucy's bones and in the "red liquid" used to seal her tomb.

Douglas, meanwhile, becomes suspicious of Luna and Saskia.  He starts digging.  He discovers that both were adopted from a Romanian orphanage, one with ties to an orphanage nearby in Exeter.  Digging deeper, he discovers there birth parents died of AIDS, though neither of the girls was infected.

Having previous located "Seward's" asylum in Plaistow (now an NHS Hematology Research Center), the team regroups and decides penetrating it must be the next order of business.  They hack into its systems first.

The security level is high, under MI5 jurisdiction.  Clearly this is more than a clinic.  There are no records of the institution before when Seward ran it.  However they do manage to break into encrypted floor plans, including tunnels running from under the place to the basements of neighboring Carfax.  Dracula's old London house is long gone, but the basements remain, including something the floor plans label as "the Red Room."  It further appears that the people who work at the clinic know there is more to it than what it appears to be, but seem to think it is HIV research of perhaps biological warfare research.

They decide to physically go in.

They mount an operation and under the cover of darkness break in through an alleyway door.  The security system is impressive.  Inside, they head for the research division and break into the computers there (these are on a local network not connected to the internet).

"Hopkins" seems nervous, immediately texting McPherson to "get out now."  They ignore their mysterious contact.  

In a high security room (101) there is a "Patient Zero."   Digging deeper, they find out his name is William Wynn Wescott, and that apparently he has been held in this facility since at least before the Second World War.  McPherson recognizes the name from his research, however.  Wescott was one of the founders of the Victorian "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," a society founded the same year as the Ripper killings (1888).  He has to be 170 years old.  His file labels him a "zoophagus," with a mania for ingesting living things.  This must be the dossier's "Renfield." His room, it seems, is sheathed in "t. iron," and the only man with full access to it is "Dr. Dee."

Is this "Dee" the same "D" that runs Edom?  And is there a connection to the Elizabethan magus Dr. John Dee?

As they continue to probe messages from "Hopkins" keep coming, warnings to "get out" and "they are tracking you."  "You are exposed."  "Cut and run."  They dig just a little more, coming across records of some experimental drug called the "Seward Serum."  "GO NOW.  GET OUT OR I AM BURNING YOU."  Hopkins warns.  They ignore the warnings an hit pay dirt.

The main project here is over something called "Dust."  Wescott is "Dust Infected #1."  There are records of nearly a century of Dust experiments at orphanages, including the one in Romania where Saskia and Luna came from, and from a "St George's" in Exeter.  

As they make their escape, Hopkins reaches out.  "Conditions have changed.  They will be hunting you now.  We need to meet."  A meeting is set up the next day near the British Museum.

Lacey and Douglas hang back, providing cover and keeping an eye out.  Luna and McPherson go into the cafe where the meeting is planned.  A woman signals them, and Luna recognizes her from Saskia's memories.  This is the "lilac" woman who has been visiting Saskia in her hospital.  She tries to reach out with her abilities only to be slapped down, hard, by a much more powerful talent.

"You almost got yourselves killed last night, and the dogs will now be in pursuit.  I have been watching you for a long time," she tells them, "and I feel protective.  My name is Genevieve Harper."  

As the pair recognize the name as "Mina Harker" from the dossier she nods.  "Yes.  I am 148 years old." 

      

'SALEM'S LOT IN THE TRUMP ERA

Baby mama drama's screamin' on and too much for me to wanna

Stay in one spot, another day of monotony's

Gotten me to the point I'm like a snail

I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot

Success is my only mothaf****n' option, failure's not

Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got to go

I cannot grow old in Salem's lot

- Eminem, Lose Yourself

I grew up in 'Salem's Lot. Many Americans did. The town that is the titular character in Stephen King's second published novel is instantly recognizable to millions of us. It's a dead little place. Nothing ever happens there. Everyone knows everyone, and it is so safe you can leave the keys in the ignition of your pick-up truck at night. If you live there, you probably don't even have a lock on your front door. After all, the crime rate is just about zero. Because 'Salem's Lot doesn't know the inflated and grotesque evils of the big city; its evils are all the small and whimpering kind. The neighbor's wife cheating with the postman. The guy who smacks his girlfriend around. The kids who shoplift at the dime store.  The alcoholism and addiction that springs from despair, from knowing the jobs have all gone and you can't feed your family.  These are the small town evils, evil with a small "e," the monotonous and banal evils that slowly bleed you dry like a million paper cuts.  Everyone knows the really big "E" Evils could never happen here.

Until, of course, Big "E" Evil waltzes--by your invitation--into town.

...Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route-12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place...

  
In terms of plot, 'Salem's Lot is essentially Dracula; an ancient European vampire relocates from East to West and begins vampirizing the populace.  But the book is actually far more than that.  In his introduction to the 2005 Illustrated Edition, King talks about the naive arrogance of a 23-year-old writer thinking he could rewrite Bram Stoker's Dracula as "the great American novel."  Maybe it would be a stretch to bestow that title on 'Salem's Lot, but what amazes is how close King actually came. Forty-two years after its publication, the novel rings true more than ever.  This is the story of a rural American town well past its glory days; no jobs, no hope, no future.  In their despair the townspeople make a Faustian bargain with a stranger, a man who comes into their lives with empty promises of great things.  Submit to him, put your faith in him, and he will make you great again.  Out of quiet desperation they turn their backs on the light and lose their souls in the process.

In the wake of the 2016 election and the more recent events in Charlottesville, 'Salem's Lot seems very relevant.  

When horror works, and it works extraordinarily well in 'Salem's Lot, it does so because it makes us uncomfortable with ourselves.  Vampires don't cast reflections, but 'Salem's Lot makes us squirm because it turns the mirror on us.  Dracula was a very 19th century novel, in which the liberal and democratic British easily put down the threat of foreign imperialism.  But 'Salem's Lot emerged at the tail end of the 20th, and just a generation removed from the people who fought World War II, King understands fascism far better than Stoker ever could have.  Fascism, whether it happens in Germany or Italy or middle America, is always the willing submission of the populace, the surrender of morals and freedoms, born out of despair.  Fascism is something that must be invited, like the vampire, into your home.

Like Eminem says in the song, he can't bear the idea of growing old in 'Salem's Lot. He's desperate to escape and become something more. And that is what the vampires in King's novel feed on, far more than blood. They drink up that quiet desperation, that ennui. With their cold dead smiles they seem to say "don't you worry about a thing, close your eyes and I will make everything go away."

King makes several references in 'Salem's Lot to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a book that deeply influenced him. No where is that more clear than in the way he characterizes Small Town, USA. 'Salem's Lot is the geographic incarnation of Jackson's protagonist, Eleanor Vance, a deeply conservative and self-obsessed woman who secretly longs for something, anything, to "happen" to her. It finally does; she encounters Hill House and allows it to seduce her. The small Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot just about does the same with its vampires...creatures that of course have to be invited in. There is a grim undercurrent running through the novel that the town is pleased something interesting is finally happening to them.  For once they are not being ignored or dismissed.  Someone is listening to them.  Someone cares.  And if the price for that is vampirism, or racism, or anti-semiticism, why not? 

...The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face...

I reread 'Salem's Lot biennially.  It was one of the novels I read in my childhood that made me want to write.  There are a thousand reasons for this.  I could talk about the stealthy and devious way King creeps up on you and makes you believe in vampires.  I could talk about the memorable characters.  I could talk about King's easy, almost folksy prose.  I could praise his intimate understanding of small town people and small town life.  But I think it rises to the level of a great novel because it has a warning for us.  It understands the narcissism that is ultimately at the heart of the vampire tale, the poisonous notion of Prince Charmings and politicians and saviors who we think will sweep in and make all the pain just magically go away.  And maybe above all, it understands the necessity of fighting this in whatever form it takes.

THE DRACULA DOSSIER: DAYS OF DISHONORABLE PEACE, SESSION FOUR

For a full summary of sessions one to three, see here.

WE ARE USED TO GENRE MIXING, we role players.  Shadowrun has been mixing cyberpunk and high fantasy for nearly thirty years.  We've seen steampunk fantasy (Castle Falkenstein), horror westerns (Deadlands), superhero war dramas (Godlike), and multi-genre free-for-alls (TORG, Rifts).  Even the original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons was a bit of a gumbo, a mix of weird fiction, high fantasy, and sci fi.  Yet despite having run horror espionage before (Delta Green and Conspiracy X), something about The Dracula Dossier daunted me when I first sat down to sketch out the campaign.  As an obsessive fan of the novel, it was essential to me that the game feel "Stoker," but I didn't want to neglect the crucial other half of it.  I feel that four sessions in, my gaming group and I finally got the balance right.

Session four of Days of Dishonorable Peace opens with a bang.  Well.  Almost.

Having broken into the tomb of Laura Wexford (our Lucy Westenra) to examine her remains (or to see if the casket is empty), the team instead discovers the opposition has left a nasty surprise for them.  The coffin contains neither a vampire nor human remains but a bomb, a combination of ball-bearings and C-4.  Fortunately for the team, CIA operative William McPherson has eight points in Explosive Devices, saving their lives in a daring rapid defusing.

These leaves questions; who was behind this?  Edom?  Dracula?  How did the opposition know the team was coming?  The agents suspect their Internet searches for the identities of the 1894 network must have triggered red flags, while the players know Dracula has nightly been interrogating CIA agent Lacey Mickelson.  Lacey's player has decided to keep these nightmares to herself, and to play the slow erosion of the character's stability.  This was completely true to the spirit of Stoker, giving us a "Mina" in the group.

While McPherson and Mickelson investigate the bomb design, Douglas Reid and Luna Richter scout the grounds outside the Highgate tomb, and there discover the remains of Laura Wexford.  Whoever planted the bomb simply dumped her skeleton, still in the decayed wedding gown, in the underbrush.  Mickelson, an expert in forensic pathology, decides she needs to examine the remains.  McPherson examines the door, taking samples in the hopes of figuring out exactly what the "red liquid" Van Helsing used a century earlier to seal it.  In claiming the remains, the group finds something else pinned to the decaying gown...the silver and jet "Westenra Brooch."

Lacey has a London contact, a coroner named Parsev Singh.  She convinces him to let her use an examining room and takes the remains there with McPherson.  Reid and Richter head back to their London base of operations to catch up on some rest and pursue another lead; they have managed to make initial contact with Oliver Prenger, the husband of the dossier's last custodian, "Hopkins."  They came across each other as both parties were investigating the same leads.  Reid and Richter decide to set up a meeting.

In the lab, parallel discoveries are made.  The stake driven through Laura's chest was not wood, but iron.  The red liquid used to seal the tomb was also iron.  Further analysis shows this isn't just any iron, this is extremely rare telluric iron.  Given the weird electrical phenomena the team saw in Berlin, it gets them thinking about Faraday cages.

Reid and Richter, meanwhile, meet with Prenger at a cafe near the British Museum.  Prenger is a special secretary to House of Lords MP Philip Douglas, descendent of "Arthur Holmwood" and the current Lord Drumlanrig.  "Hopkins" was really Andrew Miller, an MI6 analyst and Russia specialist.  Prenger is convinced the Russians have something to do with his husband's disappearance.

The conversation opens all sorts of questions; how did "Hopkins" get the dossier?  What is the Russian connection?  Is this recent, or does it go back to "Cushing" and the 1977 fiasco?  More to the point...which came first; did "Hopkins" get the dossier first and then seek out and seduce a man who just happened to be secretary to one of the 1894 legacies, or was it an innocent coincidence?  They discretely don't share this later bit with Prenger.

After regrouping, the team splits again.  The two CIA agents decide to construct a Faraday cage while Reid and Richter set up a second meeting with Prenger, this time at a pub.  While Mickelson and McPherson construct the cage, Lacey starts to confide in him her disturbing dreams and the growing fear she has that Dracula is invading her mind.  When the cage is finished, they try an experiment and put Lacey inside it.  After a flash of blinding headache pain, her connection with Dracula is severed by the cage and complete free of influence, gushes out all that has been happening to her and pleads for help.

Across town at the pub, a second meeting with Prenger is cut short when Reid and Richter realize Prenger has been followed.  In the middle of the bar one of the suspects slides a knife into Prenger's side to silence him.  Richter opens fire and takes down both, but before the surviving assailant can be questioned he kills himself with cyanide.  As they fled the club, they notice a black limousine parked across the street.  Watching them from the back is a beautiful blonde woman in white, wearing dark sunglasses.  The car drives off as things heat up...

THE DRACULA DOSSIER: DAYS OF DISHONORABLE PEACE

The following is a summary of sessions one to three of an ongoing Dracula Dossier campaign.  While this is my individual campaign, with my own take on vampires, Dracula, and the events of the Stoker novel, it does draw heavily on Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's excellent game.  If you have not bought and read these books, do.  Possible spoilers ahead.

BERLIN, 2016 (Episode 1)

In Kreuzberg, a joint operations team consisting of CIA agent William McPherson, MI6 operative Douglas Reid, and BND officer Saskia Richter have set up an observation post to monitor a suspected ISIS terrorist cell.  Hiding among Syrian refugees, there is mounting evidence that the cell has managed to smuggle sarin gas into the nation, and that an attack may me imminent.  The agents are working to verify this before sending in a strike team to shut the cell down.

The problem is, the intelligence doesn't add up.

The Cyprus-based shipping company used to bring in the sarin, for example, has ties to Bashar al-Assad's government, which itself has been known to use sarin gas.  Why would an ISIS cell be working with the Assad government?  There are other irregularities, suggesting another faction--an outside player--might be involved.

Once the presence of the gas is positively confirmed, the team decides it cannot delay any longer.  A strike team is assembled, and under the cover of darkness, prepares to go in.

Things immediately begin to go pear-shaped.  An unseasonal fog comes out of nowhere, obscuring vision.  One by one, electronic monitoring systems start to malfunction and go down.  And someone--or something--starts picking off the strike team with ease.

The operatives themselves go in.  In the darkness and the fog, they encounter a black-clad paramilitary force, soldiers that display uncanny strength and speed.  The one in the lead is unmasked, a pale man with thick, unruly hair and a thick mustache.  He attacks with a knife.  Bullets do not seem to affect him.   Agent Richter is killed, while McPherson and Reid barely manage to escape the scene with their lives.

In the wake of this, the sarin gas is released, killing more than seventy people in neighborhood and causing an international scandal when CIA and MI6 involvement is leaked.  The surviving agents are burned; McPherson goes underground and Reid goes back to his cabin in the Scottish Highlands.

But the events of Berlin reach out to them both.

EIGHT MONTHS LATER...

McPherson finds himself receiving encrypted emails, both to his burner phone and his laptop.  A figure calling himself "Hopkins" claims to know the truth of what went down in Berlin, and hints at a conspiracy far bigger than ISIS or Assad.  The emails direct McPherson to a bus station locker, where inside is a century-old dossier, along with information gathered by Hopkins, suggesting a link between the events in this dossier and an 1888 group of Masonic occultists calling themselves the Golden Dawn.  Hopkins jokingly refers to McPherson as "Jackman" now, and suggests that while he has been forced into hiding for fear for his life, he will do what he can to aid Jackman and his team from the shadows now.  The Dracula Dossier--and the terrible burden that comes with it--is theirs, now.

Meanwhile, at his cabin in the Highlands, Douglas Reid receives a visit from a strange eight-year-old girl.  She is Luna Richter, Saskia's little sister.  While Saskia had made a passing reference to her sister possessing strange "abilities" back in Berlin, Reid didn't pay much attention.  He is forced to now.  The girl, a psychic, seems to have all of the memories--even skills--of her older sister.  It is as if Saskia's brutal murder transferred the whole of her knowledge to her telepathic sibling.  When McPherson shows soon after, and brings the dossier with him, the Berlin team is re-assembled.  They decide to pursue the conspiracy hinted at in the dossier, and find the truth of what happened to them in Berlin.

WHITBY, 2017 (Session 2)

The trio decide to drive south to Whitby, where Dracula made his landing in Britain.  This was his starting point, and thus they decide to make it theirs.  Along the way, McPherson is tracked down by his old CIA partner, Lacey Mickelson.  Taking a leave of absence, she has pursued McPherson to find out the truth behind the Agency burning him.  As the trio arrive in Whitby, Lacey confronts them, and McPherson decides to bring her in.

Though she is skeptical, she agrees to help.  After taking in the "Dracula Experience," an obvious tourist trap, they explore the old town, focusing on the locations described in the dossier.  Hoping to discover the actual names and identities of the 1894 primaries, they track down the tax and residential records for the Crescent in the 1890s.  This is where Lucy Westenra and her mother had their Whitby summer home.  They come across one Amelia Wexford, and her daughter Laura.  The background information suggests Laura Wexford is almost certainly the real life "Lucy Westenra."

With this name secure, the team begins a massive Internet search or any and all available records, slowly piecing together the identities of the 1894 network.

Lucy Westenra/Laura Wexford: A nineteen-year old socialite who died of "heart failure" shortly after her engagement.  There isn't much remarkable about Laura, but the discovery of her name and identity leads the team to the rest of the network.

Arthur Holmwood/Alexander Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig: In 1894 Laura was engaged to Alexander Douglas, the son of Viscount Drumlanrig (a business partner of Laura'a father, Chester).  When Laura died, Douglas inherited her estate (including her home in Hampstead, Wallingham) just as the dossier describes. Shortly thereafter, Alexander's father died in a mysterious hunting accident and Douglas inherited his title.

Mina Harker/Genevieve "Gina" Harper, née Malcolm: Tracking down the famous "Mina Harker" is achieved by searching for Laura Wexford's school records.  Genevieve Malcolm leaves London in 1894 for the continent, and returns Genevieve Harper (providing the next link in the chain).

Jonathan Harker/James Harper:  From his marriage to Genevieve Malcolm, and his passing of the bar exam just a year earlier, tracking down "Harker" presents little difficulty. There is not much on the young solicitor, however, especially after 1894.  More disconcerting is the fact that he was employed by one Peter Hawkins...the same name used by Stoker (who changed all the others).  This suggests that "Peter Hawkins" was itself a cover identity, and that Stoker may not have known his genuine name.

Kate Reed/Catherine Cook: Laura's school records turn up the other classmate as well, Catherine Cook, daughter of Westminster Gazette founder and editor Edward Cook.  A journalist, she fits the description in the dossier.  Tracking down the society page articles she herself wrote (and mentioned in the dossier) leads to both Seward and Morris...

Quincey P Morris/Quincey Adams: The colorful "Texan" of the novel was nothing of the sort.  The son of John Quincey Adams II and great grandson of President John Quincey Adams, Quincey Adams was a close friend of the young Viscount Drumlanrig.  His assignment as an "attache" of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James is concealed in the dossier, and suggests a connection to American intelligence.

Jack Seward/Dr Jonathan Sievers: Sievers and the Viscount Drumlanrig apparently met in the British Army in Suakin, 1885.  Douglas was 20, Sievers was 24.  Sievers returned from duty "shell shocked," and took up work as a police coroner in London.  In 1890, his father passed away, leaving his son a private mental hospital in Plaistow.  Sievers changes his practice to psychiatric medicine.

Abraham Van Helsing/Albert Wilhelm Van Renterghem:  This Dutch spiritualist, psychiatrist, and hypnotist was an associate and friend of Sievers's father, and took the younger doctor under his wing.  A highly respected physician, he took a sabbatical from his work in Amsterdam in 1894, possibly placing him in London.  

(Note: As of this writing, the team has yet to ascertain the identities of Renfield, Aytown, or Cotford)

With these leads, the team decides to make their next stop London, to track down key sites connected to the disastrous 1894 operation. 

LONDON, 2017 (Session 3)

Concerned that their research may have sent up red flags with the opposition--whomever and whatever that might be--the quartet rents a car and travels to London by circuitous routes, using AirBNB to rent a home in Plaistow, near Plaistow Park.  Their research indicates that Siever's asylum, and Carfax, were once located here.

They settle into the small home and set up operations there.  In the beginning they have no greater difficulty than an over solicitous neighbor across the street.  McPherson scouts the neighborhood and discovers a large Eastern European community a few blocks away, including a Romanian father and his London-born daughter running a convenience store.  McPherson uses his impersonation skills to blend in and pass himself off as a fellow immigrant.

But there is a growing sense of being watched as the team further investigates the London locations and draws plans to investigate them.  McPherson--perhaps paranoid--has the sense of being followed and turns to see rats in the street.  Lacey, meanwhile, begins to experience disturbing dreams in which a dark figure comes into her room and interrogates her.  Luna, the psychic, spends the night monitoring her and indeed confronts a dark presence.  

There are other signs as well, but the team presses on.  They pinpoint the location of Laura Wexford's home, Wallingham, in Hampstead, as well as her burial place in nearby Highgate Cemetery (the dossier fictionalizes this as "Kingstead," but records show this is where Laura was buried).  They also locate Siever's former asylum...now an NHS Hematology Treatment and Research Center.  McPherson asks around and discovers the place has a shadowy reputation; heavily policed, there are rumors of people disappearing.

The team decides to stick with Laura.  Under the cover of darkness, they penetrate Highgate and locate the Wexford tomb.  There are signs of recent entry.  

Inside, it is much as the dossier describes, including the sarcophagus of Laura Wexford itself.  As they begin to open this, Luna Richter begins having enigmatic visions; clocks, the sea, the number four.  Only once they have opened the casket does she understand; someone has placed an explosive device her with a timer and C-4.  They have seconds before it explodes...

  

THE DRACULA DOSSIER: A REVIEW

"I write to tell you how very much I have enjoyed reading Dracula. I think it is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years."

Letter, Arthur Conan Doyle to Bram Stoker

Dracula does not immediately present itself as a spy thriller, until you stop and think about it.  Here is a foreign power from the shadows of Eastern Europe, secretly buying up properties and planning the covert invasion of a Western democracy.  Here is an illegal immigrant smuggled into the country, a terrorist in the deepest sense of the word.  Here is a foe secretly recruiting the young and the vulnerable, brainwashing and turning them to his cause.  Here is a conspiracy that threatens the Crown.  Academics have wrangled over how exactly to classify Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece for more than a century, and many have described it first and foremost as invasion literature, the fear of the foreign creeping into society and taking it over.  Seen in this light, it becomes a spy thriller, or at least lends itself to being one with a little help.  That is where Ken Hite comes in.

Some of us have been Hite groupies since the days of Chaosium's Nephilim, and despite a wide variety of RPG credits (he was the line developer, for example, of Last Unicorn's Star Trek: The Original Series) he is probably best known as the guy you go to for painstakingly researched horror games.  We're talking Secret Societies and Major Arcana, we're talking Mage the Sorcerer's Crusade and The Cainite Heresy, we're talking GURPS Cabal and the definitive edition of GURPS Horror.  The list goes on.  Of late he has been with Pelgrane Press, writing the exceptional Trail of Cthulhu around Robin Laws' Gumshoe system.  But it is with The Dracula Dossier, a campaign setting for his Gumshoe-powered game Night's Black Agents that Kenneth Hite outdoes himself.  This thing, ladies and gentlemen, is a masterpiece.

Hite describes NBA as "Jason Bourne meets Dracula," but this is selling the core rules short.  Offering a wide variety of play modes, styles, and options, Agents could just as easily be "George Smiley meets Lestat," "Richard Hannay meets the alien energy drainers from Lifeforce," or "Jack Ryan meets Miriam Blaylock."  Essentially it comes down to the player characters being spies who discover, and take on, a massive vampire conspiracy, but both the type of spy thriller--from gritty, paranoid conspiracy tale to cinematic shaken-not-stirred action--and the nature of the vampires can be tailored to taste.

Agents was good, but the appearance of The Dracula Dossier elevated it to amazing.  While it consists of a full line of materials, I will be talking specifically about two books here; Dracula Unredacted and Director's Handbook.

The backstory goes like this:

In 1894, British Intelligence attempted to recruit the ultimate deniable asset, a vampire.  Their assets--George Stoker and Armin Vambery--had uncovered the existence of these creatures nearly two decades earlier on the front lines of the Russo-Turkish War.  Spymaster Peter Hawkins sends a young agent, Johnathan Harker, to bring the vampire in.  Transport is arranged for him to Britain and a safehouse secured.  But this vampire, Count Dracula, cannot be controlled.  He turns on his handler and launches his own schemes.  British Intelligence has no choice but to recruit others to terminate him.

In the fall-out of this mess, George Stoker's brother, Bram, is assigned the task of collecting all pertinent documents (diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings) to prepare the after action report.  For whatever reason, the original is then heavily redacted and released to the public as a misinformation campaign.  The rogue branch of Intelligence that attempted to recruit Dracula, Operation Edom, goes underground.

Neither Dracula, nor Edom, surrenders so easily.

In World War II Edom attempts to recruit Dracula again, and in the 1970s realize Dracula had left behind his own network of agents that was preying on British Intelligence and feeding secrets to the Romanians.  After the terror attacks of 7/7 in 2011, Edom crawls out of the woodwork yet again, hoping to recruit Dracula to eat his way through Al-Qaeda and ISIS.  But like the back of the book says, "Dracula cannot be controlled and Edom cannot be trusted."

This is where the players come in.  Intelligence agents, they come into possession of the original, unredacted Stoker report.  This is the complete record of the 1894 operation, annotated over the years by three different Intelligence agents (one in the 40s, the 70s, and the present day--charmingly they use the work names Van Sloan, Cushing, and Hopkins after the actors who played Van Helsing).  Using this file, the "Dracula Dossier," they follow up its clues and attempt to hunt down the vampire once and for all, taking on his own massive conspiracy and Operation Edom in the process.

None of this does justice to the immensity of what Hite and co-author Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan have done here.  Dracula Unredacted is Bram Stoker's entire, full-length novel, published with hundreds of annotations scrawled in the margins in three colors of ink by the three different "Van Helsings."  Each of these corresponds to an entry in the Director's Handbook that offers several different takes on what the entry might mean.  Dracula Unredacted is then given to the players as what has to be the most amazing player handout ever conceived, and they use it to steer the campaign.  The players read it, and decide which entries to investigate.  The GM then consults the Director's Handbook and responds by taking the option that best suits his campaign.

For example, Lucy Westenra finds a brooch on the beach in Whitby.  An annotation mentions that this item was not found among her personal belongings after death.  If the players chose to pursue this clue, several different locations for where the brooch might be found are given in the Director's Handbook, as well as options for the brooch's significance.  Is it an occult artifact that calls out to vampires?  An ornament Dracula gives out to his agents?  Just a simple piece of jewelry with no significance at all?  Each choice leads to other options, allowing the players to follow the trail of clues back to Dracula.

In essence we are talking a sandbox campaign here, with the novel itself serving as the map.  The players go where they deem best and the GM responds.

The Director's Handbook also helps the GM set up the structure and purpose of Dracula's conspiracy, as well as determining what sort of vampire the Count really is.  Everything is a choice in this campaign, from the true names of the principal characters (was "Johnathan Harker" really his name, or was this a cover identity) to their exact roles (Quincy P Morris...a Texan?  Really?  Or was this an elaborate cover for an Edom agent or minion of Dracula?).  The end result is that no two playings of the Dracula Dossier would ever be the same.

For hardcore Stoker fans, Dracula Unredacted is a treasure unto itself.  While it is essentially the original Stoker novel, Hite and Ryder-Hanrahan have gone back into the author's original notes to replace characters, subplots, and events eventually cut from the novel.  These have been flawlessly inserted and repurposed.  I will say no more without spoilers, but the way Stoker's famous Dracula's Guest is put back into the book is a stroke of genius.  Even just reading Dracula Unredacted alone is a game of figuring out where Stoker ends and the new additions begin.

Because this is set in the modern day, because just as in our world Dracula was published and made into umpteen films, plays, and television programs, Dracula Unredacted is not even the players' only resource.  Nothing stops them from pulling out their smartphones and tablets in the midst of play, Googling historical figures, locations, and details from the text.  Hite hasn't just made shit up, he's drawn on a ridiculous number of other sources and references for players to chase down.  Again, this makes the Dracula Dossier a genuinely one-of-a-kind experience as reality itself conspires to further the tale.

If you have the kind of group that likes to be genuinely challenged--not just falling back on dice rolls and optimizing character stats--this is for you.  It will push players to the limits of their own ingenuity as they match wits against Dracula and attempt to dismantle his schemes.  If you like gothic horror, historicity in games, globe-hopping spy thrillers, you need to own this.  It is truly unique.

  

DRACULA RETOLD

It is so easy to reinterpret Dracula because none of the book is admissible in court.  Every word of it is hearsay.

I was eight when I first read Dracula.  I can be specific about that because it was the year Frank Langella played the Count on the silver screen.  My father, as an apology of sorts for a particularly nasty bout of drinking and coming home to throw furniture around, brought me to see it.  In retrospect, he must have been feeling particularly guilty.  We didn't do "father-son" stuff, and when we did, it was usually him trying to get me to throw a football around rather than stay in my room with my horror comics.  Taking me to Dracula was almost sorta kinda like actually condoning my weird tastes.

He devoured books the way the Count went through English virgins. 

Whatever else might be said of my father, he was a reader.  A voracious one.  He devoured books the way the Count went through English virgins.  He also had a gift, and I have been frustrated all my life that I didn't inherit it, for remembering every word he read.  Right down to the page it was on.  So over a burger and fries after the film, he mentioned to me that Dracula was a novel.  A "classic."  Maybe, he suggested, I should read it.  Again, this was mind-blowing.  Dad was always trying to get me to read, but books about Babe Ruth and Sitting Bull.  This was Dracula.  My interest piqued, he then took me to the bookstore to pick up the paperback.

I didn't go for the movie tie-in one, with a blow-dried Langella on the cover looming over a woman clearly in the midst of a massive orgasm (not that at eight I picked that up, mind you).  No...I was intrigued by the one beside it, showing a pale, balding old man with white hair, a mustache, and fangs.  "That's what he really looks like," my father told me.  "The movies all get that wrong."

Those words were magic to me.  It meant that my father had actually read Dracula in the past, something inconceivable to me at that stage of our relationship.  But the wording, what he really looks like, was more magical still.  It meant the Counts in the movies were just actors; the real Dracula was out there somewhere looking like an old man.

I went home with that edition.

In modern terms, the Count is Hannibal Lecter.  He is brilliant, sophisticated, and Old World.  He also happens to be a remorseless killer that eats people.  

Stoker's novel is nothing like any of the film versions.  No, not even Coppola's over-the-top exploration of Catholic guilt or Louis Jourdan's suave Continental seducer come close.  In modern terms, the Count is Hannibal Lecter.  He is brilliant, sophisticated, and Old World.  He also happens to be a remorseless killer that eats people.  Yes, there is sexual tension there, but we all know there was a bit of that between Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster too.  It doesn't make Lecter a Byronic hero, and neither should it make Dracula.  But with the exception of Murnau's Nosferatu, film makers seem obsessed with the sex.  It has gotten so bad that these days vampires even sparkle.  But I digress.

Giving (Dracula) a sympathetic backstory makes as much sense as giving the shark in Jaws one.

The point is, of course, that Stoker was writing about a monster...not a man looking for the reincarnation of his lost love (a part of the Dracula myth stolen from Karloff's The Mummy via Barnabas Collins), not a man who surrenders his humanity in a heroic bid to save his land (as per the plot of the new Dracula Untold).  A monster.  Giving him a sympathetic backstory makes as much sense as giving the shark in Jaws one.

But of course, this is something that plagues horror in general and Dracula in particular.  Uncomfortable with the idea that we get off on the sick little thrill of being afraid, we keep looking for ways to make horror intellectual.  "Dracula," an English teacher once informed me, "was about Anglo-Saxon England's fear of the Eastern European.  A dark and swarthy aristocrat comes and rapes Lucy Westerna, whose name means 'light of the West.'"  Then she sneered when I told her I thought it was about 'a vampire.' 

Dracula lends itself to this sort of thing because Stoker wrote a four-hundred page Rorschach blot.  The master stroke of the novel is that we barely ever see Count Dracula at all.  Again, like the damn shark in Jaws, he only pops up when it is time to feed.  But we feel him.  His presence saturates every page.  And these days, when people keep going on about Gone Girl and the novel's use of the unreliable narrator, it is useful to point out this is exactly what made Dracula work.  The novel is told through diary entries and newspaper clippings, and half the time the narrators are writing about things they don't understand the significance of.  Stoker's book is the equivalent of rounding up witnesses to a crime...each of whom gives a slightly different account.  It is so easy to reinterpret Dracula because none of the book is admissible in court.  Every word of it is hearsay.

What does Dracula look like?  Old?  Young?  Is he clean-shaven or does he have a pointy black beard?  What is he doing in London, really?  Does he kill Lucy or is it that quack Van Helsing, who is a "devout Catholic" despite having no problems desecrating the Host, is a "polymath linguist" who can barely speak English, and gives his patient dozens of transfusions from multiple donors despite not knowing the first fucking thing about blood types?  This is why there have been 170 film versions, countless TV appearances, and hundreds of literary retellings.  Because we don't know any of the answers.  Alongside Jack the Ripper, the Count remains Victorian England's grisliest unsolved mystery.

We don't even know if he is dead.  After painstaking reams of vampire lore are poured on us by Van Helsing, all telling us how difficult Dracula will be to kill and how he needs to be staked in his grave, his head cut off and mouth stuffed with garlic before burning the body...he is dispatched by getting stabbed with a knife.  Maybe.  At sunset his body vanishes into a cloud of dust, and the vampire hunters celebrate.  But Van Helsing told us the vampire can shapeshift at sunset, midnight, or sunrise (not at will as in the movies), and witnesses have already seen the Count turn into motes of dust before.  Has Van Helsing suddenly acquired Alzheimer's and forgotten all his lore?  Have they all?

It is these cracks, these plot holes, that Dracula achieves greatness, because everyone fills them in differently.  It is why we can keep going back to it.  While each retelling seizes a shadow of the story and rides it, the original is a whirlwind of uncertainty.  And nothing scares like the unknown.

IN THE SHADOWS OF LOVECRAFT COUNTRY

I have this adorable green Cthulhu plush toy; well, two actually.  One is a proper stuffed animal, with floppy wings and the cutest little face feelers.  The other is a large, soft pillow shaped like the Great Old One's head, complete with tentacles.  What Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) would make of his most famous creation--a titanic mass of world-destroying alien horror--reduced to something that elicits the same response as puppy dogs and kittens, I don't know.  But he is certainly in good company.  Bram Stoker's arch-vampire helps children learn to count on Sesame Street, and Mary Shelley's manufactured monster is now a berry-flavored breakfast cereal.  Lovecraft has joined a rather curious pop culture club.

How do old monsters go from horrifying to huggable?  Part of the problem might be overexposure.  When Stoker penned Dracula in 1897--or when Le Fanu wrote Carmilla a quarter century earlier--readers must have been terrified by the notion of beautiful young girls mysteriously experiencing blood loss and wasting away.  Today, however, there is hardly a single person out there who wouldn't immediately know to stock up on garlic and religious accessories at the sight of two puncture marks on a victim's neck.  Vampires (or more politely, as Buffy put it "Undead Americans") are as common as the common cold.  If fear of the unknown is the greatest terror humans can know, how could we expect vampires to still be scary?  Lovecraft's monstrous alien thing is in the same boat.  We've seen him in comics and video games, RPGs and CCGs, and he's been Cartman's best friend in a Totoro-inspired South Park.  He's become so well known that every four year he runs for President on the slogans "No more years" and "Why vote for the lesser evil?"

But there is something deeper going on here.  In Danse Macabre, his brilliant analysis of the genre, Stephen King described the work of the horror writer as 'psychic judo,' seeking the psychological weak spots of the reader and striking at them.  The problem is, weak spots change.  Sometime towards the end of the 20th century for example, vampires stopped fleeing from crosses.  Then they stopped being 'evil.'  They became sex symbols.  And having eventually lost all credibility they started to 'sparkle.'  This is because society changed.  For the Victorian reader, the most horrifying thing conceivable was being eternally 'damned' and denied the grace of God.  They didn't see vampires as 'immortal,' but rather forbidden from ever entering Heaven.  But if you remove God, damnation, and the soul from the equation, vampires suddenly become attractive.  They sleep all day, party all night, and live forever.  There is no longer a downside.  In an age of Botox, plastic surgery, and endless hours in the gym, who wouldn't drink a little blood to look like the cast of The Vampire Diaries?

Frankenstein is a similar case.  In 1818, the idea of man playing God was radical.  Nearly two centuries later we've split the atom, walked on the moon, and mapped the human genome.  Playing God?  Been there, done that.

And then there is Lovecraft.  In his youth, Howard lived in a universe consisting of a single galaxy, still run by a benevolent God, and following the nice and tidy laws of classical physics.  The world was widely considered a few thousand years old.  In his lifetime, Einstein and his ilk turned Newton inside out, Heisenberg completely reshaped what mankind knew or was even capable of knowing, the world became millions of years old, the universe billions, and our galaxy was just one of countless others.  We went from being God's favorite ape in a neat and tidy cosmos to a microscopic speck of dust in a universe run by chance.  Well...at least that is how it seemed. Lovecraft's weird stories zeroed in with laser-like intensity on all this uncertainty.  He wrote of man's insignificance, of the immeasurable age of the cosmos, of our civilizations being just brief blips in the endless Aeons of time.  This was heavy stuff for its day.

The problem is, most of us have gotten used to these ideas.  There are still flat-earthers who--like four-year-olds covering their ears and chanting "I can't hear you"--deny science and try to live in fantasy land, but reasonable people far outnumber them.  We know the universe is billions of years old and bigger than we can wrap our heads around.  We know the planet was not created for our benefit and just as there were dinosaurs before us there will be something else after.  We've digested this.  And because of that, Cthulhu doesn't pack the same existential wallop.  Hermey the wanna-be-dentist had pulled the Abominable Snow Man's teeth, and now he plays nice with Rudolph, Yukon Cornelius, and the gang.

Ironically, the stuff in Lovecraft that still 'works' isn't the cosmic horror, but the nasty stuff critics have always condemned him for.  The underlying racism and xenophobia common in his work continues to be a psychological sore spot for people today.  In both Europe and America, a fear of invading "primitive cultures" (we politely call them "developing countries") undermining our way of life still exists in the hearts of many people, a fear that Lovecraft would have merrily responded to. And while few people continue to advocate racial purity--as Lovecraft did--the Westboro Baptist Church and Justica Scalia's "argle bargle" of a dissent show that a pervasive fear of "unnatural" and "deviant" sexuality still abounds.  This is yet another area of discomfort Lovecraftian fiction exploits.  And most obvious of all, Lovecraft's fear of religious mania and zealotry remains as pertinent now as ever.  Millions of people live daily with a deep seated fear of foreign religions, and we have all seen the extremes that belief can drive people to.  For all these reasons stories like Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth, an insane basket of xenophobia and sexual deviancy and alien religion, continue to push our buttons, even if The Call of Cthulhu does not.

These themes in Lovecraft, mixed with more common ones such as nihilism, body horror, and fear of death, continue to strike those psychic pressure points.  Yog-Sothoth and Shub Niggurath and Great Cthulhu may have lost their original punch, but it is hard to match the degenerate shock and horror of The Rats in the Walls.  There is still gold in them thar hills of Lovecraft country, if one knows how to pan for it.