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...

  

VEINS OF THE EARTH: A REVIEW

Prior to May 25th, 1977, Dungeons of Dragons was a weird little cocktail, a Long Island Ice Tea mixed up from literary influences like Tolkien, Leiber, Moorcock, Anderson, Howard, and Vance, with a dash of Vietnam to give it bite.  It was a brutal, trippy, occasionally nightmarish little thing.  Then came Star Wars.  In the wake of the Lucasfilm hijacking of fantasy and science fiction, D&D became increasingly more cinematic, more heroic, and more a clearly delineated struggle between Good and Evil. 

I've written about Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing before.  The game is a James Raggi-led campaign to take D&D style roleplaying back to those gritty, weird roots.  With Old School mechanics dialing up the lethality, and atmospheric writing establishing the grim, eerie mood of the game, one of the most striking elements of the game has been the published settings.  All turn sharply away from the high fantasy, Light versus Dark worlds so characteristic of D&D.  

There was, for example, Geoffrey McKinney's divisive and controversial Carcosa, set on the world first mentioned by Ambrose Bierce and later more extensively in Robert Chamber's The King in Yellow.  Pretty much absorbed into the Cthulhu Mythos, this was a setting of weird science, Lovecraftian gods, and nary an elf or dwarf in sight.  The vividly described sorcerous rituals were a turn-off for many, with elements such as ritualized rape, dismembering, and child sacrifice.  Less controversial, but no less weird and wonderful was the Zak S. offering A Red & Pleasant Land.  This presented the land of Voivodja, a "Wonderland" beyond the looking glass ruled by vampiric dynasties (the Red King and the Pale King, the Queen of Hearts and the Colorless Queen) whose sorcerous warfare had turned the realm into a madhouse of chaos and horror.  With inhabitants like the Cheshire Cat, Jabberwock, and the Hatter, Voivodja made even the eerie Wonderland of the Burton films look cheery.  Mention must also be made of Kenneth Hite's Qelong, a setting inspired by Southeast Asian mythology.  Fought over by two "barely conceivable beings" this land has also been filled with horror and madness.  If you are seeing a pattern here; good.  The worlds of Weird Fantasy Role-Playing are not showcases for the struggle between Good and Evil, but rather terrifying arenas in which characters struggle for survival and sanity.

Which brings us at last to Veins of the Earth.

The Underworld isn't a new idea, it's one of the oldest known to man, and it is a staple of both mythology and fantasy roleplaying.  The word "dungeon" is, after all, the first "D."  We are all used to adventures underground.  But Patrick Stuart's spellbindingly written setting book, hauntingly illustrated by Scrap Princess, has a sort of weird alchemy to it that fuses Moria, Virgil's Underworld, Neil Marshall's The Descent, and the terrifying endless labyrinth of House of Leaves.  This is a fantasy world, a fantasy universe, right below our feet.  Where mundane, terrestrial mines and caves end, the Veins of the Earth begin, and woe to the adventurer who crawls into them.  For here "the frightful bulk of night, feebly pushed aside for a moment, as quickly, and with an irresistible violence, regains empire."  You leave the world of daylight behind for "the deeper, more true world...bordered only by light above and fire below, and perhaps not even that."  The entire setting is an endless maze of lightless tunnels and caverns, stretching out for infinity and populated by entities banished from the sane world of light and reason.

This is poetic--and to be certain it is never very clear if the Veins are literally in the Earth or an extradimensional space altogether--but the setting also brings very real concerns to bear.  Darkness rules the Veins, absolute and total, making light the most precious commodity in this underworld.  While there may be places lit by bioluminescent fungi or magic, do not expect this.  It is not the norm.  Running the setting, GMs need to adopt a whole new vocabulary.  "You walk into a room" will not work.  How, if you cannot see, do you know it is a room?  Stuart suggests learning to limit your descriptions to "you see" and bearing in mind how few meters ahead the player characters really can see.  Couple this with the fact that many of these tunnels will involve climbing, squeezing, or crawling...that there is always the very real danger of a sudden chasm in the blackness ahead.  There are detailed and surprisingly realistic 3D cave and tunnel generating systems in the book for just this.

There are other very practical rules as well.  Encumbrance becomes a serious concern when slithering throw very narrow passages, and where does the water and food come from ?  In case you run short, there are some charming rules for cannibalism.  And without light, measuring time has to be done differently.  There are no days and nights, just the endless dark. This all tends to make claustrophobia and madness very real threats.  Veins of the Earth is filled with well-thought out goodies like this.

But this is also a weird fantasy game, and in the absolute darkness, magic and horror flow deep.  There are civilizations down there; the AElf-Adal are a terrifying cross between the Unseelie and the Drow, fae beings born from human dreams and nightmares that still require madness and terror to survive.  Long ago, they were driven from the surface by the very humans they used as psychic cattle, and now they hate humanity as much as they hunger for it.  There are the Deep Janeen, solitary elemental beings of terrible power.  The dErO resemble the UFO conspiracy Greys, and the dwarven Dvagir are a race obsessed with perfecting themselves, a process they associate with Ascent.  The first of their kind emerged from the Core, and they have been working their way up ever since.  The Substratals are Lovecraftian/demonic earth elementals, and the Gnomen are perhaps the least threatening, a race that values and treasures life above all else in the cruelty of the dark.  

Aside from these are monsters, a great many of them, many original and terrifying (think fossils that claw their way out of the stone hungry for the flesh and blood they lost and can never again have).  These just add to the value of the book, either as an utterly unique and terrifying setting, or as a grab bag of ideas to add to your own games and campaigns.

Veins of the Earth completely re-imagines the way we look at the dungeon in ways never really seen before, and is yet another example of the outside-of-the-box thinking that makes so much of Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing a dark jewel of a game.  Use it to add deeper, darker levels to your dungeons, as a particularly grim Land of the Lost into which characters are thrown and struggle to escape back up into the light, or as a sourcebook for inspiration.  With high production values, lyrical and evocative writing, and disturbing illustrations, no one with a taste for weird fiction will be disappointed by it.    

                

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.

  

GODZILLA RESURGENCE (SHIN GODZILLA) : A REVIEW

IT'S EASY TO FORGET, after decades of rubber-suited wrestling matches and plucky Japanese kids, that the original 1954 film Godzilla was a horror movie.  Most of you have likely never seen it.  Ishirō Honda's tale about a gigantic, radioactive monster that emerges from the deep to terrorise a nation is an exorcism. Just nine years after the end of the Second World War, Japan was still traumatised not only by the tens of thousands killed by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the hundreds of thousands killed by the carpet bombing of its cities.  This was a country that had seen a staggering number of men, women and children burned alive, blasted to pieces, and crushed under rubble. A titanic, unstoppable monster with radioactive breath was the war personified, the collective echo of a million terrible memories.  It's a frightening movie, and a melancholy one.

The one that some of you probably do remember is the 1956 Godzilla! King of Monsters.  This was Honda's film severely edited, with all the social, nuclear, and anti-war elements carefully removed and English speaking Japanese Americans and Raymond Burr added in.  All the horror of the original was gone from this American-friendly adaptation; it wouldn't do, after all, to try and sell those "horror of war" bits to the very country that had bombed you.  A commercial success, this is the film that kicked off the "dumbing down" of Godzilla.  Soon there would be a crowd-pleasing match up against King Kong, followed by a long series of marauding kaiju, or giant monsters.  But throughout these Godzilla got cuter and cuter, dancing his little victory jig after saving Japan from the bad guy beasties, while adoring school kids cheered and yelled out his name.  This feel-good Godzilla wasn't just an international crowd pleaser, it was a proud Japanese export in an era where the country was known largely for cheap toys and transistor radios.  Godzilla became a kind of symbol of the rising Japan to the post-War baby boomer generation.

This isn't to say that there haven't been attempts to bring real terror back to the Godzilla franchise, or that some of the films didn't manage to sneak in social issues and concerns.  Yet the recent 2014 American Godzilla is pretty typical of what the films have become.  There is more action and thrills than pathos or terror.

シンゴジラ, or Shin Godzilla (plans to call the English release Godzilla Resurgence have apparently been scrapped by Toho and it will be released under the Anglicised spelling of its Japanese name) is the first Japanese Godzilla movie in twelve years, and a fresh reboot of the series.  The story bears no relation to the 2014 Hollywood version, or any of the Japanese versions before.  Writer-Director Hideaki Anno's film (co-directed with Shinji Higuchi) is a break with all the others, and the spiritual ancestor of the original Honda movie.  It is not a kids movie.  It's not a feel good movie.  There is more political drama than guys in rubber suits knocking down fake buildings.  It is a shockingly realistic film (half the time it looks like a documentary) that seems to ask one very compelling question...what the hell would really happen if a giant monster came shambling up out of the sea?

Like Honda's movie, there is a lot of collective soul searching, conscience wrestling, and trauma facing.  The film comes just five years after the historic earthquake and devastating tsunami that left more than ten thousand dead and a city irradiated.  It comes at a time when neighbouring China is flexing its military muscle right on Japan's doorstep.  It comes in the midst of an American election when one of the Presidential candidates seems ambivalent about looking out for his allies, and Japan fears having to go it alone.  And yes, it comes when the conservative leaning Japanese government is starting to think its long-standing "pacifist Constitution" needs amending.  All of this uncertainty, this fear, feeds into Shin Godzilla, making it a much deeper and richer film.

The plot is simple.  The sudden devastating collapse of the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, a bridge and tunnel allowing traffic to cross the bay, leaves the government scrambling to figure out if this was a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.  Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi (played with steely certainty by Hiroki Hasegawa) has reason to believe it might actually have been caused by a giant creature.  No one believes this idea, of course, until a monstrous tail emerges from the waters of the bay, and later, the creature comes ashore.

One of the most frightening Godzillas ever

I say "creature" because this is not your father's Godzilla.  Drawing on the elements of alien body horror he fuelled his Evangelion series with, director Anno gives us a Godzilla that is a sort of colony organism, a sickening fusion of multiple forms of life bred in the polluted and irradiated depths of the Pacific.  The monster is constantly mutating.  He emerges first as a slithering, limbless horror and gradually, over the course of the film, evolves into something more similar to the Godzilla we know.  But this is not our irradiated dinosaur.  It is a hideous mess of rippling tendrils, ragged teeth, and even the suggestion of little eyes, mouths, and fused spines in the tip of its tail.  As it rampages, it keeps growing and adapting.

Note the tip of the monster's tail

Like Spielberg's Jaws, however, Godzilla actually has surprisingly little screen time in the film.  As with Jaws, Shin Godzilla is far more concerned with the repercussions a disaster like this might have and the way people might respond to it.  The beginning is a long political debate over the use of force, with politicians going head to head over it.  After the Japanese Defense Force fails against the creature, there is mounting pressure from the international community--and especially Japan's neighbours, who worry once this thing is done tearing up Japan they might be next on the menu.  What would happen if Beijing, fearing Godzilla might head its way, might decide a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Tokyo was in order?  These fears are intensified as the nature of the monster becomes clear, and the possibility that just blasting pieces of it off might cause them to grow into separate Godzillas.  All this leads to a long subplot with the Americans, who eventually arm twist the beleaguered Prime Minister into agreeing to a city wide evacuation of Tokyo so that a nuclear weapon can be dropped on it, and Japan--which is strongly against such a strike, races against time to find a solution before it comes to that.

I won't give away the ending, but it should be clear by now this is unlike most of the other Godzilla films before it.  That is a good thing.  It is not a flawless movie--Satomi Ishihara's character, "Kayoko Ann Patterson" who is the American President's special envoy, has some cringe-worthy moments when she tries to play her image of what a brassy American girl should be like--but it is probably the best Godzilla movie since Honda's.  It's effects, a mixture of CGI and traditional Japanese model making and guys in rubber suits, are excellent and have the feel of an authentic Godzilla film. Shirō Sagisu's score is excellent, and incorporates several notes from the original 1954 movie.  All in all this is the right blend of contemporary drama and nostalgia, a surprisingly adult and profound giant monster flick.

We give it four out of five stars.

LAMENTATIONS OF THE FLAME PRINCESS WEIRD FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING; A Much Belated Look

IF YOU WERE, like me, a second generation Dungeons & Dragons player (by which I mean you started with John Eric Holmes' 1977 blue boxed set rather than the original 1974 game), then you were probably one of the nerdy kids in the beginning of E.T. (or more recently Netflix's Stranger Things).  You were likely a boy (though my little 6th grade gaming group included *gasp* two girls), bookish--or worse comic bookish--with an overdose of imagination, and hovering right there on the precarious edge of adolescence.  To you, the original D&D was something the "big kids" or possibly even the adults did.  You snuck glimpses of Greyhawk and Eldritch Wizardry the same way you did your older brother's back issues of Heavy Metal under his bed or your dad's Playboys hidden in the closet.  They were something enticing and dangerous that you didn't fully understand.

Eldritch Wizardry

You see, the original 1974 game was written for adults; it was meant for wargamers with weird fiction leanings, not daydreaming eleven-year-olds.  It caught on first with the highly experimental 1970s college crowd, and in their hands took on heady overtones of sex and drugs and post-Vietnam PTSD before eventually trickling down to us.  But the '77 Blue Box began a long process of sanitising all that, making it safe for the kiddies.  Editor Holmes was a professor of neurology and a child psychologist, and in his capable hands D&D became something to stimulate developing imaginations.  That was where I first found it, in the Gifted and Talented Education classes my school stuck me in.  Unlike the early issues of Dragon magazine, there was no nudity, profanity, or adult elements in its pages.  Don't get me wrong, Blue Box was thrilling.  There were dragons and wraiths, goblins and pit traps, but the older edition had the scantily clad warrior ladies, the nude sacrifices, and demons that hinted at dangers of an altogether different kind.

The Child-Friendly Blue Box 

'77, of course, also happened to be the year geekdom was forever transformed by something called Star Wars, and this pretty much drove the stake through the heart of D&D's darker, weirder overtones.  From there on in every edition of D&D was going to be good versus evil, black against white, with epic heroes and lots of action scenes.  First it went more Tolkien than Howard, eventually jettisoning even Tolkien's moral complexity for Dragonlance.  And when the reactionary and deeply paranoid 80s rolled around, D&D was forced to get even more squeaky clean in response to witch hunters like Jack Chick and MADD who themselves were so incapable of separating fantasy from reality that they assumed D&D player's couldn't either.  In response, terms like "gods," "demons, and "devils" (anything that might offend the Inquisition) were changed to "powers," "tanar'ri," and "baatezu" respectively, and the 1989 Writer's Guidelines for Dragon magazine expressly forbade "profanity, graphic violence or sexual activity, or any other adult topics."  Any elements that could possibly have made D&D "weird" rather than "fantastic" was cast out into the void.

20 years later, an American expatriate living in Finland decided to go looking for them.   

Now before I set someone off (and Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing has a history of setting people off) I am not saying author James Raggi faithfully recreated old school D&D.  What I am saying is that he managed to capture the impression of it that existed in the minds of those of us who came to the game in the late 70s and 80s...that feeling that our Holmes and Moldvay sets were full of magic, but that the original set possessed a darker magic, a stronger sorcery that the adults had made forbidden to us.

What Raggi did was to re-imagine a D&D that rather than gradually downplaying and starving its weird elements, took the weird home, gave it a cozy place down in the basement to sleep, and fed the weird by luring the neighbouring kids home for it to eat.  Now it is grown into something Lovecraft would be proud of...

Let's cut to the chase; Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is what the title tells you it is.  "Weird fiction" as a term predates the modern "horror" and "fantasy" genres, and described stories that were macabre or unsettling.  "Weird Fantasy" then pretty much explains that what you are getting here is a fantasy game with dark, surreal, unnerving elements.  What Raggi did was to re-imagine a D&D that rather than gradually downplaying and starving its weird elements, took the weird home, gave it a cozy place down in the basement to sleep, and fed the weird by luring home the neighbouring kids for it to eat.  Now it is grown into something Lovecraft would be proud of.

What is this "Weird?"  Author James Raggi writes in the Referee Book;

The main thing that separates a Weird Tale from a conventional horror story is the forces completely out of the control of those who encounter them. A thing that cannot be explained, cannot be defeated, cannot be solved.

He goes on to point out this is easy to achieve in a piece of fiction, where the author has complete control, but poison to a successful roleplaying game, where players must have freedom to act as they will.  The trick then is to take that sense of overwhelming alienness, of hopelessness, of incomprehensible powers and load them into the game...then letting the player's respond to them without railroading.  Much of what makes Weird Fantasy work is tone.  Mechanically, it is little different from any old school B/X edition; the Weird comes from the grim tone of the writing, the sensational and shocking artwork, and the willingness to deal head on with graphic violence, sexuality, and the surreal.

Some reviewers have classified it as a "retro-clone."  It isn't.  Retro-clones appeared when D&D became the property of new publisher Wizards of the Coast, and in a marketing strategy to popularise their new version of the game but of the game's content was made public property.  The idea was that third party publishers would capitalise on the brand name to produce a whole slew of content for the new edition. The flip side of this was that those who were not enamoured with the new version, or who longed for previous, out-of-print editions, could use the open content material and "wed" it back to the earlier mechanics (mechanics cannot be copyrighted, only their artistic presentation).  So independent designers created "retro-clones" like Swords & Wizardry (a close imitation of original D&D) or Labyrinth Lord (a clone of the 80s Moldvay/Cook edition).  These games felt like, and played like, the originals.  James Raggi took advantage of the same realities that made retro-clones possible, but Weird Fantasy Role-Playing doesn't actually recreate any older edition.  Mechanically it is very close to original D&D, but it is very much its own game.

Something it did borrow from old school D&D is the gritty, "fantasy Vietnam" aspect.  Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is very much of the spirit of the original edition in that hit points are low, the world is lethal, and death comes very quickly.  It brings to mind the now-famous "Calithena" post to an old school D&D forum on Dragonsfoot and quoted by Rob MacDougall; 

“When you’re in an old-school dungeon you’re in @*%!ing VIETNAM. Check EVERYTHING. Clear out EVERYTHING. Don’t take ONE STEP MORE than you have to until you’re COMPLETELY SURE it’s clear. Check EVERYTHING for traps. Search EVERYTHING. … THE GM WILL USE IT TO @*%! YOU OVER. Be PROACTIVE: set traps and ambushes for the monsters before they do it to you. Find a position of tactical advantage and DUMP FIREBALLS, FLAMING OIL, AND BARRAGES OF ARROWS on your enemies. And even if you do everything right, you STILL might get screwed by wandering monsters.”

Be Careful What You Touch

This is very much the case in Weird Fantasy.  In many of the post-Star Wars editions of D&D, you could feel confident that you were the "hero" and would survive to see the credits roll.  Not so in Raggi's game.  Going into a dungeon is Hell and there are no assurances everyone is coming out intact.  Worse still, no-one is promising a good death, a heroic death, or even a meaningful death.  A careless mistake, a lack of caution, an overabundance of curiosity can easily get your character killed.

Added to this old school lethality is a heavy layer of grim. Weird Fantasy uses the four standard old school character classes (Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric and thief-like "Specialist") plus the optional racial classes (Elf, Dwarf, Halfling),  These are presented mechanically close to their D&D cousins, but considerably darkened.  Fighters are those who have been "willing to slaughter at another's command" and "immersed in the worthlessness of life."  They "have seen the cruelty of battle, have committed atrocities that in any just universe would damn them to Hell, and have survived."  Screw "fantasy Vietnam," that reads like "fantasy Apocalypse Now."

The Current Edition's "Rules & Magic" Book

Magic-Users, meanwhile, do not cower from the supernatural like sane and normal people, but instead "revel" in its "darkness."  "They see the forces of magic as a new frontier to explore, a new tool for the attainment of power and knowledge.  If it blackens the soul equal to that of any devil, is is but a small price to pay." Clerics are just as likely to be religious fanatics and witch hunters as beneficent healers, and Specialists (the rogues or thieves) are "inspired by greed, boredom," and "idle curiosity" to risk "life and limb simply because a less active life is distasteful to them."  

The demihumans aren't treated with kid gloves either.  Dwarves are a "dying race" incapable of change and adaptation.  The world has moved on and their can't move with it.  Elves are creatures of Chaos, the magical Fae, who like Dwarves are fading and no longer belong in the world. 

Arguably none of this makes Weird Fantasy Role-Playing any different really from a game like Warhammer.  This isn't bright and shiny "high fantasy," its more of gritty real-life mind-set stuck into a fantasy world.  Where Raggi's game goes off on its own and really begins to (darkly) shine is its "weirdness."

...feelings of vulnerability and helplessness are important to Weird tales...knowledge equals power (and) familiarity equals boredom...destroy familiarity by not using, or subverting, cliche elements of game worlds or adventures...Players may show up expecting the usual six-ability-scores-with-classes game, with opponents taken out of a manual and treasure generated off a chart or a list.  Don't give it to them!

- James Raggi, "The Weird" 

One of the tools Weird Fantasy uses to achieve the uncertainty of the Weird is its utter lack of a bestiary.  There are no lists of goblins, hippogriffs, and trolls here.  Instead there are guidelines for creating your own, unique, monsters.  These are meant to be used sparingly; Raggi actively discourages conjuring up comfortable hordes of orcs for players to kill and recommends replacing them with human adversaries instead.  Humanoids are, after all, the safe and tidy "high fantasy" answer to giving the players something to fight while simultaneously skirting around the whole "murder" issue.  Weird Fantasy rubs your face in it.  Fighting animals can be used for spice, but monsters--real monsters--should be used sparingly.  They are horrors and aberrations that challenge the nerve and sanity as much as battle prowess. 

From "The God That Crawls" Adventure

In addition to the adversaries, the supernatural wielded by player characters was made darker and weirder too.  While the Cleric and Magic-User spell systems operate just like old school D&D, and many of the spell names read the same, they have been extensively rewritten to give them an eerie, eldritch feel.  New spells have been added, like the spectacular "Summon," which allows the creation of a random horror right then and there.  This is consistent with the game's overall approach to the supernatural as something alien, intrusive, and corrupting.

The overall effect is the creation of a gritty, old school D&D game suited perfectly to more surreal settings and horrifying adventures.  This is a game of atmosphere and mood, more Call of Cthulhu than Dungeons & Dragons 3, 3.5, 4, or 5e.  As we shall see in upcoming reviews, this has generated a lot of support for the game, with darker and more horrifying scenarios and supplements than we have seen for fantasy roleplaying in a long time.  It gives Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing that freshness, that awe, that chill old school D&D delivered when we were kids first exposed to it, an manifests that "eldritch, primordial" D&D we imagined we had missed.  If you are looking to feel twelve again, playing D&D in the darkened basement, heart pounding as your character turns every corner, this game might be for you.