Halfway Station 3.0

“Perhaps at the end the little things may teach us most.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula

Here’s my retrospective on The Dracula Dossier campaign, based on my thoughts while running it and feedback from the players during the campaign and in discussion after it closed. I suppose in a sense it’s a review, based on some 50 sessions of play over a year and a half, and the odd one-shot with different players.

TL:DR – highly recommended, the best campaign I’ve ever run, even better than The Pirates of Drinax.

The Dracula Dossier and the Adventures

This campaign was great fun for all of us; well-paced, atmospheric, scary in the early stages but with the PCs – and players – gaining confidence as they learned how to exploit the vampire’s weaknesses. All the published adventures are well thought out, and while each is built around a different kind of vampire with a different plan, it’s easy to incorporate them into a single campaign.

The published materials are well-written, and the original Dossier in particular lends itself to an improvisational style, because wherever the players’ inclinations take them, there’s a place, a person or a thing written up in just enough detail that you can absorb it quickly and insert it on the fly. It’s especially useful that many of them have multiple options – a person, for example, can be innocent, an asset for one of the human organisations, or a minion of one of the supernatural factions. Most of the time, I didn’t decide what an NPC’s allegiance was until well after the players had engaged with them, and selected it based on what I thought would be most fun.

The PCs have encountered 25-30% of those people, places and things, so it would be entirely feasible for us to play the campaign again at some point, with a different kind of vampire and avoiding the things we’ve already done. In particular, there are a lot of things in the UK and southern France which the players skirted around, and either could be a whole campaign.

There’s a huge amount of information for the players to absorb, and in the early stages of the campaign you need to telegraph leads quite strongly so they stand out, perhaps more strongly than I did.

Using SWADE

I used SWADE instead of Night’s Black Agents for the core rules because I don’t like Gumshoe as a game engine, simple as that.

I added rules for Heat, Solaces, Symbols, Safe Places, and Contacts (a weaker form of Connections), and suggested adding the Logistics rules from Sprawlrunners. Only one player was interested in any of that, and then only in the Contacts; so that was all wasted effort.

There were comments that SWADE needs more Edges, especially non-combat ones; I think for the next game I will take up one player’s suggestion that people who want new Edges can propose them, with the GM having a veto.

Most of the problems we encountered were related to fluency with the combat rules or encounter balance. The full-on Situational Rules for SWADE combat are quite crunchy, and slow play down a lot if you use them; but many of the character development options are based on exploiting those rules, so if you don’t use them, you shut the door on a number of PC Advances.

Conviction is immensely powerful, and if you let PCs use more than one Conviction per turn, it becomes overpowered. So in future, they can’t.

Double damage from magnetised iron and PCs always going first in every combat round tilted things too far in the players’ favour, and I wouldn’t use those again.

The house rule that no enemy NPC may use more than one Benny on a given roll works well; it can stay. The house rule that whenever an enemy could use a Benny it does so if a 1d6 roll scores less than or equal to the number of GM Bennies remaining is too restrictive because they do too many stupid things, so it will be dropped.

One thing we might tinker with next time is the rate of Advances. There was general support for the idea of Advances being closer together at the start of the campaign, getting gradually further apart as the game progresses. That would extend the viable length of a campaign.

Children of the Night

I had three different kinds of vampires, four kinds of human minion, and werewolves, all of them worked out in some detail. That was a waste of effort, and I should have limited myself to soldier allies and vampires from the core rules. The strength of the vampires is in their cunning and adroit use of human minions, and the strength of those minions is in numbers, weapons, and tactics. If an NPC has more than about three special abilities, I can’t remember them and the players gun them down before they have a chance to use more than that anyway. What would have been useful is adding precalculated combat options to the NPC statblocks so that I didn’t need to work them out on the fly. I’ll do that next time.

It’s unlikely the players will figure out how the vampires worked, and I won’t use that kind of bloodsucker again; but after promising the group “no Cthulhu mythos and no vamps from the core rules” I gravitated to Telluric vampires, whose powers are all tied to the Earth’s magnetic field. That makes them deadly if you don’t know their weaknesses, but once you do, they’re not too hard to handle, and likewise werewolves. What did scare the players were Renfields, who were built as combat-focussed Legendary PCs; so in a sense they were fighting themselves, and that was tough.

Running the Game

I found it useful to work through all the materials I had – the most useful for this purpose were the Directors’ Handbook and The Edom Files – and put together a timeline of events going back to 1466. It was this which suggested to me that the SOE mission to Romania in 1940 must’ve woken up the wrong vampire and thus reignited the dormant war between vampiric factions.

Three factions for the PCs to play off against each other, with a couple of independent actors, is about right; simple enough to remember, complex enough to be interesting.

The default Conspyramid didn’t really work for me, so I built a more corporate structure for Dracula with each Bride running one of the main divisions. EDOM and Lilith both had very flat structures relying on a small core team, buffed by mercenary specialists hired in as needed, which made them open to using the PCs as contractors.

Don’t get too attached to your early drafts of the conspiracy, because the conspyramids mutate in play according to what your players get up to; let them, and glory in surfing the ragged edge of chaos.

Having a ‘back office’ pseudo-PC (Hopkins) the PCs could use for skills they didn’t want to invest Advances in worked well; I think we should do that again, although there was no benefit in giving her a detailed statblock and next time I would make her a shared Connection. Or, if we go for an SF game next, the ship’s AI.

A campaign which lasts 30-50 sessions works well though; doesn’t overstay its welcome, but lets you play with some of the cool toys at Legendary before it closes. This one could have gone on longer, as we followed the collapse of Dracula’s organisation and the fighting over who picks up which pieces, but once you’ve dealt with Dracula himself, it would be an anticlimax.

Better to go out on a high note.

“No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula

Vauxhall Cross, London, April 2014: Cartwright

“Ah, Mr Cartwright. Do come in. Thank you for meeting us so late in the evening. I believe you know my assistant, Miss Westenra?” D is old school, military moustache and tweed suit. Cartwright reminds himself that D may be a good deal older than he looks.

“Yes – we met last year, in Vezelay.” Miss Westenra has perfect posture and is dressed in an elegant but understated fashion. She smiles and focuses her attention on Cartwright in that… special… way he has become all too familiar with this last couple of years.

“Excellent. That will be all, thank you, Mr Biggs… Now, Mr Cartwright, you must know there are only a few ways out of this room for you, so I am puzzled as to why you asked for the meeting? What is it, in short, that you want?” Cartwright decides there’s no point lying with a mind reader in the room.

“D, I’m an espionage junkie. I just want to stay in the game, and I was trained by SIS, so I see the game as a big team effort that needs state backing. What I’d like is a job with EDOM; field agent, analyst, or Q department, I don’t mind which. I already know what’s going on and I’m more of a subject matter expert now than most of the people you already employ. Also, I would prefer to work for my own country. However, if you aren’t buying, I’ll make a pitch to the CIA.”

“Ha! You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that. You think you could get out of here alive?”

“My team killed St Armand. We killed Thonradel. We killed Dracula. Do you think I’d just walk in here without a plan? Do you want to bet against me?”

“Suppose we agree. What happens when you get too old for the game?”

“Ultimately, I retire to the Isles of Scilly, where strangers are easily identified and asking questions gets you talked about. But that’s a long way off.”

“Well, Mr Cartwright, you do have one additional qualification which would be very useful to me, and that is your connection to Sayaret Aluka and its – shall we say – ultimate controllers. What do you say, Miss Westenra?” The lady says nothing but simply nods her head gracefully in assent.

“Very well, Mr Cartwright, welcome to the team.” Cartwright relaxes just a little. Good, he thinks. Maybe I can find out what the deal is with vampires and earthquakes. We never did get to the bottom of that.

“I trust Grade 6 and its emoluments will be adequate to begin with? No need to sign anything; if you betray us, we will simply kill you.”

D smiles unpleasantly.

“And then you’ll carry on working for us anyway.”

Exeter, Devon, April 2014: Blythe

“Mrs Blythe? There’s a postcard for you, from Santiago. I didn’t realise you knew anyone in South America. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

“Would you be a dear and read it to me? I think I need new glasses; everything is so blurry.”

“Of course. It says: ‘Thank you for the lovely letters, we all read them with great interest. We found your old friend in the end, and we gave him your regards – and Gerald’s. Get some rest now, you’ve earned it.’ Huh. Strange message. Oh, and it’s signed ‘Cartwright and Friends’. Do you know them?”

“Yes dear, I do. They visited me here once. Charming young men, especially the German one.”

And the birdsong outside in the twilight is sweeter than it has been for forty years.

Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv, May 2014: Lonely

Skyscrapers loom over the apartment blocks just a short walk from the city centre; a tranquil suburb. Lonely ambles through the sunshine with the confident walk of a man who has killed vampires and fears no lesser beings. He’s a different person from the man who used to sit in his aunt’s café trying to make one cheap cup of tea last all morning.

He’s dressed like a man who somehow neglected to declare the full extent of the haul from the safety deposit boxes in Vienna, and the tailor has managed to cut his suit so the knives aren’t obvious. Lonely doesn’t trust guns. A knife only has one thing to break, never runs out of ammo.

It’s a warm sunny day, he has a hot foreign girlfriend, and more money than he can spend in a lifetime. Things could be worse, he thinks, as he rings the doorbell of Lilith’s current apartment.

Inside are Weinberg, Sternberg, and a few other women who gaze at Lilith as if they were her worshippers, which they might well be. Wait – isn’t that Gertrude Bell? Lilith smiles at him.

“Welcome!” she says. “Now, business first. We’re all friends here. The government of Romania has developed something of a power vacuum, and I think we should place it under new management…”

GIGN HQ, Satory, France, June 2014: Vincent

With what he knows now, even after only a few months as a fearless vampire hunter, there is no way back to freelance security for Vincent. Bodyguarding rich Arabs seems hollow and pointless.

He has spent a couple of months nosing around Paris and Madrid looking for signs of a monster hunting squad to join; he has just left one, so he has some idea how to find them, and certain elements of Mossad would put in a good word; but there is no luck, even with help from Hopkins, and he can only press things so far without seeing the inside of an insane asylum.

So now he is back in Satory, in his best suit, with a CV in his hand. If anyone in France comes up against vampires or werewolves, it will be GIGN. Or so he hopes.

“M’sieur? This way please, they will see you now.”

Vincent grinds out his Gauloise in the ashtray and follows the young woman’s tapping heels to the interview office.

Vienna, Austria, August 2014: Ritter and von Dolingen

“Herr Ritter! So nice of you to come. I know you’ve been trying to find me, and there was really no point in delaying the inevitable. Do try some of the Sachertorte, it’s quite exceptional; they say it was invented here.”

“Several places make that claim. I hope that Vienna’s reputation as neutral ground still holds?”

“It does. If I’d intended to harm you, Herr Ritter, lunchtime at a fashionable café during high tourist season is not what I would have chosen.”

“Then what do you intend, Countess?”

“Herr Ritter, I’ll come straight to the point, as that family in the… bold shirts are already eyeing up our table. I like the good things in life. Continued access to them depends on a steady flow of cash. I still have contacts in the financial world, but I plan to take a back seat for some years until the excitement dies down. I need a front man to represent me, and I think you’d do very well at that. My perception is that unlike some of your friends, your attitude to people like me is one of live and let live. I propose that we work together, and we both become very rich. Name your terms.”

“Your former employer took some extreme measures to ensure loyalty, Countess.”

“And what good did it do him, in the end? No, Herr Ritter, I shall bind you to me by simple greed. So long as the partnership is in both our best interests, it will endure; what do you say?”

Tel Aviv, March 2020: Smyth and the Ladies

“So that’s the whole story,” Smyth says to Rudek as he turns the steaks on the barbecue; rare for Emilia and himself, well done for everyone else. Night is falling, but neither of them worries much about that anymore.

“Where does that leave you, then?” Rudek asks. “Another beer?” Smyth accepts. Over by the pool, the ladies are sunning themselves and talking animatedly about something neither man can hear. Judging by the laughter and cries of “Noooooo! Really?” it’s some sort of amusing gossip.

“Thanks. Christina and Natalya are free to live their own lives; they didn’t have much chance to do that before. As children we were all forced into athletic training, then they were kidnapped at 16 or 17 and converted into Renfields. Then more training and a mandatory career as bodyguards and fixers for vampires. I’m not sure how slowly Renfields age, but I think the girls look to be in their early twenties!” Rudek nods in agreement.

“It’s a similar story for me and Emilia. Neither had a ‘normal’ life. I quickly realised the girls are different people from the ones I knew at the Institute, whereas Emilia and I have gone through traumatic times together (more or less). So, we became a couple as did Cristina and Natalya. In hindsight, I think my ex was never really interested in me, she just wanted to be close to my sister; that wasn’t legal in Romania until 2001. All four of us are still in the bodyguard – fixer – assassin line of work as we don’t really have the knowledge, experience, or contacts for a major career change.”

“Sometimes,” Rudek says, gesturing at the sunny garden, “I think about leaving all this and going back to work. If I did, would you be interested?” Smyth shakes his head.

“We’re affiliated with Lilith, but not fully part of her organisation – I don’t think Lilith would trust Natalya and Christina enough, she can’t Renfield Emilia, and I don’t think she would have Renfielded me even if I agreed. However, we’ve all proven ourselves and we’re very useful as deniable assets. In return I have access to Hopkins for the occasional ‘assist’. Our assignments are strongly tilted towards helping the underdog as my views have been redirected. Pretty much the same deal she has with Firîste, come to think of it.”

Rudek’s shrug somehow conveys “Well, okay, but if you ever change your mind…” The two sit in companionable silence for a moment before Smyth continues.

“Happily, I died after a few years, but I got better with help from Emilia and Lilith. It was bound to happen I suppose – Emilia tends to get over-excited and some of those love bites never really healed! It also solved any issues about us all aging at different rates. At least now we can age together. As a hobby, I’m still hunting down those responsible for the kidnappings from the Institute and those involved in kidnapping Emilia. And speaking of Emilia, here she comes…”

Londres, Northwest Argentina, April 2024

“Hello, my name is… well, call me Ahmad, it’ll do. May I buy you a drink?”

“Pleased to meet you, and yes you may. This one is empty. I’m Ida.”

“So, I see you here every day. For years now. What’s your story?”

“A man told me to meet him here. I can’t explain, I just feel compelled to wait in case he turns up.”

“Hah! Funny, the exact same thing happened to me! His name wasn’t John, was it? It was? What a coincidence. What do you do for a living?”

“I suppose you could call me a travel agent. What about you?”

“Microbiologist. So, this John of ours… Do you think he’s coming?”

“Probably not.”

“But you wait, just in case. Me too… If you like, we could wait together?”

“Why not? But I should warn you, it’s impossible to get me drunk. I have a tolerance for alcohol you wouldn’t believe.”

Fin

GM Notes

I like to round out each campaign with the surviving characters looking back on their adventures some time later, and this is what came out of the email exchanges about that.

I delight in the irony that having spent the best years of their lives fighting vampires, all the PCs wound up working for other vampires. That wasn’t planned, but it is perfection in terms of the genre tropes.

This has been the best campaign I’ve ever run, despite some hiccups early on. As usual, I’ll do a retrospective of lessons learned, for my own benefit in future campaigns and the benefit of others considering running The Dracula Dossier; that will be the final post for the campaign, and then I’ll take a break to recover while I decide what to do next.

“No one holds command over me. No man, no god, no Prince. Call your damnable Hunt. We shall see who I drag screaming down to Hell with me.” – Vampire: The Masquerade

Ruta Nacional 40, March 2014, Ten Minutes Ago

Ritter checks his weapons for the tenth time and says: “Why us? Why is it us doing this? Why aren’t EDOM or the CIA or Mossad fighting the vampires?”

Behind his back, a Sayaret Aluka operator mutters: “What am I? Chopped liver?”

No-one hears her over the strained laughter from the other agents.

Ruta Nacional 40, Now

As Dracula moves closer with murder in his eyes, Smyth wonders whether killing him will make the others stop fighting. Probably not, he decides, we couldn’t take the risk, so we’d have to kill them anyway, and they know that, so they’ll keep fighting if only to save their own skins.

Ritter shakes his head to clear it, extracts himself from melee with the Renfield and the werewolf, somehow not giving either of them an attack on him as he goes, and pumps his shotgun as fast as he can into the werewolf, eventually killing it. His attacked SA operator fires a short, controlled burst at the Renfield, but misses it.

Smyth and Emilia slash furiously at Count Dracula, and Emilia inflicts an unbelievable amount of damage on him – damage which would have killed any four normal men.

The isolated pair of SA operators focus all their attention on defending themselves against the melee attacks from the Renfields they’re facing, which means they withdraw without being injured.

Lonely hacks the Renfield in front of him to pieces in a frenzy, but when using his off hand against the werewolf he only manages to shake it.

Cartwright steps back from the Renfield and werewolf who have just dropped his attached SA operator, and guns them both down with magnetised iron from his shotgun. This frees up Vincent to shoot two Renfields in the back on full auto, and he drops them both.

The surviving Renfield and werewolf both miss their targets but Count Dracula – badly wounded as he is – resorts to his powers of mental domination. Emilia and Smyth see him appear to evaporate into mist before disappearing, while his voice echoes in their minds: Run. Run away from me as far and as fast as you can. Smyth manages to resist this telepathic order, but Emilia does not, and leaves the fight, followed by the faithful Messy the Wander Dog.

Ritter takes careful aim at the Renfield before him and kills him with a headshot. Lonely meanwhile stabs the surviving werewolf with Lilith’s Bite, his trademark weapon, and kills it.

Smyth switches his melee weapon for the M16 SA lent to him, and scans the area through the SLR sight, looking for Dracula. The Count is hunkered down next to one of the burning cars, only a few yards away, in the best cover he can find. Normally he would be able to sneak away, but…

“Got you,” Smyth says quietly, and shoots him cleanly in the head. Dracula finally collapses, incapacitated.

Aftermath

While Cartwright stabilises the downed Sayaret Aluka operator and bandages Ritter’s wounds, the rest of the team cut Dracula’s head off and put head and body, suitably bagged, in separate cars. Emilia and Messy slink back after a few minutes. On reflection, they decide to behead the Renfields and werewolves too, just to make sure. The police will later issue a statement bemoaning drug-related gang violence. As Ritter observes, what got Dracula killed was his arrogance; if he’d left the team alone, or run away when he could, they wouldn’t have needed – or been able – to kill him.

Having hacked the satnav to steer everything onto a road which they have just blown up and littered with burning cars and dead bodies, they decide to get the Hell out of Dodge. There’s a lake not far off, where they abandon the incriminating evidence before using thermite to incinerate Dracula’s remains and anything else they really don’t want found, and dump the ashes into the lake. Everyone is fit enough to hike out.

“What now?” Smyth asks. “I mean, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve done what I set out to do.”

“We need to get out of the country,” Ritter says, “And then we have some phone calls to make. I want to know how much of Dracula’s organisation is still active.”

“Isn’t Chile on the other side of those mountains?” says Lonely.

“I’ve always wanted to see Chile,” says Cartwright.

The camera dollies back and up as the team starts moving towards the nearest pass through the Andes, disappearing into the sunset.

GM Notes

The team got lucky in this fight. First, they killed everyone else in Dracula’s car, so he didn’t have any mobile blood bags to heal himself with. Second, Emilia inflicted four Wounds on him in one hit, taking him up to five – vampires in this campaign have Tougher Than Nails and Improved Nerves of Steel, so they have five Wounds and (being Undead as well) ignore Wound Penalties. Third, and this was planning more than luck, they set up the ambush so that Dracula was facing off against the two characters best suited to dealing with him and made sure they had the right gear to do so. Even so, without Smyth doing massive damage with his last shot, Dracula would have escaped using his invisibility. Plus, throughout the session I rolled appallingly badly, and the PCs rolled really well.

Ordering Emilia to attack herself or any of the PCs would have triggered a second saving throw against the Power, so it was safer to tell her to run for it.

For this episode I took a leaf out of Dragonbane‘s book and set up some combat actions for the Bad Guys in advance, including pre-calculating everyone’s Parry, Toughness, their probable actions and the dice rolls required for each. That was very helpful and I should do it more often.

Next up: Epilogue.

“The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup
Or disappear into the potter’s ground?
When the man comes around”
– Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around

London, Two Days Ago…

“Go secure.”

“Secure.”

“Hound – D here. Prince says our favourite freelancers have picked up a Mossad kill team in Tel Aviv and boarded a flight to Buenos Aires. Take some Jacks and find out what they’re up to.”

“Sir. Rules of engagement?”

“Observe and report. If you must choose a side, it would be useful if our biological assets were fully independent.”

“Understood.”

Northwest Argentina, Last Night

The team decide to split the party, with Cartwright, Ritter and Vincent heading off on an eight-hour round trip to the airport to plant a bomb in Dracula’s helicopter in the hope of killing Varkony, while the rest double back to the Inca ruins to investigate the cave there.

Cartwright convinces the rest that the hotel booking and the helicopter are decoys, with Dracula arriving via road from the south and going directly to the ceremonial mound in the ruins; so once those two side quests are dealt with, they will get Hopkins to insert dummy road closures into the satnav data for the other ways into Londres, then set up an ambush on Ruta Nacional 40.

Lonely begins by stealing some outerwear and boots left in a hut by a construction worker to mask his scent from any werewolves that might be around. With Smyth and Emilia providing remote support, he sneaks through the wire fences marking off the Eastern Ceremonial Mound and up to the cave on the south side of the mound. Pausing on the threshold, he can hear a bored conversation in Spanish between two guards and see the glow of a lit cigarette. Pulling his night vision gear into place, he sees the cave has a variety of crates, with two guards sitting on some of them, and beyond the guards, an opening leading deeper into the mound.

After some consideration, he decides to try sneaking past the guards to examine what’s beyond them. Using the crates as cover, he manages this, and finds himself descending some stairs into a room perhaps nine metres by eleven, again with a number of crates scattered around, and double doors at the far end. Lonely has seen this kind of crate twice before, and both times it has been in one of Dracula’s secret biowarfare laboratories. He steals up to the doors and can hear footsteps beyond them, approaching. He takes cover among the crates and is disconcerted to see a werewolf emerge from the corridor beyond. It pauses on the threshold, nose wrinkling; that smell is like one of his colleagues, and at the same time, also not like them.

While it’s puzzling this out, Lonely steps forward boldly and unloads a pepper spray full on its muzzle, before turning to run back up the stairs as it sneezes violently and roars imprecations at him in Spanish, which fortunately he does not speak.

He is through the cave and out running down the mound before the guards can react, and when they do emerge and open fire, he is ducking and weaving some way off amid the scrub. The guards don’t pursue, apparently concerned Lonely might be a decoy to lure them out of position.

Ruta Nacional 40, Late Last Night

“Sorry to bother you, my Lord, but there has been an incursion at the Mound. No apparent damage, but the squad following the Europeans also ran into trouble – we lost five of eight, and both cars.”

“Don’t apologise for doing your job. Double the guard.”

“Already done, my Lord. Will you cancel the visit?”

“No, it hasn’t helped before – they just keep coming. Better to face them now, they’ll expect me to be helpless during the day. Driver, pull over. Werewolves – strip and shift to wolf form, they may try an ambush, I want you ready for it. Everyone else – into body armour, now. Enrique, pass me a set too.”

“One more thing, my Lord. A new group of tourists has arrived in Londres, from England. They don’t look like real tourists; one woman and four men. I’m sending a picture to your phone now.”

“Ah. That is Hound and her Jacks. EDOM has come to see who wins. I expect they will try to ally with me again once I have disposed of this rabble.”

Coronel Felipe Varela International Airport, Late Last Night

Ritter spots all the armed security who should have gone home by now, and guides Vincent and Cartwright through the laughably lax security at the airport. Cartwright conceals a radio-controlled bomb on Dracula’s helicopter; at this time of year there is one flight each day, arriving at 10 AM from Buenos Aires and flying back again an hour later. Sometime around 11 AM, therefore, the chopper will take off and fly to Londres.

Handing off control of the bomb to Hopkins, the team sneaks back out again and heads to a rendezvous on Ruta Nacional 40.

Ruta Nacional 40, Earlier This Morning

Ruta 40 is very long, very straight, and quite narrow, with knee-high to waist-high scrub along much of it, but nothing in the way of trees bigger than a man. By identifying where the Martinez family has property, the team is able to guess where Dracula came ashore and where he is likely to get on – and off – Ruta 40, and thus identify a suitable section of road for their ambush.

They’re unable to drop a tree blocking both lanes – there aren’t any that big – but did manage to scrounge a police stinger from EDOM earlier to blow out the tyres – they won’t help but are willing to provide minimal deniable support – and make up a pipe bomb, which they conceal in a culvert.

They alert Hopkins to insert the fake roadworks and delays into the satnav systems. They won’t last long before they’re checked and rooted out, but they only need a few hours. Then it’s just a matter of waiting.

Coronel Felipe Varela International Airport, Earlier This Morning

Shortly before 11 AM, Varkony and two other figures – both male, both bulky – emerge from the single airport building and make for the helicopter. They settle in on board without appearing to notice anything out of the ordinary, and soon they are airborne.

Once they reach an altitude of a hundred metres or so, Hopkins triggers the bomb; the helicopter bursts into flames and plummets to the ground. Within seconds, armed “airport security” drive an SUV to the crash site and rummage through the blazing wreckage; picking one of the charred and broken bodies from the debris, they stand guard over it until an ambulance arrives.

“I need whole blood, stat,” says one of the guards. The ambulance’s paramedic opens his mouth to protest, then sees an SMG raised to his face and thinks better of it.

“Right away,” he says.

Ruta Nacional 40, Now

The PCs hide the cars a little way off their IED in the culvert and take cover in the scrub. The Sayaret Aluka operators have M16A2s with M203 underslung grenade launchers, three loaded with 40mm grenades and one loaded with a hawthorn wood stake for close-in vampire defence – that’s the one next to Ritter. Ritter and Vincent have AK47s, Cartwright has a shotgun with an M203 , Emilia is in wolf form and Smyth and Lonely are running their thumbs thoughtfully along their blades.

Three black SUVs with smoked glass windows approach from the south at a leisurely pace. Everyone gets ready, then as the front vehicle passes over the culvert bomb, Cartwright sets it off, flipping it over. The other two vehicles gun their engines to accelerate past the wreckage, but before they can do so, those with automatic weapons and grenade launchers pop up out of cover and open fire. Ritter shoots out a window on the middle car, and one of the SA operators lobs a 40mm grenade from her launcher right through it, killing three of the occupants outright. Vincent’s grenade launcher is aimed at the rearmost car and through some fluke cranks the stereo up to full volume, pumping out incongruously cheerful pop music which is periodically drowned out by explosions and bursts of gunfire. Lonely, perhaps a bit late, fires the police stinger, which will at least blow the tyres out of anything trying to go back down the road to get away.

The initial volley of fire brings all three vehicles to a halt, unable to move further; the doors open and those inside spill out while Messy the Wander Dog flees in terror. In line with their training, the guard detail charges their ambushers, the Renfields firing SMGs from the hip. One Renfield and one werewolf charge Ritter and Wound him in melee as his attached SA operator tries to bring her weapon to bear. A similar pair barrels into Lonely, but by some miracle he escapes harm. A third such couple charge Cartwright and his SA operator; she is killed instantly by a cruel blow from the Renfield, while the werewolf slashes ineffectually at Cartwright. Vincent, by virtue of being further away from the fighting, is unengaged. Each of the other two SA operators is in hand-to-hand with a Renfield.

Emilia and Smyth, meanwhile, face off against The Man Himself.

To be concluded…

GM Notes

I made half-a-dozen mistakes applying the combat rules this session, but they all more or less cancelled out, and I’m not a huge fan of do-overs. I also dialled back the Renfields and werewolves from Wild Cards to Extras, as the GM workload with a dozen enemy Wild Cards on the board is just too much.

I think on the whole that was a fun and exciting session. Off-screen, Ida Varkony survived the bomb and the helicopter crash, but it will be 2-3 days before she’s back online, and it’ll all be over by then; I can’t see it taking more than one session to close out the campaign now.

Previously, on The Dracula Dossier: The team break contact with Dracula’s submarine and make their way to Tel Aviv to heal and regroup. Dracula is on his way to Argentina, and if they catch a plane, they can be there 1-2 weeks ahead of him; but where exactly is he going, and how can they find out?

Catamarca Province, Argentina, March 2014

Through a combination of traffic analysis by Hopkins and telepathic interrogation by Lilith, the team discover that Dracula is heading towards Londres in northwest Argentina, a small tourist town in Catamarca Province. This is 1,100 metres above sea level in the foothills of the Chilean Andes, has a population of some 2,100, and is on Ruta Nacional 40, which runs broadly north-south along the edge of the mountains. The ruins of the Shincal de Quimivil are located 5 kilometres away; 30 hectares of archaeological park with reconstructions of parts of an urban settlement inhabited by the indigenous population in the 15th and 16th centuries.

It’s a 20 hour flight from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires, then a 14 hour drive to Londres by the shortest route (several others are possible), in what starts as a rental and quickly turns into a beat-up second-hand car. They can be there in three days, allowing some time to cover their tracks, so they expect to arrive at least four days ahead of Dracula. They approach from the southwest; there are several areas of natural beauty near the town, and ample accommodation.

Since Londres is a tourist town, it’s easy to get into, they won’t stand out, and they need no explanation of why they’re there beyond “tourism”. This is the tail end of the local summer, with temperatures of 18 degrees at night to 31 degrees at noon.

The attached Sayaret Aluka fireteam, military-grade body armour, and fully-loaded automatic weapons in their car boots are, of course, mere courtesy details. As Lilith observes, this one is for all the marbles, so there’s no need to be parsimonious. Cartwright pauses long enough to McGyver a rearward-facing claymore mine in the boot of one of the cars, and attach a bomb to the team’s long-suffering camera drone; it’s not likely they’ll need it much longer, and it may as well go out with a bang.

Londres, March 2014

The team and their attached SA operators stagger their arrival, posing as tourist couples. Lonely struggles against his lecherousness, knowing that Lilith will conduct telepathic debriefs of both himself and the SA team; Vincent does not, claiming “eet ees called method acting, no?”.

On their first day in Londres, they check out the town, and Hopkins checks out Argentine airports, and so they learn that Dracula (under a transparent cover ID) will arrive four days after them, having booked sufficient hotel rooms for his entourage and rented a helicopter from Catamarca airport. They also discover the town is stiff with Renfields and werewolves, and quickly realise that since their werewolf can detect Dracula’s ones, they can detect her; they find themselves at the centre of a floating box wherever they go. Finally, they see that the ruins are partially closed off “for renovation”, specifically the Eastern Ceremonial Mound is off limits.

Emilia picks up a stray dog by the simple expedient of feeding it. So now they have a dog.

They become concerned they might be poisoned, and take great care to avoid anything not out of a bottle or can purchased from a random local shop.

Las Ruinas de El Shincal, March 2014

They know Dracula’s minions are there, and the minions know they’re there, and each knows that the others know, so apart from taking care not to frighten the locals there’s no need for too much tradecraft.

The second day is spent checking out the ruins of El Shincal, with special attention to the Eastern Ceremonial Mound. They notice this is easily big and flat enough for a helicopter to land on, and there is a cave mouth halfway down the south face of the mound.

They convince themselves that Dracula’s men will try to kill them the next day, as it’s the day before Dracula arrives, and decide to thin out his numbers by getting their retribution in first.

Luring the squad following them into an ambush, they destroy one of its vehicles and kill several; when they rest withdraw, they follow up and kill a few more, but three escape to spread the word. Our Heroes decide to take to the bush and… well, they’ve run out of plan now, but at least they’ve broken contact with Dracula’s minions. For now.

We dolly back and fade to black as they grab their weapons, armour, and supplies and jog off into the foothills of the Chilean Andes.

To be continued…

GM Notes

Of the options suggested since the last session, I went with the Inca site. A bit of internet research turned up some photos and details of a suitable site, then I grabbed some Loke Battlemats (a town and a jungle temple) and a Lazy DM map (to be revealed later). Naturally, the PCs went somewhere else entirely and I had to improvise. However, one of the things I love about this campaign is the ability to use the internet on the fly to provide maps and supporting information; Lonely’s player had Google Maps running in another window and quickly pulled up an actual map of the ambush site.

With multiple werewolves and a stray dog about, the game was characterised by truly awful canine puns, which garnered the players Bennies, but which I feel it is more considerate not to repeat.

We were all out of ideas by the second half of the session, which is a sign that it’s time to close out the campaign; so, I adjusted the pacing by running the ambush as a detailed combat; it should’ve been a Dangerous Quick Encounter really, since it wasn’t important to the plot. Again, we see that a combat with multiple Legendary Wild Cards on each side slows to a crawl; the game runs fast and smooth with the PCs opposed by a Wild Card and a bunch of Extras, but if everyone has Wounds, Bennies and Wild Dice, it does not.

Also, I’m still out of practice with detailed combat. Need to do something about that; either practice until I have it down pat, or change game system.

Previously, on The Dracula Dossier: Smyth and Emilia incapacitate Christina and the team tie her up aboard a commandeered motorboat, which they use to pursue Anton, Natalya and Varkony across the harbour to Dracula’s nuclear submarine. Emilia and Smyth make a quick raid onto the sub under covering fire from the rest , realise Dracula is aboard, set fire to the control room and retreat. We left our heroes preparing to board again and finish him off. But where is Varkony? Now read on…

Sevastopol, February 2014

Given a few seconds to reflect, the team decides to break contact. The terrain favours the enemy; sooner or later, Dracula will get lucky with his mental domination; Lonely, one of their two combat specialists, is badly carved up after a fight with a Renfield; and in a few minutes, the Russian Navy is going to react with helicopters, searchlights, and machineguns. It’s time to go.

Fortunately, Dracula also wants to break contact; he’s immortal, he has a lot to lose, and these enemies have disposed of a frankly disturbing number of fellow vampires. So, the sub and the speedboat part company in short order, with a desultory exchange of small arms fire which both sides intend to keep the enemy’s heads down rather than do any real damage.

The team head back to the boatyard and pick up their (stolen) vehicles, then head to a local hospital and steal an ambulance while Hopkins is leasing a jet for a medical repatriation to Tel Aviv and Cartwright is patching up Lonely as best he can in the back of the van. Ritter, supported by Cartwright, fast-talks them onto the jet and out of Ukrainian airspace via Turkey and over the eastern Med to Israel, where they hand over Christina and Natalya to Lilith for interrogation, which Smyth insists should not harm them. Lilith reassures him that will not be necessary.

Black Site Khoshekh, March 2014

While Lonely recuperates, Lilith talks to Natalya, Christina, and Rojas at Black Site Khoshekh. Meanwhile Hopkins can tell that the Russian maintenance crews in Sevastopol are working round the clock to fix up the submarine, but that only takes them a couple of days. The surveillance cameras also reveal that Varkony’s “body” is recovered by navy divers and placed in a coffin before being loaded onto the submarine. Within a week, the sub has slipped its moorings and headed out into the Black Sea before submerging.

A few days later, Lilith reports that based on telepathic interrogation of her captives, she thinks Dracula is bound for Buenos Aires. Hopkins can easily work out that it will take an Akula class submarine a minimum of 11 days to get there from Sevastopol, and 18-20 days is more likely. So, if the team hops a flight to Argentina, they’ll have 1-2 weeks before Dracula’s boat arrives; they won’t be able to beat him there if they travel by sea.

Lilith also reports something troubling: Based on telepathic leakage during the interrogation, she thinks that when in Argentina, Rojas was able to use her powers during the daylight hours, although at the moment Rojas is clearly only active at night.

The team decides to fly to Argentina in a suitably anonymous fashion, conscious that Dracula has infiltrated Argentinian Intelligence.

GM Notes

Various events in the real world have conspired to prevent the group getting together at any point in March, and I’m out of the country for six months starting in May. I think the final showdown will take 2-3 sessions, which is roughly how many we have left before I go, and I don’t want to leave the finale hanging for that long.

So, this session was entirely done by email exchanges, and now I’ve shared narrative control with the players. They need to tell me where Dracula’s hideout in Argentina is, and how they find out, and why they trust that information. Then, I’ll work up a suitable vampire lair for them to assault.

Previously, on the Dracula Dossier: The team ambush Varkony and her Renfields as they cautiously enter the boatyard. One Renfield falls to a claymore mine, Vincent manages to gas himself, Cartwright and Ritter, Emilia is facing off against Smyth’s ex Christina in hand-to-hand combat, Lonely is trading blows with Anton the Renfield, Natalya and Varkony stagger to the jetty and over the edge into the Black Sea, and Smyth – knife between his teeth – dives in after them. Now read on…

Sevastopol, February 2014

The team can’t see Varkony or Natalya, they haven’t surfaced yet, and Smyth can’t see more than a metre or so through all the particulates in the water. Christina shoots Emilia at point blank range but is distracted and misses; she backs up and jumps into the water near where Varkony and Natalya went in, which means she is right next to Smyth. Anton disengages from Lonely and joins the rest in the water. Emilia jumps into the water, Christina shoots her with a pistol but misses, then Smyth and Emilia both attack Christina in hand-to-hand combat.

Lonely is bleeding heavily and not feeling at all well. He limps along the jetty towards Cartwright and Vincent, the team medics. Ritter triggers the claymore mine pointing at the getaway boat, killing both crew and making lots of holes in it above the waterline. Vincent hangs over the side of the building and drops a few metres to the ground, intent on taking control of the boat. Cartwright heads for the stairs down, remembers he has booby-trapped them, and pauses to disarm the claymore mine covering the staircase.

Smyth and Emilia incapacitate Christina, then Emilia hurls her none too gently onto the jetty. Cartwright finishes disconnecting the claymore on the stairs while Vincent takes control of the boat. Ritter is on overwatch as everyone expects Varkony to surge out of the water onto the boat – but she does not. Alarms are sounding in the naval base, as the gunfire and explosions attract attention.

Ritter, Smyth, and Emilia keep a look out for Varkony and her surviving Renfields breaking the surface – Varkony doesn’t need to breathe, but the Renfields do. Cartwright gets Christina and Lonely onto the boat, and binds Christina. From his vantage point, Ritter sees Varkony and company break the surface for a quick breath, then go back under; he thinks they are making for the nuclear sub across the harbour, and everyone piles into the boat.

Vincent drives it at speed in pursuit of Varkony and her Renfields, and when they next come up for air, Cartwright blows Anton’s head off. Smyth and Emilia dive into the water, and after a brief struggle incapacitate Natalya; they haul her aboard the boat and tie her up. There is no sign of Varkony. They know that vampires can heal themselves using the blood of others; both Anton and Natalya were bleeding heavily.

The team guesses the sub is probably expecting a boat coming from this direction, and Cartwright triggers the last claymore remotely to lend credence to the idea that they are Varkony’s people fleeing the firefight in the boatyard. There’s an officer atop the conning tower and four sailors on deck preparing to receive the boat, so it looks like they’ve fallen for it and the team decide to bluff their way on board.

Once within hailing distance, Emilia gets a mental image of someone with glowing red eyes and a fearsome moustache trying to dominate her mentally. She shrugs that off but reports there is a vampire inside the submarine. As the boat gets close enough to board, Smyth and Emilia parkour onto the sub while Vincent guns down three of the four sailors. The fourth puts his hands up in surrender, then sees the werewolf and dives over the side; he’s not being paid enough for this.

The team can now hear the noise of the propellor starting to turn and see the disturbance in the water at the tail of the sub; the propellor is completely submerged. The officer stays on the tower, watching them. Smyth and Emilia dart through the hatch aft on the starboard side of the conning tower, run forward through the sail, then slide down the ladder into the control room, where a couple of officers and half a dozen sailors are at work. Emilia claws a sailor, Smyth shoots one, and the rest break and flee towards the rear of the submarine. The officers stay to watch, far too calmly for Smyth’s liking, and he too perceives glowing red eyes, a moustache, and an urge to do a vampire’s bidding, which he quashes. He has seen this vampire before, though, and knows it for Dracula.

Smyth shoots one of the officers, Emilia rips the throat out of the other, then they close the doors into the control room and block them with crowbars before dropping fresh road flares on the floor and making good their escape up the ladder, out of the sail, and back to their boat. Outside, Ritter resists mental domination, but is sufficiently distracted to miss when he fires at the officer on the conning tower. Cartwright and Vincent also shoot this officer, and he falls, whether dead, wounded or just being cautious they can’t tell.

Everyone looks at each other and wordlessly shares the same opinion: This may be the only chance they get to kill Dracula for good…

GM Notes

Another short session, Lonely’s player was absent and we decided to wait for Ritter’s player to join us (trains again) rather than defer the game; that meant the session was only 90 minutes this week.

I made a spot ruling that melee while swimming uses the lower of Athletics or Fighting; the rules don’t explicitly say that, but it seems like a reasonable extrapolation from the Mounted Combat rules.

I find it easier to see when I should have awarded Bennies for roleplay when writing up the session, so I’m considering awarding them one session in arrears.

Things I learned while preparing this session: The Black Sea has a basin-wide shelfbreak gyre current with a speed of about a metre per second, so I think it counts as running water; and you can get night vision goggles that work underwater, typically down to about 20 metres for a couple of hours, but in dirty water you can’t see more than a metre or so. And a lot about the internal layout and specifications of the Akula attack submarine, which is what Dracula has ‘borrowed’ from the Russian Navy.

The players are currently minded to board the submarine and kill Dracula or die trying, as it could be the only chance they get; that means the next session could be the last. I’d like everyone to be in the final session, but assorted commitments in meatspace mean it could be April before we’re all available.

I’ll miss this campaign when it’s over, but it does feel like it’s time to wrap it up. To be continued…