Zone Rouge - "Personal and Secret": Intel Briefings as player handouts

One of the narrative advantages to using the SIS framework is that scenario hooks can be given to players between sessions in the form of orders and briefing packets from London.

Under this kind of cover, I can pass along key plot hooks, NPC information, and setting details, without having to go over it in detail at the table. Like other CoC Keepers I have a weird obsession with approximate historical accuracy, so I wanted these to look as close as possible to real British SIS briefings from the time.

Fortunately, some examples of those are available! The British Archives has some that you can purchase! I used several of their real-life documents as templates for what I did here.

Examples!

1) A cover letter from "Quex" to one of the Investigators (who goes by "Sinjin"), setting the general parameters of the prelude, and alluding to some of the connections that will be uncovered further along in play.

2) A dossier on Rudolf von Sebottendorf, which recaps some of the relevant information from Wikipedia, and gives a little more connection to other soon-to-be-relevant plot points. Note the reference to a distribution network for Sebottendorf's agitprop pamphlets? That's going to come up. 

I also am using these documents to establish a broader network of potential adversaries that have some connection to the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul.

Those with experience running or playing Horror on the Orient Express will recognize a few connections here to that plot:

[SPOILERS AGAIN!]

• Sedefkar (who named and documented properties of the Simulacrum) was based in Constantinople
• The vampire who would become Fenalik spent centuries in Constantinople before departing for France, and (in my version of the game) likely has some contacts still among Eastern occultists, mystics and possibly monsters!
• The Brothers of the Skin are based out of the Shunned Mosque in Istanbul

And so all of that sets us up nicely to start diving into the Prelude scenarios themselves! In the next post, I'll start talking about the adaptations I'm making for the first scenario, "Dead Light!"

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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!