Zone Rouge: The Best Lovecraftian Villain was a Real-Life Person

Look. I know you think modern times are crazy - and they are! But compared to the 1920's, man...

Look. Here is a person, an actual person, who existed then, and possibly could ONLY have existed then. I'm going to quote 3 lightly edited sentences of biographical summary from Wikipedia, and then talk about all the amazing ways that this person fits into Call of Cthulhu, Zone Rouge, and the themes of the campaign I'll be running here. Emphasis is mine, provided via bold exclamation points.

Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer (9 November 1875 – 8 May 1945?[!]), better known under his pseudo-aristocratic alias Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff [!!]...was a German occultist [!!!], writer, intelligence agent [!!!!] and political activist [!!!!!]. He was the founder of the Thule Society [!!!!!!], a post-World War I German occultist organization where he played a key role, and that influenced many members of the Nazi Party. He was a Freemason,^[1] a Sufi of the Bektashi order - after his conversion to Islam^[2] - and a practitioner of meditation, astrology, numerology, and alchemy[!!!!11!!!].

LOOK AT THIS GUY! Holy crap! If he didn't exist, I would have had to invent him.

Let's go through some key points here:

1. We don't know exactly when he died! This is technically because his body was fished out of a large body of water some time after his death, but I don't care, I say it's because we don't know if he ever died at all.
2. He picked himself an aristocratic alias!
3. He's a German occultist, interested in Sufism, Freemasonry, and a number of other esoteric philosophies including the Rosicrucians. This puts him in the philosophical company of people such as Johannes Kepler and Goethe, and means he traveled in some of the same circles as people like Guido von List, who kick-started a lot of modern German neo-Paganism, and was hideously anti-Semitic to boot.
4. He's an intelligence agent! In the last few years of the second World War, he was a double agent for both the Germans and the British, operating in Istanbul! (Istanbul has special significance for the Horror on the Orient Express campaign, being the final stop on the outbound journey.)
5. It's not mentioned above, but he also did a jail term for fraud and forgery. He knows how to forge documents! 
6. He founded the Thule Society! To the extent that it's famous at all, it's famous for 2 things: 
1. being an organization of occultists, archaeologists, and German nationalists who traveled the globe looking for mystical objects and occult evidence, and
2. Being taken over by people like Anton Drexler, Karl Harrer, and by 1919, an Austrian-born fellow named Adolf something-or-other, who ultimately turned this group into a right-wing prototype of the eventual Nazi party. Fortunately, von Sebottendorff basically gave up on the Thule Society at this point and bailed when they shifted their attention from occultism to real-life historical villainy. Even more fortunately, this frees him up to be whatever we need him to be from 1920 onwards.
7. He was involved in basically every kind of interesting occultism that existed on the continent in that decade: Freemasonry, neo-paganism, Rosicrucianism, and Sufi mysticism via contacts in the former Ottoman Empire. He picked up Sufism while living in Istanbul in the early 1910's. This last piece - the Turkey connection - is very useful as a bridge to certain persons in Horror on the Orient Express who will remain nameless for now.

All by himself, Rudolf von Sebottendorff embodies virtually every theme I wanted to introduce in Zone Rouge and play up throughout the campaign. He has scars from the War. He has pretensions to a better (fancier) life and is willing to lie, cheat and steal to get there. He has one foot firmly in the occult. He's a dab hand at political agitation and intelligence. He is PERFECT.

And in the greater scheme of this campaign's villainy, he's small potatoes. 

In future posts, I'll describe how I plan to use him as the proximate mover for the events of the three scenarios in Zone Rouge, but also how he himself is being manipulated by forces he doesn't understand. If the Investigators happen to catch him and shut him down before 1923? Well, it was nice knowing him. 

Now that we know what the Investigators and the SIS were up against, in the next post we'll spend some time reviewing the state of the SIS in 1920, and fleshing out the Intelligence environment that the Investigators will find themselves operating in.


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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!