Zone Rouge - Intelligence and the Mythos: Agencies nobody wants, doing work nobody understands.

The British Secret Intelligence Service is a real thing - now popularly known as MI6 - and it was a real thing in 1920's Europe, the setting of my "Zone Rouge" prelude to Horror on the Orient Express. Unlike modern day MI6, however, the most you could say about the organization in the early 20's is that it managed not to be completely de-funded.

After the Great War, there was less of an apparent need for the various intelligence services floating around in the UK, and the SIS was no exception. Funding was drastically reduced, and the remaining resources were large devoted to attempting to keep tabs on communist activities. In the real world, this obsession with communism led the SIS to engage in an information-sharing partnership with the up-and-coming Nazi government in Germany. In my game, the communist mania will conceal a blindness towards a different enemy: the sorcerers, cultists and monsters of the world of Call of Cthulhu.

SIS Leadership and the Occult

Of course, not everyone in the organization is ignorant of the esoteric and occult. In the interest of providing a framework for the prelude and campaign, I wanted to have a couple of regular contacts in the high levels of the SIS that my group would interact with, and be variously supported or stymied by. Here I begin to make liberal use of historical figures in ways that, I'm sure, would displease them to no end.

The historical head of the group is Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming, who will be referenced by the code name "C." In my version of history, he is the source of the focus on communism, and is completely, violently disinterested in any theories regarding the paranormal or supernatural. He holds the purse strings of SIS, and will only release funds for projects that serve his own ends. In real history, "C" died unexpectedly in his home in 1923, to be replaced by Hugh Sinclair (more on him in a moment). In my history, I've reserved this fate for Sinclair.

Sir Hugh "Quex" Sinclair is 2nd-in-command in 1920, and is the figure the Vienna Club's Investigators will hear from most often in the Prelude. Before we go on, let's acknowledge that 1) "Quex" is an awesome nickname, and 2) If we follow the "initial-as-code name" precedent, he would be known as "Q". Q, of MI6.

In the framework of the Zone Rouge prelude scenarios, Quex is an intelligent, driven man with a hobbyist's passion for the occult. He is well read on both ancient and modern occultist and alchemical writings, and within the SIS his function is to point the Vienna Club towards scenarios with briefing packets that obliquely allude to strange goings-on. He is loyal to the organization, and does want to support the broader mission, but in the grand tradition of right-hand-men throughout history he's not afraid to to bend the rules to support a vision of the greater good that doesn't quite align with his boss' vision.

And, importantly for the Horror on the Orient Express campaign, Quex also fills the role of Professor Smith as the older acquaintance with deep ties to the occult community. Of course, in the campaign...

{SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST HotOE SCENARIO}

...he is ultimately killed and replaced by Makryat, would-be leader of the Brothers of the Skin. I really like the additional layers of intrigue this offers for the narrative: with a Cultist potentially able to pose as the Number 2 in the SIS, all kinds of interesting misinformation and back-channel intrigue is possible. Should the Investigators survive all the way to make it back to London, they may find conditions in the UK have changed dramatically due to this infiltration.

Finally, Quex's own assistant is one Claude Dansey (code name "Z"), who really became more famous in WWII when he created and activated his own network to replace the "official" SIS apparatus in Europe which had been compromised by German agents.

In the next post, I'll talk about some handouts I use,  in the form of Intelligence Briefings delivered to the Investigators, to help provide important information between sessions and keep things moving along.


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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!

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.


-------------------------------------
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!