Zone Rouge - Scenario 2: Edge of Darkness!

My Call of Cthulhu group is moving along! They are the "Vienna Club", so-named to hint at their affiliation with the world of covert intelligence, where the V in Vienna stands for Section V of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.

The Orient Express waits for them down the line, but right now they're playing through "Zone Rouge," a sort of prelude mini-campaign I've assembled, set in France between 1920 and 1922. The four scenarios in this prelude are:

1. Dead Light: the Voie Sacree, a few miles south of Verdun, France - November, 1920
2. Edge of Darkness: Verdun, France and countryside - November, 1920
3. Dead Man Stomp: Paris, France - August, 1922
4. The Auction (heavily modified!) - January, 1923, leading directly in to the first scenario of Horror on the Orient Express

In this post I'll go through the process of adapting Edge of Darkness to fit the "Zone Rouge" setting. "Edge of Darkness" is available in the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Starter Set, but much of the material in this blog are things I've created for the purpose. If you're interested in any of the materials or using this prelude setting in your own game, leave me a comment! 

Adapting Edge of Darkness

"'Cause out on the edge of darkness,

There rides a Peace Train horrible Mythos monster

Oh Peace Train Mythos Monster take this farmhouse, 

Come take my sanity again" - Cat Stevens, "Peace Train," loosely paraphrased 

Edge of Darkness is the scenario the Vienna Club thought they were heading for when the Dead Light rudely intercepted them during a gnarly late-Autumn storm on the road outside Verdun. However, the night is done, the storm has passed, and the weary and battered Investigators stumble at last into war-blasted Verdun (which was Arkham in the original scenario).

Gathering and Motivating the Investigators

In the original scenario, the Investigators are all somehow friends of one Rupert Merriweather, an aged and now dying patient at St. Mary's teaching hospital in Arkham. He asks them to meet him, and his time is presumably short. 

For my game, I wanted to spice things up a little bit, as well as connect Merriweather to the larger campaign. By making him more of a pathetic, slightly contemptible character, I could use him as a sort of cautionary tale, highlighting some of the themes and dangers confronting our group as they walk a difficult path: going deeper into Intelligence work, and deeper into the Mythos.

Before starting this Scenario, one of the Investigators received a file from "Q", or Hugh "Quex" Sinclair, the head of their division in British SIS. This file contained a dossier on the over-arching villain of the mini-campaign, one Rudolf von Sebottendorf, but it also contained a good deal of information about our version of Rupert Merriweather. 

To save you having to read the whole dossier, highlights of Zone Rouge's Merriweather are:

• An informer for SIS, but also in pay of multiple intelligence services,
• Involvement with Marion Alard (Marion Allen in original scenario) is both political and occult in nature, and is supported by von Sebottendorf under the alias "Erwin Torre"
• Gassed in ’16 at Verdun; he is dying of something related to this.
• Denied a pension by the Army, he was desperate for money and sold himself out to multiple Intelligence services.

Realizing he's dying, and wanting to atone for his various sins (including the summoning of the Lurker in the Attic at the farmhouse), he sent a telegram to "Q" begging forgiveness, and arrangements were made for the Investigators to come meet him.

And so Q's special instructions to the Investigators give them their hook, and the crux of their mission: 

I made a few other cosmetic changes as well. Because I want Merriweather's story tied up in the war, I made him much younger - about 40 years old. Consequently his poor wife Agnes is now about 35, and his obnoxious shit of a son Bertrand is 17 (nearly 18, he insists!). His adventures with Marion Alard in the farmhouse now were not 40 years ago, but only 3 - the events of the summoning took place in 1917. 

I don't think this hurts the integrity of the setting much, and it makes it even more clear how quickly one's life can fall apart in the Investigators' line of work. Because really, Merriweather is not much different than they are - an Intelligence man, an occultist, someone working in the field for forces much too big to comprehend, someone whose value is only what they can provide to their bosses. And those bosses are only too happy to be rid of them when convenient. (This was a theme well explored in the James Bond film Skyfall - I had that film much on my mind when adapting the scenario).

Changes to Other Characters and Hooks (or: Making Shrewd Use of a Sarcophagus)

The other character to receive significant work is Marion Alard (nee Allen), whose life and death takes place entirely off-screen. In the original scenario he was the leader of the "Dark Brotherhood" occult group and drove a lot of that action, only to be murdered in New Orleans when he shot his mouth off to the wrong person. He had some open-ended plot hooks relating to a malevolent Uncle in Boston, and to the golden sarcophagus-shaped box that held the amber bead that held the monster of this scenario. 

In "Zone Rouge," he's doing a good deal of meta-plot work for us. 

• Alard is our first direct connection to "Erwin Torre" (e.g. von Sebottendorf), and has the most knowledge of anyone now living about Torre's mysterious muse and patron, "En Kalif."
• Though the players may never piece it together, and certainly won't for months of real-time play at least, I have set up Alard's murderer to be none other than Mehmet Makryat. 

As we use him here, Alard has been in touch with Erwin Torre for some time, receiving guidance and tutelage towards two goals: Alsatian independence, and personal growth in occult knowledge and power. Alard reached out and identified some collaborators, including two men whose only role in the story is to die, and one Rupert Merriweather, a disaffected British Army vet stranded in the environs of Verdun.

Together, the four of them - calling themselves the "Alsatian Circle" - spent the better part of a year publishing inflammatory political pamphlets such as the one found as a clue in Dead Light. During this time, they also got up to a variety of occult experiments.

However, Alard became dissatisfied with what Torre was willing or able to teach him. He asked to be introduced to Torre's vaunted guide, known only as "En Kalif", but was rebuffed. Not one to take rejection easily, he hopped over to Paris, asked around for the equivalent of the Black Market in occult knowledge... and came up with the Golden Sarcophagus-shaped box, in which he found the Djinn (or the Lurker in the Attic, if you like).

In the scenario as written, this has hieroglyphs on the outside which reference Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep - which is great, as it will provide a little meta-game thrill to my players. It also ties into some more Nyarlathotep shenanigans to come, namely:

• [Dead Man Stomp spoiler!] Being the ultimate source of the horn used to raise the dead, and 
• [Horror on the Orient Express spoiler!] Being the "Skinless One" at the heart of the origin of the Brothers of the Skin cult.

Inside, originally, was some cryptic language that relates to the fabled lost island civilization of Mu. This doesn't really spark any fires for me though, as our game is not likely to intersect with that. So instead, a regular Language: Turkish or hard Occult roll will identify the characters as related to an early Turkic script (say, around 9th or 10th-century, neighborhood of Byzantium) that, in other objects from the period, was used for wardings and curses. However, this particular example is not exactly that script, and cannot be translated by anyone. 

What it does, however, is put this box in or near Byzantium at around the same time that [again, HotOE spoilers... again, just assume this blog is riddled with them] Sedefkar was active with the Simulacrum. Which means this box is on the radar of the Brothers of the Skin. Which means that, by obtaining it, Marion Alard gets on their radar too... and when he happens to show up alone in Paris, distraught and looking for answers, he's an easy mark for Mehmet. 

In the original scenario, Marion Allen dies with injuries similar to those inflicted by the Lurker, and has the Bloody Tongue mark carved on his head - I suppose, as a link to Masks of Nyarlathotep or other scenarios like Crack'd and Crooked Manse. In this version, it's just a clean stab to the heart - the same method later used to kill the 3 look-alike Mehmets in London! Whether the Investigators make that connection later on, who knows? But at least it's there.

If the Investigators are still in possession of the Box when we get to our version of The Auction (and I am sure they will be, in some sense), it could be an attractive target for the Brothers, or at least Mehmet's little band of them, prior to his cleaning house in "Dancers in an Evening Fog". 

Using Real-life Occult Texts in the Game

As a result of his involvement with the Alsatian Circle, Merriweather obtained second-hand a number of volumes of occult lore in French and German, which he asks the Investigators to bring back to Q as a sort of peace offering, or to purchase indulgences for his sins. Each book takes a week in game-time to read, and offers the Investigators the chance to make an Occult skill-check as though they had succeeded in an occult roll. I like this approach more than having these volumes automatically give a certain increase in Occult. I'm honestly not sure where I saw it, but it's not my idea, but it works well because these volumes are kind of just falling into the Investigators' lap. Since they didn't have to work for them, they shouldn't get too high a reward for reading them.

I found these books mostly via Archive.org's collection of public domain books. By searching for keywords like "occult" and "magic," and limiting my search to things published pre-1930 in French or German, it was pretty easy to come up with some good candidates. The handouts I prepared from them are 8-10 pages of various sheets from each book, focusing on pages that have diagrams and interesting language. I don't expect the players to read this at the table (or ever), but if they want to do so in between sessions, so much the better.

These are just some examples of what was available to interested occultists at the time. When they finally meet Q in London prior to The Auction, his study will have a great number of such books in English as well, which they may borrow and read (if they ever get the time!).

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Next Post: I'm not sure yet! Either an After-Action report on Edge of Darkness (we're scheduled to play it this Wednesday!), or a longer piece on the relationship between Intelligence work and the Occult, as embodied in the doomed, pathetic character of Rupert Merriweather.

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 - Scenario 1: Lumière Morte! (Dead Light)

In the last few posts I set up the broader narrative meta-structure and framework that I'll use for my group's run-through of "Horror on the Orient Express." This includes the use of several popular "beginner" scenarios strung together into a short prelude campaign I'm calling "Zone Rouge." Set in France between late 1920 and January 1923, the four scenarios to be used here are:

1. Dead Light: the Voie Sacree, a few miles south of Verdun, France - November, 1920
2. Edge of Darkness: Verdun, France and countryside - November, 1920
3. Dead Man Stomp: Paris, France - August, 1922
4. The Auction (heavily modified!) - January, 1923, leading directly in to the first scenario of Horror on the Orient Express

In this spoiler-heavy post (in fact, all posts from here on out are likely to be absolutely stuffed with spoilers, so BEWARE!), I'll talk about the adaptations I made to Dead Light in order to bring it into the time, place, and themes that make up the "Zone Rouge" prelude.

Adapting Dead Light

“Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again and looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone to business in the peaceful days before August 1914. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to sudden moods, and queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many were easily moved to passion where they lost control of themselves, many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening” - Philip Gibbs, war correspondent, on veterans of the Great War.

I chose Dead Light to be the opening scenario of the "Zone Rouge" mini-campaign. It has a lot to recommend it for this role:

• It's self-contained in time and place, a chance encounter on a rural road, BUT
• It has a number of elements that can be teased out and connected with broader themes and a bigger campaign.
• It is not very strongly connected to any given setting. The original scenario was written to take place just north of Arkham, but there's no strong sense of New England here.
• It's a fairly straightforward scenario to run. 3 locations, a handful of NPCs, and one monster to keep track of - that's it. 
• It's not The Haunting, which almost everyone with any CoC experience has played. 

Changes to Time and Place

The first change I made was to set it in November of 1920, on the road just outside Verdun, France. I spent some time looking for period-appropriate maps, and ultimately decided this scenario takes place more or less here - you may have to zoom, and then squint: 

The road that it's on there is the "Voie Sacree." During the Great War, the town of Verdun was the "high water mark" of German incursion into that part of France. The Kaiser's army got just to the outskirts of the city, and then stalled out for 9 horrible months in 1916 (the Battle of Verdun), until things heated up again during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 that lasted right up until the Armistice of November 11th. 

The Voie Sacree was a small road that became the lifeline to Verdun, allowing files of trucks to pass up to and back from the city, bringing supplies and fresh troops, and evacuating casualties. To this day, it's marked as route D1916 in honor of the year of the battle. 

The "A4" that's there now was built in the 1970s, but I'm assuming there was some kind of east-west route from the general direction of Paris. That's not really important to the scenario anyway. 

The time - November 1920 - puts us almost 2 years to the day after the signing of the Armistice. That means the scars of the war are very fresh, and there's a lot of upheaval in French society. Things like relatively high unemployment, veterans having difficulties re-integrating into society (see the quote above), and an increase in political agitation both from the left-wing (anarchism, socialism) and right-wing (nationalism, fascism). All of those things will be represented by NPCs and descriptions in this scenario.

And physically, the area still bears many scars from the war. One thing that we in the modern era fail to appreciate is just how BIG a crater is left behind when a WWI-era shell explodes. To paraphrase Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast: during the war, those shell craters were often filled with mud, water, and toxic oils from gas attacks - and they were deep enough to drown in if you weren't careful.

In the immediate post-war years, the Zone Rouge - the area around Verdun  and stretching northwest, that had seen some of the heaviest fighting in the War - was also home to something called the "iron harvest." Farmers and other homeowners in this area became accustomed to finding unexploded ordnance and spent shell casings on their land. When they found something, they'd collect it and leave it at the roadside for a government agent to pick up. Today, we put out recycling - in the Zone Rouge, they put out bullets and live artillery shells.

The Investigators will encounter both of these phenomena over the next few scenarios.

Changes to NPCs and Motivations

The scenario as written is kind of a "bottle episode" compared to the standard Call of Cthulhu adventure. There are a fairly limited number of PCs and locations available to interact with, and the setup is such that it's not really possible for the Investigators to go elsewhere. I tweaked them in the following way:

Doctor Godfrey Webb, owner of the Green Apple Cottage, inherited the "Dead Light" and used it to "take care of" infants that were born wrong (whether through bastardy or birth defects).

• becomes Doctor Guillaume Veniard, owner of the Pomme Verte cottage. He inherited something his father called "l'ange de la misericorde," the Angel of Mercy. He used it in the War to bring "mercy" to soldiers diagnosed with various forms of shell-shock; if they lived, the French Army and government would have had to provide for their ongoing care via pensions. The Army asked him to intervene to save them these costs.
• All of this is revealed (more or less) by his journal (a handout I created - see below), and by Amelie's hazy recollections. The Doctor has died minutes before the start of this scenario.

Emilia Webb, granddaughter of the Doctor, key clue-giver to the Investigators

• becomes Amélie Webb; all other facts basically unchanged (except things like changing references to "Boston" to "Paris" and similar.)

Jake Burns, pig farmer, eager brawler

• becomes Jacques Brochard - same profession, but also a likely deserter from his French Army unit early in the war. The circumstances under which he left the fighting are unclear, and he is easily provoked to aggression and anger by talk of the War, or by seeing others lauded for their bravery.

Mary Laker, "conspirator and proto-femme fatale"

• becomes Marie Lacroix, and is the most direct link between this scenario and the broader meta-plot of Zone Rouge. 
• In the scenario as written, she is motivated by jealousy of Emilia to get her boyfriend Clem and their associate Billy to rob the old Doctor's place. In this version, she is partly motivated by jealousy, but that jealousy has been weaponized by interactions with von Sebottendorf (in his Erwin Torre guise) who is promoting a blend of anarcho-socialist political philosophy and Eastern occult secrets. Marie is very impressed by this, and she encourages the robbery of Doctor Veniard as a kind of "direct action" wealth redistribution from the wealthy Doctor to the less-fortunate. In this case, the less-fortunate are Marie and her cronies.
• She carries a pamphlet called 'Silentium Post Clamores," which is a handout I created - more on that later.

The other NPCs basically just had name changes to something more appropriate to France/Alsace. Marie's co-conspirator Claude also has a copy of the pamphlet on him, though it is slightly burned by his method of demise.

Handouts and Connections to the Meta-Plot

The original scenario is largely self-contained, and so I more or less preserved that for this version. I did create a few handouts and "feelies," and seed in a couple of things that connect to the Zone Rouge plot, and one thing that plays into one of my Investigators' backstories.

1. Journal du Doctor Veniard

The journal is alluded to in the scenario but not provided as a handout. I made one that suits the purpose, though others have done nicer jobs than I with this. The purpose of the journal is to fill in the backstory, and also to give a means of using the Dead Light (here called the "Angel of Mercy") on purpose.

The second page (not shown here) is a list of dates from the beginning of the Battle of Verdun, initials, and abbreviations for medical conditions: "cranial injury," "muteness," "fugue," etc. An IDEA roll will reveal these were victims of the angel.

2. Silentium Post Clamores

The title of this pamphlet was originally used for a foundational work of esoteric Rosicrucianism - I feel confident that von Sebottendorf would have been familiar with it. The prop I made is pretty crude - my Photoshop/Gimp skills are minor at best.

A couple of things to note in here:

First, it accentuates the theme of disaffected youth searching for meaning and to recapture the spirit of optimism that the War took from them. This is a feeling that will drive the 1920s globally.

Secondly, it introduces the name "En Kalif." During the Zone Rouge campaign, En Kalif is a barely-relevant figure operating in the background, providing inspiration and funding to von Sebottendorf. He may appear (briefly, hooded, at a distance) during parts of the third scenario, Dead Man's Stomp.

If you have a talent for anagrams and a familiarity with Horror on the Orient Express, you will recognize this figure as none other than the vampire Fenalik, a major driver of HotOE.

At this stage (in my version of the HotOE campaign) he is newly arisen from his long imprisonment in Poissy, but has his wits enough about him to start looking for that which he lost centuries ago. He is using von Sebottendorf to spread political turmoil in France, which will keep local authorities distracted. In the ensuing turbulence, Fenalik hopes to be able to continue his searching unseen by the authorities, and gain access to people and places that in a more orderly time would be beyond his withered grasp. He is not particularly interested in the Investigators themselves here, as they have as yet no connection to what he seeks, and his plans are all set in motion before they interfere.

Fenalik will be a minor, distant part of Zone Rouge - but there may come a day when the Investigators realize their implacable vampire enemy has interacted with them before. And I, as a Keeper, will enjoy that moment immensely.

3. Amelie's Medallion
In the scenario, Emilia Webb has a pendant or medal, with some untranslateable Aklo Script on the back. It has no bearing on the scenario, but is meant to be a link to other plots if the Keeper wishes it. I do wish it! And so, in this case, it's one of a set of medals given to a particular company of troops during the war, a joint American-French group. One member ended up as an unfortunate patient of Dr. Veniard. Another soldier mailed his medal home to his kid brother before he vanished into the mists of war... and that kid brother is one of our Investigators.

I am hoping to sow that particular seed as something that will eventually pay off in the "Dreamlands Express" segment of Horror on the Orient Express, though only if the Investigator in question survives that long!

4. Prop: The Dead Light's box!
The Dead Light is kept in a particular metal box by the Doctor, and it's described as being sealed with a "strange-smelling wax." I bought a suitable small (~3-inch) box from Amazon, applied some sealing wax (one of my wife's hobbies!), et voila! Le box! Whichever Investigator comes closest to madness or death during the play through will get to take her home.

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Next post: Edge of Darkness, and the "Alsatian Circle," a brotherhood of middle-aged esotericists that happens to include one Rupert Merriweather, who is dying and who is feeling very, very sorry for what he's done.