The body of this post are session notes from a recent Night's Black Agents game. I typed these up because one player was absent that week and needed to be brought up to speed on what he'd missed. As such, there's not a lot of context or explanation here about things he'd already know. Mostly, I'm just posting it here as an archive for my players in case they need to refer to it later, and to get me back into the habit of blogging about gaming. I make no promises that this will be of interest or make much sense to a random person without that context.
We picked up where we left off, on the decomissioned oil-rig owned by Edom. Gideon set loose Mina Harker, who proceeded to turn into a sentient mobile cloud of red blood, and who most likely ate the scientist and soldier that were in the dark with him. (Both stopped screaming, and Gideon stumbled across a body in the dark.) A few moments later Mina stepped out of the room in human form, excusing the blood at her mouth as a symptom of her long battle with "Consumption".
Elsewhere on the converted Oil Rig platform, Tzofiya watched as two soldiers and a guy in a suit marched a female prisoner out to the railing at the edge of the deck. They were about to shoot this woman in the head, when the sound of gunfire (coming from Gideon’s situation) distracted them. Tzofiya and the new woman (Batty’s PC, a Russian agent named Nika) defeated the (presumably Edom-aligned) men and headed below decks.
They fought some more soldiers on the way to the boat. Raul intercepted drone launches and radio traffic. Thankfully, Dov had disabled the missile launcher on the platform, and everyone was able to slip away before enemy reinforcements could arrive. According to intercepted transmissions, there was a helicopter and a warship on their way, ordered into position by a woman’s voice identifying herself by a name that sounded something along the lines of “Can Has”, “Ken Ads”, “Kehnazz”, etc.
Whenever Mina crossed a “border” she experienced some difficulties, ranging from inconvenience and distraction up to incapacitation or possibly involuntary liquidification. This included passing through doorways, moving from boat to boat, landing or taking off, flying over Hadrian’s Wall in a helicopter, etc. At one point is was so bad, they had to use the bilge pump to relocate her from one boat to the other.
(And it should be noted that the GM stated that Mina spent a few points of Health or "Soil" at some of these border crossings. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about what that means mechanically about how my Vampires work. Night's Black Agents monster chapter is a toolbox, not an encyclopedia: no two campaign's versions of Vampires work exactly the same way.)
The players wanted a safe place to interrogate Mina. Mechanically, there are a lot of ways to create a safe haven for the PCs. You could assign Network to retcon into existence contact that owns a safehouse. You could assign Cover to retcon into existence a false identity that owns a remote property somewhere. You could make a Supply Cache roll via Preparedness to retcon into existence a safehouse that you’d set up in your previous spy career. You could assign a Familiar City from one of your points of Urban Survival to have a place you can crash in that city. Or, you can improvise. Chris made a Digital Intrusion roll to search the dark web to find a horrible person who owned remote property that Raul could break into without feeling bad about any repercussions it might have if this lead Edom or Vampires to raid the asshole’s cabin at some future date.
As such, the place came with some baggage. Implications that the owner of the place was involved in crimes such as homicide and human trafficking, and might have actually been a serial killer, etc. All of which Mina seemed to smell about the place pretty much as soon as they’d bilge pumped her onto the island. She intuitively knew how many months it had been since the most recent murder on site.
There was a long scene where the PCs interviewed Mina. She claimed to be a patriot, and alluded to sacrifices she’d made for crown and country. It’s clear she’s a prisoner of Edom, but it seems she might also be an Asset of Edom that’s done at least a little field work. She indicated that the Dracula manuscript you have (which the PCs claimed wasn’t on them) was marked with the blood “of The Man Himself” and could be used by people with the right training to control or influence Him. The implication being that maybe Edom previously controlled Dracula, but he’s been on the loose since the book went missing. She was fairly evasive and at times the PCs knew she was outright lying about things. I think it's fair to say the players where a bit divided about how much to trust her. Eventually she revealed that Dracula was trained at the Scholomance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholomance, the devil’s school in Transylvania. The body that had been on ice in London was revealed to be "Red Jack", aka Jack The Ripper. On a whim, Nika asked her if Rasputin was a Vampire, and Mina said there was a jar with his name on it inside the Scholomance. Mina gave up some useful intelligence, so despite still seeming untrustworthy to at least some of the PCs, they agreed to transport her via helicopter to English soil. The enemy of my enemy is… hopefully not going to eat half of England?
All this time, Tzofiya was intentionally making herself seem like a deliciously tempting target for Mina’s darker impulses. Exposed neck, shared deep glances, holding hands. I’m not sure if this was a variation on "good cop" to get her to talk more freely, or an effort to provoke her into attacking to expose Mina’s true evil, but it effectively achieved both in the end. Once she made up her mind she was going to eat you all, maintaining secrecy was a lot less important.
Leaving Dov to sail the boat to a later rendezvous, the rest of the party boarded a chartered commercial helicopter and left the island cabin behind. They flew over Scotland and then south over more traditionally English soil. As soon as they were definitively above England, Mina made her move.
I told Kaylin “You feel icy fingers rifling through your mind. If you want to resist, you can make a Stability test.” A few unfortunate die rolls later, and Tzofiya has shot the NPC civilian commercial pilot in the head. That’s our cliff-hanger: most of the PCs are on helicopter that is falling from the sky, there’s a murderous vampire in their midst, and one of the party’s best fighters is struggling against mental domination.
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