The PCs Have Sold Their Souls... Again

Quick update about my Night's Black Agent's campaign. I am a bastard GM. This weekend, I got two of the PCs to sell their souls to... well, not quite the devil, thankfully. They sold their character's souls to Graf Orlok (of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu). Still pretty bad. It was kind of surprising just how easily they went along with it. Player Characters do the darnedest things.

To be fair, there was an element of trickery on my part, in that the Renfield who brokered the deal over-acted and hammed it up so much they kind of took him to be a buffoon, and as a result the PCs under-estimated the entire situation. The cartoonish nature of the ritual's trappings made them lower their guard and play along when they should have been "nope"-ing the hell out of there.

I once had the opportunity to be within earshot of a real-life Masonic initiation ceremony when a friend who used to be a Mason took me out to a campground on a weekend when he thought there wasn't anything going on out there. I remember hearing the ruckus from across the park, and thinking: "Man, paranoid conspiracy theorists imagine that's some globe-dominating cabal of the Illuminati, but it's clearly just a bunch of goofy middle-aged white-guys LARPing in aprons. It would really suck if you drank the kool-aid, and psyched yourself up for selling your soul in exchange for the Higher Mysteries, only to get that silliness instead. What a let down that might be." And that germ of an idea stuck in my craw for years until I finally got a chance to use it in a game this weekend.

If we're hanging out some time, hit me up for the details. It's a pretty good yarn, but full of idiocy that would get taken out of context and offend or frighten someone if I threw it up on the interwebs.

(To explain the "...Again" in the title: about a year ago, one of the other PCs in this same campaign basically invited Mina Harker to attack her, and inadvertently gave the 100 year old English vampire bride the keys to her mind. They've been dealing with the fall-out from that ever since, but apparently didn't really learn from her mistakes.)