Contingency 2027: convention framework, slate and eight game synopses
Ten slots (afternoon + evening, Wed 27 - Sun 31 Jan 2027, Searles, Hunstanton), eight games booked and two Sunday reserves. Each game has a README, synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton and open-questions list. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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# Contingency 2027 — Convention Scenarios
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Working repository for Tim Evans' games at **Contingency 2027**.
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**Convention:** Contingency (Wyrd Sisters Games Club) · **Wed 27 – Sun 31 January 2027**
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· Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton · five days of gaming
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· Members-only event (£10/yr, £5 concession for GMs & volunteers)
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· Advance game booking via **Warhorn**, with on-the-day sign-ups at the event
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· Self-catering on-site accommodation, check-in from Mon 25 Jan
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**GM commitment:** two games a day — one afternoon, one evening — across all five
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days. Ten slots; eight scenarios booked, two Sunday slots held as reserve.
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---
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## The Slate
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| # | Day | Session | System | Game | PCs | Status |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 1 | Wed 27 | Afternoon | The Walking Dead Universe (modified) | [**BLACK SUMMER — Last Flight Out**](games/slot01-black-summer/) | 5 | Outline |
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| 2 | Wed 27 | Evening | Blade Runner RPG | [**AFTERIMAGE**](games/slot02-blade-runner-afterimage/) | 4 | **Port — con-ready (v2.2)** |
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| 3 | Thu 28 | Afternoon | Call of Cthulhu 7e | [**DEAD AIR I — Ash & Amber** (1946)](games/slot03-dead-air-1-ash-and-amber/) | 5 | Outline |
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| 4 | Thu 28 | Evening | The Dee Sanction | [**THE FAVOUR**](games/slot04-dee-sanction-the-favour/) | 5 | Outline |
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| 5 | Fri 29 | Afternoon | Call of Cthulhu 7e | [**DEAD AIR II — The Quiet City** (1962)](games/slot05-dead-air-2-the-quiet-city/) | 5 | Outline |
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| 6 | Fri 29 | Evening | VANITY | [**ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP**](games/slot06-vanity-another-bloody-treasure-map/) | 5 | Outline |
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| 7 | Sat 30 | Afternoon | Call of Cthulhu 7e | [**DEAD AIR III — Full Volume** (2027)](games/slot07-dead-air-3-full-volume/) | 5 | Outline |
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| 8 | Sat 30 | Evening | Vaesen | [**THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY**](games/slot08-vaesen-mr-parkers-diary/) | 4 | Outline |
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| 9 | Sun 31 | Afternoon | — | *Reserve — re-run of highest-demand game* | — | Held |
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| 10 | Sun 31 | Evening | — | *Reserve — pick-up / open table* | — | Held |
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The three **DEAD AIR** games are a linked Call of Cthulhu trilogy running in the
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same session slot on three consecutive days, so a player can book all three
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without a clash. Each also stands alone. See the
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[trilogy bible](docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md).
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---
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## Repository Map
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| Path | What it is |
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|---|---|
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| [`docs/schedule.md`](docs/schedule.md) | Slot grid, running times, day-by-day GM load, prep deadlines |
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| [`docs/warhorn-blurbs.md`](docs/warhorn-blurbs.md) | Player-facing, spoiler-free pitches for Warhorn submission |
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| [`docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md`](docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) | The linking truth, arc rules and hand-off state for the CoC trilogy |
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| [`docs/production-tracker.md`](docs/production-tracker.md) | Per-game status: scenario, pregens, handouts, art, playtest, print |
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| [`docs/house-standards.md`](docs/house-standards.md) | The house one-shot format this repo is written to |
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| `games/slotNN-<slug>/` | One folder per game — see the per-game README |
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### Per-game folder shape
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```
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games/slotNN-<slug>/
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README.md status line, file index, remaining prep
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scenarios/ the scenario document(s)
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characters/ pregens + print-ready sheets
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handouts/ player-facing props
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reference/ GM quick-reference screens
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playtest/ desk playtest logs and fix lists
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gm-utility/ GM console modules
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print/ generated PDFs
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```
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Directories are created as their content is written; every game starts with a
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`README.md` and a scenario outline.
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---
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## Status
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**Framework stage.** The slate is fixed and every game has a synopsis, design
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intent, act skeleton and open-questions list. One game (AFTERIMAGE) is already
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convention-ready and only needs porting. Full scenario drafts, pregens, handouts
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and playtests are the work ahead — see
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[`docs/production-tracker.md`](docs/production-tracker.md).
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---
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*Private convention play materials — not for sale or distribution. All game
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systems are the property of their respective publishers.*
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# DEAD AIR — Trilogy Bible
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*A Call of Cthulhu trilogy in three eras. Berlin 1946 → the Urals 1962 → Berlin 2027.*
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> *Every government that found it thought it was a weapon. It was an advertisement.*
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**Contingency 2027 · Slots 3, 5 and 7 — Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons.**
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Same session slot on three consecutive days so a player can take the whole arc.
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Each part is written to stand alone; nothing essential to a single afternoon
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depends on having played the one before.
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---
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## The spine, in one paragraph
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In the last winter of the war, a German broadcast-research unit recorded
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something that was not a sound and pressed it onto lacquer discs. It is not a
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weapon, though three states in a row have spent enormous effort proving to
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themselves that it is. It is a **lure**: a pattern that survives by being heard,
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that lodges in a listening mind and makes that mind a relay, and that needs only
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enough minds holding it *at the same moment* to arrive properly. Every regime
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that has possessed it has responded the same way — by building a bigger
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transmitter. The trilogy is the story of that pattern getting a larger and larger
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audience, from a flooded basement, to a closed city, to the open internet.
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## The truth (GM only, all three parts)
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- The material was catalogued by its German handlers as **die Folge** — *the
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Sequence*. Nobody involved has ever agreed on what it is. It has no body, no
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location and no demands. Its only appetite is **simultaneous attention**.
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- A mind that has held the Sequence for long enough becomes a **carrier**:
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outwardly normal, occasionally producing the pattern unprompted — humming it,
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drawing it, tapping it. Carriers are not possessed and are not villains. Most
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of them are victims, and the arc's cruelty is that every part asks the players
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what to do about a person who has done nothing wrong.
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- The Sequence propagates but does not scheme. There is no cult with a plan.
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What there is, in every era, is a **committee** — men in a room deciding the
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thing in the vault is an asset. The recurring antagonist of the trilogy is
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institutional confidence, not a monster.
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- **What actually happens if it completes:** not an eruption or a summoning. The
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world simply becomes a place where the Sequence is one of the things that is
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true, retroactively, and always was. Nobody notices. That is the horror, and it
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is why the players' win condition is always *keeping the audience small*
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rather than *destroying the thing*.
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## Timeline
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| When | What |
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|---|---|
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| 1938–44 | The unit's research runs out of a broadcast annexe in Berlin. Human listeners are used. The records of what was done to them are what the 1946 players find first. |
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| Feb 1945 | The unit's director orders the material destroyed, then doesn't. He seals the sub-basement and floods it. |
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| **Feb 1946** | **PART ONE.** An Allied technical-intelligence team and a Soviet trophy brigade race to the same address in a shattered city. What the players find is split three ways at the end of the afternoon — and *how* it splits is the players' choice. |
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| 1947–61 | The Soviet share becomes a state programme. A closed city is built over the work. |
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| **Oct 1962** | **PART TWO.** The programme's own staff, sealed in during a containment failure, in the fortnight the world is closest to ending for entirely unrelated reasons. |
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| 1963–89 | The programme is buried, its paperwork scattered into archives. Discs go missing individually rather than all at once. |
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| 1991–2010s | Archive dumps and private collectors. Lacquers surface at auction, mislabelled, cheap. |
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| **Jan 2027** | **PART THREE.** Berlin. A disc has been digitised, sampled, and is about to be played to an audience of a size no previous era could have assembled. |
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## Arc rules
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1. **Each part stands alone.** Any part can be a player's only DEAD AIR game and
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must land completely on its own. No part ends on "to be continued".
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2. **Each part is a different genre of investigation.** Part One is a scramble —
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competing teams, a physical dig, a deadline set by rivals. Part Two is a
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closed-box procedural — no way out, everyone a suspect, the enemy is the
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institution. Part Three is an open-city sprint — too much information, no
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authority, a clock set by a scheduled broadcast.
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3. **Each part escalates the audience, not the monster.** One room, then one
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city, then everyone. The Sequence never gets stronger. The speakers do.
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4. **Continuity is a reward, not a requirement.** Returning players should get
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three or four specific payoffs per part — a name in a file, an object they
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handled, a person they spared. New players lose nothing but the shiver.
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5. **State hand-off explicitly.** Each part's Epilogue records what the table
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decided in a short "carry-forward" block. The GM notes it and honours it in
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the next part where cheap to do so. **Default assumption if a table's choices
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don't feed forward:** the Soviets take the material in 1946, the programme is
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shut down but not destroyed in 1962, and at least one disc reaches Berlin.
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Part Two and Part Three both open with a one-line reconciliation note so a
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contrary Part One result is absorbed, not contradicted.
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6. **Nobody gets to be right.** Every climax is a decision where each option
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costs something real, and all options are written.
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## Recurring elements
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| Element | Part One | Part Two | Part Three |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| **The object** | Twelve lacquer discs and a listening ledger | The discs, transcribed to tape and fed to an antenna array | One surviving lacquer, digitised, in a sampler |
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| **The carrier** | A survivor of the wartime listening trials | A senior engineer who has been humming it for thirty years | A musician who doesn't know where the hook came from |
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| **The committee** | Two intelligence services who both want it | A ministry that wants the array switched on | A label, a festival and a streaming platform |
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| **The clock** | The rival team's dig | The scheduled test | The scheduled broadcast |
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| **The choice** | Who gets it | Whether to end it or hide it | Whether to stop it publicly or quietly |
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## Tone and content
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Bleak, procedural, adult. Horror comes from paperwork and from decent people
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following instructions. Keep the supernatural sparse: in a 3h30 slot the Sequence
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should be directly *experienced* no more than three times, and the third time is
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the climax.
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**Content warnings (stated at the top of each part):** Nazi human
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experimentation and its documentation; the Holocaust as historical context;
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Soviet state violence and coerced labour; suicide; institutional cruelty to
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people who have done nothing wrong; in Part Three, self-harm and mass-casualty
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risk. Safety tools stated in 30 seconds at the top of each table, no ceremony.
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## Art direction
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Ink and pencil, hand-drawn, never photorealistic — house style. Each era gets its
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own register: **1946** ruined-city line drawing, heavy blacks, wet stone.
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**1962** technical-drawing precision, isometric plant schematics, Cyrillic
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labelling. **2027** cold flat vector and screen-grab textures. The Sequence
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itself is only ever drawn as a waveform or an oscilloscope trace — never given a
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face, in any era.
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Asset IDs: `DA1-ART-##`, `DA2-ART-##`, `DA3-ART-##`; handouts `DA1-H1-A` etc.
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## Open questions
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1. Is the trilogy pitched on Warhorn as a series with booking priority for
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players taking all three, or as three unrelated CoC games with a quiet nod?
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2. Pregens: three fresh sets, or one family/institutional lineage carried
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through the eras (a name recurring across three generations)? The lineage
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option is stronger for returning players and more work.
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3. Does Part Three use modern-day CoC 7e straight, or lean on Delta Green-style
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handler structure? Straight 7e is the default until decided.
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# House Standards — Contingency 2027
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Every scenario in this repository is written to the same format. This page is the
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short version; it exists so a stand-in GM, or a future draft, does not have to
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guess.
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## Structure
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- **Introduction → Act One → Act Two → Act Three → Epilogue**
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(VANITY games use the four-act variant.)
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- **3h30 (210 min) of play** inside the 4-hour slot, plus a 10-minute break —
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about 3h40 wall clock. Plan **~3h15 of actual content** against that budget.
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- Budgets: Intro 15 · Act One 60 · Act Two 90 · Act Three 30 · Epilogue 15.
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These are ceilings, not targets.
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- The session clock counts **play time** and pauses for the break.
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- **Act Three always happens.** Compress Act Two if the clock has beaten the
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table. Hard rule: at 2:45, go to Act Three regardless.
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- The break sits at the end of Act One, on a cliffhanger.
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- Every act ends with a **Pacing Note**: what must be true before the next act,
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and the specific fast-track if running late.
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- A one-shot **ends written** — closure or designed ambiguity, never an
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unwritten "to be continued".
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## Timing table
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Every scenario carries a Session Timing Guide with a **GM Checkpoint** column —
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a one-line test the GM can apply mid-session ("body examined, report started,
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they know the test moved"). The checkpoints are what make the table usable in
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play.
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## Clues
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Every essential clue has **three routes**:
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1. **Automatic on the right approach** — the right question in the right scene
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finds it without a roll. Rolls buy extra, not entry.
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2. **A written fallback** — an NPC volunteers it, or a second location carries it.
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3. **The Countdown** — the antagonist's scheduled move delivers or forces it.
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Essential clues never sit behind a search roll. Each act has at least one
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essential and one optional clue. Clue trails are tables: # | Clue | Source | How
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Found | What It Reveals | Type.
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## The countdown clock
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Antagonists move on schedule whether the players act or not, and each advance is
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*felt* — a van glimpsed twice, a witness suddenly unwilling. Keep the opposition
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one step behind the players until the climax. Pressure, not punishment.
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## Writing for the GM at the table
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- Scannable over literary. Bullets, tables, bold keywords.
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- **Read-aloud text in blockquotes**, three sentences or fewer (the cold open may
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run to six), always labelled "read aloud or paraphrase".
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- **Mechanics inline and bracketed:** `[CoC: Library Use — the 1893 entry]`,
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`[BR: Observation — the torn hem]`. Never send the GM to another page.
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- Every NPC gets a **one-line essence** — who they are and what they want —
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before any other detail, and appears again in the end-of-document NPC roster.
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- **State the failure case** for every clue, scene and set-piece: what happens if
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the players miss it, skip it, or break it.
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- A 3–4 line **system crash-course** in the master rules block, so a stand-in GM
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could run the game cold.
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## Slot logistics
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- Pregens always. Player count stated per game, with the scaling line: which
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count it runs at, which pregen drops first, how splits adjust. Nothing
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essential lives only on one PC.
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- **Safety tools stated in 30 seconds, no ceremony.** One line in the
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Introduction. Content warnings in the Overview and in the Warhorn blurb.
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- **Slot Zero** (the first 15 minutes): seating and safety line → pitch each
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pregen in one spoken tagline → players choose in five minutes → open in motion.
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- **Party splits are a feature.** Parallel tracks, each holding half a
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revelation, alternating in ~12-minute segments, each segment ending on a pull.
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- **One set-piece per scenario**, with its own GM quick-reference page. Idle
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players get jobs during it.
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## Endings
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- Aim the climax at a **decision, not a die roll** — every option costs
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something, and every option is written.
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- Write the chaos contingency ("if someone shoots") — the table that torches the
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negotiation still gets a real ending.
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- List the **compromise endings** players will invent. When a playtest finds a
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new one, write it in.
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- Epilogue: per-PC vignettes keyed to the outcome, then table debrief. Land the
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last line on the theme.
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- **Early finish** at 2:30: expand the vignettes, then run the bonus scene, which
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is already written.
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## Versioning
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v1 draft → playtest → v2 → v2.1… A game is marked **convention-ready** only
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after a full-session desk playtest lands inside the time budget with the fix list
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applied. Each game's README carries the version, the playtest count and what
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remains.
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## Art
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Ink sketch / pencil illustration, hand-drawn feel, never photorealistic. Each
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scenario adds its own direction line on top. Asset IDs `[Slot]-ART-##`, handouts
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`[Slot]-H[act]-[letter]`. Generated via `mj-gen "<prompt>"`.
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# Contingency 2027 — Production Tracker
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Legend: **—** not started · **◐** in progress · **✔** done · **n/a** not required
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| # | Game | Outline | Scenario v1 | Pregens | Handouts | Art | Playtest | Print | Console |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 1 | BLACK SUMMER | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
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| 2 | AFTERIMAGE | ✔ | ✔ *(port)* | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ ×3 | ◐ reprint | ◐ port |
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| 3 | DEAD AIR I | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
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| 4 | THE FAVOUR | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
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| 5 | DEAD AIR II | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
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| 6 | ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
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| 7 | DEAD AIR III | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
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| 8 | MR PARKER'S DIARY | ✔ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
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**A game is convention-ready when:** the scenario is at v2 or later, pregens are
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audited against the rules, handouts and art are produced, it has survived at
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least two desk playtests inside the 3:30 budget with the fix list applied, and
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the print pack exists.
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## Decisions blocking work
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These are the open questions that stop drafting, gathered from the outlines.
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Everything else can proceed without them.
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| # | Question | Blocks |
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|---|---|---|
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| 1 | Was Witchfinder Garrett on screen in a previous game? Nothing in the Continuum 2026 or Contingency 2025/26 material mentions him. | THE FAVOUR — Act One shape |
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| 2 | Does Ilse Brandt (Part One) return in Part Two, and does the Brandt name carry to Part Three? | DEAD AIR II and III — Act Two shape |
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| 3 | Trilogy pregens: three fresh sets, or one lineage across the eras? | All three DEAD AIR pregen sets |
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| 4 | Confirmed Warhorn slot times. | All print, all timing tables |
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| 5 | Which TWDU book edition is at the table? | BLACK SUMMER Runner stat block |
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| 6 | Which Vaesen bestiary entry the ferryman is built on. | MR PARKER'S DIARY v1 |
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## Shared production
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- **VANITY rules digest** — copy the Continuum 2026 build into
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`games/slot06-.../reference/`. No rewrite.
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- **GM console** — one Contingency 2027 build with a module per game. The
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AFTERIMAGE module already exists and ports; the rest are new.
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- **DEAD AIR is one production with three outputs.** Shared bible, shared NPC
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lineage, shared art direction, one print run. Treating it as three separate
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scenarios is the main way this slate becomes undeliverable.
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- **Art** — house style throughout: ink sketch / pencil, hand-drawn feel, never
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photorealistic. Generate via `mj-gen "<prompt>"`. Each game states its own
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direction line on top of the base style.
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@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
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# Contingency 2027 — Schedule & GM Load
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|
||||
**Wed 27 – Sun 31 January 2027 · Searles Leisure Resort, Hunstanton**
|
||||
|
||||
## Running times
|
||||
|
||||
> **Slot times below are placeholders.** Contingency 2026 ran three slots a day
|
||||
> (morning / afternoon / evening). Confirm the 2027 published times against
|
||||
> Warhorn before printing anything, then update this table.
|
||||
|
||||
| Session | Assumed time | Play budget |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Afternoon | 14:00 – 18:00 | 3h30 play + 10 min break |
|
||||
| Evening | 19:30 – 23:30 | 3h30 play + 10 min break |
|
||||
|
||||
House rule: **3h30 of play in a 4-hour slot**, planned to ~3h15 of actual
|
||||
content. Session clock counts play time only and pauses for the break.
|
||||
|
||||
## The grid
|
||||
|
||||
| # | Day | Session | Game | System | PCs |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| 1 | Wed 27 | Afternoon | BLACK SUMMER — Last Flight Out | Walking Dead Universe (modified) | 5 |
|
||||
| 2 | Wed 27 | Evening | AFTERIMAGE | Blade Runner RPG | 4 |
|
||||
| 3 | Thu 28 | Afternoon | DEAD AIR I — Ash & Amber | Call of Cthulhu 7e | 5 |
|
||||
| 4 | Thu 28 | Evening | THE FAVOUR | The Dee Sanction | 5 |
|
||||
| 5 | Fri 29 | Afternoon | DEAD AIR II — The Quiet City | Call of Cthulhu 7e | 5 |
|
||||
| 6 | Fri 29 | Evening | ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP | VANITY | 5 |
|
||||
| 7 | Sat 30 | Afternoon | DEAD AIR III — Full Volume | Call of Cthulhu 7e | 5 |
|
||||
| 8 | Sat 30 | Evening | THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY | Vaesen | 4 |
|
||||
| 9 | Sun 31 | Afternoon | *Reserve* | — | — |
|
||||
| 10 | Sun 31 | Evening | *Reserve* | — | — |
|
||||
|
||||
## Why the slate sits this way
|
||||
|
||||
- **DEAD AIR runs Thu / Fri / Sat afternoons** — same session, three consecutive
|
||||
days. A player who wants the whole arc books one time of day and never clashes
|
||||
with themselves. Each part is written to stand alone for drop-ins.
|
||||
- **Wednesday opens on the two most physical games.** Black Summer and
|
||||
AFTERIMAGE are the least prep-hungry on the day (AFTERIMAGE is already
|
||||
finished) and the best "arrival day" energy — a hard survival run and a
|
||||
noir case.
|
||||
- **Evenings alternate tone** against the afternoon's Cthulhu: Dee Sanction
|
||||
(Thu), comic fantasy (Fri), folk horror (Sat). Never two bleak games in a row
|
||||
on the same day.
|
||||
- **VANITY sits Friday evening** — the loosest, funniest game on the night the
|
||||
bar is busiest and the table is most likely to be tired and social.
|
||||
- **Sunday is deliberately empty.** People leave, energy drops, and two reserve
|
||||
slots absorb overspill demand or a re-run without new prep. If Sunday evening
|
||||
never fills, that is a feature.
|
||||
|
||||
## GM load check
|
||||
|
||||
| Day | Games | Prep-heavy? | Notes |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Wed | 2 | One (Black Summer) | AFTERIMAGE is a port — read-through only |
|
||||
| Thu | 2 | Both | Heaviest day. DEAD AIR I must be fully finished well in advance |
|
||||
| Fri | 2 | One (DEAD AIR II) | VANITY reuses the existing convention rules digest |
|
||||
| Sat | 2 | Both | DEAD AIR III is the arc payoff — needs the most playtesting |
|
||||
| Sun | 0 booked | — | Reserve |
|
||||
|
||||
**Consequence:** eight new-or-ported games is a real workload. The three CoC
|
||||
games share a setting bible, NPC lineage and art direction, which is what makes
|
||||
the count achievable — treat DEAD AIR as one production with three outputs, not
|
||||
three productions.
|
||||
|
||||
## Prep deadlines (working back from 27 Jan 2027)
|
||||
|
||||
| By | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| End Sep 2026 | All eight scenario drafts at v1. Trilogy bible locked. |
|
||||
| End Oct 2026 | Pregens complete for all eight. First desk playtests on DEAD AIR I–III. |
|
||||
| End Nov 2026 | Playtest fixes applied (v2). Handouts and art briefs written. |
|
||||
| End Dec 2026 | Art generated, handouts laid out, GM console modules built. |
|
||||
| 10 Jan 2027 | Print pack produced: sheets, handouts, GM screens. |
|
||||
| 20 Jan 2027 | Read-throughs done. Everything marked convention-ready. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Open logistics questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. Confirmed slot times from Warhorn — the table above is assumed, not verified.
|
||||
2. Table size cap at Searles (does 5-player seating work in the game rooms?).
|
||||
3. Whether the DEAD AIR trilogy can be flagged on Warhorn as a linked series with
|
||||
booking priority for players taking all three.
|
||||
4. Power/table space for the GM console tablet in the evening rooms.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,155 @@
|
||||
# Warhorn Blurbs — Contingency 2027
|
||||
|
||||
Player-facing copy for game submission. **Spoiler-free.** Each entry: title,
|
||||
system, player count, tone flags, content warnings, and a pitch of ~80 words.
|
||||
|
||||
Copy these into Warhorn as-is once the slot times are confirmed.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 1 · Wed afternoon
|
||||
### BLACK SUMMER: LAST FLIGHT OUT
|
||||
**The Walking Dead Universe RPG (modified)** · 5 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Survival · downbeat · human antagonists · high lethality*
|
||||
|
||||
New York, six weeks after the fall. The army is still flying people out of an old
|
||||
airfield in Brooklyn, and they stop at dawn. To board you need a stamped transit
|
||||
chit with your face on it. Between the five of you, you have three. Ten miles of
|
||||
dead city lie between here and the runway, and the queue at the far end is longer
|
||||
than anybody wants to think about.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** graphic violence and gore, a child in danger, summary
|
||||
execution, crowd crush, PvP possible. Safety tools in use.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 2 · Wed evening
|
||||
### AFTERIMAGE
|
||||
**Blade Runner RPG** · 4 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Investigation-heavy · noir · one foot chase · ambiguous ending*
|
||||
|
||||
Los Angeles, 2037. A memory designer is dead in his studio and Rep-Detect has
|
||||
been handed the case with a whisper attached: rogue replicant. The whisper comes
|
||||
from a corporation, and it is a lie of the useful kind. You have until dawn.
|
||||
Nobody in this story gets to be right — you only get to decide who pays.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** violence, a death investigation, themes of grief, memory
|
||||
and consent. Safety tools in use.
|
||||
|
||||
*Previously run at Continuum 2026.*
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 3 · Thu afternoon
|
||||
### DEAD AIR I: ASH & AMBER (1946)
|
||||
**Call of Cthulhu 7e** · 5 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Historical · investigation · competitive · part one of three — stands alone*
|
||||
|
||||
Berlin, February 1946. You catalogue German science before the other lot get to
|
||||
it, and it has been six weeks of frozen filing cabinets. Then an address in the
|
||||
Soviet sector turns out to be a broadcasting annexe that officially never
|
||||
existed, and under it is a sub-basement somebody deliberately flooded. By tonight
|
||||
what is down there will be in somebody's hands. You get to decide whose.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** Nazi human experimentation and its documentation, the
|
||||
Holocaust as historical context, conditions in occupied Berlin, drowning,
|
||||
suicide. Safety tools in use.
|
||||
|
||||
*Part one of the DEAD AIR trilogy (Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Each part stands
|
||||
completely alone — play one, two or all three.*
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 4 · Thu evening
|
||||
### THE FAVOUR
|
||||
**The Dee Sanction** · 5 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Historical horror · protection job · moral trap · no clean ending*
|
||||
|
||||
You are marked. You were going to hang, and instead you belong to Dr Dee. Now
|
||||
there is a warrant in your hand and it says: go to the border country, and see
|
||||
that Witchfinder Garrett comes to no harm. The same Garrett who put three of you
|
||||
in front of a magistrate. He is there to hang a woman on Friday, she did not do
|
||||
it, and something has been feeding him names for eleven years.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** witch trials and judicial execution, torture described,
|
||||
religious persecution, a hanging on screen. Safety tools in use.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 5 · Fri afternoon
|
||||
### DEAD AIR II: THE QUIET CITY (1962)
|
||||
**Call of Cthulhu 7e** · 5 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Historical · closed-box procedural · paranoia · part two of three — stands alone*
|
||||
|
||||
A closed city in the Urals that is not on any map, October 1962. You have worked
|
||||
here eleven years and long ago stopped being curious about the tapes. On Monday
|
||||
the gates shut for an "administrative period". On Tuesday a technician takes off
|
||||
his headphones and walks into the lake. On Friday, at six in the morning, someone
|
||||
is going to close a switch.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** Soviet state violence and coerced labour, institutional
|
||||
cruelty, suicide, medical horror. Safety tools in use.
|
||||
|
||||
*Part two of the DEAD AIR trilogy. Stands completely alone — no need to have
|
||||
played part one.*
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 6 · Fri evening
|
||||
### ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP
|
||||
**VANITY** (a house d6 game — no prior knowledge needed) · 5 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Comic fantasy · dungeon crawl · light rules · rivals*
|
||||
|
||||
You bought a treasure map off a man in a tavern. Yes. You know. So did four other
|
||||
groups this week. Here is the thing, though: the map is real, the vault is where
|
||||
it says it is, and there is a great deal of gold in it. The old man who printed
|
||||
the maps was not running a swindle. He was running a recruitment drive.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** cartoon violence, greed, one genuinely unpleasant moment at
|
||||
the vault door. Safety tools in use.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 7 · Sat afternoon
|
||||
### DEAD AIR III: FULL VOLUME (2027)
|
||||
**Call of Cthulhu 7e, modern day** · 5 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Contemporary · research sprint · escalating scale · part three of three — stands alone*
|
||||
|
||||
Berlin, today. A lacquer disc came out of a box of Cold War acetates at auction
|
||||
and sold for four hundred euros to a producer who liked the label. He sampled
|
||||
fifteen seconds of it, and the hook has been going round the city for eight
|
||||
months. You have almost certainly already heard it. At midnight it closes a
|
||||
festival, live, uncut, streamed to two hundred thousand people.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** self-harm and suicide, mass-casualty risk, drug use in a
|
||||
club setting, loud audio and flashing lights described in play (described only —
|
||||
no audio or lighting effects are used at the table). Safety tools in use.
|
||||
|
||||
*Part three of the DEAD AIR trilogy, and its payoff. Stands completely alone.*
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Slot 8 · Sat evening
|
||||
### THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY
|
||||
**Vaesen — Nordic Horror Roleplaying** · 4 players · pregens provided
|
||||
*Folk horror · archival mystery · slow burn · winter*
|
||||
|
||||
A parcel reaches the Society in February: the field diary of an English
|
||||
naturalist who drowned in a northern lake last October. It was posted three weeks
|
||||
after he died. The first sixty pages are ordinary. The next twenty are in the
|
||||
same hand and written from somewhere outside his own life. The last page is dated
|
||||
nine days from now and it describes your arrival.
|
||||
|
||||
**Content warnings:** drowning, dead children, an implied suicide, a community's
|
||||
collective silence. The diary prop addresses players directly. Safety tools in
|
||||
use.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Submission checklist
|
||||
|
||||
- [ ] Slot times confirmed against the published 2027 schedule
|
||||
- [ ] Decide whether DEAD AIR is listed as a linked series with booking priority
|
||||
- [ ] Player counts confirmed against room/table sizes at Searles
|
||||
- [ ] "Pregens provided, no system knowledge needed" stated on every entry
|
||||
- [ ] Content warnings reviewed once more before submission
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
|
||||
# Slot 1 · Wed 27 Jan, afternoon — BLACK SUMMER: LAST FLIGHT OUT
|
||||
|
||||
*The plane leaves at dawn. You have three chits and five people.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** The Walking Dead Universe RPG (Free League), house-modified for
|
||||
*Black Summer* · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) · survival journey with a
|
||||
hard countdown · one large set-piece (the queue) · downbeat ending by design.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/black-summer-outline.md`](scenarios/black-summer-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, rules modifications, open questions |
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1, then pregens.
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · chit props (physical handout — the
|
||||
chits must be real objects passed around the table) · New York route map handout
|
||||
· Runner stat block and modified threat tables · desk playtest ×2 · print pack.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*The Walking Dead Universe RPG © Free League Publishing. Black Summer © its
|
||||
rights holders. Private convention play materials — not for sale or distribution.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,152 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 1] BLACK SUMMER: LAST FLIGHT OUT
|
||||
|
||||
> *The plane leaves at dawn. You have three chits and five people.*
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline (pre-v1). This document fixes the concept, the truth, the
|
||||
shape and the rules modifications. The full scenario is written against it.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Wednesday 27 January 2027, afternoon
|
||||
- **System:** The Walking Dead Universe RPG (Free League) — **modified**, see below
|
||||
- **Setting:** New York City, six weeks after the fall. Late autumn, rain turning
|
||||
to sleet. From a Manhattan basement to Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn.
|
||||
- **Players:** 5, pregenerated. Runs at 4 (drop the Soldier). At 6, split the
|
||||
Journey into two tracks in Act One.
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
- **Content warnings:** graphic violence, gore, a child in danger, summary
|
||||
execution, crowd crush and suffocation, betrayal between player characters as a
|
||||
supported outcome. Safety tools stated in the first 30 seconds.
|
||||
|
||||
## Design intent
|
||||
|
||||
1. **The dead are the weather; people are the plot.** Runners are fast, quiet and
|
||||
almost never survivable — they exist to make every human negotiation urgent,
|
||||
not to be fought.
|
||||
2. **Scarcity is the whole game.** There are fewer transit chits than there are
|
||||
player characters, and there is no clever solution that makes the maths work.
|
||||
The scenario is a machine for producing that conversation.
|
||||
3. **No heroism, no cavalry.** Nothing in the scenario rewards self-sacrifice
|
||||
with a rescue. The show's register is exhaustion, not defiance.
|
||||
4. **PvP is permitted and pre-written**, but never forced. Every anti-social move
|
||||
a table might make has a written consequence so the GM never improvises a
|
||||
punishment.
|
||||
5. **The ending is small.** Some of them get on a plane. The scenario does not
|
||||
tell the table whether that was worth it.
|
||||
|
||||
## Player experience
|
||||
|
||||
Six weeks ago you had a life. Now you are in a flooded basement on the Lower East
|
||||
Side with four strangers and a rumour: the army is still flying people out of an
|
||||
old airfield in Brooklyn, and they stop at dawn. To board you need a stamped
|
||||
transit chit with a face on it. Between the five of you, you have three. Ten
|
||||
miles of dead city lie between here and there, the rain is turning to sleet, and
|
||||
every hour you spend deciding is an hour of the night gone. You will reach the
|
||||
airfield. That was never the hard part. The hard part is the queue.
|
||||
|
||||
## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)
|
||||
|
||||
The **airlift was cancelled eighteen hours ago.** The order reached the Floyd
|
||||
Bennett Field detachment at midday and its commanding officer, **Major Ruth
|
||||
Okonjo**, made a decision she has not shared with anyone below her: she kept the
|
||||
processing tents open and kept stamping chits. Four thousand people are queued
|
||||
in the field's grass runways, orderly, hopeful, and quiet, because they believe
|
||||
they are in a line that leads somewhere. If they learn otherwise before the last
|
||||
aircraft is loaded, they will overrun the wire in under ten minutes and everyone
|
||||
— including the crews — dies.
|
||||
|
||||
So the queue is not a queue. **The queue is the containment.** Okonjo's soldiers
|
||||
are still taking chits, still checking faces, still saying *"next"*, and the
|
||||
aircraft on the apron is loading detachment personnel, their families, and
|
||||
nobody else. It leaves at first light.
|
||||
|
||||
Two things can break it before dawn:
|
||||
- **Sergeant Danny Vasquez** knows, and has started selling the truth in
|
||||
exchange for places on the aircraft. He is why the players can find out.
|
||||
- A **runner incursion** through the field's northern fence line, already
|
||||
building in the marsh, on a timetable the players cannot stop.
|
||||
|
||||
**Timeline before play:**
|
||||
| When | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| T-6 weeks | The fall. New York goes dark in nine days. |
|
||||
| T-11 days | Floyd Bennett Field airlift begins. Chit system introduced. |
|
||||
| T-4 days | The chit black market establishes itself in the tent city. |
|
||||
| T-18 hours | Cancellation order received. Okonjo suppresses it. |
|
||||
| T-6 hours | Vasquez begins selling the truth. Play begins. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Structure
|
||||
|
||||
| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, chits physically distributed, safety line said |
|
||||
| Act One — The Crossing | 60 min | 1:15 | Party out of Manhattan; at least one PC has lost something they came with |
|
||||
| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the first sight of the field's lights |
|
||||
| Act Two — The Line | 90 min | 2:45 | The truth known by at least one PC; chit count changed from its starting number |
|
||||
| Act Three — Dawn | 30 min | 3:15 | The decision made at the wire; the aircraft resolved |
|
||||
| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes, outcome named |
|
||||
|
||||
**Hard rule:** at 2:45 on the clock the northern fence goes, whatever the table
|
||||
is doing.
|
||||
|
||||
- **Act One — The Crossing.** Manhattan to Brooklyn overnight. A Journey played
|
||||
as three linked Challenges: getting out of the building, the water crossing,
|
||||
and the approach through Flatbush. Runners here are environmental — the cost of
|
||||
noise, never a fight to win. Ends on the field's lights across the marsh.
|
||||
- **Act Two — The Line.** The tent city outside the wire: the chit market, the
|
||||
families, Vasquez, and the processing tent. This is the long act and it is
|
||||
almost entirely social. The players can gain chits (buy, steal, forge, be
|
||||
given) and every route costs something the scenario names. This is where they
|
||||
learn what the queue is.
|
||||
- **Act Three — Dawn.** The fence, the crowd, and the aircraft. A decision, not
|
||||
a die roll: say nothing and board on your chits; tell the crowd and lose the
|
||||
window but give four thousand people a running start; or force the wire.
|
||||
- **Set-piece:** the queue itself — a crowd-pressure sequence with its own GM
|
||||
quick-reference page. Idle players hold the crowd cards.
|
||||
|
||||
## Rules modifications (The Walking Dead Universe → Black Summer)
|
||||
|
||||
Stated to the table in one minute; a stand-in GM needs only this block.
|
||||
|
||||
1. **Runners, not walkers.** The dead are fast, near-silent and arrive in
|
||||
seconds. Replace the standard walker profile with a **Runner** block: higher
|
||||
Mobility, no shamble telegraph, and a Threat Level that rises in one step
|
||||
rather than climbing gradually. There is no safe distance, only a safe
|
||||
*situation*.
|
||||
2. **No Haven play.** Drop the Haven rules entirely — nobody is building
|
||||
anything. The scenario is Journey + Challenge structure end to end.
|
||||
3. **The chit replaces the anchor.** Each PC's chit (or lack of one) is tracked
|
||||
as a physical prop. Holding a chit is what the Drive and Issue mechanics
|
||||
attach to for this game.
|
||||
4. **Stress does not reset.** No comfort scenes, no recovery — the arc of a
|
||||
Black Summer night is one-way.
|
||||
|
||||
*Everything else is core TWDU. These modifications are deliberate and minimal;
|
||||
if a fifth one appears in playtest, something is wrong with the scenario, not
|
||||
the rules.*
|
||||
|
||||
## Pregens (design brief)
|
||||
|
||||
Five, each wired into the chit maths and to at least one other PC:
|
||||
|
||||
1. **The one with the child** — has a chit for the child and none for herself.
|
||||
2. **The soldier** — deserted the field detachment two days ago and knows the
|
||||
layout, and one of the reasons the queue is wrong.
|
||||
3. **The broker** — arrived with three chits and sold two. Knows the market.
|
||||
4. **The doctor** — the only PC everyone else has a practical reason to keep alive.
|
||||
5. **The liar** — has a chit that is not theirs and a face that does not match it.
|
||||
|
||||
Nothing essential lives only on one PC. Starting chit count: **3 for 5 players.**
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. Confirm which TWDU book edition is at the table (core rulebook stat blocks vs
|
||||
any later supplement) before the Runner block is written against it.
|
||||
2. Physical chits: card stock with a stamped serial and a photo window, or a
|
||||
simpler token? The prop is doing real dramatic work and deserves a decision.
|
||||
3. How closely to nod at the show's canon — Rose and Anna, the western safe zone.
|
||||
Current intent: flavour only, nothing required.
|
||||
4. Is PvP at the wire acceptable at a Contingency table with strangers, or does
|
||||
the scenario steer harder away from it? Affects Act Three's written options.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
|
||||
# Slot 2 · Wed 27 Jan, evening — AFTERIMAGE
|
||||
|
||||
*Three women remember the same childhood. One of them buried it.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** Blade Runner RPG (Free League) · **4 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play)
|
||||
· investigation-heavy · foot chase in Act Two · ambiguous ending.
|
||||
|
||||
**Status: PORT — convention-ready.** This scenario is finished. It is
|
||||
[`Continuum2026`](https://github.com/slaguru666/Continuum2026) v2.2, three desk
|
||||
playtests, three different endings reached, all inside 3:30, art complete.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/afterimage-port-notes.md`](scenarios/afterimage-port-notes.md) | Synopsis, and the complete list of what changes for Contingency |
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** copy the Continuum 2026 package in · apply the port changes ·
|
||||
reprint sheets and handouts · one GM read-through. No new writing.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*Blade Runner RPG © Free League Publishing & Alcon Entertainment. Private
|
||||
convention play materials — not for sale or distribution.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 2] AFTERIMAGE — port notes
|
||||
|
||||
> *Three women remember the same childhood. One of them buried it.*
|
||||
|
||||
**This scenario is already written and convention-ready.** It ran as Continuum
|
||||
2026, Friday Slot 2. Source of truth:
|
||||
`slaguru666/Continuum2026` → `01 Friday/Slot 2 Evening Blade Runner/AFTERIMAGE/`.
|
||||
Version **v2.2**, three desk playtests (two full sessions from the GM and player
|
||||
chairs plus an Act Two stress re-run), six art assets complete.
|
||||
|
||||
Nothing in this document replaces the scenario. It records the synopsis for the
|
||||
Contingency slate and lists exactly what changes.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Wednesday 27 January 2027, evening
|
||||
- **System:** Blade Runner RPG (Free League)
|
||||
- **Setting:** Los Angeles, 2037 — Sector 9, the Kipple fringe, the ruined Santa
|
||||
Monica pier
|
||||
- **Players:** 4 (Rick, Jax, Kael, Sloane)
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
|
||||
## Synopsis
|
||||
|
||||
Memory designer **Elias Kade** is dead in his studio with a neural interface
|
||||
spike through his temple, and Rep-Detect has been handed the case with a whisper
|
||||
attached: *rogue replicant*. The whisper comes from Wallace Corporation, and it
|
||||
is a lie of the useful kind.
|
||||
|
||||
Kade's daughter walked out six years ago. Being a memory man, he rebuilt her —
|
||||
three identical Nexus-8 units given the same curated childhood, installed in
|
||||
three districts, visited once a month, each believing she was human and an only
|
||||
child. One was retired in the street by a patrol sweep in 2036 and he never said
|
||||
a word. Then he was given ten weeks to live, consolidated everything he had ever
|
||||
stolen and everything he had ever done onto a single drive — and the real
|
||||
daughter came home, found out what she had been replaced with, and there was a
|
||||
struggle near the rig that she herself can no longer honestly remember.
|
||||
|
||||
The players have until dawn. There is no rogue replicant. There is a woman who
|
||||
may or may not be a murderer, two innocent women who do not know they are copies,
|
||||
a corporate fixer who wants all three swept into a van as intellectual property,
|
||||
and a drive that will either break or free everyone who touches it. Nobody in
|
||||
this story gets to be right. The players only get to decide who pays.
|
||||
|
||||
## What changes for Contingency 2027
|
||||
|
||||
| Change | Detail |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| Event header | "Continuum 2026 — Friday 24 July, Slot 2, Cranfield" → "Contingency 2027 — Wednesday 27 January, Slot 2, Searles, Hunstanton" |
|
||||
| Filenames | `fri-slot2-blade-runner-afterimage.md` → `slot02-blade-runner-afterimage.md`; same for handout and sheet exports |
|
||||
| Asset IDs | `F2-ART-##` → `C2-ART-##` (or keep and note the legacy prefix — decide once, apply everywhere) |
|
||||
| GM console | Port the AFTERIMAGE module into the Contingency 2027 console build; verify the session clock, chase runner and prop fullscreen still work offline |
|
||||
| Print | Reprint character sheets and handout pack — including the monologue card ×2, the one item flagged outstanding at Continuum |
|
||||
| Playtest | None needed. One GM read-through, since the last run was July 2026 |
|
||||
|
||||
**Do not re-cut the scenario.** It is timed, playtested and landed three
|
||||
different endings inside the slot. Changes beyond the table above need a stated
|
||||
reason and a new version number.
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. Keep the `F2-ART` asset prefix for provenance, or renumber to `C2-ART` for
|
||||
consistency with the rest of the 2027 slate? Renumbering touches the handouts,
|
||||
the sheets and the console module.
|
||||
2. Evening slot at Searles — is there enough table light for the printed props,
|
||||
and power for the console tablet? Affects whether the physical prop pack or
|
||||
the console is primary.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
|
||||
# Slot 3 · Thu 28 Jan, afternoon — DEAD AIR I: ASH & AMBER
|
||||
|
||||
*Berlin, February 1946. Two armies are digging for the same basement.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) ·
|
||||
competitive scramble · physical dig set-piece · the players choose who inherits
|
||||
the thing they found.
|
||||
|
||||
Part one of the [DEAD AIR trilogy](../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md)
|
||||
(Slots 3, 5, 7 — Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Stands alone.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/dead-air-1-outline.md`](scenarios/dead-air-1-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions |
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1.
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · handouts (the listening ledger, a
|
||||
disc label, a T-Force inventory form) · art (`DA1-ART-##`) · desk playtest ×2 ·
|
||||
print pack.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*Call of Cthulhu © Chaosium Inc. Private convention play materials — not for
|
||||
sale or distribution.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,159 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 3] DEAD AIR I: ASH & AMBER
|
||||
|
||||
> *Berlin, February 1946. Two armies are digging for the same basement.*
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Part one of three — read the
|
||||
[trilogy bible](../../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) first.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Thursday 28 January 2027, afternoon
|
||||
- **System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e
|
||||
- **Setting:** Berlin, February 1946. The British sector, the Soviet sector, and
|
||||
a flooded sub-basement under a bombed broadcasting annexe that sits, awkwardly,
|
||||
on the line between them.
|
||||
- **Players:** 5, pregenerated — a mixed Allied technical-intelligence team
|
||||
(T-Force / CIOS pattern: officers, technical specialists and interpreters sent
|
||||
to catalogue German science before anyone else does). Runs at 4.
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
- **Content warnings:** Nazi human experimentation and its documentation; the
|
||||
Holocaust as historical context; the condition of civilians in occupied Berlin,
|
||||
including hunger and coercion; drowning; suicide.
|
||||
|
||||
## Design intent
|
||||
|
||||
1. **A scramble, not a mystery.** The players know from minute one that someone
|
||||
else wants what they want. The tension is speed and leverage, not deduction.
|
||||
2. **The horror is a filing cabinet.** The worst thing in the scenario is a
|
||||
ledger of names with listening times beside them. Keep the supernatural to
|
||||
three moments; the paperwork does the rest.
|
||||
3. **The city is the antagonist's ally.** Ruined Berlin in February — no light,
|
||||
no heat, no reliable authority, a sector boundary that changes what a piece of
|
||||
paper is worth depending on which side of a street you are standing on.
|
||||
4. **The ending is a distribution, not a victory.** The material *will* leave
|
||||
the basement. The afternoon is about deciding, under pressure, who ends up
|
||||
holding which part of it — and that choice is the seed of Parts Two and Three.
|
||||
5. **No competent authority.** Nobody the players can report to will act in time.
|
||||
|
||||
## Player experience
|
||||
|
||||
You are here to make lists. That is the job: get into German laboratories before
|
||||
the other lot do, write down what is in them, ship home what matters. It has been
|
||||
six weeks of frozen filing cabinets and it has been fine.
|
||||
|
||||
Then a name on a captured requisition doesn't match anything, and an address in
|
||||
the Soviet sector turns out to be a broadcasting annexe that officially never
|
||||
existed, and a Russian major you have shared cigarettes with all winter suddenly
|
||||
has no time for you at all. Under the rubble is a sub-basement somebody
|
||||
deliberately flooded in the last weeks of the war. In it are twelve lacquer
|
||||
discs and a ledger of people who were made to listen to them. By this evening the
|
||||
discs will be in somebody's hands. Before the light goes, you have to decide
|
||||
whose — and whether you tell anyone what they actually are.
|
||||
|
||||
## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)
|
||||
|
||||
**Reichssender research group "Folge"** operated out of an annexe of a Berlin
|
||||
broadcasting facility from 1938. Its stated brief was psychological broadcasting.
|
||||
Its actual work, from 1941, was the capture and reproduction of a signal its
|
||||
director, **Dr Anselm Vehr**, believed was already being transmitted and merely
|
||||
needed to be heard properly. To find out what hearing it did, the group used
|
||||
people: first volunteers, then patients, then prisoners. The ledger records
|
||||
initials, duration and outcome. The outcomes column has four symbols and only
|
||||
one of them is good.
|
||||
|
||||
In February 1945 Vehr ordered the material destroyed. Then he did not destroy it.
|
||||
He sealed the sub-basement, opened the water main, wrote a two-page account of
|
||||
what he thought the Sequence was, and shot himself in the stairwell — where his
|
||||
body still is, above the waterline, holding the account.
|
||||
|
||||
**Twelve discs survive.** So does one listener: **Ilse Brandt**, nineteen,
|
||||
subject in the 1944 trials, now living four streets away, working as a
|
||||
*Trümmerfrau* clearing rubble. She has not spoken since 1944. She hums, and what
|
||||
she hums is the Sequence, and she has been humming it in a city of ruins for two
|
||||
years to an audience of nobody in particular. She is not dangerous. She is the
|
||||
scenario's conscience: everyone in the story wants her as evidence, and the
|
||||
players are the only people who might treat her as a person.
|
||||
|
||||
**The competition:** Soviet trophy brigade officer **Major Yeva Kravchenko** has
|
||||
the same requisition the players have and three days' head start on the digging
|
||||
equipment. She is not a villain — she is competent, tired, and under orders she
|
||||
cannot refuse. She will trade. She would rather trade than dig, because the water
|
||||
is a real problem and she is short of pumps, which the players' side has.
|
||||
|
||||
**What the Sequence does, on the page:** heard once, it is a fifteen-second
|
||||
pattern that is not quite a tone. It stays. Days later you find you are tapping
|
||||
it. The scenario's Sanity costs come from the ledger, from Vehr's account, and
|
||||
from the third and last direct exposure at the climax.
|
||||
|
||||
### Timeline
|
||||
|
||||
| When | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| 1938 | Group Folge established at the annexe. |
|
||||
| 1941–44 | Listening trials. 60 subjects. The ledger. |
|
||||
| Oct 1944 | Ilse Brandt, subject 51. |
|
||||
| Feb 1945 | Vehr seals and floods the sub-basement; suicide in the stairwell. |
|
||||
| Jan 1946 | A captured requisition reaches Allied hands and is filed wrongly for three weeks. |
|
||||
| T-3 days | Kravchenko's brigade begins clearing the site. |
|
||||
| **Play begins** | The players get the file. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Structure
|
||||
|
||||
| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, the file in their hands |
|
||||
| Act One — The Paper Trail | 60 min | 1:15 | The address identified; Kravchenko met; Ilse found or heard of |
|
||||
| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the first descent into the water |
|
||||
| Act Two — The Annexe | 90 min | 2:45 | Ledger recovered; Vehr's account read; the Soviets are inside too |
|
||||
| Act Three — The Division | 30 min | 3:15 | The material distributed; Ilse's fate decided |
|
||||
| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; carry-forward block recorded |
|
||||
|
||||
- **Act One — The Paper Trail.** Requisitions, a bombed records office, a former
|
||||
technician now working as a translator for the Americans, and an approach to
|
||||
Kravchenko across the sector line. The act's real work is establishing that
|
||||
everyone wants this and nobody knows what it is.
|
||||
- **Act Two — The Annexe.** The dig and the flooded sub-basement. Cold water,
|
||||
bad air, a body on the stairs holding a confession, twelve discs in a rack, the
|
||||
ledger, and — once — the Sequence itself, played by accident. The Soviet team
|
||||
arrives partway through, which turns the act from an exploration into a
|
||||
negotiation conducted while standing in freezing water.
|
||||
- **Act Three — The Division.** Above ground, at dusk. A decision, not a die
|
||||
roll. The discs, the ledger, Vehr's account and Ilse are four things, and there
|
||||
are at least three parties who want them. Every split is playable and each one
|
||||
is written. **Default carry-forward for Part Two: the Soviets get the discs.**
|
||||
Any other outcome is absorbed by Part Two's opening reconciliation note.
|
||||
- **Set-piece:** the flooded descent — cold-water exposure, failing lamps, a
|
||||
rising level and a rival team on the stairs. Own GM quick-reference page.
|
||||
|
||||
## Cast
|
||||
|
||||
- **Major Yeva Kravchenko** — Soviet trophy brigade. *Wants the discs delivered
|
||||
and to go home.* Will trade pumps for access. Honest, and out of options.
|
||||
- **Dr Anselm Vehr** — dead on the stairs. *Wanted to be believed.* His account
|
||||
is the scenario's central handout.
|
||||
- **Ilse Brandt** — subject 51. *Wants to be left alone.* Hums the Sequence.
|
||||
- **Capt. Hugh Ferrers** — the players' own liaison. *Wants a clean report.*
|
||||
The voice of the committee: whatever the players find, he will describe it as
|
||||
an asset.
|
||||
|
||||
## Handouts (brief)
|
||||
|
||||
`DA1-H2-A` the listening ledger page (initials, duration, outcome symbols) ·
|
||||
`DA1-H2-B` Vehr's two-page account · `DA1-H2-C` a disc label · `DA1-H1-A` the
|
||||
T-Force requisition that starts it · `DA1-H3-A` the inventory form the players
|
||||
must fill in at the end, which is the scenario's last quiet joke.
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. Are the pregens all one nationality (British T-Force) or a mixed Allied team?
|
||||
Mixed is richer and complicates the sector-line politics usefully.
|
||||
2. Does Ilse Brandt survive as a written NPC into Part Two (aged 35 in 1962,
|
||||
somewhere in the Soviet programme)? That is a strong arc payoff and needs
|
||||
deciding before Part Two is drafted.
|
||||
3. Historical register: how much real 1946 Berlin detail — sector boundaries,
|
||||
rations, the Trümmerfrauen — before it becomes homework? Current intent:
|
||||
heavy on texture, light on dates.
|
||||
4. Sanity budget for the afternoon: the ledger and the account are both hits, and
|
||||
the climax is a third. Confirm that is not one too many for a 3h30 slot.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
||||
# Slot 4 · Thu 28 Jan, evening — THE FAVOUR
|
||||
|
||||
*Keep alive the man who condemned you. That is the favour.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** The Dee Sanction · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) ·
|
||||
protection job turned inside out · a hanging assize on a deadline · no clean
|
||||
choice at the end.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/the-favour-outline.md`](scenarios/the-favour-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions |
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1.
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 Agent pregens · handouts (Garrett's
|
||||
commission book page, the indictment, Dee's written order) · art · desk
|
||||
playtest ×2 · print pack.
|
||||
|
||||
**Continuity check needed:** Witchfinder Garrett is described as *returning*.
|
||||
No prior scenario in the Continuum 2026 or Contingency 2025/2026 material
|
||||
mentions him — see the outline's open questions.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*The Dee Sanction © Paul Baldowski / All Rolled Up. Private convention play
|
||||
materials — not for sale or distribution.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,155 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 4] THE FAVOUR
|
||||
|
||||
> *Keep alive the man who condemned you. That is the favour.*
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline (pre-v1).
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Thursday 28 January 2027, evening
|
||||
- **System:** The Dee Sanction
|
||||
- **Setting:** England, autumn 1596. A market town on the Welsh border, three
|
||||
days before the assize.
|
||||
- **Players:** 5 Agents of Dr John Dee — condemned men and women working off a
|
||||
sentence that will never actually end. Runs at 4.
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
- **Content warnings:** witch trials and judicial execution; torture described,
|
||||
not depicted; religious persecution; the accusation of a child; a hanging on
|
||||
screen unless the players prevent it.
|
||||
|
||||
## Design intent
|
||||
|
||||
1. **The protection job, inverted.** The Agents are ordered to keep alive the
|
||||
witchfinder who put half of them in irons. Everything else in the scenario
|
||||
follows from how badly that sits.
|
||||
2. **The Agents cannot walk away**, and the scenario never pretends otherwise.
|
||||
Dee's Sanction is a leash. The one thing the players fully control is *how*
|
||||
they obey.
|
||||
3. **Garrett is not a monster.** He is frightened, devout, and about to find out
|
||||
that everything he has believed about his own righteousness was a transaction.
|
||||
He must be playable as a man the table could almost pity.
|
||||
4. **The innocent woman is not saveable and the guilty thing is not killable** —
|
||||
at least not both, not in one night. The climax is a trade.
|
||||
5. **Period texture over period accuracy.** Mud, cold, bad law, and the specific
|
||||
Elizabethan terror of being *noticed by the state*.
|
||||
|
||||
## Player experience
|
||||
|
||||
You are marked. Every one of you was going to hang, or burn, or rot, and instead
|
||||
you belong to Dr Dee — and the man who put three of you in front of a magistrate
|
||||
in the first place was Witchfinder **Ezekiel Garrett**.
|
||||
|
||||
Now there is a warrant in your hand, in Dee's own script, and it says: *go to
|
||||
Ludlow, and see that Master Garrett comes to no harm before Michaelmas.* Dee owes
|
||||
a favour to someone at court, that someone needs Garrett alive to testify at
|
||||
Westminster, and so the debt comes down the chain until it lands on you.
|
||||
|
||||
Garrett is in Ludlow to hang a woman on Friday. She did not do it. And something
|
||||
in that town has been feeding Garrett names for eleven years, has decided the
|
||||
arrangement is finished, and intends to collect him before the court ever hears
|
||||
a word.
|
||||
|
||||
## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)
|
||||
|
||||
Ezekiel Garrett, 51, has been a witchfinder for eleven years and has a
|
||||
conviction rate that has made him famous. He believes it is God. It is not.
|
||||
|
||||
In 1585, half-starved and failing, Garrett was given a **commission book** by a
|
||||
grateful magistrate — a bound blank ledger for recording accusations. Something
|
||||
came with it. Since then, names have appeared in that book in a hand that is not
|
||||
his: usually overnight, usually while he sleeps, always people who can be made to
|
||||
confess. He has never spoken of this to a living soul. He has told himself,
|
||||
successfully, for eleven years, that he writes them himself and forgets.
|
||||
|
||||
**The thing in the book — call it the Clerk —** has been trading. It writes the
|
||||
names; he burns and hangs them; each execution is payment. The arrangement was
|
||||
never open-ended. The book has eleven pages left and the Clerk has written
|
||||
Garrett's own name on the last one.
|
||||
|
||||
**Alys Corbett**, 34, herbwoman, was named on Tuesday. She is completely
|
||||
innocent — she is not even a witch of the ordinary harmless kind. She was named
|
||||
because she is the only person in Ludlow who noticed that Garrett's accusations
|
||||
arrive in a rhythm, and said so in the wrong alehouse.
|
||||
|
||||
**The favour:** Dee owes **Lord Bramfield** a debt from 1591. Bramfield is
|
||||
building a case at Westminster against a rival, and Garrett's testimony about
|
||||
that rival's household is the hinge of it. Bramfield does not care what Garrett
|
||||
is. He cares that Garrett arrives in London breathing.
|
||||
|
||||
**The trap for the players:** the simplest way to save Alys is to discredit
|
||||
Garrett, and a discredited Garrett is a useless witness, and a useless witness
|
||||
means the favour is unpaid, and an unpaid favour means Dee withdraws his
|
||||
protection from five marked people. The scenario is built so that the players
|
||||
find that out in Act Two, not Act Three.
|
||||
|
||||
### Timeline
|
||||
|
||||
| When | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| 1585 | Garrett receives the commission book. |
|
||||
| 1585–96 | Forty-one executions. Garrett's reputation made. |
|
||||
| 1591 | Dee incurs the debt to Bramfield. |
|
||||
| 1595 | Three of the Agents are condemned on Garrett's evidence. |
|
||||
| Tue | Alys Corbett named. |
|
||||
| **Play begins** | Wednesday, the Agents arrive in Ludlow. |
|
||||
| Friday, dawn | The assize. The hanging. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Structure
|
||||
|
||||
| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, Dee's warrant read aloud |
|
||||
| Act One — Ludlow | 60 min | 1:15 | Garrett met face to face; Alys seen; at least two townsfolk turned |
|
||||
| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on a new name appearing in the book overnight |
|
||||
| Act Two — The Book | 90 min | 2:45 | The Clerk understood; the last page found; the favour's price known |
|
||||
| Act Three — The Assize | 30 min | 3:15 | Friday dawn; the trade made |
|
||||
| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; what the marks cost |
|
||||
|
||||
- **Act One — Ludlow.** Arrival, the town, the gaol, and the excruciating first
|
||||
conversation with a man who does not remember any of the Agents' faces. The act
|
||||
must earn the players' hatred honestly and then complicate it.
|
||||
- **Act Two — The Book.** Investigation proper: eleven years of records, a
|
||||
bereaved family, a priest who has suspected for a decade, and eventually the
|
||||
commission book itself. Ends when the players know what Garrett is and what
|
||||
saving him costs them.
|
||||
- **Act Three — The Assize.** Dawn, the market square, the scaffold. A decision,
|
||||
not a die roll. Written options: let the Clerk take Garrett and lose Dee's
|
||||
protection; give the Clerk a substitute (there are two candidates and both are
|
||||
appalling); break the book, which frees Garrett to go on hanging people for
|
||||
another twenty years; or hand Garrett to Bramfield whole and let Alys die on
|
||||
schedule.
|
||||
- **Set-piece:** the assize itself — a public hearing run as a scene with a clock,
|
||||
where the Agents must act without being seen to act. Own GM quick-reference
|
||||
page.
|
||||
|
||||
## Cast
|
||||
|
||||
- **Witchfinder Ezekiel Garrett** — *wants to be a righteous man and has almost
|
||||
managed not to notice that he is not.* Frightened, devout, courteous, doomed.
|
||||
- **Alys Corbett** — herbwoman, condemned. *Wants to be believed.* Innocent, and
|
||||
aware that this makes no difference.
|
||||
- **The Clerk** — the thing in the commission book. *Wants the last page filled.*
|
||||
Never seen. Writes.
|
||||
- **Lord Bramfield's man, Hollis** — *wants Garrett on a horse to London by
|
||||
Saturday.* Polite, armed, and entirely uninterested in the players' consciences.
|
||||
- **Father Wells** — parish priest. *Wants to have said something ten years ago.*
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. **Continuity: Garrett is described as returning, but no prior scenario in the
|
||||
Continuum 2026 or Contingency 2025/2026 material mentions a Witchfinder
|
||||
Garrett.** Is he from an unwritten backstory, a different repo, or the
|
||||
Agents' *shared character history* rather than a played scenario? If he was
|
||||
on screen before, his prior appearance changes Act One entirely — the Agents
|
||||
would already know his face and he theirs. **Needs an answer before v1.**
|
||||
2. Are three of the five pregens specifically condemned on Garrett's evidence, or
|
||||
is that one PC's hook? Three is stronger and riskier — it invites the table to
|
||||
unite on revenge in Act One before the complication lands.
|
||||
3. Ludlow, or a fictional border town? Real Ludlow has a real assize history and
|
||||
a real castle; a fictional town avoids the homework. Current lean: fictional
|
||||
town, real county.
|
||||
4. Does the previous Dee Sanction game (*The Princes Bride*, Continuum 2026)
|
||||
share Agents with this one? If so, veteran players get a payoff and the
|
||||
pregens should be built as the same five.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
|
||||
# Slot 5 · Fri 29 Jan, afternoon — DEAD AIR II: THE QUIET CITY
|
||||
|
||||
*October 1962. The gates are shut, the phones are dead, and the test is on Friday.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30 play) ·
|
||||
closed-box procedural · no way out · the institution is the antagonist.
|
||||
|
||||
Part two of the [DEAD AIR trilogy](../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md)
|
||||
(Slots 3, 5, 7 — Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Stands alone.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/dead-air-2-outline.md`](scenarios/dead-air-2-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions |
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1.
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · handouts (programme file, the
|
||||
array schematic, a censored letter home) · art (`DA2-ART-##`) · desk playtest ×2 ·
|
||||
print pack.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*Call of Cthulhu © Chaosium Inc. Private convention play materials — not for
|
||||
sale or distribution.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 5] DEAD AIR II: THE QUIET CITY
|
||||
|
||||
> *October 1962. The gates are shut, the phones are dead, and the test is on Friday.*
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Part two of three — read the
|
||||
[trilogy bible](../../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) first.
|
||||
|
||||
**Reconciliation note (if the table played Part One):** this scenario assumes the
|
||||
Soviets took the discs from Berlin in 1946. If the Part One table sent them west
|
||||
instead, open with one line — the material was recovered from an American
|
||||
facility by a KGB operation in 1951 — and change nothing else.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Friday 29 January 2027, afternoon
|
||||
- **System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e
|
||||
- **Setting:** **Sosnovy-9**, a closed city in the Urals — a place that is not on
|
||||
maps, whose residents have no address, and which exists to house Programme
|
||||
SIRENA. 22–27 October 1962.
|
||||
- **Players:** 5, pregenerated — the programme's own staff: engineers, a
|
||||
physician, a political officer, an archivist. They are not investigators sent
|
||||
in. They already work here, and that is the point.
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
- **Content warnings:** Soviet state violence, coerced labour and the camp
|
||||
system as background; institutional cruelty to people who have done nothing
|
||||
wrong; suicide; radiation-sickness-adjacent medical horror; the Cuban Missile
|
||||
Crisis as a real, lived fear.
|
||||
|
||||
## Design intent
|
||||
|
||||
1. **A closed box.** Nobody leaves. The gates shut in the Introduction and stay
|
||||
shut. Every problem must be solved with the people and materials already
|
||||
inside the wire.
|
||||
2. **The antagonist is a committee.** There is no cultist. There is a ministry
|
||||
that has decided the array is a strategic asset, a deputy director who agrees
|
||||
with them, and a schedule. Horror by memorandum.
|
||||
3. **The players are complicit.** They built this. Some of them have been
|
||||
humming it for years. The scenario never lets them stand outside the thing
|
||||
they are investigating.
|
||||
4. **1962 pressure is real and irrelevant.** The world is genuinely five days
|
||||
from a nuclear exchange, and that is exactly why the ministry wants SIRENA
|
||||
switched on. The crisis is not the plot; it is the reason nobody sensible is
|
||||
available to stop this.
|
||||
5. **Ending it costs the city.** There is no option where the array goes quiet
|
||||
and everyone goes home.
|
||||
|
||||
## Player experience
|
||||
|
||||
You have worked here eleven years. The city has a cinema, a good bakery, a lake
|
||||
with a fence around it, and no name — mail goes to a box number in Sverdlovsk.
|
||||
What you do here is classified from your own families, and you have long ago
|
||||
stopped being curious about the tapes.
|
||||
|
||||
On Monday the gates close for an "administrative period". The telephones go to a
|
||||
single line. Two men from the ministry arrive and announce that the SIRENA
|
||||
array's full-power test, scheduled for next spring, will now happen on Friday,
|
||||
because of Cuba. On Tuesday a technician in Building Four takes off his
|
||||
headphones, walks into the lake, and does not come up, and you are the ones who
|
||||
have to write the report. By Wednesday you will have read the 1946 file. By
|
||||
Thursday you will understand that the array does not project anything at the
|
||||
Americans at all — it simply makes the city loud enough to be heard properly. And
|
||||
on Friday, at 06:00, someone is going to close a switch.
|
||||
|
||||
## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)
|
||||
|
||||
The twelve Berlin lacquers reached Moscow in 1946 and became **Programme
|
||||
SIRENA**: an attempt to weaponise the Sequence as a broadcast psychological
|
||||
agent. Sixteen years of work has produced no evidence it can be aimed and
|
||||
abundant evidence it does *something*, which in this system is enough to keep a
|
||||
budget.
|
||||
|
||||
**The array** — a phased transmitter across the ridge above the city — was built
|
||||
to project the Sequence at range. It cannot. What it does is expose everyone
|
||||
within about nine kilometres, simultaneously, at volume. Every test has raised
|
||||
the number of carriers inside the fence. The programme's own personnel are the
|
||||
sample and nobody has ever written that down in one place, because no single
|
||||
department holds all three of the files that would show it.
|
||||
|
||||
**Chief engineer Arkady Sorin**, 55, has been on the programme since 1949 and has
|
||||
been humming the Sequence, unconsciously, for thirty years. He is the most senior
|
||||
carrier and the kindest man in the city, and he has known for a decade that the
|
||||
full-power test will finish something. His plan is not sabotage. He intends to be
|
||||
in the transmitter hall when it fires, because he believes — correctly — that a
|
||||
carrier at the focus becomes the instrument, and he would rather it were him than
|
||||
the eleven thousand people who live here. The players can help him, stop him,
|
||||
replace him, or turn him in.
|
||||
|
||||
**Deputy Director Lev Bogdanov** brought the schedule forward. He is not
|
||||
malicious and not stupid: he has read summaries, not files, and the summaries say
|
||||
promising. He is the trilogy's committee in one man and he can be *persuaded* —
|
||||
which is the scenario's central and hardest route, because it requires the
|
||||
players to assemble, from three departments, a document that proves their own
|
||||
work has been poisoning their own city.
|
||||
|
||||
**The containment failure** in Building Four on Tuesday is what starts play:
|
||||
one dead technician, one surviving colleague who will not stop tapping her
|
||||
fingers, and a report that the players must write and that everyone above them
|
||||
wants to say "industrial accident".
|
||||
|
||||
### Timeline
|
||||
|
||||
| When | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| 1946 | The discs reach Moscow. |
|
||||
| 1949 | Programme SIRENA established; Sosnovy-9 built over the next four years. |
|
||||
| 1953–61 | Six partial-power tests. Carrier count rises after each. |
|
||||
| Mon 22 Oct | Gates closed. Ministry party arrives. Test moved to Friday. |
|
||||
| **Tue 23 Oct** | Building Four incident. **Play begins.** |
|
||||
| Fri 26 Oct, 06:00 | Full-power test. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Structure
|
||||
|
||||
| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, the gates shut on screen |
|
||||
| Act One — The Incident | 60 min | 1:15 | The body examined; the report started; the players know the test moved |
|
||||
| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the 1946 file being signed out |
|
||||
| Act Two — The Files | 90 min | 2:45 | Three departments' records cross-referenced; Sorin's condition known; Bogdanov approached at least once |
|
||||
| Act Three — Friday, 06:00 | 30 min | 3:15 | The transmitter hall; the decision made |
|
||||
| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; carry-forward block recorded |
|
||||
|
||||
- **Act One — The Incident.** A drowning, an autopsy, a colleague who taps, and a
|
||||
report form with a box on it labelled *cause*. Establishes the city, the wire,
|
||||
and that the players' own signatures are on things.
|
||||
- **Act Two — The Files.** The long act: three departments, three partial truths,
|
||||
one archivist who has been quietly indexing this for years. Splits well —
|
||||
archive track and medical track, each holding half a revelation. The 1946
|
||||
Berlin file is in here, and returning players will recognise the ledger.
|
||||
- **Act Three — Friday, 06:00.** The transmitter hall. Sorin is already there.
|
||||
The options are all written: let him do it, take his place, cut the feed and
|
||||
face what the ministry does to a city that fails a test, or expose the
|
||||
programme and accept that eleven thousand people will not be allowed to leave
|
||||
either way.
|
||||
- **Set-piece:** the array test itself — countdown, hall, and the one direct
|
||||
exposure of the afternoon. Own GM quick-reference page.
|
||||
|
||||
## Cast
|
||||
|
||||
- **Arkady Sorin** — chief engineer, carrier, thirty years. *Wants to be the
|
||||
price.* Warm, funny, and completely resolved.
|
||||
- **Deputy Director Lev Bogdanov** — the ministry's man. *Wants a result to
|
||||
take back to Moscow this week.* Persuadable with evidence, and only evidence.
|
||||
- **Nadia Vlasenko** — archivist. *Wants someone senior to read what she has
|
||||
filed.* The players' best ally and the scenario's clue engine.
|
||||
- **Dr Irina Kus** — physician. *Wants to stop signing death certificates she
|
||||
does not believe.* Holds the medical half of the truth.
|
||||
- **Yuri Petrov** — the tapping survivor from Building Four. *Wants to sleep.*
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. **Does Ilse Brandt from Part One appear here?** Aged 35, brought east in 1946
|
||||
as "material". This is the single strongest continuity payoff available in the
|
||||
trilogy and needs deciding before v1 — it changes Act Two's shape.
|
||||
2. Are the pregens all Soviet nationals, or does the party include a German
|
||||
specialist taken east in 1946 (a route for a Part One character to return)?
|
||||
3. How much Cuban Missile Crisis to put on screen? Current intent: radio
|
||||
bulletins only, never a scene — it is pressure, not plot.
|
||||
4. Naming: **Sosnovy-9** is invented, to avoid attaching this to a real closed
|
||||
city with real residents. Confirm that choice stands.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
|
||||
# Slot 6 · Fri 29 Jan, evening — ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP
|
||||
|
||||
*The map is genuine. That is the problem.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** VANITY (Tim's own d6 pool game) · **5 players, one per class** ·
|
||||
4-hour slot (3h30 play) · simple D&D-shaped dungeon crawl · comic on the way in,
|
||||
straight-faced at the vault door.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/another-bloody-treasure-map-outline.md`](scenarios/another-bloody-treasure-map-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, four-act skeleton, open questions |
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1.
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens (one per class) · the map itself as a
|
||||
physical handout · rival-party cards · art (woodcut/scratchboard, matching the
|
||||
VANITY rulebook) · desk playtest ×2 · print pack.
|
||||
|
||||
**Reuses:** the VANITY convention rules digest built for Continuum 2026 — copy
|
||||
it in as `reference/vanity-convention-rules.html`, no rewrite needed.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*VANITY © Tim Evans. Private convention play materials — not for sale or
|
||||
distribution.*
|
||||
+141
@@ -0,0 +1,141 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 6] ANOTHER BLOODY TREASURE MAP — a VANITY one-shot
|
||||
|
||||
> *The map is genuine. That is the problem.*
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Built to the same four-act shape as *The Vain
|
||||
Crown* (Continuum 2026), which is the proven VANITY convention structure.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Friday 29 January 2027, evening
|
||||
- **System:** VANITY (Draft 13) — the house d6 pool game. Table copy of the rules
|
||||
digest carried over from Continuum 2026.
|
||||
- **Setting:** generic high-fantasy, played broad. A market town, a bad road, and
|
||||
a hole in a hill.
|
||||
- **Players:** 5, pregenerated, one per class
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
- **Content warnings:** cartoon violence, greed, one genuinely unpleasant moment
|
||||
at the vault door. Nothing that needs a warning beyond the usual line.
|
||||
|
||||
**System crash-course** *(for a stand-in GM)*: roll a pool of d6 = Attribute +
|
||||
Knack + situation; **5–6 = Success**; one Success succeeds, extras buy damage or
|
||||
manoeuvres. Fail with two or more 1s = **Stumble** (bank 1 Bane). **Push**
|
||||
rerolls non-Successes once, always +1 Bane. Players spend **Vanity** (start 3)
|
||||
for +1 die / go first / Refuse to Fall; playing a **Vice** earns 1 Vanity and
|
||||
hands the GM a Bane. At **6 Banes → THE RECKONING** (2d6 table). No HP —
|
||||
**Grit**; at 0 you are Taken Out (attacker may always Subdue).
|
||||
|
||||
## Design intent
|
||||
|
||||
1. **Simple, D&D-shaped, on purpose.** Tavern, road, dungeon, treasure. No
|
||||
mystery structure, no clue trail. This is the loose Friday-night game and it
|
||||
should feel like one.
|
||||
2. **Funny on the way in, straight at the vault.** VANITY's register — the jokes
|
||||
buy you the right to play the last twenty minutes completely seriously.
|
||||
3. **The joke of the title is the premise.** Everyone at the table has done this
|
||||
before. The scenario knows that, says so, and then makes the map real.
|
||||
4. **Rivals, not monsters, are the pressure.** Three other parties have the same
|
||||
map. They are competent, comic, and genuinely dangerous.
|
||||
5. **The ending is a division of spoils**, and the division is the actual
|
||||
scenario. Everything before it is set-up for one conversation about who
|
||||
carries what.
|
||||
|
||||
## Player experience
|
||||
|
||||
You bought a treasure map off a man in a tavern. Yes. You know. So did four other
|
||||
groups this week, because he printed a great many of them and he is not a subtle
|
||||
man, and by Tuesday there were three parties of adventurers on the same road
|
||||
being extremely rude to each other.
|
||||
|
||||
Here is the thing though. The map is real. The vault is where it says it is. The
|
||||
treasure is in it and there is a *lot* of it. The old man who printed the maps was
|
||||
not running a swindle — he was running a recruitment drive, because the hoard has
|
||||
a condition attached and he has been trying to give it away for sixty years.
|
||||
Whoever carries the gold out of that hill inherits everything else that came with
|
||||
it: the name, the debts, and the people still owed.
|
||||
|
||||
## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)
|
||||
|
||||
**Ordric Vane** was a very successful thief who, in 1547 of the local reckoning,
|
||||
robbed the wrong shrine and acquired a hoard bound by a **weighing curse**: the
|
||||
treasure may only leave the vault carried by someone who wants it, and whoever
|
||||
carries it out assumes the carrier's obligations in full — every enemy, every
|
||||
debt, and the name Ordric Vane, which a surprising number of people are still
|
||||
actively looking for.
|
||||
|
||||
Ordric has spent sixty years failing to die and printing maps. He is not
|
||||
malicious; he is exhausted, and he has been scrupulously honest in a way nobody
|
||||
has ever noticed, because the maps say exactly what the terms are in a marginal
|
||||
note everybody assumes is decorative flourish. (**It is `H1-A`, the map handout.
|
||||
Put the terms on it in plain sight from minute one.** When the table works it out
|
||||
in Act Four, the joke is on them and it is a fair joke.)
|
||||
|
||||
**The weighing room** at the vault's threshold does the arithmetic: it measures
|
||||
what each person is carrying against what they want, and the door only opens
|
||||
outward for someone whose greed balances the load. A party can split the hoard so
|
||||
that no one person qualifies — and then nothing leaves at all.
|
||||
|
||||
**The rivals:**
|
||||
- **The Company of the Bright Hand** — professional, insured, and led by a woman
|
||||
who has done proper research and knows about the curse. She wants the players to
|
||||
carry it out. She will be extremely helpful.
|
||||
- **Three Lads Called Ned** — enthusiastic idiots. Comic relief that becomes
|
||||
tragic if the players let them reach the door first.
|
||||
- **Brother Anselm** — one man, no party, here to seal the vault permanently. Not
|
||||
wrong.
|
||||
|
||||
### Timeline
|
||||
|
||||
| When | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| ~60 years ago | Ordric robs the shrine; the curse takes. |
|
||||
| Since | Roughly 400 maps printed. Eleven parties have reached the vault. Nine turned back. Two are still in there. |
|
||||
| Last week | The players buy their map. |
|
||||
| **Play begins** | The tavern. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Structure (four acts, VANITY house shape)
|
||||
|
||||
| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, one practice roll each, map handed over |
|
||||
| Act One — The Tavern | 45 min | 1:00 | Map read, at least one rival party met, the road taken |
|
||||
| Act Two — The Road | 40 min | 1:40 | One fight won, one rival party outmanoeuvred or joined |
|
||||
| Act Three — The Hill | 35 min | 2:15 | Vault entrance found; the two who are still in there met |
|
||||
| Act Four — The Weighing Room | 60 min | 3:15 | Hoard reached; the terms understood; the division made |
|
||||
| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Who carried what, and what came looking |
|
||||
|
||||
**Hard rules:** the party reaches the hill by 2:15. The weighing room starts by
|
||||
2:40. The division happens no later than 3:15 — it is the entire point of the
|
||||
evening.
|
||||
|
||||
**Pre-written cuts if running late** *(take them early, in this order)*:
|
||||
(1) the Neds are met on the road rather than getting their own scene at the hill;
|
||||
(2) one road encounter instead of two; (3) Brother Anselm is already at the vault
|
||||
door when the party arrives rather than trailing them.
|
||||
|
||||
## Cast
|
||||
|
||||
- **Ordric Vane** — *wants to put it down.* Sells the map in Act One as a
|
||||
disappointing old man in a good coat. Returns in Act Four.
|
||||
- **Captain Ilsabet Crane**, Company of the Bright Hand — *wants the players to
|
||||
be the ones who carry it.* Charming, generous, entirely straight with them if
|
||||
asked a direct question, which nobody ever does.
|
||||
- **The Neds** — *want to be adventurers.* Three of them. All called Ned.
|
||||
- **Brother Anselm** — *wants the hill sealed.* The only honest broker, and
|
||||
therefore the least popular person in the scenario.
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. Does this share a world with *The Vain Crown*? A one-line nod (the same
|
||||
peacock motif, a mention of Nettlebrook) is free and rewards returning
|
||||
players.
|
||||
2. Five classes — confirm the VANITY Draft 13 class list is unchanged since the
|
||||
Continuum build before the pregens are written.
|
||||
3. The map handout is doing heavy lifting: it must be attractive enough that
|
||||
players read it in Act One and dense enough that they miss the terms. Prop
|
||||
design needs a dedicated pass.
|
||||
4. How mean is Act Four allowed to be? A table that splits the hoard perfectly
|
||||
gets nothing out — is that a valid ending, or does the scenario always give
|
||||
them a way to leave with *something*? Current lean: valid ending, and funny.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
||||
# Slot 7 · Sat 30 Jan, afternoon — DEAD AIR III: FULL VOLUME
|
||||
|
||||
*Berlin, now. Eighty years of secrecy, and it goes out live at midnight.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e (modern day) · **5 players** · 4-hour slot (3h30
|
||||
play) · open-city sprint · too much information, no authority, a broadcast clock.
|
||||
|
||||
Part three — the payoff — of the
|
||||
[DEAD AIR trilogy](../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md)
|
||||
(Slots 3, 5, 7 — Thu/Fri/Sat afternoons). Stands alone.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/dead-air-3-outline.md`](scenarios/dead-air-3-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions |
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1. **This is the arc payoff —
|
||||
budget the most playtesting here.**
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 5 pregens · handouts (auction lot listing, a
|
||||
waveform print, the platform's takedown policy, a set list) · art
|
||||
(`DA3-ART-##`) · desk playtest ×3 · print pack.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*Call of Cthulhu © Chaosium Inc. Private convention play materials — not for
|
||||
sale or distribution.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,169 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 7] DEAD AIR III: FULL VOLUME
|
||||
|
||||
> *Berlin, now. Eighty years of secrecy, and it goes out live at midnight.*
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline (pre-v1). Part three of three — read the
|
||||
[trilogy bible](../../../docs/dead-air-trilogy-bible.md) first.
|
||||
|
||||
**Reconciliation note:** this scenario needs exactly one thing to be true — that
|
||||
at least one lacquer disc survived and reached the West. Every Part One and Part
|
||||
Two outcome allows that, including the ones where the players thought they had
|
||||
destroyed everything. If a previous table burned the lot, the surviving disc is
|
||||
the one Vehr kept in his desk rather than the vault, and that is a *better*
|
||||
opening line, not a retcon.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Saturday 30 January 2027, afternoon
|
||||
- **System:** Call of Cthulhu 7e, modern day
|
||||
- **Setting:** Berlin, January 2027. A Kreuzberg record archive, a Charlottenburg
|
||||
auction house, a Neukölln studio, and **Teufelsberg** — the abandoned Cold War
|
||||
listening station on the rubble mountain, where the closing set of a broadcast
|
||||
festival goes out live at midnight.
|
||||
- **Players:** 5, pregenerated — no agency, no badges: an archivist, a mastering
|
||||
engineer, a music journalist, a historian of the East German security
|
||||
apparatus, and one person who has been hearing it since childhood.
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
- **Content warnings:** self-harm and suicide; mass-casualty risk; drug use in a
|
||||
club setting; flashing-light and loud-audio content described in play (state
|
||||
this one plainly — it is the only warning that might affect a real person at
|
||||
the table); the trilogy's historical warnings carried forward.
|
||||
|
||||
## Design intent
|
||||
|
||||
1. **Too much information, not too little.** Part One was a dig and Part Two was
|
||||
an archive; Part Three is a flood. Everything is online, most of it is wrong,
|
||||
and the players' problem is triage against a clock.
|
||||
2. **No authority to call.** No Delta Green, no Society, no ministry. Five
|
||||
private citizens with laptops and about eleven hours.
|
||||
3. **The scale finally lands.** One room, then one city, then everyone. The
|
||||
climax is the first time in the trilogy that the audience is genuinely
|
||||
uncountable.
|
||||
4. **The quiet win is the hard one.** Stopping a broadcast publicly is easy and
|
||||
catastrophic — it makes the Sequence a story, and a story is an audience.
|
||||
Stopping it quietly costs the players everything they would need to prove they
|
||||
were right.
|
||||
5. **End the trilogy, but honestly.** The arc closes. It does not end with the
|
||||
Sequence destroyed, because it cannot be — it ends with it made small again,
|
||||
by five people nobody will ever thank.
|
||||
|
||||
## Player experience
|
||||
|
||||
A lacquer disc came out of a box of Stasi-era acetates at a Charlottenburg
|
||||
auction and sold for four hundred euros to a producer who liked the label. He
|
||||
sampled fifteen seconds of it. The hook has been going round Berlin for eight
|
||||
months — it is on a playlist with nine million plays, and you have almost
|
||||
certainly already heard it.
|
||||
|
||||
You have until midnight. At midnight the producer's set closes a festival at
|
||||
Teufelsberg, live, streamed, and the whole thing is built around the sample at
|
||||
full length for the first time. Between now and then you have an archive that
|
||||
holds a 1946 ledger nobody has looked at since 1991, a woman who has been drawing
|
||||
the same waveform since she was six, a platform whose takedown process takes four
|
||||
working days, and a producer who is not a villain, has done nothing illegal, and
|
||||
will not stop for anything less than a reason.
|
||||
|
||||
## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)
|
||||
|
||||
The disc is **one of the twelve**. It travelled west in a document dump after
|
||||
1991, mislabelled, and sat in a private collection until the owner died and the
|
||||
estate went to auction in May 2026.
|
||||
|
||||
**Kasimir Adler**, 34, producer, bought lot 118 because the label was pretty.
|
||||
He sampled fifteen seconds into a track called *Amber*. It did well. It did well
|
||||
in the way things do when they will not leave your head. Adler has been sleeping
|
||||
badly, has been extending the sample in each remix without deciding to, and has
|
||||
built his festival closing set around the full uncut lacquer. He is not
|
||||
possessed and there is no cult. He is a man with a good ear who found a hook that
|
||||
works better than anything he has ever made, and the reason it works is the
|
||||
reason everyone should stop.
|
||||
|
||||
**The arithmetic:** every previous era's exposure was bounded — a basement, a
|
||||
city. The festival stream is expected to hold somewhere north of two hundred
|
||||
thousand simultaneous viewers, at the exact moment the uncut Sequence plays for
|
||||
four minutes. That is the number. Nothing else in the trilogy has ever been the
|
||||
number.
|
||||
|
||||
**What happens if it completes** is not an eruption. The Sequence simply becomes
|
||||
one of the things that has always been true, quietly and retroactively, and
|
||||
nobody — including the players, including the survivors — will be able to
|
||||
remember that it was ever otherwise. The Epilogue for that outcome is the
|
||||
scariest page in the trilogy and it is entirely mundane.
|
||||
|
||||
**The carrier** is **Mila Brandt**, 29, a mastering engineer and one of the
|
||||
pregens' natural allies — a great-granddaughter of the Berlin trials (surname
|
||||
deliberate; see Part One's Ilse). She has drawn the same fifteen-second waveform
|
||||
in the margins of her notebooks since she was six years old and has never known
|
||||
why. She is the only person alive who can tell, by ear, which parts of Adler's
|
||||
set are the Sequence and which are just music. Using her means asking her to
|
||||
listen to it deliberately.
|
||||
|
||||
### Timeline
|
||||
|
||||
| When | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| 1991 | Archive dump; the disc goes west, mislabelled. |
|
||||
| May 2026 | Estate auction, lot 118. Adler buys it. |
|
||||
| Jun 2026 | *Amber* released. |
|
||||
| Sep 2026 | Playlist placement. Nine million plays by January. |
|
||||
| Nov 2026 | Adler books the Teufelsberg closing set. |
|
||||
| **Play begins** | ~13:00 on the day of the festival. |
|
||||
| 00:00 | The set. Four uncut minutes, streamed. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Structure
|
||||
|
||||
| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line (including the audio/light warning), the clock on the table |
|
||||
| Act One — The Hook | 60 min | 1:15 | The sample traced to lot 118; the auction record found; Mila identified |
|
||||
| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the 1946 ledger surfacing in the archive |
|
||||
| Act Two — Provenance | 90 min | 2:45 | The chain 1946 → 1962 → now assembled; Adler approached at least once; the platform route tried and failed |
|
||||
| Act Three — Teufelsberg | 30 min | 3:15 | On the mountain before midnight; the decision made |
|
||||
| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; the trilogy's last line |
|
||||
|
||||
- **Act One — The Hook.** Modern research: streaming metadata, an auction
|
||||
catalogue, a dead collector's estate, and the growing realisation that the
|
||||
players have all heard this already. Fast, sharp, lots of screens.
|
||||
- **Act Two — Provenance.** The long act. The archive holds the 1946 material
|
||||
(returning players meet the ledger again) and a Soviet file from Sosnovy-9 that
|
||||
arrived via a 1990s dump. Meanwhile: the platform's takedown process, the
|
||||
festival's promoter, and Adler himself, who is reachable, reasonable, and
|
||||
cannot be convinced by anything except the thing the players cannot prove.
|
||||
Splits well — archive track and Adler track.
|
||||
- **Act Three — Teufelsberg.** Night, the rubble mountain, the radomes, four
|
||||
thousand people and a stream. A decision, not a die roll: cut the power and
|
||||
cause a story; get Mila to the desk and have her surgically strip the Sequence
|
||||
out of the master live; convince Adler in ninety seconds; or take the stage.
|
||||
Every option is written, including the one where they fail and the Epilogue is
|
||||
a perfectly ordinary morning.
|
||||
- **Set-piece:** the last twenty minutes before midnight — a split-track sprint
|
||||
between the stage and the sound desk, with its own GM quick-reference page.
|
||||
|
||||
## Cast
|
||||
|
||||
- **Kasimir Adler** — producer. *Wants the best set of his life.* Not a villain.
|
||||
Tired, courteous, and completely certain the players are cranks.
|
||||
- **Mila Brandt** — mastering engineer, carrier. *Wants to know why she has been
|
||||
drawing it since she was six.* The cost of using her is asking her to listen.
|
||||
- **Dr Ute Halbach** — archivist at the institute holding the 1991 dump. *Wants
|
||||
someone to care about a collection nobody has requested in thirty years.*
|
||||
- **Jonas Reike** — festival promoter. *Wants the stream to go out.* The
|
||||
committee, 2027 edition: he has a contract, an insurer and no imagination.
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. **The Brandt surname link is currently the trilogy's whole payoff.** Confirm
|
||||
it, or find a subtler thread — a returning object rather than a returning
|
||||
bloodline. Decide before v1.
|
||||
2. Straight CoC 7e, or Delta Green-style handler framing? Straight 7e is the
|
||||
default, and the "no authority to call" design intent argues for keeping it.
|
||||
3. Teufelsberg is real, currently a guided-tour site, and hosting a fictional
|
||||
festival there is a licence worth taking knowingly. Confirm.
|
||||
4. Does the failure ending get played out, or narrated? Playing it — an ordinary
|
||||
morning where nobody remembers — is far stronger and needs careful writing so
|
||||
it does not read as an anticlimax at a convention table.
|
||||
5. The uncut Sequence is described, never performed. Confirm there is no
|
||||
intention to use actual audio at the table — the content warning assumes
|
||||
description only.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
|
||||
# Slot 8 · Sat 30 Jan, evening — THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY
|
||||
|
||||
*The last twenty pages are in his hand. He has been dead a month.*
|
||||
|
||||
**System:** Vaesen — Nordic Horror Roleplaying · **4 players** · 4-hour slot
|
||||
(3h30 play) · archival mystery · folk horror · a frozen lake at night.
|
||||
|
||||
| File | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| [`scenarios/mr-parkers-diary-outline.md`](scenarios/mr-parkers-diary-outline.md) | Synopsis, design intent, plot truth, act skeleton, open questions |
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline. Next: full scenario draft to v1.
|
||||
|
||||
**Remaining prep:** scenario v1 · 4 Society pregens · handouts (three diary
|
||||
spreads — Parker's hand early, Parker's hand wrong, and the page that describes
|
||||
the players) · the burnt parish register · art · desk playtest ×2 · print pack.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
*Vaesen © Free League Publishing, based on the work of Johan Egerkrans. Private
|
||||
convention play materials — not for sale or distribution.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,164 @@
|
||||
# [Contingency 2027 — Slot 8] THE CURIOUS CASE OF MR PARKER'S DIARY
|
||||
|
||||
> *The last twenty pages are in his hand. He has been dead a month.*
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** outline (pre-v1).
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
- **Slot:** Saturday 30 January 2027, evening
|
||||
- **System:** Vaesen — Nordic Horror Roleplaying (Free League)
|
||||
- **Setting:** the Mythic North, February 1901. The Society's castle in Upsala,
|
||||
then **Hällvattnet**, a sawmill parish in northern Sweden, in the fortnight of
|
||||
the year when the lake is thickest.
|
||||
- **Players:** 4, pregenerated members of the Society. Runs at 5.
|
||||
- **Runtime:** 3h30 play in a 4-hour slot
|
||||
- **Content warnings:** drowning; dead children (myling); a suicide implied in a
|
||||
journal; a community's collective decision to let someone die. The diary
|
||||
handout addresses the players directly, which lands harder than expected —
|
||||
flag it in the safety line.
|
||||
|
||||
## Design intent
|
||||
|
||||
1. **The document is the monster's vehicle.** The diary is not a clue about the
|
||||
haunting; it is *how the haunting travels*. Everyone who reads it becomes
|
||||
eligible, and the players read it in the Introduction.
|
||||
2. **Archival investigation.** Vaesen is at its best in registers, parish
|
||||
records and ledgers. The solution is a name, written down, in a book somebody
|
||||
burned.
|
||||
3. **The grievance is a public works project.** The vaesen is not evil. It is
|
||||
owed something, and the parish took it away in 1894 for good economic reasons.
|
||||
4. **One vaesen, seen twice.** Once in glimpse, once at the climax. Vaesen's
|
||||
monsters shrink when overexposed.
|
||||
5. **The ending is a choice about a stranger.** Two routes out. One of them is
|
||||
easy and passes the problem to somebody the players will never meet.
|
||||
|
||||
## Player experience
|
||||
|
||||
A parcel reaches Castle Gyllencreutz in February. Inside is the field diary of
|
||||
**Edmund Parker**, an English naturalist who spent last autumn cataloguing the
|
||||
fauna of a lake in the far north, and who drowned there in October. The parcel
|
||||
was posted from Hällvattnet three weeks *after* the drowning.
|
||||
|
||||
The first sixty pages are ordinary — weather, water temperature, a very great
|
||||
number of birds, a man being slowly charmed by a place. The next twenty are in
|
||||
the same hand, plainly, unmistakably his, and they are written from somewhere
|
||||
outside his own life. They describe the parish as if from the water. They
|
||||
describe the sawmill's owner in terms no living guest would use. And on the last
|
||||
written page, dated nine days from now, they describe four people from the
|
||||
Society arriving at Hällvattnet by sledge, and they get two of you right.
|
||||
|
||||
## Plot summary (GM truth — players never see this page)
|
||||
|
||||
Hällvattnet's lake had a **ferryman** — a vaesen of the drowned, whose office was
|
||||
to carry the dead across and whose right was a name spoken over the water at the
|
||||
inlet each Michaelmas. The parish did this for two hundred years without much
|
||||
thinking about it.
|
||||
|
||||
In **1894** the sawmill company dammed and rerouted the inlet. The rite stopped,
|
||||
because the place where it was performed no longer existed. Since then the
|
||||
drowned of Hällvattnet — including four children under the ice in 1897 — have
|
||||
been stranded: not carried, not gone, in the water. The ferryman is not malicious
|
||||
and it is not free. It cannot leave its office and it cannot perform it, and it
|
||||
has spent seven years looking for a replacement.
|
||||
|
||||
**Edmund Parker**, 41, naturalist, spent September and October on that lake with
|
||||
nets and notebooks, and was the first person in seven years to look at the water
|
||||
with genuine attention. He was not tricked. He was *asked*, in the way these
|
||||
things ask, and — lonely, unmarried, in love with the place and privately
|
||||
finished with the life he had — he agreed to a bargain he understood only in
|
||||
outline. He gave himself to be *kept*.
|
||||
|
||||
What is now writing in Parker's diary is Parker, in the sense that matters least.
|
||||
It is him as the office has made him: an inventory-taker who now inventories the
|
||||
living. **The diary is the recruitment.** It circulates; it is read; each reader
|
||||
is looked at. Parker is trying — in the only way left to him — to find someone to
|
||||
take the post so that he can finally go under properly, and he is being decent
|
||||
about it in a way that makes the whole thing worse.
|
||||
|
||||
**The weakness (Vaesen requirement):** the ferryman must be given back the name
|
||||
it was called by before the mill, spoken over open water at the old inlet. That
|
||||
name is in the **parish register for 1893**, which the mill's owner,
|
||||
**Gustaf Lind**, burned in 1895 when a company lawyer told him the old rights
|
||||
recorded in it might constitute an easement. A copy exists: the dean's visitation
|
||||
transcript, filed in Härnösand, which the players can reach by telegram — or the
|
||||
name can be had from the one person in the parish old enough to remember hearing
|
||||
it, who will not say it aloud for any money.
|
||||
|
||||
### Timeline
|
||||
|
||||
| When | What |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| ~1690 | The rite established. |
|
||||
| 1894 | The inlet dammed and rerouted. Rite lapses. |
|
||||
| 1895 | Lind burns the 1893 register. |
|
||||
| 1897 | Four children under the ice. |
|
||||
| Sep–Oct 1900 | Parker's season on the lake. |
|
||||
| 12 Oct 1900 | Parker drowns. Bargain struck. |
|
||||
| Nov 1900 | The diary posted to the Society. |
|
||||
| **Play begins** | February 1901, Upsala. |
|
||||
|
||||
## Structure
|
||||
|
||||
| Section | Budget | Cumulative | GM checkpoint |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Introduction | 15 min | 0:15 | Pregens dealt, safety line, the diary read at the castle |
|
||||
| Act One — Hällvattnet | 60 min | 1:15 | Parish reached; Lind met; the 1894 works identified |
|
||||
| *break* | 10 min | — | Ends on the first glimpse from the ice |
|
||||
| Act Two — The Register | 90 min | 2:45 | The burning known; the name's two routes open; Parker spoken to |
|
||||
| Act Three — The Old Inlet | 30 min | 3:15 | Night on the ice; the name spoken, or not |
|
||||
| Epilogue | 15 min | 3:30 | Per-PC vignettes; what happened to the diary |
|
||||
|
||||
- **Act One — Hällvattnet.** Sledge, cold, a company parish where everyone works
|
||||
for one man. The Society's usual difficulty: the people who know are the people
|
||||
with the most to lose by saying so.
|
||||
- **Act Two — The Register.** The archival heart. The presbytery, the mill's
|
||||
legal file, an old woman who will not speak the name, and a telegram to
|
||||
Härnösand that takes hours to answer. Meanwhile Parker can be *talked to*,
|
||||
through the diary, which is the scene the whole scenario is built to earn.
|
||||
- **Act Three — The Old Inlet.** Night, the frozen lake, the choked channel where
|
||||
the rite was performed. A decision, not a die roll: speak the name and release
|
||||
the ferryman (which releases Parker, and the four children, and ends the
|
||||
office) — or hand the diary on, which saves nothing and dooms a stranger, and
|
||||
which at least two NPCs will suggest helpfully.
|
||||
- **Set-piece:** the crossing to the old inlet over rotten ice, at night, with
|
||||
something keeping pace underneath. Own GM quick-reference page.
|
||||
|
||||
## Cast
|
||||
|
||||
- **Edmund Parker** — the kept man. *Wants to be relieved of the post.* Courteous,
|
||||
articulate, apologetic. Never threatens.
|
||||
- **Gustaf Lind** — mill owner. *Wants the easement question to stay closed.*
|
||||
Burned the register for a reason he still thinks was sound.
|
||||
- **Kerstin Aho**, 79 — *wants not to be the one who says it.* Heard the name as
|
||||
a girl. Will not repeat it, and her refusal is not stubbornness; it is the last
|
||||
correct instinct in the parish.
|
||||
- **Pastor Elias Ström** — *wants the four children to have been carried.* Keeps
|
||||
the presbytery. Has been praying about this for four years without telling
|
||||
anyone what about.
|
||||
|
||||
## Handouts
|
||||
|
||||
Three diary spreads are the core props: `H0-A` Parker's hand, early and ordinary
|
||||
· `H2-A` Parker's hand, from the water · `H2-B` the page dated nine days ahead
|
||||
that describes the players. Plus the burnt register fragment and the Härnösand
|
||||
telegram.
|
||||
|
||||
## Open questions
|
||||
|
||||
1. `H2-B` — how specific can the page describing the player characters be, given
|
||||
the players choose pregens in the Introduction? Options: leave two blanks for
|
||||
the GM to fill in after selection, or describe them obliquely enough that any
|
||||
two fit. The first is far stronger and needs a physical prop that supports it.
|
||||
2. Which vaesen, exactly? The office described here is closest to a **Näcken**
|
||||
given a psychopomp function, but Vaesen's own bestiary may have a better fit —
|
||||
check the core book and *Mythic Britain & Ireland* before v1 rather than
|
||||
inventing one.
|
||||
3. Is Parker English by design (a foreign naturalist, an outsider's eye on the
|
||||
Mythic North) or should he be Swedish for tighter fit? Current lean: keep him
|
||||
English — the outsider is the point, and the Society is used to English
|
||||
correspondents.
|
||||
4. Four players or five? Vaesen's Society archetypes reward five, but the
|
||||
Saturday evening slot is late and four moves faster.
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user