Campaign of the Month: July 2021
The Coldfall Sanction
Night’s Black Agents: The Dracula Dossier
The wild beasts of the desert
shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island,
And the demon shall cry to his fellow;
Lilith also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.
– Isaiah 34:14, a prophecy concerning Edom
EDOM:
In 1893, a visionary British Naval Intelligence Department spymaster code- named “Peter Hawkins” launched a plan to recruit the perfect spy: a vampire. British intelligence assets on the Turkish frontier, specifically the army doctor George Stoker and the Orientalist and traveler Ármin Vámbéry, had uncovered evidence of vampires’ existence during the Russo- Turkish War of 1877–1878, and, upon further investigation over the next decade or so, developed a trove of cryptic occult materials and obscure scientific papers to make their case.
Called “Operation Edom,” after the vampire- tinged prophecy in Isaiah, the trial ran promisingly at first. Hawkins made contact with a vampire named Dracula. A meet was set and made, a safe house and a headquarters in England prepared. Then it all started to go wrong. Dracula imprisoned his minder and double-crossed NID, outsiders — possibly with their own ties to foreign espionage — became involved, and Hawkins ordered a sanction. Then Hawkins disappeared, and the Edom agents on the ground had to run the operation themselves. They barred Dracula from England, and hunted him down on his home earth, where — during the great eruption and earthquake of 31 August 1894 — they terminated him, with extreme prejudice and two knives.
Or so they said.
Game Mode:
Mirror
Many spy stories, especially in the modern era, present a “wilderness of mirrors,” a world of hidden agendas and shifting allegiances. They threaten personal identity and self-knowledge, mirroring those threats in betrayal and contests between corrupt opponents where the protagonist must trust only his own moral sense — if she can remember it. This is the world of John Le Carré’s Smiley novels and Barry Eisler’s John Rain thrillers, of movies like Ronin and Spy Games and the Mission: Impossible films, of TV shows like The Prisoner and MI-5.
In Mirror mode games, your contacts and even your team are quite possibly unreliable.
The Coldfall Sanction Comments