This is the second adventure in the Edom Files - I have run the first already, and you can read about it here. Luckily I'm playing with a group that has completed the Dracula Dosser campaign already, so is quite familiar with Edom and its background.
As discussed in the Dracula Dossier, Edom is a covert organisation that sits within MI6 and is tasked with countering the threat of the undead to national security. In the campaign we played, Edom ended up as adversaries of the player characters - although they could have been allies.
In the Carmilla Sanction, the PCs are members of an Edom hit squad tasked with tracking down and slaying the vampire Carmilla Karnstein in Austria in 1948. It is right after WW2, and Austria is still divided up between the Allied powers. Southern Austria is under British occupation.
We generated characters specifically for this mission and they are:
- Sean O'Reilly, code name Wolf, a former military policeman, his drive is Mystery
- Code name Fox, nobody knows his real name, he is a master forger and works for Edom because he has nowhere else to go
- Jeff Hoffmann, code name Moth, he is a demolitions expert and an Austrian native, his drive is Collector
- Nathan Blake, code name Owl, he is an MI6 assassin, his drive is Slayer
The PCs had to scale the Leichenberg mountain in Styria in order to approach the schloss covertly, descending the mountain in an effort to surprise the castle's inhabitants during daylight. There were a number of things that could have gone wrong on the climb, as only one of them (Hoffmann) was an experienced mountaineer, and two were out of shape with no Athletics pools to speak of (Fox had not trained for this sort of work).
As it was, the group avoided alerting the castle's inhabitants, and bought themselves more time by bivouacking on the mountain overnight in order to launch their attack at dawn the next day. This they succeeded in doing, roping across to the castle's roof and gaining access to the fourth floor through a window.
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| Schloss Karnstein |
Initial investigation found the castle seemingly deserted, but the agents soon encountered some of Carmilla's servants on the third floor of the central wing of the castle. While Hoffmann sought to overpower one of the men and use him as a shield against a second, Blake was surprised by a third who stabbed him in the back before O'Reilly could shoot him with his crossbow. Fox sought to grapple with him but found the servant to be unusually strong.
IIRC one of the servants had his neck broken and another was stabbed to death with a kukri. It was all very bloody, needless to say, but the alarm was not raised, which was the important thing, and Blake's knife wound was successfully treated. The third man was aggressively interrogated by Hoffmann (including the removal of a finger), and provided additional information on some of the other inhabitants of the castle and the news that his mistress had left the day before, before he too was ruthlessly executed by the agents.
The team explored the south wing of the castle and discovered evidence that it had been lived in about three years before. Clues included six beds in a dormitory with sheets still on them, graffiti carved into bed posts, empty food cans, dresses and clippings of brown hair. Strangely, they also found a tattoo machine with some dried dark ink still in it.
Over the main stair case in the castle they saw a painting of Carmilla which Fox reckoned to be from the 1690s. He took a few photos of it. In the master bedroom the agents successfully surprised and killed a vampire that looked like a middle-aged woman, who was sleeping in a four poster bed covered in grave soil. Blake presciently opened the curtains to the bedroom beforehand, allowing sunlight to stream in before the sleeping vampire was attacked and beheaded with a kukri.
In the fireplace of the master bedroom Fox discovered the burned remains of grey passports of the sort used to move between the Allied sectors in Vienna. He could not identify whom they were intended for, but he recognised them as very good forgeries, the handiwork of a Romanian forger who he knows lives in Vienna called Popescu.
Proceeding downstairs to the castle chapel, the group surprised and killed another servant coming upstairs armed with a shotgun. Hoffmann took the weapon. Reaching the chapel, they stormed in to find it devoid of Christian symbols and with strange designs painted on the walls, some of them in dried blood. A large and intricate pyramid of human bones sat on the altar. Hoffmann recognised this as a site for the practise of advanced witchcraft.
Before they could explore further, the dark skinned woman clinging to the ceiling dropped on them. She prepared her blowpipe to shoot at Blake, but was shot in the face by Hoffmann. While the blast from his shotgun did little damage to the woman, who cackled evilly, it did destroy her blowpipe. Before she could act further, however, Blake attacked with his kukri and successfully beheaded her.
With two vampires down, the team moved to the front of the castle. The shooting had alerted two more servants who were leading horses out of the stables. They mounted these and began riding hell for leather towards the castle. They seemed to be brandishing whips. They rode into a hail of automatic weapons fire from Blake, Hoffmann and O'Reilly who downed a horse and shot down both the servants. One of the horses kept coming, seemingly possessed of a berserk rage, but Hoffmann finished it off with a grenade. The group reckons it had been infected with vampire blood at some stage.
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| Blake considers whether vampire hunting is all it is cracked up to be. |
With the shooting over, the three agents turned to find the hapless Fox with a tall, gaunt man dressed in 18th century costume, most of it black. He was holding a relatively modern automatic pistol against Fox's head. He ordered the agents to drop their weapons in German. As they complied, Blake reached for one of his throwing knives, and with a career-defining throw, landed it in one of the man's eye sockets, killing him instantly. It turned out he was not a vampire.
Further searching of the premises revealed no sign of Carmilla, other than evidence that a black sports car, an Alfa Romeo, which had been stored in one of the garages, had been driven away recently. Fox suspected that Carmilla might have been tipped off about the attack somehow.
The team now checked in with Edom on the long range radio from the castle, explaining that Carmilla was still active, but the castle was sanitised. They said they were going to search the immediate locale for her. In reality, they began to make preparations to get into the Soviet sector. A truck was found in the garage, and keys on one of the dead servants. With the sun setting over Styria, they headed east.
To be continued...
Poor old Fox; he was a bit out of his depth amongst all these gurning psychopaths!
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