The player characters were as follows:
- Edmund Harrow - a disgraced alienist sacked from an asylum after some of his more dubious experiments came to light
- Captain Arthur Pembroke - survivor of an 'earthquake' in the Himalayas which wiped out his company, now pensioned off by the army
- Percival Quinn - a medium with good social contacts, although also with a reputation for gulling the grieving with some of his parlour tricks
- Lord Arthur Wrenford - an aristocrat with an interest in the occult and considerable financial resources he uses to aid the Society
SPOILER ALERT: This adventure was adapted from one contained in Casting the Runes published by the Design Mechanism. There are considerable spoilers here. As written, the adventure is not, in my opinion, playable, although some have tried. I rewrote it on a hot and crowded train between London and Brighton.
We started the adventure with the player characters being
sent to the premises of Eve & Porter, a well-respected dealer in Near Eastern antiquities,
located in the St James's district of central London. They were there to meet
Adrian Sowerby, a junior member of staff at the establishment and an ally of the Society. Young Sowerby was in a spot of bother having - informally - loaned out one of the
items in the shop's stock to a retired merchant banker called Percival Wallace.
The unfortunate Mr Wallace had recently died, seemingly the
victim of a case of human combustion. His entire estate was now subject to
probate, and unfortunately, officially, the lamp was still meant to be located
in the Eve & Porter vault. Sowerby had loaned it out without permission and against store policy, and could lose his job if it was not returned - and discretely at that.
Following a meeting with Mr Sowerby, the group had a closer
examination of a photograph of the lamp as well as a look at the Arabic
transcription around the rim. Sowerby told them that the lamp dated
back to the 13th century and may have been used as a means of lighting a church
in Egypt. It was a product of Coptic Egyptian craftsmen and had been brought to
Britain by an army officer who was involved in the Egyptian campaign in 1882.
The other complicating factor was that the lamp had previously been loaned out to an individual called Gervais Strang of Homebush Park in East Sussex, who died in a sudden fire at his house in 1895. Like Wallace, he had been loaned the lamp, with a view to potentially buying it.
The party decided to do some further digging around and were able to find out that there was a centre of Coptic knowledge at the British Museum in London led by Austin Smith, an assistant keeper at the department of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities. Smith was able to grant them an interview and was able to tell them that while there was considerable interest in Coptic religious artefacts at the museum, its real expert was a former protege of his, Kyrillos Fanous, a young Egyptian man who was now working at a nearby Egyptian antiquities shop called Nilus.
In return for a slap-up lunch Smith was also able to provide
translation of the Arabic inscription, although all he could tell them was that
it it was a translation of two passages from the Bible. Firstly there was a
passage from the book of Genesis - "He placed at the east of the
garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep
the way of the Tree of Life." The second passage was from
Ezekiel, and said, "They have defiled my sanctuary in the same day, and have
profaned my sabbaths". Smith was not able to comment on the significance of the
passages.
After lunch the group repaired to the shop in Coptic Street where they interviewed young Fanous. He told them that because the Coptic religion had been persecuted over the centuries by the various rulers of Egypt, they had developed rituals and artefacts to help them defend their churches. Looking at the photograph of the lamp from the Eve & Porter catalogue, he thought this might be one such artefact. He insinuated that there might be some kind of guardian spirit imprisoned inside the lamp. He provided the adventurers with a religious medallion to protect them from the evil spirit should it emerge, plus a binding ritual, which he rehearsed with them.
The party now decided to leverage its connections with the police and indeed it was Captain Pembroke whose connections were able to get him an inspector to help them across the threshold of the Mayfair townhouse of the deceased Mr Wallace. He also provided them with a manila envelope inside of which were the crime scene photographs. This showed the pile of ash that used to be the luckless Mr Wallace, as well as the fact that the Coptic lamp was sitting on the desk in his study in front of him. Also obvious on the desk were a small bottle of oil and a box of matches.
Accompanied by the police inspector ally, the party was able to enter the house and began to notice that many of Mr Wallace's belongings were in the process of being packed up in crates. His valet told them that they were being transported for safekeeping to the home of his nephew, Reginald Dewhurst, Mr Wallace's heir apparent, who owned a mansion in Surrey near Cranleigh.
The party was given admission to the study of Mr Wallace and were able to see that his ashes had already been removed, and that the lamp was now missing. Speaking to his valet they were able to speculate that it might have been packed already. A thorough search discovered that it was in none of the packing cases still in the townhouse and the valet speculated that it might have been in one of the crates already dispatched to Victoria Station for transportation to Surrey.
The team jumped into their coach and headed directly to Victoria, where they found that the crates had already been loaded on board a train and had been sent to Cranleigh. Boarding a train themselves, they headed for Cranleigh in the gathering dusk, changing trains hurriedly at Guildford. Here they saw there was already a cart at the station and a number of men were loading the crates into the cart.
Among the men at the cart was Mr Dewhurst. He was duly confronted and refused to give up his belongings, but when it was made obvious to him that he was taking delivery of some of his uncle's artefacts without the inheritance having been legally confirmed, he duly allowed a search of the crates.
The party was able to find and identify the Coptic lamp, and immediately removed it from the crates. A guilty-looking Mr Dewhurst was allowed to keep the rest of his uncle's belongings, and the party promised that they would take no further steps from a legal perspective.
At this point they hurried to a churchyard in Cranleigh, where they began to perform a ritual to banish the fire spirit which they believed was contained inside the lamp. At this point during the ritual the lamp started to get warmer but the ritual was successful, thanks in no part to a successful use of willpower by Percival Quinn, and the fire spirit was duly bound or banished, the team was not sure which.
Rather than stay in Cranleigh they decided to head back to London on the last train, and were able to return to their headquarters successfully. Here it was decided that the lamp should be contained in the secure occult vault in the Society's basement where it could be properly guarded. It was duly acquired by the Society from Eve & Porter the following day in order to save young Sowerby's blushes.
Thoughts on World of Darkness
It should come as no surprise that I am mulling over the prospect of a Vampire or Werewolf campaign. In order to look at this more carefully I wanted to run a plain vanilla World of Darkness game with mortal characters. In this context I chose England in 1906 as the setting. I thought the game ran relatively well using World of Darkness, and I don't have any particular reservations about it. I like role-playing games with dice pool mechanics.
World of Darkness is not an investigative game per se. In
this context I think Call of Cthulhu would be a better system or indeed Trail of Cthulhu. I don't think we fully explored all the mechanics in the system,
for example there was no combat so we were not able to fully evaluate the
combat or physical damage systems in the game. The ritual system used was a fairly
basic one that I jury rigged from the core rules, as there is no proper magic system in the book (magic is supplemental, given which WoD setting you decide to use). I think the characters have a
fair amount of depth and we still have to fully explore the merits and flaws
that they possess. I am happy to run a second Edwardian game using this system
before making a final decision about a possible Vampire game.
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